The University of South Carolina wants to start working smarter. Later this summer, the school will open an institute dedicated to studying and developing artificial intelligence, which is sometimes abbreviated AI, the school announced Tuesday. The institute aims to use its AI research to help develop "self-improving" and customized programs for social workers, pharmacists, teachers and more, the release said. To do that, "The AI Institute plans to enlist philosophers, ethicists, public policy experts, and lawyers dedicated to exploring the societal impact of AI technology, both the good and the unintended negative outcomes," the release said. "For example, some have expressed concern that autonomous vehicles could soon put tens of thousands of truck drivers out of work."

What's the earliest we can predict cancer survival rates, and what schools do the best job of educating children? You can only answer these questions with very rare access to private and personal data, but access to this personal data requires that you master methods for the principled protection of user privacy. While not all privacy use cases have been solved, the last few years have seen great strides in privacy-preserving technologies. This free course will introduce you to three cutting-edge technologies for privacy-preserving AI: Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, and Encrypted Computation. You will learn how to use the newest privacy-preserving technologies, such as OpenMined's PySyft.

The Python Mega Course is one of the top online Python courses with over 100,000 enrolled students and is targeted toward people with little or no previous programming experience. The course follows a modern-teaching approach where students learn by doing. You will start from scratch and master Python by building 10 real-world applications in Python 3, guided and supported by the course instructor. What you'll learn Go from a total beginner to an advanced-Python programmer Create 10 real-world Python programs (no Tic-Tac-Toe games) Solidify your skills with bonus practice activities throughout the course Create an app that translates English words Create a web-mapping app Create a portfolio website Create a desktop app for storing book information Create a webcam video app that detects objects Create a web scraper Create a data visualization app Create a database app Create a geocoding web app Create a website blocker Send automated emails Analyze and visualize data Use Python to schedule programs based on computer events. Go from a total beginner to an advanced-Python programmer Create 10 real-world Python programs (no Tic-Tac-Toe games) Solidify your skills with bonus practice activities throughout the course Create an app that translates English words Create a web-mapping app Create a portfolio website Create a desktop app for storing book information Create a webcam video app that detects objects Create a web scraper Create a data visualization app Create a database app Create a geocoding web app Create a website blocker Send automated emails Analyze and visualize data Use Python to schedule programs based on computer events.

In the field of technology, it is important to be good at your job, but it is more important to inspire greatness in others. To become a great leader in the field of information technology, you can follow this advice and lead your team to greatness. Matching Words to Deeds: Do What You Say You'll Do Nobody likes an egomaniac, especially when that person's actions don't back up their claims. Instead, be the opposite: humble about most things, and when you say you'll do something, do it well. When your deeds back up your words, you gain credibility and you show your team that you are capable of delivering positive results.

Closed-captioning in videos: Adding or turning on closed-captioning in all videos, including YouTube and GoNoodle, assists students in making connections between text and audio representations of language. Captioning is an assistive technology tool that is free and easy to use: simply push the CC button underneath a video. Closed-captioning provides missing information for individuals who have difficulty processing speech and auditory components of visual media. It is crucial for students who are hard of hearing and can support students' reading skills. Graphic organizers: Graphic organizers are a no-tech AT tool that offers a simple, effective way to provide writing support to elementary, middle, and high school students who have dysgraphia, executive function challenges, and other learning challenges. Students with executive function challenges who struggle with organization, for example, can benefit from the visual organization of their thoughts and ideas, and graphic organizers "clarify implicit relationships contained in the text in a way that text alone may not."

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) with a lattice architecture are introduced in this work, combining several desirable properties of SNNs and self-organized maps (SOMs). Networks are trained with biologically motivated, unsupervised learning rules to obtain a self-organized grid of filters via cooperative and competitive excitatory-inhibitory interactions. Several inhibition strategies are developed and tested, such as (i) incrementally increasing inhibition level over the course of network training, and (ii) switching the inhibition level from low to high (two-level) after an initial training segment. During the labeling phase, the spiking activity generated by data with known labels is used to assign neurons to categories of data, which are then used to evaluate the network's classification ability on a held-out set of test data. Several biologically plausible evaluation rules are proposed and compared, including a population-level confidence rating, and an $n$-gram inspired method. The effectiveness of the proposed self-organized learning mechanism is tested using the MNIST benchmark dataset, as well as using images produced by playing the Atari Breakout game.

Cognitive and metacognitive strategy had demonstrated a significant role in self-regulated learning (SRL), and an appropriate use of strategies is beneficial to effective learning or question-solving tasks during a human-computer interaction process. This paper proposes a novel method combining Knowledge Map (KM) based data mining technique with Thinking Map (TM) to detect learner's cognitive and metacognitive strategy in the question-solving scenario. In particular, a graph-based mining algorithm is designed to facilitate our proposed method, which can automatically map cognitive strategy to metacognitive strategy with raising abstraction level, and make the cognitive and metacognitive process viewable, which acts like a reverse engineering engine to explain how a learner thinks when solving a question. Additionally, we develop an online learning environment system for participants to learn and record their behaviors. To corroborate the effectiveness of our approach and algorithm, we conduct experiments recruiting 173 postgraduate and undergraduate students, and they were asked to complete a question-solving task, such as "What are similarities and differences between array and pointer?" from "The C Programming Language" course and "What are similarities and differences between packet switching and circuit switching?" from "Computer Network Principle" course. The mined strategies patterns results are encouraging and supported well our proposed method.

In many real-world sequential decision making problems, the number of available actions (decisions) can vary over time. While problems like catastrophic forgetting, changing transition dynamics, changing rewards functions, etc. have been well-studied in the lifelong learning literature, the setting where the action set changes remains unaddressed. In this paper, we present an algorithm that autonomously adapts to an action set whose size changes over time. To tackle this open problem, we break it into two problems that can be solved iteratively: inferring the underlying, unknown, structure in the space of actions and optimizing a policy that leverages this structure. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach on large-scale real-world lifelong learning problems.

Class imbalance has been one of the major challenges for medical image segmentation. The model cascade (MC) strategy significantly alleviates class imbalance issue. In spite of its outstanding performance, this method leads to an undesired system complexity and meanwhile ignores the relevance among the models. To handle these flaws of MC, we propose in this paper a light-weight deep model, i.e., the One-pass Multi-task Network (OM-Net) to solve class imbalance better than MC and require only one-pass computation for brain tumor segmentation. First, OM-Net integrates the separate segmentation tasks into one deep model. Second, to optimize OM-Net more effectively, we take advantage of the correlation among tasks to design an online training data transfer strategy and a curriculum learning-based training strategy. Third, we further propose to share prediction results between tasks, which enables us to design a cross-task guided attention (CGA) module. With the guidance of prediction results provided by the previous task, CGA can adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses based on the category-specific statistics. Finally, a simple yet effective post-processing method is introduced to refine the segmentation results of the proposed attention network. Extensive experiments are performed to justify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Most impressively, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the BraTS 2015 and BraTS 2017 datasets. With the proposed approaches, we also won the joint third place in the BraTS 2018 challenge among 64 participating teams. We will make the code publicly available at https://github.com/chenhong-zhou/OM-Net.

The ability to learn and adapt in real time is a central feature of biological systems. Neuromorphic architectures demonstrating such versatility can greatly enhance our ability to efficiently process information at the edge. A key challenge, however, is to understand which learning rules are best suited for specific tasks and how the relevant hyperparameters can be fine-tuned. In this work, we introduce a conceptual framework in which the learning process is integrated into the network itself. This allows us to cast meta-learning as a mathematical optimization problem. We employ DeepHyper, a scalable, asynchronous model-based search, to simultaneously optimize the choice of meta-learning rules and their hyperparameters. We demonstrate our approach with two different datasets, MNIST and FashionMNIST, using a network architecture inspired by the learning center of the insect brain. Our results show that optimal learning rules can be dataset-dependent even within similar tasks. This dependency demonstrates the importance of introducing versatility and flexibility in the learning algorithms. It also illuminates experimental findings in insect neuroscience that have shown a heterogeneity of learning rules within the insect mushroom body.