We present a rapid design methodology that combines automated hyper-parameter tuning with semi-supervised training to build highly accurate and robust models for voice commands classification. Proposed approach allows quick evaluation of network architectures to fit performance and power constraints of available hardware, while ensuring good hyper-parameter choices for each network in real-world scenarios. Leveraging the vast amount of unlabeled data with a student/teacher based semi-supervised method, classification accuracy is improved from 84% to 94% in the validation set. For model optimization, we explore the hyper-parameter space through population based training and obtain an optimized model in the same time frame as it takes to train a single model.

Learning from demonstration allows for rapid deployment of robot manipulators to a great many tasks, by relying on a person showing the robot what to do rather than programming it. While this approach provides many opportunities, measuring, evaluating and improving the person's teaching ability has remained largely unexplored in robot manipulation research. To this end, a model for learning from demonstration is presented here which incorporates the teacher's understanding of, and influence on, the learner. The proposed model is used to clarify the teacher's objectives during learning from demonstration, providing new views on how teaching failures and efficiency can be defined. The benefit of this approach is shown in two experiments (N=30 and N=36, respectively), which highlight the difficulty teachers have in providing effective demonstrations, and show how ~169-180% improvement in teaching efficiency can be achieved through evaluation and feedback shaped by the proposed framework, relative to unguided teaching.

Thanks to the Big Data revolution and increasing computing capacities, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made an impressive revival over the past few years and is now omnipresent in both research and industry. The creative sectors have always been early adopters of AI technologies and this continues to be the case. As a matter of fact, recent technological developments keep pushing the boundaries of intelligent systems in creative applications: the critically acclaimed movie "Sunspring", released in 2016, was entirely written by AI technology, and the first-ever Music Album, called "Hello World", produced using AI has been released this year. Simultaneously, the exploratory nature of the creative process is raising important technical challenges for AI such as the ability for AI-powered techniques to be accurate under limited data resources, as opposed to the conventional "Big Data" approach, or the ability to process, analyse and match data from multiple modalities (text, sound, images, etc.) at the same time. The purpose of this white paper is to understand future technological advances in AI and their growing impact on creative industries. This paper addresses the following questions: Where does AI operate in creative Industries? What is its operative role? How will AI transform creative industries in the next ten years? This white paper aims to provide a realistic perspective of the scope of AI actions in creative industries, proposes a vision of how this technology could contribute to research and development works in such context, and identifies research and development challenges.

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class.

Most of the successful commercial applications to date--in areas such as computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language processing--have involved supervised learning, taking advantage of labeled datasets. However, most of the world's data is unlabeled. In this book, we will cover the field of unsupervised learning (which is a branch of machine learning used to find hidden patterns) and learn the underlying structure in unlabeled data. According to many industry experts, such as Yann LeCun, the Director of AI Research at Facebook and a professor at NYU, unsupervised learning is the next frontier in AI and may hold the key to AGI. For this and many other reasons, unsupervised learning is one of the trendiest topics in AI today.

Staying ahead of the tide is the mantra for today's technology professionals. As technology and related processes evolve, those who work in the field must update their skills and even careers if necessary. Some traditional help desk, system, and network administrator roles are fading out to be replaced by endeavors requiring a heftier and more diverse skills set. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AL) are two such fields making steady inroads into the IT world. People looking for a future career in technology would do well to become familiar with both ML and AI.

In this work we propose a new computational framework, based on generative deep models, for synthesis of photo-realistic food meal images from textual descriptions of its ingredients. Previous works on synthesis of images from text typically rely on pre-trained text models to extract text features, followed by a generative neural networks (GANs) aimed to generate realistic images conditioned on the text features. These works mainly focus on generating spatially compact and well-defined categories of objects, such as birds or flowers. In contrast, meal images are significantly more complex, consisting of multiple ingredients whose appearance and spatial qualities are further modified by cooking methods. We propose a method that first builds an attention-based ingredients-image association model, which is then used to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistent constraint is added to further improve image quality and control appearance. Extensive experiments show our model is able to generate meal image corresponding to the ingredients, which could be used to augment existing dataset for solving other computational food analysis problems.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) trigger a dystopic future (re: Skynet)? Will machine learning help cure cancer? Theories abound in the AI conversation. What's not debatable, however, is AI's popularity. Consumers are adopting it at a rapid clip and manufacturers are investing heavily in AI research and development.

Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and deep learning. Evolution relies on random mutations and on random genetic recombination. Here we show that learning to evolve, i.e. learning to mutate and recombine better than at random, improves the result of evolution in terms of fitness increase per generation and even in terms of attainable fitness. We use deep reinforcement learning to learn to dynamically adjust the strategy of evolutionary algorithms to varying circumstances. Our methods outperform classical evolutionary algorithms on combinatorial and continuous optimization problems.

In this report we review memory-based meta-learning as a tool for building sample-efficient strategies that learn from past experience to adapt to any task within a target class. Our goal is to equip the reader with the conceptual foundations of this tool for building new, scalable agents that operate on broad domains. To do so, we present basic algorithmic templates for building near-optimal predictors and reinforcement learners which behave as if they had a probabilistic model that allowed them to efficiently exploit task structure. Furthermore, we recast memory-based meta-learning within a Bayesian framework, showing that the meta-learned strategies are near-optimal because they amortize Bayes-filtered data, where the adaptation is implemented in the memory dynamics as a state-machine of sufficient statistics. Essentially, memory-based meta-learning translates the hard problem of probabilistic sequential inference into a regression problem.