One of the landmark events in the course of evolution of technology has been the advent of Artificial Intelligence, which has subsequently impacted different sectors of the society profoundly. Its multifaceted benefits have successfully initiated a complete paradigm shift even in our education sector. Education is one of the primary tools which is inextricably linked with the growth of human resources in the country. Artificial intelligence immensely helps to accentuate the growth and development index. It utilizes data models (as part of primary and secondary data sources) and makes decisions based on the input data whose success rate improves with further iterations.

Grade prediction for future courses not yet taken by students is important as it can help them and their advisers during the process of course selection as well as for designing personalized degree plans and modifying them based on their performance. One of the successful approaches for accurately predicting a student's grades in future courses is Cumulative Knowledge-based Regression Models (CKRM). CKRM learns shallow linear models that predict a student's grades as the similarity between his/her knowledge state and the target course. A student's knowledge state is built by linearly accumulating the learned provided knowledge components of the courses he/she has taken in the past, weighted by his/her grades in them. However, not all the prior courses contribute equally to the target course. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Attentive Knowledge-based model (NAK) that learns the importance of each historical course in predicting the grade of a target course. Compared to CKRM and other competing approaches, our experiments on a large real-world dataset consisting of $\sim$1.5 grades show the effectiveness of the proposed NAK model in accurately predicting the students' grades. Moreover, the attention weights learned by the model can be helpful in better designing their degree plans.

In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fashion and for which he/she is well-prepared for so as to get a good grade in. To this end, we propose two different grade-aware course recommendation approaches to recommend to each student his/her optimal set of courses. The first approach ranks the courses by using an objective function that differentiates between courses that are expected to increase or decrease a student's GPA. The second approach combines the grades predicted by grade prediction methods with the rankings produced by course recommendation methods to improve the final course rankings. To obtain the course rankings in the first approach, we adapt two widely-used representation learning techniques to learn the optimal temporal ordering between courses. Our experiments on a large dataset obtained from the University of Minnesota that includes students from 23 different majors show that the grade-aware course recommendation methods can do better on recommending more courses in which the students are expected to perform well and recommending fewer courses in which they are expected not to perform well in than grade-unaware course recommendation methods.

Though deep reinforcement learning has led to breakthroughs in many difficult domains, these successes have required an ever-increasing number of samples. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) systems require an exponentially increasing number of samples, their development is restricted to a continually shrinking segment of the AI community. Likewise, many of these systems cannot be applied to real-world problems, where environment samples are expensive. Resolution of these limitations requires new, sample-efficient methods. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce the MineRL Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors. The primary goal of the competition is to foster the development of algorithms which can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of samples needed to solve complex, hierarchical, and sparse environments. To that end, we introduce: (1) the Minecraft ObtainDiamond task, a sequential decision making environment requiring long-term planning, hierarchical control, and efficient exploration methods; and (2) the MineRL-v0 dataset, a large-scale collection of over 60 million state-action pairs of human demonstrations that can be resimulated into embodied trajectories with arbitrary modifications to game state and visuals. Participants will compete to develop systems which solve the ObtainDiamond task with a limited number of samples from the environment simulator, Malmo. The competition is structured into two rounds in which competitors are provided several paired versions of the dataset and environment with different game textures. At the end of each round, competitors will submit containerized versions of their learning algorithms and they will then be trained/evaluated from scratch on a hold-out dataset-environment pair for a total of 4-days on a prespecified hardware platform.

With the emergence of batteryless computing platforms, we are now able to execute computer programs on embedded systems that do not require a dedicated energy source. These platforms are typically used in sensing applications [30, 39, 70, 73, 79], and their hardware architecture consists primarily of a sensor-enabled microcontroller that is powered by some form of harvested energy such as solar, RF or piezoelectric [63]. Programs that run on these platforms follow the so-called intermittent computing paradigm [50, 52, 75, 77] where a system pauses and resumes its code execution based on the availability of harvested energy. Over the past decade, the efficiency of batteryless computing platforms has been improved by reducing their energy waste through hardware provisioning, through check-pointing [64] to avoid restarting code execution from the beginning at each power-up [8], and through discarding stale sensor data [34] which are no longer useful. Despite these advancements, the capability of batteryless computing platforms has remained limited to simple sensing applications only. In this paper, we introduce the concept of intermittent learning (Figure 1) which makes energy harvested embedded systems capable of executing lightweight machine learning tasks. Their ability to run machine learning tasks inside energy harvesting microcontrollers pushes the boundary of batteryless computing as these devices are able to sense, learn, infer, and evolve over a prolonged lifetime. The proposed intermittent learning paradigm enables a true lifelong learning experience in mobile and embedded systems and advances sensor systems from being smart to smarter. Once deployed in the field, an intermittent learner classifies sensor data as well as learns from them to update the classifier at run-time--without requiring any help from any external system.

The new demands for high-reliability and ultra-high capacity wireless communication have led to extensive research into 5G communications. However, the current communication systems, which were designed on the basis of conventional communication theories, significantly restrict further performance improvements and lead to severe limitations. Recently, the emerging deep learning techniques have been recognized as a promising tool for handling the complicated communication systems, and their potential for optimizing wireless communications has been demonstrated. In this article, we first review the development of deep learning solutions for 5G communication, and then propose efficient schemes for deep learning-based 5G scenarios. Specifically, the key ideas for several important deep learningbased communication methods are presented along with the research opportunities and challenges. H. Huang, G. Gui, Z. Yang, and H. Sari are with Key Lab of Broadband Wireless Communication and Sensor Network Technology (Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210003, China. S. Guo is with Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong (Email: song.guo@polyu.edu.hk). J. Zhang is with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication (BUPT), Beijing 100876, China (Email: jhzhang@bupt.edu.cn). F. Adachi is with Wireless Signal Processing Research Group, Research Organization of Electrical Communication (ROEC), Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan (Email: adachi@ecei.tohoku.ac.jp).

Proteins are crucial to almost every fundamental biological process necessary for life. They do everything from create and maintain the shape of cells to serving as both signal and receiver for cellular communications. Proteins are composed on long chains of amino acids and they perform their varied tasks by folding themselves into precise 3D structures that determine how they function and interact with other molecules. Because their exact shape is so crucial to their function research into uncovering the exact shape is a central task to molecular biology. This task is especially important for the development of lifesaving and life-altering medicines.

Predictive analysis in business process monitoring aims at forecasting the future information of a running business process. The prediction is typically made based on the model extracted from historical process execution logs (event logs). In practice, different business domains might require different kinds of predictions. Hence, it is important to have a means for properly specifying the desired prediction tasks, and a mechanism to deal with these various prediction tasks. Although there have been many studies in this area, they mostly focus on a specific prediction task. This work introduces a language for specifying the desired prediction tasks, and this language allows us to express various kinds of prediction tasks. This work also presents a mechanism for automatically creating the corresponding prediction model based on the given specification. Differently from previous studies, instead of focusing on a particular prediction task, we present an approach to deal with various prediction tasks based on the given specification of the desired prediction tasks. We also provide an implementation of the approach which is used to conduct experiments using real-life event logs.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. It only takes 10 Spotpower (SP) to haul a truck across the Boston Dynamics parking lot ( 1 degree uphill, truck in neutral). These Spot robots are coming off the production line now and will be available for a range of applications soon.

As artificial intelligence systems spread to more diverse and larger tasks in many domains, the machine learning algorithms, and in particular the deep learning models and the databases required to train them are getting bigger themselves. Some algorithms do allow for some scaling of large computations by leveraging data parallelism. However, they often require a large amount of data to be exchanged in order to ensure the shared knowledge throughout the compute nodes is accurate. In this work, the effect of different levels of communications between deep learning models is studied, in particular how it affects performance. The first approach studied looks at decentralizing the numerous computations that are done in parallel in training procedures such as synchronous and asynchronous stochastic gradient descent. In this setting, a simplified communication that consists of exchanging low bandwidth outputs between compute nodes can be beneficial. In the following chapter, the communication protocol is slightly modified to further include training instructions. Indeed, this is studied in a simplified setup where a pre-trained model, analogous to a teacher, can customize a randomly initialized model's training procedure to accelerate learning. Finally, a communication channel where two deep learning models can exchange a purposefully crafted language is explored while allowing for different ways of optimizing that language.