In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in advance, and they have a tendency to obscure the underlying rewards and punishments patterns. Indeed, if stochastic elements were absent, the same outcome would occur every time and the learning problems involved could be greatly simplified. In addition, in most practical situations, the cost of an observation to receive either a reward or punishment can be significant, and one would wish to arrive at the correct learning conclusion by incurring minimum cost. In this paper, we present a stochastic approach to reinforcement learning which explicitly models the variability present in the learning environment and the cost of observation. Criteria and rules for learning success are quantitatively analyzed, and probabilities of exceeding the observation cost bounds are also obtained.

Expectation-Maximization (EM) is the fallback method for parameter estimation of hidden (aka latent) variable models. Given the full batch of data, EM forms an upper-bound of the negative log-likelihood of the model at each iteration and then updates to the minimizer of this upper-bound. We introduce a versatile online variant of EM where the data arrives in as a stream. Our motivation is based on the relative entropy divergences between two joint distributions over the hidden and visible variables. We view the EM upper-bound as a Monte Carlo approximation of an expectation and show that the joint relative entropy divergence induces a similar expectation form. As a result, we employ the divergence to the old model as the inertia term to motivate our online EM algorithm. Our motivation is more widely applicable than previous ones and leads to simple online updates for mixture of exponential distributions, hidden Markov models, and the first known online update for Kalman filters. Additionally, the finite sample form of the inertia term lets us derive online updates when there is no closed form solution. Experimentally, sweeping the data with an online update converges much faster than the batch update. Our divergence based methods also lead to a simple way to combine hidden variable models and this immediately gives efficient algorithms for distributed setting.

One of the central goals of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) is to learn long-term dependencies in sequential data. Nevertheless, the most popular training method, Truncated Backpropagation through Time (TBPTT), categorically forbids learning dependencies beyond the truncation horizon. In contrast, the online training algorithm Real Time Recurrent Learning (RTRL) provides untruncated gradients, with the disadvantage of impractically large computational costs. Recently published approaches reduce these costs by providing noisy approximations of RTRL. We present a new approximation algorithm of RTRL, Optimal Kronecker-Sum Approximation (OK). We prove that OK is optimal for a class of approximations of RTRL, which includes all approaches published so far. Additionally, we show that OK has empirically negligible noise: Unlike previous algorithms it matches TBPTT in a real world task (character-level Penn TreeBank) and can exploit online parameter updates to outperform TBPTT in a synthetic string memorization task.

According to a story in The Japan Times, the school will feed the AI information about 9,000 suspected bullying cases reported by Otsu's elementary and junior high schools between 2012 and 2018. This information will include details on the students involved -- their ages, genders, absenteeism records, and academic achievements -- as well as when and where any bullying incidents took place. "Through an AI theoretical analysis of past data, we will be able to properly respond to cases without just relying on teachers' past experiences," Otsu Mayor Naomi Koshi said, according to The Japan Times. The hope is that the AI will allow school officials to identify the bullying cases that are likely to escalate in seriousness so that they can intervene and diffuse the situation before it's too late. "Bullying may start from low-level friction in relationships, but can get worse day by day," an Otsu education board official said, according to The Japan Times.

Can I be a professional translator without any credentials? If I want to be a published writer, should I still ghostwrite for money? Do summaries of existing book summaries make any sense? The seemingly obvious answer to them all is "no," yet I did all those things anyway. And while some led nowhere, others now pay my bills.

Artificial intelligence is also going to be more prevalent with chat bot software assisting high school students' research and the introduction of physical …

In the changing tech scenario in India, noted and well-established institutes have now also started to step forward and train students as well as the professionals in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The institutes are providing both the current needs of algorithms and mathematical insights as well as practical experiences. In this article, we list 5 tier-1 institutes that have added courses on artificial intelligence in India. About The Programme: This institute launched a dual degree specialisation in data science as well as in robotics in the year 2018. Any B.Tech student can enroll in this programme based on the CGPA cut-off of 8.0 at the end of the 5th semester.

My concerns about the skilled workforce are pragmatic as well as principled. As an industry, we have an incredible obligation to build a road from the classroom to the workplace so the necessary skillfulness is taught to the next generation. CEOs need to envision and reshape the "Worker of the Future" as a critical role for success moving forward. Business leaders also have a keen responsibility in developing the profession so that they match the skills that are in demand tomorrow. The new generation will only want the keys to the kingdom if we show them what's possible.

But the ambiguity of human decision-making often makes it extraordinarily hard for the legal system to know whether anyone has actually discriminated. To understand how algorithms affect discrimination, we must therefore also understand how they affect the problem of detecting discrimination. By one measure, algorithms are fundamentally opaque, not just cognitively but even mathematically. Yet for the task of proving discrimination, processes involving algorithms can provide crucial forms of transparency that are otherwise unavailable. These benefits do not happen automatically. But with appropriate requirements in place, the use of algorithms will make it possible to more easily examine and interrogate the entire decision process, thereby making it far easier to know whether discrimination has occurred. By forcing a new level of specificity, the use of algorithms also highlights, and makes transparent, central tradeoffs among competing values. Algorithms are not only a threat to be regulated; with the right safeguards in place, they have the potential to be a positive force for equity.

Little by little, newspapers are revealing the bright future that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building. Intelligent machines will help everywhere. However, this bright future may have a possible dark side: a dramatic job market contraction before its unpredictable transformation. Hence, in a near future, large numbers of job seekers may need financial support while catching up with these novel unpredictable jobs. This possible job market crisis has an antidote inside. In fact, the rise of AI is sustained by the biggest knowledge theft of the recent years. Many learning AI machines are extracting knowledge from unaware skilled or unskilled workers by analyzing their interactions. By passionately doing their jobs, many of these workers are shooting themselves in the feet. In this paper, we propose Human-in-the-loop Artificial Intelligence (HitAI) as a fairer paradigm for AI systems. Recognizing that any AI system has humans in the loop, HitAI will reward these aware and unaware knowledge producers with a different scheme: decisions of AI systems generating revenues will repay the legitimate owners of the knowledge used for taking those decisions. As modern Merry Men, HitAI researchers should fight for a fairer Robin Hood Artificial Intelligence that gives back what it steals. This article is part of the special track on AI and Society.