Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Education


Efficient sampling for Gaussian linear regression with arbitrary priors

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper develops a computationally efficient posterior sampling algorithm for Bayesian linear regression models with Gaussian errors. Our new approach is motivated by the fact that existing software implementations for Bayesian linear regression do not readily handle problems with large number of observations (hundreds of thousands) and predictors (thousands). Moreover, existing sampling algorithms for popular shrinkage priors are bespoke Gibbs samplers based on case-specific latent variable representations. By contrast, the new algorithm does not rely on case-specific auxiliary variable representations, which allows for rapid prototyping of novel shrinkage priors outside the conditionally Gaussian framework. Specifically, we propose a slice-within-Gibbs sampler based on the elliptical slice sampler of Murray et al. [2010].


Configurable Markov Decision Processes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In many real-world problems, there is the possibility to configure, to a limited extent, some environmental parameters to improve the performance of a learning agent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Configurable Markov Decision Processes (Conf-MDPs), to model this new type of interaction with the environment. Furthermore, we provide a new learning algorithm, Safe Policy-Model Iteration (SPMI), to jointly and adaptively optimize the policy and the environment configuration. After having introduced our approach and derived some theoretical results, we present the experimental evaluation in two explicative problems to show the benefits of the environment configurability on the performance of the learned policy.


8 Ways Machine Learning Will Improve Education - The Tech Edvocate

#artificialintelligence

Education is moving away from traditional rows of students looking at the same textbook while a teacher lectures from the front of the room. Today's classrooms are not simply evolving to use more technology and digital resources; they are also investing in machine learning. Machine learning is defined as "a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to "learn" (i.e., progressively improve performance on a specific task) with data, without being explicitly programmed." For example, in education, we see machine learning in learning analytics and artificial intelligence. Machine learning is essentially mining data.


Developer defends school-shooting video game as victimized seek its halt

The Japan Times

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT – The developer of a school-shooting video game is vowing to continue selling it online as parents of slain children and other mass shooting victims work to get the game wiped off the internet. The "Active Shooter" game was created by Anton Makarevskiy, a 21-year-old developer from Moscow, and is being marketed by his entity Acid Software. Acid said in a Twitter posting Tuesday that it will not be censored and cited free expression rights. The game is branded as a "SWAT simulator" that lets players choose between being an active shooter terrorizing a school or the SWAT team responding to the shooting. Players can choose a gun, grenade or knife, and civilian and police death totals are shown on the screen.


Ai/Machine learning: Software Engineer - Machine Learning at Bolt (San Francisco, California, United States)

#artificialintelligence

Software Engineer - Machine Learning at Bolt San Francisco, California, United States (Posted Jun 2 2018) About the company Welcome to a new era of ecommerce: Amazon-like checkout. What We Do: End-to-End Payment Processing Hyper-Optimized Checkout 100% Fraud Coverage Clear Insights & Analytics What Does that Mean for Merchants? Happier customers who repeat buy No more fraudulent chargebacks Zero order review overhead Full performance transparency Payments completely handled A single dashboard for business analytics 24/7 premium support Job position Permanent Job description Payment infrastructure on the internet is fragmented and broken. Bolt is building a future where sending payments is as easy as sending messages. To do this, we've redesigned payments from the ground up.


5 Free Online Machine Learning Courses - InformationWeek

#artificialintelligence

In the past year there's been a bit of a careers and job scare when it comes to artificial intelligence, automation, and related technologies. Big consulting firms have conducted studies about the future of jobs and whether they will be lost to artificial intelligence. The consensus is that jobs will be lost, while some jobs will be created. "The development of automation enabled by technologies including robotics and artificial intelligence brings the promise of higher productivity (and with productivity, economic growth), increased efficiencies, safety, and convenience," said McKinsey in a study released last year. "But these technologies also raise difficult questions about the broader impact of automation on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work itself."


Deep Learning: Turkey's biggest artificial intelligence community

#artificialintelligence

As the number of people who work on a volunteer basis or try to contribute for good causes increase in Turkey, we look to the future with confidence. Furthermore, if these volunteers comprise of scientists, academicians and youths, supporting such formations mean paving the way of social developments. The Deep Learning Turkey community, which teaches and guides high school students and undergraduates, turning artificial intelligence into a social responsibility project, has reached out to thousands of youths although it was established only in August of last year. The community helps youths who are interested in artificial intelligence and want to have a career in this field as well as providing information sharing on an open platform for scientists. Deep Learning Turkey is the biggest and the most effective artificial intelligence community in Turkey.


PyData Seattle (Bellevue, WA)

#artificialintelligence

Schedule: 6:00 - 6:30 Mix and mingle 6:30 - 6:40 Announcements 6:40 - 6:50 Lightning Talk 6:50 - 7:30 Talk Night: Jason Kessler 7:30 - 7:40 QA 7:40 - 8:00 More networking Scattertext is a Python library for visualizing how words, phrases, topics and other linguistic units are associated with a category of text. This talk will cover different techniques for visualizing term-associations, visualizing both automatically generated and preexisting topics, and techniques to visualize word embeddings on a two-dimensional scatterplot. We'll work through notebooks which will be available at Source code for the package is hosted on Github at https://github.com/JasonKessler Prior to joining CDK, Jason was the founding data scientist at PlaceIQ and worked as a research scientist for JD Power and Associates. He has published peer-reviewed papers on algorithms and corpora for sentiment and belief analysis, and has sat on program committees and reviewed for several AI and NLP conferences.


Artificial intelligence and human development

#artificialintelligence

AI is an area of computer science dedicated to creating software that can be taught to perform complex procedures. What makes AI "intelligent" is that it can learn new behaviours, improve performance as more experience is gained, and make decisions and predictions based on available data. The algorithms at the core of some AI systems are trained using the large datasets that are now available thanks to the "big data" revolution. It is the intelligent capabilities of AI systems that allow for the automation of tasks that until now required human judgement to deliver. There is enormous potential for how AI can benefit the developing world and what it can contribute towards achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals: AI can play a crucial role in augmenting healthcare capacity by filling gaps in human expertise, increasing productivity, and enhancing disease surveillance.


Fast and Scalable Bayesian Deep Learning by Weight-Perturbation in Adam

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Uncertainty computation in deep learning is essential to design robust and reliable systems. Variational inference (VI) is a promising approach for such computation, but requires more effort to implement and execute compared to maximum-likelihood methods. In this paper, we propose new natural-gradient algorithms to reduce such efforts for Gaussian mean-field VI. Our algorithms can be implemented within the Adam optimizer by perturbing the network weights during gradient evaluations, and uncertainty estimates can be cheaply obtained by using the vector that adapts the learning rate. This requires lower memory, computation, and implementation effort than existing VI methods, while obtaining uncertainty estimates of comparable quality. Our empirical results confirm this and further suggest that the weight-perturbation in our algorithm could be useful for exploration in reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization.