Time series has wide applications in the real world and is known to be difficult to forecast. Since its statistical properties change over time, its distribution also changes temporally, which will cause severe distribution shift problem to existing methods. However, it remains unexplored to model the time series in the distribution perspective. In this paper, we term this as Temporal Covariate Shift (TCS). This paper proposes Adaptive RNNs (AdaRNN) to tackle the TCS problem by building an adaptive model that generalizes well on the unseen test data. AdaRNN is sequentially composed of two novel algorithms. First, we propose Temporal Distribution Characterization to better characterize the distribution information in the TS. Second, we propose Temporal Distribution Matching to reduce the distribution mismatch in TS to learn the adaptive TS model. AdaRNN is a general framework with flexible distribution distances integrated. Experiments on human activity recognition, air quality prediction, and financial analysis show that AdaRNN outperforms the latest methods by a classification accuracy of 2.6% and significantly reduces the RMSE by 9.0%. We also show that the temporal distribution matching algorithm can be extended in Transformer structure to boost its performance.

Plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) displays complex nonlinear dynamics that find critical phenomena in areas such as nonlinear waves. However, such a nonlinear solution depends sensitively on the selection of parameters and different potentials in the Schr\"odinger equation. Despite this complexity, the machine learning community has developed remarkable efficiencies in predicting complicated datasets by regression. Here, we consider a recurrent neural network (RNN) approach to predict the complex propagation of nonlinear solitons in plasmon-induced transparency metamaterial systems with applied potentials bypassing the need for analytical and numerical approaches of a guiding model. We demonstrate the success of this scheme on the prediction of the propagation of the nonlinear solitons solely from a given initial condition and potential. We prove the prominent agreement of results in simulation and prediction by long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural networks. The framework presented in this work opens up a new perspective for the application of RNN in quantum systems and nonlinear waves using Schr\"odinger-type equations, for example, the nonlinear dynamics in cold-atom systems and nonlinear fiber optics.

Dr Georgina Cosma and postgraduate student Kareem Ahmed of the School of Science, have designed and trained an AI model to predict building emissions rates values with 27 inputs with little loss in accuracy. The proposed AI model – which was created with the support of Cundall's head of research and innovation, Edwin Wealend, and trained using large-scale data obtained from UK government energy performance assessments – can generate a BER value almost instantly. Dr Cosma says the research "is an important first step towards the use of machine learning tools for energy prediction in the UK" and it shows how data can "improve current processes in the construction industry". In their latest paper, Dr Cosma and the team reveal their AI system can generate building emissions rates for non-domestic buildings in less than a second and with as few as 27 variables with little loss in accuracy. They used a'decision tree-based ensemble' machine algorithm and built and validated the system using 81,137 real data records that contain information for non-domestic buildings over the whole of England from 2010 to 2019.

This report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute covers the most salient progress in research and reporting over the second quarter of 2021 in the field of AI ethics with a special emphasis on "Environment and AI", "Creativity and AI", and "Geopolitics and AI." The report also features an exclusive piece titled "Critical Race Quantum Computer" that applies ideas from quantum physics to explain the complexities of human characteristics and how they can and should shape our interactions with each other. The report also features special contributions on the subject of pedagogy in AI ethics, sociology and AI ethics, and organizational challenges to implementing AI ethics in practice. Given MAIEI's mission to highlight scholars from around the world working on AI ethics issues, the report also features two spotlights sharing the work of scholars operating in Singapore and Mexico helping to shape policy measures as they relate to the responsible use of technology. The report also has an extensive section covering the gamut of issues when it comes to the societal impacts of AI covering areas of bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, fairness, interpretability, disinformation, policymaking, law, regulations, and moral philosophy.

As one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning, statistics and differential privacy, Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) has been extensively studied in recent years. However, most of the previous work can only handle either regular data distribution or irregular data in the low dimensional space case. To better understand the challenges arising from irregular data distribution, in this paper we provide the first study on the problem of DP-SCO with heavy-tailed data in the high dimensional space. In the first part we focus on the problem over some polytope constraint (such as the $\ell_1$-norm ball). We show that if the loss function is smooth and its gradient has bounded second order moment, it is possible to get a (high probability) error bound (excess population risk) of $\tilde{O}(\frac{\log d}{(n\epsilon)^\frac{1}{3}})$ in the $\epsilon$-DP model, where $n$ is the sample size and $d$ is the dimensionality of the underlying space. Next, for LASSO, if the data distribution that has bounded fourth-order moments, we improve the bound to $\tilde{O}(\frac{\log d}{(n\epsilon)^\frac{2}{5}})$ in the $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP model. In the second part of the paper, we study sparse learning with heavy-tailed data. We first revisit the sparse linear model and propose a truncated DP-IHT method whose output could achieve an error of $\tilde{O}(\frac{s^{*2}\log d}{n\epsilon})$, where $s^*$ is the sparsity of the underlying parameter. Then we study a more general problem over the sparsity ({\em i.e.,} $\ell_0$-norm) constraint, and show that it is possible to achieve an error of $\tilde{O}(\frac{s^{*\frac{3}{2}}\log d}{n\epsilon})$, which is also near optimal up to a factor of $\tilde{O}{(\sqrt{s^*})}$, if the loss function is smooth and strongly convex.

We consider the dictionary-based ROM-net (Reduced Order Model) framework [T. Daniel, F. Casenave, N. Akkari, D. Ryckelynck, Model order reduction assisted by deep neural networks (ROM-net), Advanced modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7 (16), 2020] and summarize the underlying methodologies and their recent improvements. The main contribution of this work is the application of the complete workflow to a real-life industrial model of an elastoviscoplastic high-pressure turbine blade subjected to thermal, centrifugal and pressure loadings, for the quantification of the uncertainty on dual quantities (such as the accumulated plastic strain and the stress tensor), generated by the uncertainty on the temperature loading field. The dictionary-based ROM-net computes predictions of dual quantities of interest for 1008 Monte Carlo draws of the temperature loading field in 2 hours and 48 minutes, which corresponds to a speedup greater than 600 with respect to a reference parallel solver using domain decomposition, with a relative error in the order of 2%. Another contribution of this work consists in the derivation of a meta-model to reconstruct the dual quantities of interest over the complete mesh from their values on the reduced integration points.

Along with climate change, more frequent extreme events, such as flooding and tropical cyclones, threaten the livelihoods and wellbeing of poor and vulnerable populations. One of the most immediate needs of people affected by a disaster is finding shelter. While the proliferation of data on disasters is already helping to save lives, identifying damages in buildings, assessing shelter needs, and finding appropriate places to establish emergency shelters or settlements require a wide range of data to be combined rapidly. To address this gap and make a headway in comprehensive assessments, this paper proposes a machine learning workflow that aims to fuse and rapidly analyse multimodal data. This workflow is built around open and online data to ensure scalability and broad accessibility. Based on a database of 19 characteristics for more than 200 disasters worldwide, a fusion approach at the decision level was used. This technique allows the collected multimodal data to share a common semantic space that facilitates the prediction of individual variables. Each fused numerical vector was fed into an unsupervised clustering algorithm called Self-Organizing-Maps (SOM). The trained SOM serves as a predictor for future cases, allowing predicting consequences such as total deaths, total people affected, and total damage, and provides specific recommendations for assessments in the shelter and housing sector. To achieve such prediction, a satellite image from before the disaster and the geographic and demographic conditions are shown to the trained model, which achieved a prediction accuracy of 62 %

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), which usually utilizes machine learning methods and is effective in disaggregating smart meter readings from the household-level into appliance-level consumptions, can help to analyze electricity consumption behaviours of users and enable practical smart energy and smart grid applications. However, smart meters are privately owned and distributed, which make real-world applications of NILM challenging. To this end, this paper develops a distributed and privacy-preserving federated deep learning framework for NILM (FederatedNILM), which combines federated learning with a state-of-the-art deep learning architecture to conduct NILM for the classification of typical states of household appliances. Through extensive comparative experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed FederatedNILM framework is demonstrated.

The traditional production paradigm of large batch production does not offer flexibility towards satisfying the requirements of individual customers. A new generation of smart factories is expected to support new multi-variety and small-batch customized production modes. For that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enabling higher value-added manufacturing by accelerating the integration of manufacturing and information communication technologies, including computing, communication, and control. The characteristics of a customized smart factory are to include self-perception, operations optimization, dynamic reconfiguration, and intelligent decision-making. The AI technologies will allow manufacturing systems to perceive the environment, adapt to the external needs, and extract the process knowledge, including business models, such as intelligent production, networked collaboration, and extended service models. This paper focuses on the implementation of AI in customized manufacturing (CM). The architecture of an AI-driven customized smart factory is presented. Details of intelligent manufacturing devices, intelligent information interaction, and construction of a flexible manufacturing line are showcased. The state-of-the-art AI technologies of potential use in CM, i.e., machine learning, multi-agent systems, Internet of Things, big data, and cloud-edge computing are surveyed. The AI-enabled technologies in a customized smart factory are validated with a case study of customized packaging. The experimental results have demonstrated that the AI-assisted CM offers the possibility of higher production flexibility and efficiency. Challenges and solutions related to AI in CM are also discussed.

The ability to plan into the future while utilizing only raw high-dimensional observations, such as images, can provide autonomous agents with broad capabilities. Visual model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods that plan future actions directly have shown impressive results on tasks that require only short-horizon reasoning, however, these methods struggle on temporally extended tasks. We argue that it is easier to solve long-horizon tasks by planning sequences of states rather than just actions, as the effects of actions greatly compound over time and are harder to optimize. To achieve this, we draw on the idea of collocation, which has shown good results on long-horizon tasks in optimal control literature, and adapt it to the image-based setting by utilizing learned latent state space models. The resulting latent collocation method (LatCo) optimizes trajectories of latent states, which improves over previously proposed shooting methods for visual model-based RL on tasks with sparse rewards and long-term goals. Videos and code at https://orybkin.github.io/latco/.