The 4th edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in the field of AI Ethics since January 2021. This report aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the ever-changing developments in the field. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, with a particular focus on four key themes: Ethical AI, Fairness & Justice, Humans & Tech, and Privacy. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. Opening the report is a long-form piece by Edward Higgs (Professor of History, University of Essex) titled "AI and the Face: A Historian's View." In it, Higgs examines the unscientific history of facial analysis and how AI might be repeating some of those mistakes at scale. The report also features chapter introductions by Alexa Hagerty (Anthropologist, University of Cambridge), Marianna Ganapini (Faculty Director, Montreal AI Ethics Institute), Deborah G. Johnson (Emeritus Professor, Engineering and Society, University of Virginia), and Soraj Hongladarom (Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok). This report should be used not only as a point of reference and insight on the latest thinking in the field of AI Ethics, but should also be used as a tool for introspection as we aim to foster a more nuanced conversation regarding the impacts of AI on the world.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

In researching for this blog, I reached out to Brendan Bennett, a Reinforcement Learning Researcher at the University of Alberta, for his thoughts on how emerging digital technologies may be deployed in the energy industry. Brendan and I discussed how some recent landmark accomplishments in artificial intelligence might soon make their way into the energy industry. Digital innovation in commercial spheres has largely been a story of improving efficiency and reliability while reducing costs. In the energy sector, these innovations have been a result of oil and gas companies doing what they do best: relying on talented engineers to improve on existing solutions. Improvements have quickly spread across the industry, bringing down costs and making processes more efficient.

In this paper, we address the problem of answering complex information needs by conversing conversations with search engines, in the sense that users can express their queries in natural language, and directly receivethe information they need from a short system response in a conversational manner. Recently, there have been some attempts towards a similar goal, e.g., studies on Conversational Agents (CAs) and Conversational Search (CS). However, they either do not address complex information needs, or they are limited to the development of conceptual frameworks and/or laboratory-based user studies. We pursue two goals in this paper: (1) the creation of a suitable dataset, the Search as a Conversation (SaaC) dataset, for the development of pipelines for conversations with search engines, and (2) the development of astate-of-the-art pipeline for conversations with search engines, the Conversations with Search Engines (CaSE), using this dataset. SaaC is built based on a multi-turn conversational search dataset, where we further employ workers from a crowdsourcing platform to summarize each relevant passage into a short, conversational response. CaSE enhances the state-of-the-art by introducing a supporting token identification module and aprior-aware pointer generator, which enables us to generate more accurate responses. We carry out experiments to show that CaSE is able to outperform strong baselines. We also conduct extensive analyses on the SaaC dataset to show where there is room for further improvement beyond CaSE. Finally, we release the SaaC dataset and the code for CaSE and all models used for comparison to facilitate future research on this topic.

Welcome back to the "Life in 2050" series! So far, we've looked at how ongoing developments in science, technology, and geopolitics will be reflected in terms of warfare and the economy. Today, we are shifting gears a little and looking at how the turbulence of this century will affect the way people live from day to day. As noted in the previous two installments, changes in the 21st century will be driven by two major factors. These include the disruption caused by rapidly accelerating technological progress, and the disruption caused by rising global temperatures, and the environmental impact this will have (aka. These factors will be pulling the world in opposite directions, and simultaneously at that.

Part II: Research applications" LINK "Physical and thermal properties of gold nanoparticles embedded Nd3 -doped borophosphate glasses: Spectroscopic parameters" LINK "Spectral Assessment of Organic Matter with Different Composition Using Reflectance Spectroscopy" Remote Sensing LINK

A research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin is using active machine learning in the search for suitable molecular materials for new organic semiconductors, the basis for organic field effect transistors (OFETs), light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic solar cells (OPVs). To efficiently deal with the myriad of possibilities for candidate molecules, machine learning proves an invaluable tool. It is envisaged that organic semiconductors will enable important future technologies such as portable solar cells or rollable displays. For such applications, improved organic molecules – which make up these materials – need to be discovered. For material discovery tasks of this nature researchers are increasingly utilising machine learning methods, training on data from computer simulations or experiments.

Industrial companies are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) as part of the fourth digital revolution. 1 1. The first two revolutions introduced programmable logic controllers and distributed control systems, which enabled plant-wide data collection and automation. The third revolution--advanced process controls--further abstracted automation into high-level models, allowing for increasingly dynamic plant operation. For more on the latest innovations in process controls, see Stephan Görner, Andy Luse, Naman Maheshwari, Ravi Malladi, Lapo Mori, and Robert Samek, "The potential of advanced process controls in energy and materials," November 23, 2020. AI leverages big data; it promises new insights that derive from applying machine learning to datasets with more variables, longer timescales, and higher granularity than ever.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have enabled significant improvements in modelling physical processes described by partial differential equations (PDEs). PINNs are based on simple architectures, and learn the behavior of complex physical systems by optimizing the network parameters to minimize the residual of the underlying PDE. Current network architectures share some of the limitations of classical numerical discretization schemes when applied to non-linear differential equations in continuum mechanics. A paradigmatic example is the solution of hyperbolic conservation laws that develop highly localized nonlinear shock waves. Learning solutions of PDEs with dominant hyperbolic character is a challenge for current PINN approaches, which rely, like most grid-based numerical schemes, on adding artificial dissipation. Here, we address the fundamental question of which network architectures are best suited to learn the complex behavior of non-linear PDEs. We focus on network architecture rather than on residual regularization. Our new methodology, called Physics-Informed Attention-based Neural Networks, (PIANNs), is a combination of recurrent neural networks and attention mechanisms. The attention mechanism adapts the behavior of the deep neural network to the non-linear features of the solution, and break the current limitations of PINNs. We find that PIANNs effectively capture the shock front in a hyperbolic model problem, and are capable of providing high-quality solutions inside and beyond the training set.

We propose the novel use of a generative adversarial network (GAN) (i) to make predictions in time (PredGAN) and (ii) to assimilate measurements (DA-PredGAN). In the latter case, we take advantage of the natural adjoint-like properties of generative models and the ability to simulate forwards and backwards in time. GANs have received much attention recently, after achieving excellent results for their generation of realistic-looking images. We wish to explore how this property translates to new applications in computational modelling and to exploit the adjoint-like properties for efficient data assimilation. To predict the spread of COVID-19 in an idealised town, we apply these methods to a compartmental model in epidemiology that is able to model space and time variations. To do this, the GAN is set within a reduced-order model (ROM), which uses a low-dimensional space for the spatial distribution of the simulation states. Then the GAN learns the evolution of the low-dimensional states over time. The results show that the proposed methods can accurately predict the evolution of the high-fidelity numerical simulation, and can efficiently assimilate observed data and determine the corresponding model parameters.