Energy
Google install AI-powered cooling system for data centre - Information Age
Although human intervention will occur when needed, the DeepMind system will take screenshots every five minutes to analyse where and when energy consumption levels can be reduced. DeepMind said in a recent blog post: "Even minor improvements would provide significant energy savings and reduce CO2 emissions to help combat climate change." Any necessary changes are checked for predicted energy efficiency and temperature levels, as well as any possuble safety repercussions, before being implemented. Google have reported energy savings of approximately 30% as a result of the use of DeepMind's cooling system. See also: Going green: technology's battle to save the planet The multinational search engine have been using a DeepMind cooling system for the last few months, but until this past week, the system merely offered recommendations for humans to accept or reject.
Machine Learning for Spatiotemporal Sequence Forecasting: A Survey
Spatiotemporal systems are common in the real-world. Forecasting the multi-step future of these spatiotemporal systems based on the past observations, or, Spatiotemporal Sequence Forecasting (STSF), is a significant and challenging problem. Although lots of real-world problems can be viewed as STSF and many research works have proposed machine learning based methods for them, no existing work has summarized and compared these methods from a unified perspective. This survey aims to provide a systematic review of machine learning for STSF. In this survey, we define the STSF problem and classify it into three subcategories: Trajectory Forecasting of Moving Point Cloud (TF-MPC), STSF on Regular Grid (STSF-RG) and STSF on Irregular Grid (STSF-IG). We then introduce the two major challenges of STSF: 1) how to learn a model for multi-step forecasting and 2) how to adequately model the spatial and temporal structures. After that, we review the existing works for solving these challenges, including the general learning strategies for multi-step forecasting, the classical machine learning based methods for STSF, and the deep learning based methods for STSF. We also compare these methods and point out some potential research directions.
On a New Improvement-Based Acquisition Function for Bayesian Optimization
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular algorithm for solving challenging optimization tasks. It is designed for problems where the objective function is expensive to evaluate, perhaps not available in exact form, without gradient information and possibly returning noisy values. Different versions of the algorithm vary in the choice of the acquisition function, which recommends the point to query the objective at next. Initially, researchers focused on improvement-based acquisitions, while recently the attention has shifted to more computationally expensive information-theoretical measures. In this paper we present two major contributions to the literature. First, we propose a new improvement-based acquisition function that recommends query points where the improvement is expected to be high with high confidence. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a large set of benchmark functions from the global optimization literature, where it turns out to perform at least as well as current state-of-the-art acquisition functions, and often better. This suggests that it is a powerful default choice for BO. The novel policy is then compared to widely used global optimization solvers in order to confirm that BO methods reduce the computational costs of the optimization by keeping the number of function evaluations small. The second main contribution represents an application to precision medicine, where the interest lies in the estimation of parameters of a partial differential equations model of the human pulmonary blood circulation system. Once inferred, these parameters can help clinicians in diagnosing a patient with pulmonary hypertension without going through the standard invasive procedure of right heart catheterization, which can lead to side effects and complications (e.g. severe pain, internal bleeding, thrombosis).
Nvidia reveals its RTX graphics cards with game-changing ray tracing tech
Nvidia today revealed its newest GeForce series GPUs at Gamescom, the RTX series built on its Turing architecture. According to Nvidia the RTX update is the biggest since CUDA. Real-time ray tracing brings cinema quality light and shadow reflections to gaming, but that's not the only update. The new Turing architecture, developed over the last 10 years, brings a leap in performance that can only be described as incredible. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said a single Turing card renders advanced lighting effects faster than a DGX supercomputer running 4 Volta cards.
Deep Learning Stretches Up to Scientific Supercomputers
Researchers delivered a 15-petaflop deep-learning software and ran it on Cori, a supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility. Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, enjoys unprecedented success in commercial applications. However, the use of machine learning in high performance computing for science has been limited. Why? Advanced machine learning tools weren't designed for big data sets, like those used to study stars and planets. A team from Intel, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and Stanford changed that situation.
A Distribution Similarity Based Regularizer for Learning Bayesian Networks
Probabilistic graphical models compactly represent joint distributions by decomposing them into factors over subsets of random variables. In Bayesian networks, the factors are conditional probability distributions. For many problems, common information exists among those factors. Adding similarity restrictions can be viewed as imposing prior knowledge for model regularization. With proper restrictions, learned models usually generalize better. In this work, we study methods that exploit such high-level similarities to regularize the learning process and apply them to the task of modeling the wave propagation in inhomogeneous media. We propose a novel distribution-based penalization approach that encourages similar conditional probability distribution rather than force the parameters to be similar explicitly. We show in experiment that our proposed algorithm solves the modeling wave propagation problem, which other baseline methods are not able to solve.
Top 10 Data Science Platforms That Cash the Analytics Code Analytics Insight
Data science platforms are the must-have tools for any business enterprises that aspire to scale up its frontiers. Data science platform is essentially a software hub around which all the data science functionalities like data exploration and integration from various sources, coding, model building are performed. Data science platforms are programmed to train and test models and deploy the results to solve real-life business problems. Data science platforms are a massive hit driving business revenues to new heights, this can be ascertained by the fact that the global data science platform market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 39.2% in the next decade to reach to approx. Using the massively varied data science platforms, one question is often asked and debated, which ones are the top data science platforms that let you use the best tools for the job at hand?
Improving Search through A3C Reinforcement Learning based Conversational Agent
Aggarwal, Milan, Arora, Aarushi, Sodhani, Shagun, Krishnamurthy, Balaji
We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards and better states.
Particle physicists team up with AI to solve toughest science problems
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator at the European particle physics lab CERN, produce about a million gigabytes of data every second. Even after reduction and compression, the data amassed in just one hour is similar to the data volume Facebook collects in an entire year โ too much to store and analyze. Luckily, particle physicists don't have to deal with all of that data all by themselves. They partner with a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning that learns how to do complex analyses on its own. A group of researchers, including scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, summarize current applications and future prospects of machine learning in particle physics in a paper published today in Nature.
YC-backed Sterblue aims to enable smarter drone inspections
As government regulation for commercial drone usage seems to be trending in a very positive direction for the companies involved, there is an ever-growing opportunity for drone startups to utilize artificial intelligence to deliver insights without requiring much human effort. Sterblue, a French drone software startup that is launching out of Y Combinator's latest class of companies, is aiming to get off-the-shelf drones inspecting large outdoor structures up close with automated insights that identify anomalies that need a second look. The startup's software is specifically focused on enabling drones to easily inspect large power lines or wind turbines with simple automated trajectories that can get a job done much quicker and with less room for human error. The software also allows the drones to get much closer to the large structures they are scanning so the scanned images are as high-quality as possible. Compared to navigating a tight urban environment, Sterblue has the benefit of there being very few airborne anomalies around these structures, so autonomously flying along certain flight paths is as easy as having a CAD structure available and enough wiggle room to correct for things like wind condition.