Government
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Play a Role in Endpoint Security
Traditional endpoint protection is reactive, responding once something has happened. Endpoint protection with machine learning is proactive, capable of studying an almost limitless amount of network traffic, logging information and app installations for anomalous activity. "Security technologies with artificial intelligence capabilities have the potential to anticipate attacks and counter them in real-time," says Turner. "Given that cyberattacks occur in seconds, the speed brought by AI-driven security technologies is crucial." Because of the recent shift to remote learning, the number of endpoints has exploded.
Shanghai Plans to be Digital Hub by 2035
Shanghai is aiming to make the city a global digital hub by 2035 as it pushes forward with its digital city construction plan. The plans include information technology upgrades of industrial and urban management, online economy development and data usage innovation. Shanghai will head up digital infrastructure and data usage across the country, with upgrades and digital transformation until 2025. Then by 2035, the city will become a global digital hub. Shanghai can boost digital transformation by industrial, talent and data volume advantages.
Wang Yaping becomes first Chinese woman to walk in space
Astronaut Wang Yaping has become the first Chinese woman to walk in space, authorities said Monday, as part of a six-month mission to the country's space station. Wang and fellow astronaut Zhai Zhigang left the main module of the Tiangong station for more than six hours to install equipment and carry out tests alongside the station's robotic arm as part of its ongoing construction, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMS). The third member of the crew, Ye Guangfu, provided assistance from inside the station, CMS said on its website. Tiangong, meaning "heavenly palace", is a crucial part of China's military-led drive to become a leading space power, after landing a rover on Mars and sending probes to the Moon. Its core module entered orbit earlier this year, with the station expected to be operational by 2022.
Enterprise Data Monetization Capabilities
Life saving principle to guide work practices for high risk operations. AI to review contractor document during onboarding to make sure contractors met life saving principle requirements. Australian Tax Office during 2018 tax period used 240000 tax payer. AI solution flagged messages about business expenses and ask the tax payer to look back at their expense and brought 118M dollars adjustment during that period. ATO made sure the solution is in best interest for government as well as for its citizens.
A Comparison of Model-Free and Model Predictive Control for Price Responsive Water Heaters
Biagioni, David J., Zhang, Xiangyu, Graf, Peter, Sigler, Devon, Jones, Wesley
We present a careful comparison of two model-free control algorithms, Evolution Strategies (ES) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), with receding horizon model predictive control (MPC) for operating simulated, price responsive water heaters. Four MPC variants are considered: a one-shot controller with perfect forecasting yielding optimal control; a limited-horizon controller with perfect forecasting; a mean forecasting-based controller; and a two-stage stochastic programming controller using historical scenarios. In all cases, the MPC model for water temperature and electricity price are exact; only water demand is uncertain. For comparison, both ES and PPO learn neural network-based policies by directly interacting with the simulated environment under the same scenarios used by MPC. All methods are then evaluated on a separate one-week continuation of the demand time series. We demonstrate that optimal control for this problem is challenging, requiring more than 8-hour lookahead for MPC with perfect forecasting to attain the minimum cost. Despite this challenge, both ES and PPO learn good general purpose policies that outperform mean forecast and two-stage stochastic MPC controllers in terms of average cost and are more than two orders of magnitude faster at computing actions. We show that ES in particular can leverage parallelism to learn a policy in under 90 seconds using 1150 CPU cores.
Adversarial sampling of unknown and high-dimensional conditional distributions
Hassanaly, Malik, Glaws, Andrew, Stengel, Karen, King, Ryan N.
Many engineering problems require the prediction of realization-to-realization variability or a refined description of modeled quantities. In that case, it is necessary to sample elements from unknown high-dimensional spaces with possibly millions of degrees of freedom. While there exist methods able to sample elements from probability density functions (PDF) with known shapes, several approximations need to be made when the distribution is unknown. In this paper the sampling method, as well as the inference of the underlying distribution, are both handled with a data-driven method known as generative adversarial networks (GAN), which trains two competing neural networks to produce a network that can effectively generate samples from the training set distribution. In practice, it is often necessary to draw samples from conditional distributions. When the conditional variables are continuous, only one (if any) data point corresponding to a particular value of a conditioning variable may be available, which is not sufficient to estimate the conditional distribution. This work handles this problem using an a priori estimation of the conditional moments of a PDF. Two approaches, stochastic estimation, and an external neural network are compared here for computing these moments; however, any preferred method can be used. The algorithm is demonstrated in the case of the deconvolution of a filtered turbulent flow field. It is shown that all the versions of the proposed algorithm effectively sample the target conditional distribution with minimal impact on the quality of the samples compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the procedure can be used as a metric for the diversity of samples generated by a conditional GAN (cGAN) conditioned with continuous variables.
Robust and Information-theoretically Safe Bias Classifier against Adversarial Attacks
In this paper, the bias classifier is introduced, that is, the bias part of a DNN with Relu as the activation function is used as a classifier. The work is motivated by the fact that the bias part is a piecewise constant function with zero gradient and hence cannot be directly attacked by gradient-based methods to generate adversaries such as FGSM. The existence of the bias classifier is proved an effective training method for the bias classifier is proposed. It is proved that by adding a proper random first-degree part to the bias classifier, an information-theoretically safe classifier against the original-model gradient-based attack is obtained in the sense that the attack generates a totally random direction for generating adversaries. This seems to be the first time that the concept of information-theoretically safe classifier is proposed. Several attack methods for the bias classifier are proposed and numerical experiments are used to show that the bias classifier is more robust than DNNs against these attacks in most cases.
Exploratory Factor Analysis of Data on a Sphere
Dai, Fan, Dorman, Karin S., Dutta, Somak, Maitra, Ranjan
Data on high-dimensional spheres arise frequently in many disciplines either naturally or as a consequence of preliminary processing and can have intricate dependence structure that needs to be understood. We develop exploratory factor analysis of the projected normal distribution to explain the variability in such data using a few easily interpreted latent factors. Our methodology provides maximum likelihood estimates through a novel fast alternating expectation profile conditional maximization algorithm. Results on simulation experiments on a wide range of settings are uniformly excellent. Our methodology provides interpretable and insightful results when applied to tweets with the $\#MeToo$ hashtag in early December 2018, to time-course functional Magnetic Resonance Images of the average pre-teen brain at rest, to characterize handwritten digits, and to gene expression data from cancerous cells in the Cancer Genome Atlas.
American Hate Crime Trends Prediction with Event Extraction
Han, Songqiao, Huang, Hailiang, Liu, Jiangwei, Xiao, Shengsheng
Social media platforms may provide potential space for discourses that contain hate speech, and even worse, can act as a propagation mechanism for hate crimes. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects hate crime data and releases statistic report yearly. These statistics provide information in determining national hate crime trends. The statistics can also provide valuable holistic and strategic insight for law enforcement agencies or justify lawmakers for specific legislation. However, the reports are mostly released next year and lag behind many immediate needs. Recent research mainly focuses on hate speech detection in social media text or empirical studies on the impact of a confirmed crime. This paper proposes a framework that first utilizes text mining techniques to extract hate crime events from New York Times news, then uses the results to facilitate predicting American national-level and state-level hate crime trends. Experimental results show that our method can significantly enhance the prediction performance compared with time series or regression methods without event-related factors. Our framework broadens the methods of national-level and state-level hate crime trends prediction.
Explaining Face Presentation Attack Detection Using Natural Language
Mirzaalian, Hengameh, Hussein, Mohamed E., Spinoulas, Leonidas, May, Jonathan, Abd-Almageed, Wael
A large number of deep neural network based techniques have been developed to address the challenging problem of face presentation attack detection (PAD). Whereas such techniques' focus has been on improving PAD performance in terms of classification accuracy and robustness against unseen attacks and environmental conditions, there exists little attention on the explainability of PAD predictions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of explaining PAD predictions through natural language. Our approach passes feature representations of a deep layer of the PAD model to a language model to generate text describing the reasoning behind the PAD prediction. Due to the limited amount of annotated data in our study, we apply a light-weight LSTM network as our natural language generation model. We investigate how the quality of the generated explanations is affected by different loss functions, including the commonly used word-wise cross entropy loss, a sentence discriminative loss, and a sentence semantic loss. We perform our experiments using face images from a dataset consisting of 1,105 bona-fide and 924 presentation attack samples. Our quantitative and qualitative results show the effectiveness of our model for generating proper PAD explanations through text as well as the power of the sentence-wise losses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first introduction of a joint biometrics-NLP task. Our dataset can be obtained through our GitHub page.