Approximation theorists have established best-in-class optimal approximation rates of deep neural networks by utilizing their ability to simultaneously emulate partitions of unity and monomials. Motivated by this, we propose partition of unity networks (POUnets) which incorporate these elements directly into the architecture. Classification architectures of the type used to learn probability measures are used to build a meshfree partition of space, while polynomial spaces with learnable coefficients are associated to each partition. The resulting hp-element-like approximation allows use of a fast least-squares optimizer, and the resulting architecture size need not scale exponentially with spatial dimension, breaking the curse of dimensionality. An abstract approximation result establishes desirable properties to guide network design. Numerical results for two choices of architecture demonstrate that POUnets yield hp-convergence for smooth functions and consistently outperform MLPs for piecewise polynomial functions with large numbers of discontinuities.

Hypergraphs are a natural modeling paradigm for a wide range of complex relational systems with multibody interactions. A standard analysis task is to identify clusters of closely related or densely interconnected nodes. While many probabilistic generative models for graph clustering have been proposed, there are relatively few such models for hypergraphs. We propose a Poisson degree-corrected hypergraph stochastic blockmodel (DCHSBM), an expressive generative model of clustered hypergraphs with heterogeneous node degrees and edge sizes. Approximate maximum-likelihood inference in the DCHSBM naturally leads to a clustering objective that generalizes the popular modularity objective for graphs. We derive a general Louvain-type algorithm for this objective, as well as a a faster, specialized "All-Or-Nothing" (AON) variant in which edges are expected to lie fully within clusters. This special case encompasses a recent proposal for modularity in hypergraphs, while also incorporating flexible resolution and edge-size parameters. We show that hypergraph Louvain is highly scalable, including as an example an experiment on a synthetic hypergraph of one million nodes. We also demonstrate through synthetic experiments that the detectability regimes for hypergraph community detection differ from methods based on dyadic graph projections. In particular, there are regimes in which hypergraph methods can recover planted partitions even though graph based methods necessarily fail due to information-theoretic limits. We use our model to analyze different patterns of higher-order structure in school contact networks, U.S. congressional bill cosponsorship, U.S. congressional committees, product categories in co-purchasing behavior, and hotel locations from web browsing sessions, that it is able to recover ground truth clusters in empirical data sets exhibiting the corresponding higher-order structure.

Can we define what it means to be "creative," and if so, can our definition drive artificial intelligence (AI) systems to feats of creativity indistinguishable from human efforts? This mixed question is considered from technological and social perspectives. Beginning with an exploration of the value we attach to authenticity in works of art, the article considers the ability of AI to detect forgeries of renowned paintings and, in so doing, somehow reveal the quiddity of a work of art. We conclude by considering whether evolving technical capability can revise traditional relationships among art, artist, and the market.

This paper proposes an agent-based simulation of a presidential election, inspired by the French 2017 presidential election. The simulation is based on data extracted from polls, media coverage, and Twitter. The main contribution is to consider the impact of scandals and media bashing on the result of the election. In particular, it is shown that scandals can lead to higher abstention at the election, as voters have no relevant candidate left to vote for. The simulation is implemented in Unity 3D and is available to play online.

A voting process involves the participation of many people that interact together in order to reach a common decision. In this paper, we focus on voting processes in which a single person is elected. A voting method is defined as the set of rules that determine the winner of the election, given an input from each voter, for example their preferred candidate or an order relation between all candidates. Social Choice Theory is the field that studies the aggregation of individual preferences towards a collective choice, like for example electing a candidate or choosing a movie. Computational social choice is a recent field which aim is to apply computer science to social choice problems [3].

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undoubtedly received significant attention in recent years. AI is being adopted to provide solutions to problems in fields such as medicine, engineering, education, government and several other domains. In order to analyze the state of the art of research in the field of AI, we present a systematic literature review focusing on the Evolution of AI programming languages. We followed the systematic literature review method by searching relevant databases like SCOPUS, IEEE Xplore and Google Scholar. EndNote reference manager was used to catalog the relevant extracted papers. Our search returned a total of 6565 documents, whereof 69 studies were retained. Of the 69 retained studies, 15 documents discussed LISP programming language, another 34 discussed PROLOG programming language, the remaining 20 documents were spread between Logic and Object Oriented Programming (LOOP), ARCHLOG, Epistemic Ontology Language with Constraints (EOLC), Python, C++, ADA and JAVA programming languages. This review provides information on the year of implementation, development team, capabilities, limitations and applications of each of the AI programming languages discussed. The information in this review could guide practitioners and researchers in AI to make the right choice of languages to implement their novel AI methods.

The US should not agree to ban the use or development of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI) software, a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress. The panel, led by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, on Tuesday concluded two days of public discussion about how the world's biggest military power should consider AI for national security and technological advancement. Its vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said autonomous weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification. "It is a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis," he said. For about eight years, a coalition of non-governmental organisations has pushed for a treaty banning "killer robots", saying human control is necessary to judge attacks' proportionality and assign blame for war crimes.

The UK's data regulator is writing to WhatsApp to demand that the chat app does not hand user data to Facebook, as millions worldwide continue to sign up for alternatives such as Signal and Telegram to avoid forthcoming changes to its terms of service. Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner, told a parliamentary committee that in 2017, WhatsApp had committed not to hand any user information over to Facebook until it could prove that doing so respected GDPR. But, she said, that agreement was enforced by the Irish data protection authority until the Brexit transition period ended on 1 January. Now that Britain is fully outside the EU, ensuring that those promises are being kept falls to the Information Commissioner's Office. "The change in the terms of service, and the requirement of users to share information with Facebook, does not apply to UK users or to users in the EU," Denham told the digital, culture, media and sport sub-committee on online harms and disinformation, "and that's because in 2017 my office negotiated with WhatsApp so that they agreed not to share user information and contact information until they could show that they complied with the GDPR."

This paper introduces BioScript, a domain-specific language (DSL) for programmable biochemistry that executes on emerging microfluidic platforms. The goal of this research is to provide a simple, intuitive, and type-safe DSL that is accessible to life science practitioners. The novel feature of the language is its syntax, which aims to optimize human readability; the technical contribution of the paper is the BioScript type system. The type system ensures that certain types of errors, specific to biochemistry, do not occur, such as the interaction of chemicals that may be unsafe. Results are obtained using a custom-built compiler that implements the BioScript language and type system. The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of software-programmable laboratory-on-a-chip (pLoC) technology, enabled by technological advances in microfabrication and coupled with scientific understanding of microfluidics, the fundamental science of fluid behavior at the micro- to nanoliter scale. The net result of these collective advancements is that many experimental laboratory procedures have been miniaturized, accelerated, and automated, similar in principle to how the world's earliest computers automated tedious mathematical calculations that were previously performed by hand. Although the vast majority of microfluidic devices are effectively application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), a variety of programmable LoCs have been demonstrated.16, With a handful of exceptions, research on programming languages and compiler design for programmable LoCs has lagged behind their silicon counterparts. To address this need, this paper presents a domain-specific programming language (DSL) and type system for a specific class of pLoC that manipulate discrete droplets of liquid on a two-dimensional grid. The basic principles of the language and type system readily generalize to programmable LoCs, realized across a wide variety of microfluidic technologies.

On Feb 15, 2019, John Abowd, chief scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau, announced the results of a reconstruction attack that they proactively launched using data released under the 2010 Decennial Census.19 The decennial census released billions of statistics about individuals like "how many people of the age 10-20 live in New York City" or "how many people live in four-person households." Using only the data publicly released in 2010, an internal team was able to correctly reconstruct records of address (by census block), age, gender, race, and ethnicity for 142 million people (about 46% of the U.S. population), and correctly match these data to commercial datasets circa 2010 to associate personal-identifying information such as names for 52 million people (17% of the population). This is not specific to the U.S. Census Bureau--such attacks can occur in any setting where statistical information in the form of deidentified data, statistics, or even machine learning models are released. That such attacks are possible was predicted over 15 years ago by a seminal paper by Irit Dinur and Kobbi Nissim12--releasing a sufficiently large number of aggregate statistics with sufficiently high accuracy provides sufficient information to reconstruct the underlying database with high accuracy. The practicality of such a large-scale reconstruction by the U.S. Census Bureau underscores the grand challenge that public organizations, industry, and scientific research faces: How can we safely disseminate results of data analysis on sensitive databases? An emerging answer is differential privacy. An algorithm satisfies differential privacy (DP) if its output is insensitive to adding, removing or changing one record in its input database. DP is considered the "gold standard" for privacy for a number of reasons. It provides a persuasive mathematical proof of privacy to individuals with several rigorous interpretations.25,26 The DP guarantee is composable and repeating invocations of differentially private algorithms lead to a graceful degradation of privacy.