The outcomes of elections, product sales, and the structure of social connections are all determined by the choices individuals make when presented with a set of options, so understanding the factors that contribute to choice is crucial. Of particular interest are context effects, which occur when the set of available options influences a chooser's relative preferences, as they violate traditional rationality assumptions yet are widespread in practice. However, identifying these effects from observed choices is challenging, often requiring foreknowledge of the effect to be measured. In contrast, we provide a method for the automatic discovery of a broad class of context effects from observed choice data. Our models are easier to train and more flexible than existing models and also yield intuitive, interpretable, and statistically testable context effects. Using our models, we identify new context effects in widely used choice datasets and provide the first analysis of choice set context effects in social network growth.

Sketch drawings are an intuitive visual domain that appeals to human instinct. Previous work has shown that recurrent neural networks are capable of producing sketch drawings of a single or few classes at a time. In this work we investigate representations developed by training a generative model to produce sketches from pixel images across many classes in a sketch domain. We find that the embeddings learned by this sketching model are informative for visual tasks and capture some forms of visual understanding. We then use them to exceed state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised few-shot classification on the Omniglot and mini-ImageNet benchmarks. We also leverage the generative capacity of our model to produce high quality sketches of novel classes based on just a single example.

Reasoning is a fundamental capability for harnessing valuable insight, knowledge and patterns from knowledge graphs. Existing work has primarily been focusing on point-wise reasoning, including search, link predication, entity prediction, subgraph matching and so on. This paper introduces comparative reasoning over knowledge graphs, which aims to infer the commonality and inconsistency with respect to multiple pieces of clues. We envision that the comparative reasoning will complement and expand the existing point-wise reasoning over knowledge graphs. In detail, we develop KompaRe, the first of its kind prototype system that provides comparative reasoning capability over large knowledge graphs. We present both the system architecture and its core algorithms, including knowledge segment extraction, pairwise reasoning and collective reasoning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed KompaRe.

The 2nd 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 July 2020. 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, including: AI and society, bias and algorithmic justice, disinformation, humans and AI, labor impacts, privacy, risk, and future of AI ethics. 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. These experts include: Danit Gal (Tech Advisor, United Nations), Amba Kak (Director of Global Policy and Programs, NYU's AI Now Institute), Rumman Chowdhury (Global Lead for Responsible AI, Accenture), Brent Barron (Director of Strategic Projects and Knowledge Management, CIFAR), Adam Murray (U.S. Diplomat working on tech policy, Chair of the OECD Network on AI), Thomas Kochan (Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management), and Katya Klinova (AI and Economy Program Lead, Partnership on AI). 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.

New technologies have always thrown up new questions about Intellectual Property. Whether that's the printing press revolution, the invention of recorded music, or the advent of the internet. Artificial Intelligence is no different. Over the past ten years AI technologies have accelerated. I've seen for myself the incredible impact they're having across a huge range of sectors – from medicine to manufacturing.

Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced that it has acquired LLamasoft, a leader in AI-powered supply chain design and planning for a purchase price of approximately $1.5 billion. Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., LLamasoft's technology is used by hundreds of enterprise customers, including brands such as Boeing, Danone S.A., Home Depot, and Nestle. The acquisition will strengthen Coupa's supply chain capabilities, enabling businesses to drive greater value through Business Spend Management. The events of this year continue to demonstrate the importance of supply chain agility, as companies work to more rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, economic conditions, and the political landscape. With demand uncertainty on one hand and supply volatility on the other, companies are in need of supply chain technology that can help them assess alternatives and balance trade-offs to achieve desired business results.

Intelligent automation has changed everything, and as a result citizens expect to interact as easily with the government as they do with commercial online sites. That means filing a tax return, registering to vote or paying a parking ticket should be as simple as ordering a pack of batteries. And just as Americans trust Amazon will maintain the highest standard of security to keep data private, they also expect government agencies to protect their data and operations from external threats. However, three quarters of the federal technology budget is spent on operations and maintenance for legacy systems, according to IDC, which means citizens are not benefiting from the efficiencies that come from new technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). To design a digital experience that matches citizen expectations, enterprise IT must move from a back-office support function into a strategic catalyst that unlocks value and enhances public-sector safety and productivity.

In July 2017, I sat in on a closed-door meeting coordinated by the State Department and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. In the room were research scientists, government officials, and policy wonks with PhDs in the hard sciences. Our task that day was to talk about the future of Crispr-Cas9. Back then, the public wasn't yet aware of this powerful genetic editing tool, but today you probably know it as the set of "molecular scissors" that use biological processes to cut and paste genetic information. Crispr might be new, but the key points of our conversation were hardly original.

June 8, 2019 Updated: April 20, 2020 "[AI] is going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind. AI oracle and venture capitalist Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, 2018 In a nondescript building close to downtown Chicago, Marc Gyongyosi and the small but growing crew of IFM / Onetrack.AI have one rule that rules them all: think simple. The words are written in simple font on a simple sheet of paper that's stuck to a rear upstairs wall of their industrial two-story workspace. Sitting at his cluttered desk, located near an oft-used ping-pong table and prototypes of drones from his college days suspended overhead, Gyongyosi punches some keys on a laptop to pull up grainy video footage of a forklift driver operating his vehicle in a warehouse. It was captured from overhead courtesy of a Onetrack.AI "forklift vision system." The Future of Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence is impacting the future of virtually every industry and every human being. Artificial intelligence has acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future. Employing machine learning and computer vision for detection and classification of various "safety events," the shoebox-sized device doesn't see all, but it sees plenty. Like which way the driver is looking as he operates the vehicle, how fast he's driving, where he's driving, locations of the people around him and how other forklift operators are maneuvering their vehicles. IFM's software automatically detects safety violations (for example, cell phone use) and notifies warehouse managers so they can take immediate action. The main goals are to prevent accidents and increase efficiency. The mere knowledge that one of IFM's devices is watching, Gyongyosi claims, has had "a huge effect." Marc Gyongyosi Photo Credit: IFM/OneTrack.AI The lower level of IFM was designed to mimic a warehouse environment so products can be effectively tested on site. Photo Credit: IFM/OneTrack.AI "If you think about a camera, it really is the richest sensor available to us today at a very interesting price point," he says. "Because of smartphones, camera and image sensors have become incredibly inexpensive, yet we capture a lot of information.

In this episode, Lilly interviews Jonathan Sauder, the Principal Investigator of a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts project to design a rover for the surface of Venus. Sauder explains why exploring Venus is important and why previous surface missions have only lasted a few hours. They discuss his innovative wheeled-robot concept, a hybrid automaton rover which would be mostly mechanical and powered by wind. Jonathan Sauder is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Fellow and Senior Mechatronics Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in the Technology Infusion Group focused on innovative concepts. He is also a lecturer of "Design Theory and Methodology" and "Advanced Mechanical Design" at the University of Southern California, where he received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering.