While global cybersecurity spending now surpasses $100 billion annually, 64 percent of enterprises were compromised in 2018, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute. The standard answer is that wily cyber-criminals are employing ever-evolving, increasingly sophisticated attack methods, part of a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse in which they all too often outsmart the good guys. This is undoubtedly true – but the root of the problem is that traditional machine learning-based cybersecurity solutions fail to keep up with the growing sophistication of today's cyber threats, both those that are created by hackers and AI alike. Why does machine learning so often come up short – and how should cybersecurity evolve to meet the scale and complexity of the challenge? There's no question that machine learning has driven significant improvements in cybersecurity.

Microsoft will release the latest edition of its famous Flight Simulator software for PC later this month with ultra lifelike graphics - but it will require a massive 150GB of free storage to install it. The software will make use of satellite maps from Bing as well as live readings from weather stations and airports around the world to create'the most realistic' version of the game ever developed. Users simply upload their desired destination and use the'realistic' training system to navigate the area – the simulator is set to be released for PC on August 18, Xbox shortly after and VR later this year. The simulator lets'pilots' sit in a realistic cockpit, allowing them to learn the ins and outs of a real airplane and travel from or to more than 40,000 real-world airports and visit sites between them. The latest version of the 38 year old software includes 37 thousand airports, 1.5 billion buildings and two trillion trees, mountains, roads and rivers. According to Microsoft it will include live traffic, real time weather and moving animals to reflect the fact Earth is a'living world'.

Saving lives or economy is a dilemma for epidemic control in most cities while smart-tracing technology raises people's privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a solution for the life-or-economy dilemma that does not require private data. We bypass the private-data requirement by suppressing epidemic transmission through a dynamic control on inter-regional mobility that only relies on Origin-Designation (OD) data. We develop DUal-objective Reinforcement-Learning Epidemic Control Agent (DURLECA) to search mobility-control policies that can simultaneously minimize infection spread and maximally retain mobility. DURLECA hires a novel graph neural network, namely Flow-GNN, to estimate the virus-transmission risk induced by urban mobility. The estimated risk is used to support a reinforcement learning agent to generate mobility-control actions. The training of DURLECA is guided with a well-constructed reward function, which captures the natural trade-off relation between epidemic control and mobility retaining. Besides, we design two exploration strategies to improve the agent's searching efficiency and help it get rid of local optimums. Extensive experimental results on a real-world OD dataset show that DURLECA is able to suppress infections at an extremely low level while retaining 76\% of the mobility in the city. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/anyleopeace/DURLECA/.

Digital discrimination is a form of discrimination whereby users are automatically treated unfairly, unethically or just differently based on their personal data by a machine learning (ML) system. Examples of digital discrimination include low-income neighbourhood's targeted with high-interest loans or low credit scores, and women being undervalued by 21% in online marketing. Recently, different techniques and tools have been proposed to detect biases that may lead to digital discrimination. These tools often require technical expertise to be executed and for their results to be interpreted. To allow non-technical users to benefit from ML, simpler notions and concepts to represent and reason about digital discrimination are needed. In this paper, we use norms as an abstraction to represent different situations that may lead to digital discrimination. In particular, we formalise non-discrimination norms in the context of ML systems and propose an algorithm to check whether ML systems violate these norms.

This paper presents an approach for constructing multifidelity surrogate models to simultaneously represent, and learn representations of, multiple information sources. The approach formulates a network of surrogate models whose relationships are defined via localized scalings and shifts. The network can have general structure, and can represent a significantly greater variety of modeling relationships than the hierarchical/recursive networks used in the current state of the art. We show empirically that this flexibility achieves greatest gains in the low-data regime, where the network structure must more efficiently leverage the connections between data sources to yield accurate predictions. We demonstrate our approach on four examples ranging from synthetic to physics-based simulation models. For the numerical test cases adopted here, we obtained an order-of-magnitude reduction in errors compared to multifidelity hierarchical and single-fidelity approaches.

The notion of graph filters can be used to define generative models for graph data. In fact, the data obtained from many examples of network dynamics may be viewed as the output of a graph filter. With this interpretation, classical signal processing tools such as frequency analysis have been successfully applied with analogous interpretation to graph data, generating new insights for data science. What follows is a user guide on a specific class of graph data, where the generating graph filters are low-pass, i.e., the filter attenuates contents in the higher graph frequencies while retaining contents in the lower frequencies. Our choice is motivated by the prevalence of low-pass models in application domains such as social networks, financial markets, and power systems. We illustrate how to leverage properties of low-pass graph filters to learn the graph topology or identify its community structure; efficiently represent graph data through sampling, recover missing measurements, and de-noise graph data; the low-pass property is also used as the baseline to detect anomalies.

We propose a data fusion method based on multi-fidelity Gaussian process regression (GPR) framework. This method combines available data of the quantity of interest (QoI) and its gradients with different fidelity levels, namely, it is a Gradient-enhanced Cokriging method (GE-Cokriging). It provides the approximations of both the QoI and its gradients simultaneously with uncertainty estimates. We compare this method with the conventional multi-fidelity Cokriging method that does not use gradients information, and the result suggests that GE-Cokriging has a better performance in predicting both QoI and its gradients. Moreover, GE-Cokriging even shows better generalization result in some cases where Cokriging performs poorly due to the singularity of the covariance matrix. We demonstrate the application of GE-Cokriging in several practical cases including reconstructing the trajectories and velocity of an underdamped oscillator with respect to time simultaneously, and investigating the sensitivity of power factor of a load bus with respect to varying power inputs of a generator bus in a large scale power system. We also show that though GE-Cokriging method requires a little bit higher computational cost than Cokriging method, the result of accuracy comparison shows that this cost is usually worth it.

We propose a novel approach that integrates machine learning into compartmental disease modeling to predict the progression of COVID-19. Our model is explainable by design as it explicitly shows how different compartments evolve and it uses interpretable encoders to incorporate covariates and improve performance. Explainability is valuable to ensure that the model's forecasts are credible to epidemiologists and to instill confidence in end-users such as policy makers and healthcare institutions. Our model can be applied at different geographic resolutions, and here we demonstrate it for states and counties in the United States. We show that our model provides more accurate forecasts, in metrics averaged across the entire US, than state-of-the-art alternatives, and that it provides qualitatively meaningful explanatory insights. Lastly, we analyze the performance of our model for different subgroups based on the subgroup distributions within the counties.

In recent years, curial incidents and accidents have been reported due to un-intended control caused by misjudgment of statistical machine learning (SML), which include deep learning. The international functional safety standards for Electric/Electronic/Programmable (E/E/P) systems have been widely spread to improve safety. However, most of them do not recom-mended to use SML in safety critical systems so far. In practical the new concepts and methods are urgently required to enable SML to be safely used in safety critical systems. In this paper, we organize five kinds of technical safety concepts (TSCs) for SML components toward accordance with functional safety standards. We discuss not only quantitative evaluation criteria, but also development process based on XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) and Automotive SPICE to improve explainability and reliability in development phase. Fi-nally, we briefly compare the TSCs in cost and difficulty, and expect to en-courage further discussion in many communities and domain.

Not even the best quantum computers or AI from the past and present can help us in predicting the future. The dichotomy of a world under lockdown is that it is also in flux. Nothing is fixed anymore, not your corner office overlooking the city you love, not the position of a country that wants to be the AI superpower of the world. We honestly do not know what the future looks like. Who would have thought that a pandemic will make the world start adopting AI technologies like there is no tomorrow?