Flooding is a destructive and dangerous hazard and climate change appears to be increasing the frequency of catastrophic flooding events around the world. Physics-based flood models are costly to calibrate and are rarely generalizable across different river basins, as model outputs are sensitive to site-specific parameters and human-regulated infrastructure. In contrast, statistical models implicitly account for such factors through the data on which they are trained. Such models trained primarily from remotely-sensed Earth observation data could reduce the need for extensive in-situ measurements. In this work, we develop generalizable, multi-basin models of river flooding susceptibility using geographically-distributed data from the USGS stream gauge network. Machine learning models are trained in a supervised framework to predict two measures of flood susceptibility from a mix of river basin attributes, impervious surface cover information derived from satellite imagery, and historical records of rainfall and stream height. We report prediction performance of multiple models using precision-recall curves, and compare with performance of naive baselines. This work on multi-basin flood prediction represents a step in the direction of making flood prediction accessible to all at-risk communities.

Modern applications of machine learning (ML) deal with increasingly heterogeneous datasets comprised of data collected from overlapping latent subpopulations. As a result, traditional models trained over large datasets may fail to recognize highly predictive localized effects in favour of weakly predictive global patterns. This is a problem because localized effects are critical to developing individualized policies and treatment plans in applications ranging from precision medicine to advertising. To address this challenge, we propose to estimate sample-specific models that tailor inference and prediction at the individual level. In contrast to classical ML models that estimate a single, complex model (or only a few complex models), our approach produces a model personalized to each sample. These sample-specific models can be studied to understand subgroup dynamics that go beyond coarse-grained class labels. Crucially, our approach does not assume that relationships between samples (e.g. a similarity network) are known a priori. Instead, we use unmodeled covariates to learn a latent distance metric over the samples. We apply this approach to financial, biomedical, and electoral data as well as simulated data and show that sample-specific models provide fine-grained interpretations of complicated phenomena without sacrificing predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models such as deep neural networks.

One of the key challenges in the semantic mapping problem in postdisaster environments is how to analyze a large amount of data efficiently with minimal supervision. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based semantic mapping tool consisting of three main ideas. First, we develop a frugal semantic segmentation algorithm that uses only a small amount of labeled data. Next, we investigate on the problem of learning to detect a new class of object using just a few training examples. Finally, we develop an explainable cost map learning algorithm that can be quickly trained to generate traversability cost maps using only raw sensor data such as aerial-view imagery. This paper presents an overview of the proposed idea and the lessons learned.

From its inception, AI has had a rather ambivalent relationship to humans---swinging between their augmentation and replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. To do this effectively, AI systems must pay more attention to aspects of intelligence that helped humans work with each other---including social intelligence. I will discuss the research challenges in designing such human-aware AI systems, including modeling the mental states of humans in the loop, recognizing their desires and intentions, providing proactive support, exhibiting explicable behavior, giving cogent explanations on demand, and engendering trust. I will survey the progress made so far on these challenges, and highlight some promising directions. I will also touch on the additional ethical quandaries that such systems pose. I will end by arguing that the quest for human-aware AI systems broadens the scope of AI enterprise, necessitates and facilitates true inter-disciplinary collaborations, and can go a long way towards increasing public acceptance of AI technologies.

Traditional deep neural nets (NNs) have shown the state-of-the-art performance in the task of classification in various applications. However, NNs have not considered any types of uncertainty associated with the class probabilities to minimize risk due to misclassification under uncertainty in real life. Unlike Bayesian neural nets indirectly infering uncertainty through weight uncertainties, evidential neural networks (ENNs) have been recently proposed to support explicit modeling of the uncertainty of class probabilities. It treats predictions of an NN as subjective opinions and learns the function by collecting the evidence leading to these opinions by a deterministic NN from data. However, an ENN is trained as a black box without explicitly considering different types of inherent data uncertainty, such as vacuity (uncertainty due to a lack of evidence) or dissonance (uncertainty due to conflicting evidence). This paper presents a new approach, called a {\em regularized ENN}, that learns an ENN based on regularizations related to different characteristics of inherent data uncertainty. Via the experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed regularized ENN can better learn of an ENN modeling different types of uncertainty in the class probabilities for classification tasks.

On October 15 the Democratic presidential candidates will once again have the opportunity to debate their positions on a range of issues affecting this country. Let's hope that this go-round we hear their visions for Digital America. Yes, health care, immigration, climate change and other topics that consumed the previous debates are important. Yes, impeachment is on the front page. But what is the agenda that provides hope and opportunity for Americans in a new digital-based economy? So far, much of the campaign focus on the new economy has been reduced to a misleadingly simple "break'em up!" solution for Big Tech.

Enhanced Cyber Security approach has multiple layers of protection. Its spread across the computers, networks, programs, or data that we want to keep safe. Every day, around 230,000 malware samples are created by hackers stated Panda Security. Machine learning solution makes it easy to interact with customers. AI makes cybersecurity, better through the automation of a complicated process that detects cyber-attacks and reacts to cybersecurity breaches.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the ability of microorganisms like bacteria, viruses, fungi and certain parasites to resist drugs such as antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals from destroying it. AMR is a worldwide public health threat that is projected to rise. Globally, by 2050, over 10 million deaths per year will be due to antimicrobial resistance according to projections from a report by Wellcome Trust and the UK government. For antibiotic resistance alone, each year over two million people in the U.S. are affected, and 23,000 die, according to figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Researchers at Washington State University have combined game theory with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a tool that can identify genes that are antibiotic-resistant in bacteria, and published their study in Scientific Reports on October 9, 2019.

All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor. You can't see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It's being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view. Only mathematicians and computer scientists fully understand the sea change, powered as it is by artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms, risk modeling and biometrics. But if you are one of the millions of vulnerable people at the receiving end of the radical reshaping of welfare benefits, you know it is real and that its consequences can be serious – even deadly.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 14 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Attacking enemy lines as a heavily up-gunned armored robot, firing lasers, knocking enemy drones out of the air with "elevating" weapons, controlling air and ground drones as networked "nodes" in war and using AI to organize long-range targeting data -- are all desired attributes for the Army's new infantry vehicle - the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. The new vehicle, slated to ultimately replace the decades-old Bradley, will achieve operational combat status as soon as 2026 -- and, according to Army documents, pave the way forward into a new era of major, high-powered, mechanized warfare. As it enters a new prototyping and test phase for the vehicle, the Army is further refining its ambitious and high-standard requirements.