Government
How artificial intelligence is shaping the future of society
Maria Bartiromo explores the bounds of artificial intelligence usage globally. From health care to the transportation industry, FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of society. In February the U.S. government launched an American AI initiative, which aims to stimulate AI development. The government's investments in unclassified R&D for AI technologies is up 40 percent since 2015 and for the first time in history, President Trump's fiscal year 2019 budget requests to designate AI and unmanned autonomous systems a priority. However, some say the problem is that China spends much more on AI investment and financing. In 2017, AI spending hit $39.5 billion, with China accounting for 70 percent of the expenditures.
PANEL Artificial Intelligence and the Future of EU Diplomacy
As technological development advances, its accomplishments are bound to increasingly shape our society and pervade a plethora of different domains, international relations and diplomacy included. Artificial Intelligence, being at the forefront of the new technological revolution, has the capacity to profoundly impact the work of policy makers and introduce new innovative tools, that might become the bread and butter of pivotal international actors. As the European Union strives to forge a more effective Common Foreign and Security Policy, this event purports to discuss the potential implications of AI on EU Foreign Policy and examine the opportunities and challenges that might arise from its practice in the sphere of European diplomacy. The application of Artificial Intelligence in EU foreign policy indeed raises several critical questions. Can advancement in AI lead to a more cohesive and confident EU foreign policy?
Artificial intelligence needs patients' voice to remake health care - STAT
"Listen to your patient; they are telling you the diagnosis," an aphorism attributed to Dr. William Osler, the founder of modern medicine, still holds true today. The disappearance of patients' stories from electronic health records could be one reason that artificial intelligence and machine learning have so far failed to deliver their promised revolution of health care. The medical industry's fascination with artificial intelligence is understandable. Advancements in medicine have dramatically improved patient outcomes, and there is every reason to believe that machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and the like will do the same. But before we jump on the AI bandwagon, I offer this caution: consider the source of the data it is dependent on.
Why an "AI Race" Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea
One thing we can be sure about AI -- because we are told it so often and at so increasingly high a pitch -- is that whatever it actually is, the national interest demands more of it. And we need it now, or else China will beat us there, and we certainly wouldn't want that, would we? What does it look like, how would it work, and how would it change our society? The race is on, and if America doesn't start taking AI seriously, we're going to find ourselves the losers in an ever-widening Dystopia Gap. Savage and Nancy Scola exemplifies the mix of maximum alarm and minimum meaning that's become so typical in our national (and nationalist) discussion around artificial intelligence.
Job Role: Machine Learning Engineer
A machine learning engineer (MLE) is a key part of a team working for a business that wants to benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence functionality. In general, these professionals are the guardians of some of the most powerful technologies around. Let's look at more on what MLEs do from machine learning professionals in the tech field who spoke to us about what it means to fill one of these job roles. Join nearly 200,000 subscribers who receive actionable tech insights from Techopedia. At a very basic level, a machine learning engineers has to understand the nuts and bolts of how these projects get put together, and how they get shepherded toward completion.
Can a computer fool you into thinking it is human?
Robert Epstein was looking for love. The year being 2006, he was looking online. As he recounted in the journal Scientific American Mind, he began a promising email exchange with a pretty brunette in Russia. Epstein was disappointed - he wanted more than a penfriend, let's be frank - but she was warm and friendly. Soon she confessed she was developing a crush on him.
Flow: A Modular Learning Framework for Autonomy in Traffic
Wu, Cathy, Kreidieh, Aboudy, Parvate, Kanaad, Vinitsky, Eugene, Bayen, Alexandre M
The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) holds vast potential for transportation systems through improved safety, efficiency, and access to mobility. However, due to numerous technical, political, and human factors challenges, new methodologies are needed to design vehicles and transportation systems for these positive outcomes. This article tackles important technical challenges arising from the partial adoption of autonomy (hence termed mixed autonomy, to involve both AVs and human-driven vehicles): partial control, partial observation, complex multi-vehicle interactions, and the sheer variety of traffic settings represented by real-world networks. To enable the study of the full diversity of traffic settings, we first propose to decompose traffic control tasks into modules, which may be configured and composed to create new control tasks of interest. These modules include salient aspects of traffic control tasks: networks, actors, control laws, metrics, initialization, and additional dynamics. Second, we study the potential of model-free deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods to address the complexity of traffic dynamics. The resulting modular learning framework is called Flow. Using Flow, we create and study a variety of mixed-autonomy settings, including single-lane, multi-lane, and intersection traffic. In all cases, the learned control law exceeds human driving performance (measured by system-level velocity) by at least 40% with only 5-10% adoption of AVs. In the case of partially-observed single-lane traffic, we show that a low-parameter neural network control law can eliminate commonly observed stop-and-go traffic. In particular, the control laws surpass all known model-based controllers, achieving near-optimal performance across a wide spectrum of vehicle densities (even with a memoryless control law) and generalizing to out-of-distribution vehicle densities.
On the Equivalence between Node Embeddings and Structural Graph Representations
Srinivasan, Balasubramaniam, Ribeiro, Bruno
This work provides the first unifying theoretical framework for node embeddings and structural graph representations, bridging methods like matrix factorization and graph neural networks. Using invariant theory, we show that the relationship between structural representations and node embeddings is analogous to that of a distribution and its samples. We prove that all tasks that can be performed by node embeddings can also be performed by structural representations and vice-versa. We also show that the concept of transductive and inductive learning is unrelated to node embeddings and graph representations, clearing another source of confusion in the literature. Finally, we introduce new practical guidelines to generating and using node embeddings, which fixes significant shortcomings of standard operating procedures used today.
Deep Lifetime Clustering
Mouli, S Chandra, Teixeira, Leonardo, Neville, Jennifer, Ribeiro, Bruno
The goal of lifetime clustering is to develop an inductive model that maps subjects into $K$ clusters according to their underlying (unobserved) lifetime distribution. We introduce a neural-network based lifetime clustering model that can find cluster assignments by directly maximizing the divergence between the empirical lifetime distributions of the clusters. Accordingly, we define a novel clustering loss function over the lifetime distributions (of entire clusters) based on a tight upper bound of the two-sample Kuiper test p-value. The resultant model is robust to the modeling issues associated with the unobservability of termination signals, and does not assume proportional hazards. Our results in real and synthetic datasets show significantly better lifetime clusters (as evaluated by C-index, Brier Score, Logrank score and adjusted Rand index) as compared to competing approaches.
An introduction to flexible methods for policy evaluation
This chapter covers different approaches to policy evaluation for assessing the causal effect of a treatment or intervention on an outcome of interest. As an introduction to causal inference, the discussion starts with the experimental evaluation of a randomized treatment. It then reviews evaluation methods based on selection on observables (assuming a quasi-random treatment given observed covariates), instrumental variables (inducing a quasi-random shift in the treatment), difference-in-differences and changes-in-changes (exploiting changes in outcomes over time), as well as regression discontinuities and kinks (using changes in the treatment assignment at some threshold of a running variable). The chapter discusses methods particularly suited for data with many observations for a flexible (i.e. semi- or nonparametric) modeling of treatment effects, and/or many (i.e. high dimensional) observed covariates by applying machine learning to select and control for covariates in a data-driven way. This is not only useful for tackling confounding by controlling for instance for factors jointly affecting the treatment and the outcome, but also for learning effect heterogeneities across subgroups defined upon observable covariates and optimally targeting those groups for which the treatment is most effective.