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To do AI right, forget your AI strategy - Eyes on APAC
This is a guest post by David R. Hardoon, managing director of Aboitiz Data Innovation If anything, the past few years have shown that artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a buzzword. AI has successfully redefined the way that businesses work. From finance to healthcare, various industries have shown tangible outcomes from using AI as a part of their solutions, reiterating the immense possibilities this technology can provide for the world. As more people continue to experience the benefits of utilising technologies to ensure businesses are future-ready, there is no doubt in my mind that AI will only continue to grow in importance in 2022 and beyond. This mirrors the sentiment of Kearney's survey respondents, where more than 70% of them see AI as crucial to Southeast Asia's future. That said, the reality is that there is currently a gap between the number of people who favour AI adoption to be accelerated, and those that are truly able to adopt and operationalise it to its fullest potential, with over 80% of the region still in the early stage of AI adoption.
Three trends helping medical device organisations go digital in 2022
Bob Tilling, VP global sales, Kallik, explains why medical device companies will have to embrace the digital world that lies ahead. Against this backdrop, medical device organisations have had to prepare themselves for compliance deadlines and adapt to new technologies. Looking ahead the busy period doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. From this month, I expect to see a sharp rise in organisations feeling the pressure of the looming IVDR deadline in May 2022. Here, technology will again prove its worth, and it will be on standby to lend a digital hand to businesses yet to make progress towards reaching compliance.
Nonlocal Kernel Network (NKN): a Stable and Resolution-Independent Deep Neural Network
You, Huaiqian, Yu, Yue, D'Elia, Marta, Gao, Tian, Silling, Stewart
Neural operators have recently become popular tools for designing solution maps between function spaces in the form of neural networks. Differently from classical scientific machine learning approaches that learn parameters of a known partial differential equation (PDE) for a single instance of the input parameters at a fixed resolution, neural operators approximate the solution map of a family of PDEs. Despite their success, the uses of neural operators are so far restricted to relatively shallow neural networks and confined to learning hidden governing laws. In this work, we propose a novel nonlocal neural operator, which we refer to as nonlocal kernel network (NKN), that is resolution independent, characterized by deep neural networks, and capable of handling a variety of tasks such as learning governing equations and classifying images. Our NKN stems from the interpretation of the neural network as a discrete nonlocal diffusion reaction equation that, in the limit of infinite layers, is equivalent to a parabolic nonlocal equation, whose stability is analyzed via nonlocal vector calculus. The resemblance with integral forms of neural operators allows NKNs to capture long-range dependencies in the feature space, while the continuous treatment of node-to-node interactions makes NKNs resolution independent. The resemblance with neural ODEs, reinterpreted in a nonlocal sense, and the stable network dynamics between layers allow for generalization of NKN's optimal parameters from shallow to deep networks. This fact enables the use of shallow-to-deep initialization techniques. Our tests show that NKNs outperform baseline methods in both learning governing equations and image classification tasks and generalize well to different resolutions and depths.
Multi-Label Classification on Remote-Sensing Images
Singh, Aditya Kumar, Shankar, B. Uma
Acquiring information on large areas on the earth's surface through satellite cameras allows us to see much more than we can see while standing on the ground. This assists us in detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area like land-use patterns, atmospheric conditions, forest cover, and many unlisted aspects. The obtained images not only keep track of continuous natural phenomena but are also crucial in tackling the global challenge of severe deforestation. Among which Amazon basin accounts for the largest share every year. Proper data analysis would help limit detrimental effects on the ecosystem and biodiversity with a sustainable healthy atmosphere. This report aims to label the satellite image chips of the Amazon rainforest with atmospheric and various classes of land cover or land use through different machine learning and superior deep learning models. Evaluation is done based on the F2 metric, while for loss function, we have both sigmoid cross-entropy as well as softmax cross-entropy. Images are fed indirectly to the machine learning classifiers after only features are extracted using pre-trained ImageNet architectures. Whereas for deep learning models, ensembles of fine-tuned ImageNet pre-trained models are used via transfer learning. Our best score was achieved so far with the F2 metric is 0.927.
Challenges of Artificial Intelligence -- From Machine Learning and Computer Vision to Emotional Intelligence
Pietikäinen, Matti, Silven, Olli
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered as the new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. AI is heavily invested in both industry and academy. However, there is also a lot of hype in the current AI debate. AI based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. AI has been under research since the 1940s, and the industry has seen many ups and downs due to over-expectations and related disappointments that have followed. The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of AI, its history, its potential and limitations. We believe that AI is a helper, not a ruler of humans. We begin by describing what AI is and how it has evolved over the decades. After fundamentals, we explain the importance of massive data for the current mainstream of artificial intelligence. The most common representations for AI, methods, and machine learning are covered. In addition, the main application areas are introduced. Computer vision has been central to the development of AI. The book provides a general introduction to computer vision, and includes an exposure to the results and applications of our own research. Emotions are central to human intelligence, but little use has been made in AI. We present the basics of emotional intelligence and our own research on the topic. We discuss super-intelligence that transcends human understanding, explaining why such achievement seems impossible on the basis of present knowledge,and how AI could be improved. Finally, a summary is made of the current state of AI and what to do in the future. In the appendix, we look at the development of AI education, especially from the perspective of contents at our own university.
AI Helps Speed Up Ecological Surveys
The way seals appear in aerial photos can vary significantly from one batch to the next, depending on the altitude and angle at which the photo was taken. The research team therefore evaluated robustness to such variation. In addition, to demonstrate the potential of their deep-learning model, the scientists tested their approach on a fundamentally different dataset, of a much smaller scale: images of microscopic growth rings in fishbones called otoliths. These otoliths, or hearing stones, are hard, calcium carbonate structures located directly behind a fish's brain. The scientists trained their model to count the daily growth rings visible in the images, which are used to estimate the age of the fish.
Super-resolution in Molecular Dynamics Trajectory Reconstruction with Bi-Directional Neural Networks
Winkler, Ludwig, Müller, Klaus-Robert, Sauceda, Huziel E.
Molecular dynamics simulations are a cornerstone in science, allowing to investigate from the system's thermodynamics to analyse intricate molecular interactions. In general, to create extended molecular trajectories can be a computationally expensive process, for example, when running $ab-initio$ simulations. Hence, repeating such calculations to either obtain more accurate thermodynamics or to get a higher resolution in the dynamics generated by a fine-grained quantum interaction can be time- and computationally-consuming. In this work, we explore different machine learning (ML) methodologies to increase the resolution of molecular dynamics trajectories on-demand within a post-processing step. As a proof of concept, we analyse the performance of bi-directional neural networks such as neural ODEs, Hamiltonian networks, recurrent neural networks and LSTMs, as well as the uni-directional variants as a reference, for molecular dynamics simulations (here: the MD17 dataset). We have found that Bi-LSTMs are the best performing models; by utilizing the local time-symmetry of thermostated trajectories they can even learn long-range correlations and display high robustness to noisy dynamics across molecular complexity. Our models can reach accuracies of up to 10$^{-4}$ angstroms in trajectory interpolation, while faithfully reconstructing several full cycles of unseen intricate high-frequency molecular vibrations, rendering the comparison between the learned and reference trajectories indistinguishable. The results reported in this work can serve (1) as a baseline for larger systems, as well as (2) for the construction of better MD integrators.
Former Nervana Leads Target Optimal Training Configurations
Ex-Nervana Systems engineers made the jump from a hardware-centric approach to efficient training to pushing better insight into optimization of models and systems. Nervana Systems was one of the first AI chip startups to generate big buzz, culminating in an acquisition by Intel in summer, 2016. The startup's co-founder and CEO, Naveen Rao, moved into the VP role for the AI products group while fellow Nervana engineers, including Hanlin Tang (who led development for the Neon software stack for Nervana's devices) also stuck around Intel focusing on practical AI algorithms and federal programs. Rao and Tang, among others, are together again with a new startup, MosaicML, which came out of stealth today with $37 million in funding from a wide range of VC partners, including Lux Capital, Future Ventures, E14, and others. The target is machine learning training and as the world quickly learned, optimized deep learning has far less to do with efficient, high performance hardware than the VCs believed in the 2014-2021 frame.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad field of computer science that focuses on creating intelligent machines that can accomplish activities that would normally need human intelligence. Machines may learn from their experiences, adapt to new inputs, and execute human-like jobs thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Most AI examples you hear about today rely largely on deep learning and natural language processing, from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars. Computers can be trained to perform certain jobs by processing massive volumes of data and recognizing patterns in the data using these methods. Artificial Intelligence refers to the intelligence displayed by machines. In today's world, Artificial Intelligence has become highly popular. It is the simulation of human intelligence in computers that have been programmed to learn and mimic human actions.
Dubai can't shake off the stain of smuggled African gold
In the moon-like landscape of northern Sudan, informal gold miners toil with spades and pickaxes to extract their prize from shallow pits that pockmark the terrain. Mining ore in the sweltering heat of the Nubian desert is the first stage of an illicit network that has exploded in the past 18 months following a pandemic-induced spike in the gold price. African governments desperate to recoup lost revenue are looking to Dubai to help stop the trade. Interviews with government officials across Africa reveal smuggling operations that span at least nine countries and involve tons of gold spirited over borders. That's a cause for international concern because the funds from contraband minerals dealing in Africa fuel conflict, finance criminal and terrorist networks, undermine democracy and facilitate money laundering, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While it's impossible to say precisely how much is lost to smugglers each year, United Nations trade data for 2020 show a discrepancy of at least $4 billion between the United Arab Emirates' declared gold imports from Africa and what African countries say they exported to the UAE.