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Students Create Owl Assist Chatbot Using Artificial Intelligence · News · Keene State College
Two years ago, computer science professor Dr. Meena Vimal Cruz handed her student Matthew Pittendreigh a project: use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to create a chatbot for the college. "In my teaching," said Dr. Cruz, "I mentor students and help them get hands-on experience, applying theoretical knowledge to real-world problems. We work on a project basis. A chatbot will act like an automated customer support to help prospective students apply, get connected, and answer important questions about resources and deadlines, any hour of the day or night." Matthew, already a veteran of Dr. Cruz's projects, jumped right in.
How State's Disinformation-Fighting Arm Uses Artificial Intelligence
Emerging technologies--and partnerships promoting their use--have proven instrumental for the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a hub that steers federal efforts to counter state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining the U.S. "Artificial intelligence and the tools that it offers are really helping us to understand what's happening in the environment, and to identify coordinated activity," the GEC's Acting Coordinator Daniel Kimmage said Thursday. "There's obviously a much broader range of activity across the State Department, but for us it's a powerful way to better understand what's happening in the environment, and identify coordinated activity." The center was mandated by Congress several years ago to help tackle challenges around diplomacy in the digital age. At an event hosted by Foreign Policy, Kimmage offered a glimpse into how technology is impacting and enabling GEC's work, particularly as online disinformation campaigns led by U.S. adversaries grow in sophistication. "We've got what you might describe as our traditional sources of information--we have the cables, our diplomatic colleagues out in the field. We have an analysis from our colleagues in the intelligence community, and we have a huge and growing ocean of open-source information," he explained.
South Florida restaurant buys robots to fight staffing issues
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The future of food is here. A restaurant in Florida has added several new high-tech workers to its roster. After struggling with staffing issues, the seafood place decided to invest in robots to help deliver food to tables and perform other important tasks.
Crack the top 40 machine learning interview questions
The Amazon ML interview, called the Machine Learning Engineer Interview, focuses heavily on e-commerce ML tools, cloud computing, and AI recommendation systems. Amazon ML engineers are expected to build ML systems and use Deep Learning models. Research scientists have higher levels of education and work to improve ASR, NLU, and TTS features. The technical portion of the ML interview focuses on ML models, bias-variance tradeoff, and overfitting. The Facebook ML Interview consists of generic algorithm questions, ML design, and system design.
Consistent Accelerated Inference via Confident Adaptive Transformers
Schuster, Tal, Fisch, Adam, Jaakkola, Tommi, Barzilay, Regina
We develop a novel approach for confidently accelerating inference in the large and expensive multilayer Transformers that are now ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP). Amortized or approximate computational methods increase efficiency, but can come with unpredictable performance costs. In this work, we present CATs--Confident Adaptive Transformers--in which we simultaneously increase computational efficiency, while guaranteeing a specifiable degree of consistency with the original model with high confidence. Our method trains additional prediction heads on top of intermediate layers, and dynamically decides when to stop allocating computational effort to each input using a Figure 1: Our CAT model G can save computational resources meta consistency classifier. To calibrate our by exiting early on certain inputs--while guaranteeing early prediction stopping rule, we formulate a predictive consistency with the full model F. unique extension of conformal prediction.
Dynamically Addressing Unseen Rumor via Continual Learning
Lee, Nayeon, Madotto, Andrea, Bang, Yejin, Fung, Pascale
Rumors are often associated with newly emerging events, thus, an ability to deal with unseen rumors is crucial for a rumor veracity classification model. Previous works address this issue by improving the model's generalizability, with an assumption that the model will stay unchanged even after the new outbreak of an event. In this work, we propose an alternative solution to continuously update the model in accordance with the dynamics of rumor domain creations. The biggest technical challenge associated with this new approach is the catastrophic forgetting of previous learnings due to new learnings. We adopt continual learning strategies that control the new learnings to avoid catastrophic forgetting and propose an additional strategy that can jointly be used to strengthen the forgetting alleviation.
Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases
Das, Rajarshi, Zaheer, Manzil, Thai, Dung, Godbole, Ameya, Perez, Ethan, Lee, Jay-Yoon, Tan, Lizhen, Polymenakos, Lazaros, McCallum, Andrew
It is often challenging for a system to solve a new complex problem from scratch, but much easier if the system can access other similar problems and description of their solutions -- a paradigm known as case-based reasoning (CBR). We propose a neuro-symbolic CBR approach for question answering over large knowledge bases (CBR-KBQA). While the idea of CBR is tempting, composing a solution from cases is nontrivial, when individual cases only contain partial logic to the full solution. To resolve this, CBR-KBQA consists of two modules: a non-parametric memory that stores cases (question and logical forms) and a parametric model which can generate logical forms by retrieving relevant cases from memory. Through experiments, we show that CBR-KBQA can effectively derive novel combination of relations not presented in case memory that is required to answer compositional questions. On several KBQA datasets that test compositional generalization, CBR-KBQA achieves competitive performance. For example, on the challenging ComplexWebQuestions dataset, CBR-KBQA outperforms the current state of the art by 11% accuracy. Furthermore, we show that CBR-KBQA is capable of using new cases \emph{without} any further training. Just by incorporating few human-labeled examples in the non-parametric case memory, CBR-KBQA is able to successfully generate queries containing unseen KB relations.