Media
Using Continuous Machine Learning to Run Your ML Pipeline
CI/CD is a key concept that is becoming increasingly popular and widely adopted in the software industry nowadays. Incorporating continuous integration and deployment for a software project that doesn't contain a machine learning component is fairly straightforward because the stages of the pipeline are somewhat standard, and it is unlikely that the CI/CD pipeline will change a lot over the course of development. But, when the project involves a machine learning component, this may not be true. As opposed to traditional software development, building a pipeline for a machine learning components may involve a lot of changes over time, mostly in response to observations made during past iterations of development. Therefore, for ML projects, notebooks are widely used to get started with the project, and once a stable foundation (base code for different stages of the ML pipeline) is available to build upon, the code is pushed to a version control system, and the pipeline is migrated to a CI/CD tool such as Jenkins or TravisCI.
Audio Tagging by Cross Filtering Noisy Labels
Zhu, Boqing, Xu, Kele, Kong, Qiuqiang, Wang, Huaimin, Peng, Yuxing
High quality labeled datasets have allowed deep learning to achieve impressive results on many sound analysis tasks. Yet, it is labor-intensive to accurately annotate large amount of audio data, and the dataset may contain noisy labels in the practical settings. Meanwhile, the deep neural networks are susceptive to those incorrect labeled data because of their outstanding memorization ability. In this paper, we present a novel framework, named CrossFilter, to combat the noisy labels problem for audio tagging. Multiple representations (such as, Logmel and MFCC) are used as the input of our framework for providing more complementary information of the audio. Then, though the cooperation and interaction of two neural networks, we divide the dataset into curated and noisy subsets by incrementally pick out the possibly correctly labeled data from the noisy data. Moreover, our approach leverages the multi-task learning on curated and noisy subsets with different loss function to fully utilize the entire dataset. The noisy-robust loss function is employed to alleviate the adverse effects of incorrect labels. On both the audio tagging datasets FSDKaggle2018 and FSDKaggle2019, empirical results demonstrate the performance improvement compared with other competing approaches. On FSDKaggle2018 dataset, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and even surpasses the ensemble models.
Global Big Data Conference
The move comes six weeks after the Redmond-based technology giant told about 50 news production contractors they would not be kept on by MSN beyond June 30. Full-time employees were spared from those cuts, but some MSN workers who were let go said domestic staffers and others globally were informed by conference calls Monday that, effective immediately, their services were no longer needed. A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged the company eliminated "a small number" of roles Monday across various departments, including MSN, but would not provide specific numbers. The spokesperson said the cuts are part of a redeployment of resources the company typically engages in during its new fiscal year -- which began July 1 -- and that it remains committed to news and content and MSN as a business moving forward. One former employee cut Monday said the moves dramatically reduced the number of human editors handling content curation for the site.
Generative algorithms are redefining the intersection of software and music โ TechCrunch
What if you could mix and match different tracks from your favorite artists, or create new ones on your own with their voices? This could become a reality sooner than later, as AI models similar to the ones used to create computer-generated art images and embed deepfakes in videos are being increasingly applied to music. The use of algorithms to create music is not new. Researchers used computer programs to generate piano sheet music as far back as the 1950s, and musicians from that era such as Iannis Xenakis and Gottfried Koenig even used them to compose their own music. What has changed are the improvements in generative algorithms, which first gained popularity back in 2014, coupled with large amounts of compute power that are increasingly changing what computers can do with music today.