We've all heard it before: "Win or go home." Whether in business or on the playing field, the pressure to win is intense. And in today's financial services industry, the winner can literally take all. As banks struggle to adapt in the throes of digital disruption, executives find themselves squeezed to use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) models to power their digital transformation initiatives forward. The industry's use of computational finance models to make decisions is nothing new.

Research is still being done on how to detect fake news without manual intervention. Detecting fake news by using stylometry-based provenance to track a text's writing style back to its first source has been accepted as one way to solve the challenge. Earlier, researchers from Harvard University and MIT-IBM Watson Lab had come up with an AI-powered tool to recognise AI-generated text. Known as the Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), the system works on finding out if a particular piece of writing was produced by a language model algorithm, aka computer or a human. With AI and natural language generation models being used to make fake news, GLTR can be used to differentiate machine-generated text from human-written text to a non-expert reader.

Humans can't keep pace with the rapid growth of new cyberthreats.

Workers place more trust in robots and AI than their managers according to the second annual AI at Work study conducted by Oracle and Future Workplace. To compile the study, the two firms surveyed 8,370 employees, managers and HR leaders across 10 countries to find that AI has changed the relationship between people and technology in the workplace and is reshaping the role HR teams and managers need to play when it comes to attracting, retaining and developing talent. In contrast to common fears that AI and robots will take workers jobs, the AI at Work study found that employees, managers and HR leaders across the globe are reporting increased adoption of AI in the workplace and many are welcoming the emerging technology with enthusiasm. AI is becoming more prominent in workplaces with 50 percent of workers currently using some form of AI at work compared to only 32 percent last year. Workers in China (77%) and India (78%) have adopted AI over two times more than those in France (32%) and Japan (29%).

Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times, presented "Data Science at the New York Times" at Rev. Wiggins advocated that data scientists find problems that impact the business; re-frame the problem as a machine learning (ML) task; execute on the ML task; and communicate the results back to the business in an impactful way. He covered examples of how his team addressed business problems with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive ML solutions. This post provides distilled highlights, a transcript, and a video of the session. In the Rev session, "Data Science at The New York Times", Chris Wiggins provided insights into how the Data Science group at The New York Times helped the newsroom and business be economically strong by developing and deploying ML solutions. Wiggins advised that data scientists ingest business problems, re-frame them as ML tasks, execute on the ML tasks, and then clearly and concisely communicate the results back to the organization. He advocated that an impactful ML solution does not end with Google Slides but becomes "a working API that is hosted or a GUI or some piece of working code that people can put to work". Wiggins also dove into examples of applying unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning to address business problems. Wiggins also indicated that data science, data engineering, and data analysis are different groups at The New York Times. The data science group, in particular, includes people from a "wide variety of intellectual trainings" including cognitive science, physics, finance, applied math, and more. Wiggins closed the session with indicating how he looks forward to hiring from even more diverse job applications. For more insights from this session, watch the video or read through the transcript. I have about 30 minutes with you. I'm going to try to tell you all about data science at the New York Times, and in case I run out of time my email address and my Twitter are here. If you don't remember anything else, just remember we're hiring.

Discovering content and stories in movies is one of the most important concepts in multimedia content research studies. Network models have proven to be an efficient choice for this purpose. When an audience watches a movie, they usually compare the characters and the relationships between them. For this reason, most of the models developed so far are based on social networks analysis. They focus essentially on the characters at play. By analyzing characters' interactions, we can obtain a broad picture of the narration's content. Other works have proposed to exploit semantic elements such as scenes, dialogues, etc. However, they are always captured from a single facet. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce in this work a multilayer network model to capture the narration of a movie based on its script, its subtitles, and the movie content. After introducing the model and the extraction process from the raw data, we perform a comparative analysis of the whole 6-movie cycle of the Star Wars saga. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for video content representation and analysis.

The usability and practicality of any machine learning (ML) applications are largely influenced by two critical but hard-to-attain factors: low latency and low cost. Unfortunately, achieving low latency and low cost is very challenging when ML depends on real-world data that are highly distributed and rapidly growing (e.g., data collected by mobile phones and video cameras all over the world). Such real-world data pose many challenges in communication and computation. For example, when training data are distributed across data centers that span multiple continents, communication among data centers can easily overwhelm the limited wide-area network bandwidth, leading to prohibitively high latency and high cost. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that the latency and cost of ML on highly-distributed and rapidly-growing data can be improved by one to two orders of magnitude by designing ML systems that exploit the characteristics of ML algorithms, ML model structures, and ML training/serving data. We support this thesis statement with three contributions. First, we design a system that provides both low-latency and low-cost ML serving (inferencing) over large-scale and continuously-growing datasets, such as videos. Second, we build a system that makes ML training over geo-distributed datasets as fast as training within a single data center. Third, we present a first detailed study and a system-level solution on a fundamental and largely overlooked problem: ML training over non-IID (i.e., not independent and identically distributed) data partitions (e.g., facial images collected by cameras varies according to the demographics of each camera's location).

Artificial neural networks have exceeded human-level performance in accomplishing several individual tasks (e.g. voice recognition, object recognition, and video games). However, such success remains modest compared to human intelligence that can learn and perform an unlimited number of tasks. Humans' ability of learning and accumulating knowledge over their lifetime is an essential aspect of their intelligence. Continual machine learning aims at a higher level of machine intelligence through providing the artificial agents with the ability to learn online from a non-stationary and never-ending stream of data. A key component of such a never-ending learning process is to overcome the catastrophic forgetting of previously seen data, a problem that neural networks are well known to suffer from. The work described in this thesis has been dedicated to the investigation of continual learning and solutions to mitigate the forgetting phenomena in neural networks. To approach the continual learning problem, we first assume a task incremental setting where tasks are received one at a time and data from previous tasks are not stored. Since the task incremental setting can't be assumed in all continual learning scenarios, we also study the more general online continual setting. We consider an infinite stream of data drawn from a non-stationary distribution with a supervisory or self-supervisory training signal. The proposed methods in this thesis have tackled important aspects of continual learning. They were evaluated on different benchmarks and over various learning sequences. Advances in the state of the art of continual learning have been shown and challenges for bringing continual learning into application were critically identified.

Abstract: Replacing static word embeddings with contextualized word representations has yielded significant improvements on many NLP tasks. However, just how contextual are the contextualized representations produced by models such as ELMo and BERT? Are there infinitely many context-specific representations for each word, or are words essentially assigned one of a finite number of word-sense representations? For one, we find that the contextualized representations of all words are not isotropic in any layer of the contextualizing model. While representations of the same word in different contexts still have a greater cosine similarity than those of two different words, this self-similarity is much lower in upper layers.