Retail
Deploy pre-trained models on AWS Wavelength with 5G edge using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
With the advent of high-speed 5G mobile networks, enterprises are more easily positioned than ever with the opportunity to harness the convergence of telecommunications networks and the cloud. As one of the most prominent use cases to date, machine learning (ML) at the edge has allowed enterprises to deploy ML models closer to their end-customers to reduce latency and increase responsiveness of their applications. As an example, smart venue solutions can use near-real-time computer vision for crowd analytics over 5G networks, all while minimizing investment in on-premises hardware networking equipment. Retailers can deliver more frictionless experiences on the go with natural language processing (NLP), real-time recommendation systems, and fraud detection. Even ground and aerial robotics can use ML to unlock safer, more autonomous operations.
Bayesian Predictive Profiles With Applications to Retail Transaction Data
Massive transaction data sets are recorded in a routine manner in telecommunications, retail commerce, and Web site management. In this paper we address the problem of inferring predictive in- dividual proflles from such historical transaction data. We de- scribe a generative mixture model for count data and use an an approximate Bayesian estimation framework that efiectively com- bines an individual's speciflc history with more general population patterns. We use a large real-world retail transaction data set to illustrate how these proflles consistently outperform non-mixture and non-Bayesian techniques in predicting customer behavior in out-of-sample data.
Optimization in Machine Learning and Data Science
Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have burst into public consciousness in the last several years. While large language and multimodal models like GPT-4 have recently taken the excitement to a new level, developments in voice recognition software, novel recommendation systems for online retailers and streaming services, superhuman-level play by computers in Chess and Go, and unfulfilled promises in technologies like self-driving cars have been generating interest for more than a decade. Many research disciplines are feeling the profound effects of AI. For example, scientists can now utilize neural networks (NNs) to predict a protein's structure based on its amino acid sequence [3] -- a problem that was identified decades ago as a grand challenge for computational science. ML, AI, data science, data analysis, data mining, and statistical inference all have different but overlapping meanings; the term "data science" is perhaps the most general.
Covariant adds $75 million in Series C Funds to meet demand for scaled AI robotics deployments - Modern Materials Handling
Covariant, an AI robotics company, has announced it has raised an additional $75 million in Series C funds, bringing its total funding to $222 million. Returning investors Radical Ventures and Index Ventures co-led the round, which also saw additional funding from returning investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Amplify Partners. The round also welcomed new investors Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures, and Northgate Capital. The funding will be used to ensure today's leading retailers and their logistics providers are able to deploy robotic picking quickly and without disruption to their current operations, Covariant stated. This comes at a time when retail executives are eager to invest in AI-powered robotic automation: according to a Covariant-led research survey from February 2023, more than 80% of retail leaders see automation as a key solution for navigating operational uncertainty in an unpredictable marketplace โ and 98% plan to further invest in AI Robotics in 2023 despite current economic conditions.
Build: Azure OpenAI Service helps customers accelerate innovation with large AI models; Microsoft expands availability - Source
Customers shopping for a used car can sometimes feel overwhelmed digging through countless specs and reviews, but CarMax, the largest used car retailer in the U.S., is making it easier for customers to find the most useful information. Thanks to powerful AI language models, potential buyers can now see summaries of customer reviews for every make, model and year of vehicle that CarMax sells, about 5,000 combinations in a vast inventory of approximately 45,000 cars. The summaries provide easy-to-read takeaways from real customer reviews: whether it's a great family car, how comfortable the ride is or if there's enough space to pack for weekend adventures. CarMax has also used the models to create new website content that allows customers to easily see what's new for each version of a car, helping them decide whether new features are worth splurging on. CarMax generated the massive amount of original content in just a few months -- a rate previously impossible -- with powerful GPT-3 natural language models built by the company OpenAI.
The Last Worker review โ unconvincing takedown of capitalist megastructures lacks conviction
Playing as Kurt, the sole human employee of an Amazon-like online retailer called Jรผngle, you spend your days keeping pace with an army of robotic drones as they sort millions of packages for delivery. Then an activist group wrangles you into a scheme to bring down the giant corporation, whereupon both Kurt's world and the game's central premise begin to fall apart. Initially, The Last Worker is built around a light simulation of Kurt's daily routine. Using a hovering cart, you must locate assigned packages among the endless shelving units, and either transport them to a delivery chute or send them for recycling. Packages vary in size, weight, and condition, all of which must be checked before dispatch.
Online Joint Assortment-Inventory Optimization under MNL Choices
Liang, Yong, Mao, Xiaojie, Wang, Shiyuan
We study an online joint assortment-inventory optimization problem, in which we assume that the choice behavior of each customer follows the Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice model, and the attraction parameters are unknown a priori. The retailer makes periodic assortment and inventory decisions to dynamically learn from the realized demands about the attraction parameters while maximizing the expected total profit over time. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that can effectively balance the exploration and exploitation in the online decision-making of assortment and inventory. Our algorithm builds on a new estimator for the MNL attraction parameters, a novel approach to incentivize exploration by adaptively tuning certain known and unknown parameters, and an optimization oracle to static single-cycle assortment-inventory planning problems with given parameters. We establish a regret upper bound for our algorithm and a lower bound for the online joint assortment-inventory optimization problem, suggesting that our algorithm achieves nearly optimal regret rate, provided that the static optimization oracle is exact. Then we incorporate more practical approximate static optimization oracles into our algorithm, and bound from above the impact of static optimization errors on the regret of our algorithm. At last, we perform numerical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
Use of a Socially Assistive Robot as a Online Shopping Digital Skills Assistan
Macleod, Scott, Dragone, Mauro
Tele-medicine has recently gained popularity in healthcare [9]. Digital sessions reduce preparation and travel time for patients and has been found to improve patient outcomes and reduce hospital visits [3]. Other digital solutions now allow treatments to occur in the patients home. Remote physio therapy has been tested where patients meet with a physio therapist, via tele-conference, to view live demonstratations ofcorrect exercise techniques, and then access a database of exercises with reference images and videos to follow while performing rehabilitation exercises without remote human supervision [11]. The digital skills divide among older adults can limit their access to health services, as well as other services that rely on digital technology [5]. This has the potential to exclude them from the ever-increasing number of services and advancements such as those mentioned above. Digital technology has been found to be empowering for elderly users when they are designed with the elderly in mind [2], specifically by facilitating daily activities [6]. Many physical challenging life factors, such as reduced mobility and social contact, can be addressed through the use of digital technology, motivating many programs aimed at increasing digital literacy in the elderly population such as [8]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.