Scientists are scrambling to work out what effect specific measures, such as social distancing, have in slowing the spread of COVID-19.Credit: Ivan Romano/Getty Hong Kong seems to have given the world a lesson in how to effectively curb COVID-19. With a population of 7.5 million, it has reported just 4 deaths. Researchers studying Hong Kong's approach have already found that swift surveillance, quarantine and social-distancing measures, such as the use of face masks and school closures, helped to cut coronavirus transmission -- measured by the average number of people each infected person infects, or R -- to close to the critical level of 1 by early February. Working out the effectiveness of the unprecedented measures implemented worldwide to limit the spread of the coronavirus is now one of scientists' most pressing questions. Researchers hope that, ultimately, they will be able to accurately predict how adding and removing control measures affects transmission rates and infection numbers.

Recent developments in image classification and natural language processing, coupled with the rapid growth in social media usage, have enabled fundamental advances in detecting breaking events around the world in real-time. Emergency response is one such area that stands to gain from these advances. By processing billions of texts and images a minute, events can be automatically detected to enable emergency response workers to better assess rapidly evolving situations and deploy resources accordingly. To date, most event detection techniques in this area have focused on image-only or text-only approaches, limiting detection performance and impacting the quality of information delivered to crisis response teams. In this paper, we present a new multimodal fusion method that leverages both images and texts as input. In particular, we introduce a cross-attention module that can filter uninformative and misleading components from weak modalities on a sample by sample basis. In addition, we employ a multimodal graph-based approach to stochastically transition between embeddings of different multimodal pairs during training to better regularize the learning process as well as dealing with limited training data by constructing new matched pairs from different samples. We show that our method outperforms the unimodal approaches and strong multimodal baselines by a large margin on three crisis-related tasks.

Cyber security adversaries and engagements are ubiquitous and ceaseless. We delineate Adversarial Genetic Programming for Cyber Security, a research topic that, by means of genetic programming (GP), replicates and studies the behavior of cyber adversaries and the dynamics of their engagements. Adversarial Genetic Programming for Cyber Security encompasses extant and immediate research efforts in a vital problem domain, arguably occupying a position at the frontier where GP matters. Additionally, it prompts research questions around evolving complex behavior by expressing different abstractions with GP and opportunities to reconnect to the Machine Learning, Artificial Life, Agent-Based Modeling and Cyber Security communities. We present a framework called RIVALS which supports the study of network security arms races. Its goal is to elucidate the dynamics of cyber networks under attack by computationally modeling and simulating them.

Artificial intelligence has been applied in wildfire science and management since the 1990s, with early applications including neural networks and expert systems. Since then the field has rapidly progressed congruently with the wide adoption of machine learning (ML) in the environmental sciences. Here, we present a scoping review of ML in wildfire science and management. Our objective is to improve awareness of ML among wildfire scientists and managers, as well as illustrate the challenging range of problems in wildfire science available to data scientists. We first present an overview of popular ML approaches used in wildfire science to date, and then review their use in wildfire science within six problem domains: 1) fuels characterization, fire detection, and mapping; 2) fire weather and climate change; 3) fire occurrence, susceptibility, and risk; 4) fire behavior prediction; 5) fire effects; and 6) fire management. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of various ML approaches and identify opportunities for future advances in wildfire science and management within a data science context. We identified 298 relevant publications, where the most frequently used ML methods included random forests, MaxEnt, artificial neural networks, decision trees, support vector machines, and genetic algorithms. There exists opportunities to apply more current ML methods (e.g., deep learning and agent based learning) in wildfire science. However, despite the ability of ML models to learn on their own, expertise in wildfire science is necessary to ensure realistic modelling of fire processes across multiple scales, while the complexity of some ML methods requires sophisticated knowledge for their application. Finally, we stress that the wildfire research and management community plays an active role in providing relevant, high quality data for use by practitioners of ML methods.

Computational intelligence in finance has been a very popular topic for both academia and financial industry in the last few decades. Numerous studies have been published resulting in various models. Meanwhile, within the Machine Learning (ML) field, Deep Learning (DL) started getting a lot of attention recently, mostly due to its outperformance over the classical models. Lots of different implementations of DL exist today, and the broad interest is continuing. Finance is one particular area where DL models started getting traction, however, the playfield is wide open, a lot of research opportunities still exist. In this paper, we tried to provide a state-of-the-art snapshot of the developed DL models for financial applications, as of today. We not only categorized the works according to their intended subfield in finance but also analyzed them based on their DL models. In addition, we also aimed at identifying possible future implementations and highlighted the pathway for the ongoing research within the field.

Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing research direction owing to the large amount of available data and low budget requirement, compared with randomized controlled trials. Embraced with the rapidly developed machine learning area, various causal effect estimation methods for observational data have sprung up. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of causal inference methods under the potential outcome framework, one of the well known causal inference framework. The methods are divided into two categories depending on whether they require all three assumptions of the potential outcome framework or not. For each category, both the traditional statistical methods and the recent machine learning enhanced methods are discussed and compared. The plausible applications of these methods are also presented, including the applications in advertising, recommendation, medicine and so on. Moreover, the commonly used benchmark datasets as well as the open-source codes are also summarized, which facilitate researchers and practitioners to explore, evaluate and apply the causal inference methods.

Its impact is drastic and real: Youtube's AIdriven recommendation system would present sports videos for days if one happens to watch a live baseball game on the platform [1]; email writing becomes much faster with machine learning (ML) based auto-completion [2]; many businesses have adopted natural language processing based chatbots as part of their customer services [3]. AI has also greatly advanced human capabilities in complex decision-making processes ranging from determining how to allocate security resources to protect airports [4] to games such as poker [5] and Go [6]. All such tangible and stunning progress suggests that an "AI summer" is happening. As some put it, "AI is the new electricity" [7]. Meanwhile, in the past decade, an emerging theme in the AI research community is the so-called "AI for social good" (AI4SG): researchers aim at developing AI methods and tools to address problems at the societal level and improve the wellbeing of the society.

Large transformer-based language models (LMs) trained on huge text corpora have shown unparalleled generation capabilities. However, controlling attributes of the generated language (e.g. switching topic or sentiment) is difficult without modifying the model architecture or fine-tuning on attribute-specific data and entailing the significant cost of retraining. We propose a simple alternative: the Plug and Play Language Model (PPLM) for controllable language generation, which combines a pretrained LM with one or more simple attribute classifiers that guide text generation without any further training of the LM. In the canonical scenario we present, the attribute models are simple classifiers consisting of a user-specified bag of words or a single learned layer with 100,000 times fewer parameters than the LM. Sampling entails a forward and backward pass in which gradients from the attribute model push the LM's hidden activations and thus guide the generation. Model samples demonstrate control over a range of topics and sentiment styles, and extensive automated and human annotated evaluations show attribute alignment and fluency. PPLMs are flexible in that any combination of differentiable attribute models may be used to steer text generation, which will allow for diverse and creative applications beyond the examples given in this paper.

Saudi authorities attempt to control a fire at an Aramco factory. The world's largest oil processing facility and a nearby oil field in Saudi Arabia were set ablaze early Saturday morning after reported drone attacks by Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels. The Interior Ministry was quoted by state-run media as saying the fires at the Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqyaq and the nearby Khurais oil field operated by Saudi Aramco were "targeted by drones." It wasn't immediately clear if there were any injuries, nor what effect it would have on oil production in the kingdom. Smoke is seen following a fire at Aramco facility in the eastern city of Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, September 14, 2019.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – Drones attacked the world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oil field operated by Saudi Aramco early Saturday, the kingdom's Interior Ministry said, sparking a huge fire at a processor crucial to global energy supplies. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks in Buqyaq and the Khurais oil field, though Yemen's Houthi rebels previously launched drone assaults deep inside of the kingdom. It wasn't clear if there were any injuries in the attacks, nor what effect it would have on oil production in the kingdom. The attack also likely will heighten tensions further across the wider Persian Gulf amid a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers. Online videos apparently shot in Buqyaq included the sound of gunfire in the background.