With the continuous and vast increase in the amount of data in our digital world, it has been acknowledged that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale to address these challenges. Thus, there was a crucial need for automating the process of building good machine learning models. In the last few years, several techniques and frameworks have been introduced to tackle the challenge of automating the process of Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyper-parameter tuning (CASH) in the machine learning domain. The main aim of these techniques is to reduce the role of the human in the loop and fill the gap for non-expert machine learning users by playing the role of the domain expert. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey for the state-of-the-art efforts in tackling the CASH problem. In addition, we highlight the research work of automating the other steps of the full complex machine learning pipeline (AutoML) from data understanding till model deployment. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive coverage for the various tools and frameworks that have been introduced in this domain. Finally, we discuss some of the research directions and open challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the vision and goals of the AutoML process.

The space of Artificial Intelligence entities is dominated by conversational bots. Some of them fit in our pockets and we take them everywhere we go, or allow them to be a part of human homes. Siri, Alexa, they are recognised as present in our world. But a lot of games research is restricted to existing in the separate realm of software. We enter different worlds when playing games, but those worlds cease to exist once we quit. Similarly, AI game-players are run once on a game (or maybe for longer periods of time, in the case of learning algorithms which need some, still limited, period for training), and they cease to exist once the game ends. But what if they didn't? What if there existed artificial game-players that continuously played games, learned from their experiences and kept getting better? What if they interacted with the real world and us, humans: live-streaming games, chatting with viewers, accepting suggestions for strategies or games to play, forming opinions on popular game titles? In this paper, we introduce the vision behind a new project called Thyia, which focuses around creating a present, continuous, `always-on', interactive game-player.

At the 2017 Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games meeting at Dagstuhl, Julian Togelius asked how to make spaces where every way of filling in the details yielded a good game. This study examines the possibility of enriching search spaces so that they contain very high rates of interesting objects, specifically game elements. While we do not answer the full challenge of finding good games throughout the space, this study highlights a number of potential avenues. These include naturally rich spaces, a simple technique for modifying a representation to search only rich parts of a larger search space, and representations that are highly expressive and so exhibit highly restricted and consequently enriched search spaces.

In this work we show that Evolution Strategies (ES) are a viable method for learning non-differentiable parameters of large supervised models. ES are black-box optimization algorithms that estimate distributions of model parameters; however they have only been used for relatively small problems so far. We show that it is possible to scale ES to more complex tasks and models with millions of parameters. While using ES for differentiable parameters is computationally impractical (although possible), we show that a hybrid approach is practically feasible in the case where the model has both differentiable and non-differentiable parameters. In this approach we use standard gradient-based methods for learning differentiable weights, while using ES for learning non-differentiable parameters - in our case sparsity masks of the weights. This proposed method is surprisingly competitive, and when parallelized over multiple devices has only negligible training time overhead compared to training with gradient descent. Additionally, this method allows to train sparse models from the first training step, so they can be much larger than when using methods that require training dense models first.

Dance is an art and when technology meets this kind of art, it's a novel attempt in itself. Several researchers have attempted to automate several aspects of dance, right from dance notation to choreography. Furthermore, we have encountered several applications of dance automation like e-learning, heritage preservation, etc. Despite several attempts by researchers for more than two decades in various styles of dance all round the world, we found a review paper that portrays the research status in this area dating to 1990 \cite{politis1990computers}. Hence, we decide to come up with a comprehensive review article that showcases several aspects of dance automation. This paper is an attempt to review research work reported in the literature, categorize and group all research work completed so far in the field of automating dance. We have explicitly identified six major categories corresponding to the use of computers in dance automation namely dance representation, dance capturing, dance semantics, dance generation, dance processing approaches and applications of dance automation systems. We classified several research papers under these categories according to their research approach and functionality. With the help of proposed categories and subcategories one can easily determine the state of research and the new avenues left for exploration in the field of dance automation.

We present a deep reinforcement learning approach to optimizing the execution cost of computation graphs in a static compiler. The key idea is to combine a neural network policy with a genetic algorithm, the Biased Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (BRKGA). The policy is trained to predict, given an input graph to be optimized, the node-level probability distributions for sampling mutations and crossovers in BRKGA. Our approach, "REINFORCE-based Genetic Algorithm Learning" (REGAL), uses the policy's ability to transfer to new graphs to significantly improve the solution quality of the genetic algorithm for the same objective evaluation budget. As a concrete application, we show results for minimizing peak memory in TensorFlow graphs by jointly optimizing device placement and scheduling. REGAL achieves on average 3.56% lower peak memory than BRKGA on previously unseen graphs, outperforming all the algorithms we compare to, and giving 4.4x bigger improvement than the next best algorithm. We also evaluate REGAL on a production compiler team's performance benchmark of XLA graphs and achieve on average 3.74% lower peak memory than BRKGA, again outperforming all others. Our approach and analysis is made possible by collecting a dataset of 372 unique real-world TensorFlow graphs, more than an order of magnitude more data than previous work.

We propose a new class of structured methods for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling, called DPPMC, designed for high-dimensional nonisotropic distributions where samples are correlated to reduce the variance of the estimator via determinantal point processes. We successfully apply DPPMCs to problems involving nonisotropic distributions arising in guided evolution strategy (GES) methods for RL, CMA-ES techniques and trust region algorithms for blackbox optimization, improving state-of-the-art in all these settings. In particular, we show that DPPMCs drastically improve exploration profiles of the existing evolution strategy algorithms. We further confirm our results, analyzing random feature map estimators for Gaussian mixture kernels. We provide theoretical justification of our empirical results, showing a connection between DPPMCs and structured orthogonal MC methods for isotropic distributions.

At the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) is an alternative approach to deep learning. Evolutionary algorithms (EA) are a subset of evolutionary computation--algorithms that mimic biological evolution to solve complex problems. Published this week on Tuesday in Cell Reports, IBM researchers took an innovative approach using evolutionary algorithms to create a state-of-the-art cloud-based neuroscience model for studying neurodegenerative disorders. The origins of artificial intelligence goes back to the 1950s. The recent global resurrection of AI from its hibernation is largely due to advances in machine learning pattern recognition, namely deep learning.

The field of fluid mechanics is rapidly advancing, driven by unprecedented volumes of data from experiments, field measurements, and large-scale simulations at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Machine learning presents us with a wealth of techniques to extract information from data that can be translated into knowledge about the underlying fluid mechanics. Moreover, machine learning algorithms can augment domain knowledge and automate tasks related to flow control and optimization. This article presents an overview of past history, current developments, and emerging opportunities of machine learning for fluid mechanics. We outline fundamental machine learning methodologies and discuss their uses for understanding, modeling, optimizing, and controlling fluid flows. The strengths and limitations of these methods are addressed from the perspective of scientific inquiry that links data with modeling, experiments, and simulations. Machine learning provides a powerful information processing framework that can augment, and possibly even transform, current lines of fluid mechanics research and industrial applications.

As the complexity of neural network models has grown, it has become increasingly important to optimize their design automatically through metalearning. Methods for discovering hyperparameters, topologies, and learning rate schedules have lead to significant increases in performance. This paper shows that loss functions can be optimized with metalearning as well, and result in similar improvements. The method, Genetic Loss-function Optimization (GLO), discovers loss functions de novo, and optimizes them for a target task. Leveraging techniques from genetic programming, GLO builds loss functions hierarchically from a set of operators and leaf nodes. These functions are repeatedly recombined and mutated to find an optimal structure, and then a covariance-matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) is used to find optimal coefficients. Networks trained with GLO loss functions are found to outperform the standard cross-entropy loss on standard image classification tasks. Training with these new loss functions requires fewer steps, results in lower test error, and allows for smaller datasets to be used. Loss-function optimization thus provides a new dimension of metalearning, and constitutes an important step towards AutoML.