You will have the opportunity to work alongside prominent researchers and engineers in Cambridge, UK, gaining skills and hands-on experience working on practical AI and machine learning problems that help tackle some of society's toughest challenges. The ideal candidate will have a passion for leveraging their expertise from computer science work and/or other technical fields to solve real-world challenges by applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. To apply for the 2018 Microsoft AI Residency Program, complete the application and submit the following items in one PDF or .doc: For questions related to this program, please contact AIResidency@microsoft.com. See here for information on AI residencies available in Redmond, US.

Non-recurring traffic congestion is caused by temporary disruptions, such as accidents, sports games, adverse weather, etc. We use data related to real-time traffic speed, jam factors (a traffic congestion indicator), and events collected over a year from Nashville, TN to train a multi-layered deep neural network. The traffic dataset contains over 900 million data records. The network is thereafter used to classify the real-time data and identify anomalous operations. Compared with traditional approaches of using statistical or machine learning techniques, our model reaches an accuracy of 98.73 percent when identifying traffic congestion caused by football games. Our approach first encodes the traffic across a region as a scaled image. After that the image data from different timestamps is fused with event- and time-related data. Then a crossover operator is used as a data augmentation method to generate training datasets with more balanced classes. Finally, we use the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to tune the sensitivity of the classifier. We present the analysis of the training time and the inference time separately.

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.

We provide novel theoretical insights on structured prediction in the context of efficient convex surrogate loss minimization with consistency guarantees. For any task loss, we construct a convex surrogate that can be optimized via stochastic gradient descent and we prove tight bounds on the so-called "calibration function" relating the excess surrogate risk to the actual risk. In contrast to prior related work, we carefully monitor the effect of the exponential number of classes in the learning guarantees as well as on the optimization complexity. As an interesting consequence, we formalize the intuition that some task losses make learning harder than others, and that the classical 0-1 loss is ill-suited for general structured prediction.

Modern vehicles are equipped with increasingly complex sensors. These sensors generate large volumes of data that provide opportunities for modeling and analysis. Here, we are interested in exploiting this data to learn aspects of behaviors and the road network associated with individual drivers. Our dataset is collected on a standard vehicle used to commute to work and for personal trips. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) trained on the GPS position and orientation data is utilized to compress the large amount of position information into a small amount of road segment states. Each state has a set of observations, i.e. car signals, associated with it that are quantized and modeled as draws from a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). The inference for the topic distributions is carried out using HDP split-merge sampling algorithm. The topic distributions over joint quantized car signals characterize the driving situation in the respective road state. In a novel manner, we demonstrate how the sparsity of the personal road network of a driver in conjunction with a hierarchical topic model allows data driven predictions about destinations as well as likely road conditions.

Artificial Neural Networks are powerful function approximators capable of modelling solutions to a wide variety of problems, both supervised and unsupervised. As their size and expressivity increases, so too does the variance of the model, yielding a nearly ubiquitous overfitting problem. Although mitigated by a variety of model regularisation methods, the common cure is to seek large amounts of training data--which is not necessarily easily obtained--that sufficiently approximates the data distribution of the domain we wish to test on. In contrast, logic programming methods such as Inductive Logic Programming offer an extremely data-efficient process by which models can be trained to reason on symbolic domains. However, these methods are unable to deal with the variety of domains neural networks can be applied to: they are not robust to noise in or mislabelling of inputs, and perhaps more importantly, cannot be applied to non-symbolic domains where the data is ambiguous, such as operating on raw pixels. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Inductive Logic framework, which can not only solve tasks which traditional ILP systems are suited for, but shows a robustness to noise and error in the training data which ILP cannot cope with. Furthermore, as it is trained by backpropagation against a likelihood objective, it can be hybridised by connecting it with neural networks over ambiguous data in order to be applied to domains which ILP cannot address, while providing data efficiency and generalisation beyond what neural networks on their own can achieve.

We consider a decision-making problem where the environment varies both in space and time. Such problems arise naturally when considering e.g., the navigation of an underwater robot amidst ocean currents or the navigation of an aerial vehicle in wind. To model such spatiotemporal variation, we extend the standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) to a new framework called the Time-Varying Markov Decision Process (TVMDP). The TVMDP has a time-varying state transition model and transforms the standard MDP that considers only immediate and static uncertainty descriptions of state transitions, to a framework that is able to adapt to future time-varying transition dynamics over some horizon. We show how to solve a TVMDP via a redesign of the MDP value propagation mechanisms by incorporating the introduced dynamics along the temporal dimension. We validate our framework in a marine robotics navigation setting using spatiotemporal ocean data and show that it outperforms prior efforts.

Consider a multi-variate time series $(X_t)_{t=0}^{T}$ where $X_t \in \mathbb{R}^d$ which may represent spike train responses for multiple neurons in a brain, crime event data across multiple regions, and many others. An important challenge associated with these time series models is to estimate an influence network between the $d$ variables, especially when the number of variables $d$ is large meaning we are in the high-dimensional setting. Prior work has focused on parametric vector auto-regressive models. However, parametric approaches are somewhat restrictive in practice. In this paper, we use the non-parametric sparse additive model (SpAM) framework to address this challenge. Using a combination of $\beta$ and $\phi$-mixing properties of Markov chains and empirical process techniques for reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), we provide upper bounds on mean-squared error in terms of the sparsity $s$, logarithm of the dimension $\log d$, number of time points $T$, and the smoothness of the RKHSs. Our rates are sharp up to logarithm factors in many cases. We also provide numerical experiments that support our theoretical results and display potential advantages of using our non-parametric SpAM framework for a Chicago crime dataset.

Data association, the reasoning over correspondence between targets and measurements, is a problem of fundamental importance in target tracking. Recently, belief propagation (BP) has emerged as a promising method for estimating the marginal probabilities of measurement to target association, providing fast, accurate estimates. The excellent performance of BP in the particular formulation used may be attributed to the convexity of the underlying free energy which it implicitly optimises. This paper studies multiple scan data association problems, i.e., problems that reason over correspondence between targets and several sets of measurements, which may correspond to different sensors or different time steps. We find that the multiple scan extension of the single scan BP formulation is non-convex and demonstrate the undesirable behaviour that can result. A convex free energy is constructed using the recently proposed fractional free energy (FFE). A convergent, BP-like algorithm is provided for the single scan FFE, and employed in optimising the multiple scan free energy using primal-dual coordinate ascent. Finally, based on a variational interpretation of joint probabilistic data association (JPDA), we develop a sequential variant of the algorithm that is similar to JPDA, but retains consistency constraints from prior scans. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on a bearings only target localisation problem.

In this article a few simple applications of Markov chain are going to be discussed as a solution to a few text processing problems. These problems appeared as assignments in a few courses, the descriptions are taken straightaway from the courses themselves. Use a Markov chain to create a statistical model of a piece of English text. Simulate the Markov chain to generate stylized pseudo-random text. In the 1948 landmark paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon founded the field of information theory and revolutionized the telecommunications industry, laying the groundwork for today's Information Age. In this paper, Shannon proposed using a Markov chain to create a statistical model of the sequences of letters in a piece of English text. Markov chains are now widely used in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, information retrieval, data compression, and spam filtering. They also have many scientific computing applications including the genemark algorithm for gene prediction, the Metropolis algorithm for measuring thermodynamical properties, and Google's PageRank algorithm for Web search.