In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, billions of sensors and devices collect and process data from the environment, transmit them to cloud centers, and receive feedback via the internet for connectivity and perception. However, transmitting massive amounts of heterogeneous data, perceiving complex environments from these data, and then making smart decisions in a timely manner are difficult. Artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, is now a proven success in various areas including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. AI introduced into the IoT heralds the era of artificial intelligence of things (AIoT). This paper presents a comprehensive survey on AIoT to show how AI can empower the IoT to make it faster, smarter, greener, and safer. Specifically, we briefly present the AIoT architecture in the context of cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing. Then, we present progress in AI research for IoT from four perspectives: perceiving, learning, reasoning, and behaving. Next, we summarize some promising applications of AIoT that are likely to profoundly reshape our world. Finally, we highlight the challenges facing AIoT and some potential research opportunities.

Goal-oriented dialog systems enable users to complete specific goals like requesting information about a movie or booking a ticket. Typically the dialog system pipeline contains multiple ML models, including natural language understanding, state tracking and action prediction (policy learning). These models are trained through a combination of supervised or reinforcement learning methods and therefore require collection of labeled domain specific datasets. However, collecting annotated datasets with language and dialog-flow variations is expensive, time-consuming and scales poorly due to human involvement. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically creating a large corpus of annotated dialogs from a few thoroughly annotated sample dialogs and the dialog schema. Our approach includes a novel goal-sampling technique for sampling plausible user goals and a dialog simulation technique that uses heuristic interplay between the user and the system (Alexa), where the user tries to achieve the sampled goal. We validate our approach by generating data and training three different downstream conversational ML models. We achieve 18 ? 50% relative accuracy improvements on a held-out test set compared to a baseline dialog generation approach that only samples natural language and entity value variations from existing catalogs but does not generate any novel dialog flow variations. We also qualitatively establish that the proposed approach is better than the baseline. Moreover, several different conversational experiences have been built using this method, which enables customers to have a wide variety of conversations with Alexa.

At the American Society for Microbiology annual meeting this past weekend, microbiologist Nick Loman of the University of Birmingham spoke about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in biology. Although microbial geneticists such as Loman are beginning to harness the computational power of machine learning to analyze their data, Loman cautions that many scientists have plunged ahead with using AI before really understanding its benefits--and limitations. The Scientist sat down with Loman in San Francisco to chat further. The Scientist: Are there areas in biology where there have been large amounts of enthusiasm for these approaches? And what are some of the reasons for that? Nick Loman: Definitely in this kind of -omics space people are getting excited about machine learning simply because these are data sets with millions, billions, even trillions of data points and there was no alternative way to analyze them.

Preview this course - GET COUPON CODE Have you ever thought about what would happen if you combined the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence with financial engineering? Today, you can stop imagining, and start doing. This course will teach you the core fundamentals of financial engineering, with a machine learning twist. We will cover must-know topics in financial engineering, such as: Exploratory data analysis, significance testing, correlations, alpha and beta Time series analysis, simple moving average, exponentially-weighted moving average Holt-Winters exponential smoothing model Efficient Market Hypothesis Random Walk Hypothesis Time series forecasting ("stock price prediction") Modern portfolio theory Efficient frontier / Markowitz bullet Mean-variance optimization Maximizing the Sharpe ratio Convex optimization with Linear Programming and Quadratic Programming Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) Algorithmic trading (VIP only) Statistical Factor Models (VIP only) Regime Detection with Hidden Markov Models (VIP only) In addition, we will look at various non-traditional techniques which stem purely from the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, such as: Classification models Unsupervised learning Reinforcement learning and Q-learning ***VIP-only sections (get it while it lasts!) You will learn exactly why their methodology is fundamentally flawed and why their results are complete nonsense.

One of the most challenging aspects of real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the multitude of unpredictable and ever-changing distractions that could divert an agent from what was tasked to do in its training environment. While an agent could learn from reward signals to ignore them, the complexity of the real-world can make rewards hard to acquire, or, at best, extremely sparse. A recent class of self-supervised methods have shown promise that reward-free adaptation under challenging distractions is possible. However, previous work focused on a short one-episode adaptation setting. In this paper, we consider a long-term adaptation setup that is more akin to the specifics of the real-world and propose a geometric perspective on self-supervised adaptation. We empirically describe the processes that take place in the embedding space during this adaptation process, reveal some of its undesirable effects on performance and show how they can be eliminated. Moreover, we theoretically study how actor-based and actor-free agents can further generalise to the target environment by manipulating the geometry of the manifolds described by the actor and critic functions.

We propose a hierarchical Bayesian recurrent state space model for modeling switching network connectivity in resting state fMRI data. Our model allows us to uncover shared network patterns across disease conditions. We evaluate our method on the ADNI2 dataset by inferring latent state patterns corresponding to altered neural circuits in individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In addition to states shared across healthy and individuals with MCI, we discover latent states that are predominantly observed in individuals with MCI. Our model outperforms current state of the art deep learning method on ADNI2 dataset.

Seamlessly interacting with humans or robots is hard because these agents are non-stationary. They update their policy in response to the ego agent's behavior, and the ego agent must anticipate these changes to co-adapt. Inspired by humans, we recognize that robots do not need to explicitly model every low-level action another agent will make; instead, we can capture the latent strategy of other agents through high-level representations. We propose a reinforcement learning-based framework for learning latent representations of an agent's policy, where the ego agent identifies the relationship between its behavior and the other agent's future strategy. The ego agent then leverages these latent dynamics to influence the other agent, purposely guiding them towards policies suitable for co-adaptation. Across several simulated domains and a real-world air hockey game, our approach outperforms the alternatives and learns to influence the other agent.

In searching for a generalizable representation of temporally extended tasks, we spot two necessary constituents: the utility needs to be non-Markovian to transfer temporal relations invariant to a probability shift, the utility also needs to be lifted to abstract out specific grounding objects. In this work, we study learning such utility from human demonstrations. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) has been accepted as a general framework of utility learning, its fundamental formulation is one concrete Markov Decision Process. Thus the learned reward function does not specify the task independently of the environment. Going beyond that, we define a domain of generalization that spans a set of planning problems following a schema. We hence propose a new quest, Generalized Inverse Planning, for utility learning in this domain. We further outline a computational framework, Maximum Entropy Inverse Planning (MEIP), that learns non-Markovian utility and associated concepts in a generative manner. The learned utility and concepts form a task representation that generalizes regardless of probability shift or structural change. Seeing that the proposed generalization problem has not been widely studied yet, we carefully define an evaluation protocol, with which we illustrate the effectiveness of MEIP on two proof-of-concept domains and one challenging task: learning to fold from demonstrations.

Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with enjoyment declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom model these dynamics, instead proceeding as though user preferences were fixed in time. In this work, we adopt a multi-armed bandit setup, modeling satiation dynamics as a time-invariant linear dynamical system. In our model, the expected rewards for each arm decline monotonically with consecutive exposures and rebound towards the initial reward whenever that arm is not pulled. We analyze this model, showing that, when the arms exhibit deterministic identical dynamics, our problem is equivalent to a specific instance of Max K-Cut. In this case, a greedy policy, which plays the arms in a cyclic order, is optimal. In the general setting, where each arm's satiation dynamics are stochastic and governed by different (unknown) parameters, we propose an algorithm that first uses offline data to estimate each arm's reward model and then plans using a generalization of the greedy policy.

This paper proves that the episodic learning environment of every finite-horizon decision task has a unique steady state under any behavior policy, and that the marginal distribution of the agent's input indeed approaches to the steady-state distribution in essentially all episodic learning processes. This observation supports an interestingly reversed mindset against conventional wisdom: While steady states are usually presumed to exist in continual learning and are considered less relevant in episodic learning, it turns out they are guaranteed to exist for the latter. Based on this insight, the paper further develops connections between episodic and continual RL for several important concepts that have been separately treated in the two RL formalisms. Practically, the existence of unique and approachable steady state enables a general, reliable, and efficient way to collect data in episodic RL tasks, which the paper applies to policy gradient algorithms as a demonstration, based on a new steady-state policy gradient theorem. The paper also proposes and empirically evaluates a perturbation method that facilitates rapid mixing in real-world tasks.