Anyone that might be concerned about computers taking over look away now, because they are a step closer to sounding just like humans. Researchers in the UK at Google's DeepMind unit have been working on making computer-generated speech sound as "natural" as humans. The technology, called WaveNet, which is focused on the area of speech synthesis, or text-to-speech, was found to sound more natural than any of Google's products. However, this was only achieved after the WaveNet artificial neural network was trained to produce English and Chinese speech which required copious amounts of computing power, so the technology probably won't be hitting the mainstream any time soon. Using a convolutional neural network, which is used for artificial intelligence in deep learning, it is trained on data and then the systems make inferences about new data, in addition to being used to generate new data.

Songbirds provide a model system that neuroscientists use to understand how the brain learns and controls speech and similar skills. Much like infants learning to speak from their parents, songbirds learn their song from a tutor and practice it millions of times before reaching maturity. Also like humans, songbirds have evolved special brain regions for learning and producing their vocalizations. These newly-evolved brain regions in songbirds, known as the song system, are found within broader brain areas shared by birds and humans across evolution. So by studying how the song system works, we can learn about our own brains.

Singularities of a statistical model are the elements of the model's parameter space which make the corresponding Fisher information matrix degenerate. These are the points for which estimation techniques such as the maximum likelihood estimator and standard Bayesian procedures do not admit the root-$n$ parametric rate of convergence. We propose a general framework for the identification of singularity structures of the parameter space of finite mixtures, and study the impacts of the singularity levels on minimax lower bounds and rates of convergence for the maximum likelihood estimator over a compact parameter space. Our study makes explicit the deep links between model singularities, parameter estimation convergence rates and minimax lower bounds, and the algebraic geometry of the parameter space for mixtures of continuous distributions. The theory is applied to establish concrete convergence rates of parameter estimation for finite mixture of skewnormal distributions. This rich and increasingly popular mixture model is shown to exhibit a remarkably complex range of asymptotic behaviors which have not been hitherto reported in the literature.

The Predictive Analytics Scores below – ordered on Forecasted Future Needs and Demand from High to Low – shows you Machine learning's Predictive Analysis. The link takes you to a corresponding product in The Art of Service's store to get started. The Art of Service's predictive model results enable businesses to discover and apply the most profitable technologies and applications, attracting the most profitable customers, and therefore helping maximize value from their investments. The Predictive Analytics algorithm evaluates and scores technologies and applications. The platform monitors over six thousand technologies and applications for months, looking for interest swings in a topic, concept, technology or application, not just a count of mentions.

We propose an expectation-maximization-like(EMlike) method to train Boltzmann machine with unconstrained connectivity. It adopts Monte Carlo approximation in the E-step, and replaces the intractable likelihood objective with efficiently computed objectives or directly approximates the gradient of likelihood objective in the M-step. The EM-like method is a modification of alternating minimization. We prove that EM-like method will be the exactly same with contrastive divergence in restricted Boltzmann machine if the M-step of this method adopts special approximation. We also propose a new measure to assess the performance of Boltzmann machine as generative models of data, and its computational complexity is O(Rmn). Finally, we demonstrate the performance of EM-like method using numerical experiments.

Although there has been substantial research in software analytics for effort estimation in traditional software projects, little work has been done for estimation in agile projects, especially estimating user stories or issues. Story points are the most common unit of measure used for estimating the effort involved in implementing a user story or resolving an issue. In this paper, we offer for the \emph{first} time a comprehensive dataset for story points-based estimation that contains 23,313 issues from 16 open source projects. We also propose a prediction model for estimating story points based on a novel combination of two powerful deep learning architectures: long short-term memory and recurrent highway network. Our prediction system is \emph{end-to-end} trainable from raw input data to prediction outcomes without any manual feature engineering. An empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach consistently outperforms three common effort estimation baselines and two alternatives in both Mean Absolute Error and the Standardized Accuracy.

Hearing Aid (HA) algorithms need to be tuned ("fitted") to match the impairment of each specific patient. The lack of a fundamental HA fitting theory is a strong contributing factor to an unsatisfying sound experience for about 20% of hearing aid patients. This paper proposes a probabilistic modeling approach to the design of HA algorithms. The proposed method relies on a generative probabilistic model for the hearing loss problem and provides for automated inference of the corresponding (1) signal processing algorithm, (2) the fitting solution as well as a principled (3) performance evaluation metric. All three tasks are realized as message passing algorithms in a factor graph representation of the generative model, which in principle allows for fast implementation on hearing aid or mobile device hardware. The methods are theoretically worked out and simulated with a custom-built factor graph toolbox for a specific hearing loss model.

Robust Bayesian models are appealing alternatives to standard models, providing protection from data that contains outliers or other departures from the model assumptions. Historically, robust models were mostly developed on a case-by-case basis; examples include robust linear regression, robust mixture models, and bursty topic models. In this paper we develop a general approach to robust Bayesian modeling. We show how to turn an existing Bayesian model into a robust model, and then develop a generic strategy for computing with it. We use our method to study robust variants of several models, including linear regression, Poisson regression, logistic regression, and probabilistic topic models. We discuss the connections between our methods and existing approaches, especially empirical Bayes and James-Stein estimation.

This paper reports applications of Difference of Convex functions (DC) programming to Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) with expert data. This is made possible because the norm of the Optimal Bellman Residual (OBR), which is at the heart of many RL and LfD algorithms, is DC. Improvement in performance is demonstrated on two specific algorithms, namely Reward-regularized Classification for Apprenticeship Learning (RCAL) and Reinforcement Learning with Expert Demonstrations (RLED), through experiments on generic Markov Decision Processes (MDP), called Garnets.

We address the task of simultaneous feature fusion and modeling of discrete ordinal outputs. We propose a novel Gaussian process(GP) auto-encoder modeling approach. In particular, we introduce GP encoders to project multiple observed features onto a latent space, while GP decoders are responsible for reconstructing the original features. Inference is performed in a novel variational framework, where the recovered latent representations are further constrained by the ordinal output labels. In this way, we seamlessly integrate the ordinal structure in the learned manifold, while attaining robust fusion of the input features. We demonstrate the representation abilities of our model on benchmark datasets from machine learning and affect analysis. We further evaluate the model on the tasks of feature fusion and joint ordinal prediction of facial action units. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach compared to the state of the art.