The rapid development of social media changes the lifestyle of people and simultaneously provides an ideal place for publishing and disseminating rumors, which severely exacerbates social panic and triggers a crisis of social trust. Early content-based methods focused on finding clues from the text and user profiles for rumor detection. Recent studies combine the stances of users' comments with news content to capture the difference between true and false rumors. Although the user's stance is effective for rumor detection, the manual labeling process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limits the application of utilizing it to facilitate rumor detection. In this paper, we first finetune a pre-trained BERT model on a small labeled dataset and leverage this model to annotate weak stance labels for users' comment data to overcome the problem mentioned above. Then, we propose a novel Stance-aware Reinforcement Learning Framework (SRLF) to select high-quality labeled stance data for model training and rumor detection. Both the stance selection and rumor detection tasks are optimized simultaneously to promote both tasks mutually. We conduct experiments on two commonly used real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models significantly, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Exploiting the inner-shot and inter-shot dependencies is essential for key-shot based video summarization. Current approaches mainly devote to modeling the video as a frame sequence by recurrent neural networks. However, one potential limitation of the sequence models is that they focus on capturing local neighborhood dependencies while the high-order dependencies in long distance are not fully exploited. In general, the frames in each shot record a certain activity and vary smoothly over time, but the multi-hop relationships occur frequently among shots. In this case, both the local and global dependencies are important for understanding the video content. Motivated by this point, we propose a Reconstructive Sequence-Graph Network (RSGN) to encode the frames and shots as sequence and graph hierarchically, where the frame-level dependencies are encoded by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and the shot-level dependencies are captured by the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Then, the videos are summarized by exploiting both the local and global dependencies among shots. Besides, a reconstructor is developed to reward the summary generator, so that the generator can be optimized in an unsupervised manner, which can avert the lack of annotated data in video summarization. Furthermore, under the guidance of reconstruction loss, the predicted summary can better preserve the main video content and shot-level dependencies. Practically, the experimental results on three popular datasets i.e., SumMe, TVsum and VTW) have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed approach to the summarization task.

Privacy protection has recently attracted the attention of both academics and industries. Society protects individual data privacy through complex legal frameworks. This has become a topic of interest with the increasing applications of data science and artificial intelligence that have created a higher demand to the ubiquitous application of the data. The privacy protection of the broad Data-InformationKnowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) landscape, the next generation of information organization, has not been in the limelight. Next, we will explore DIKW architecture through the applications of popular swarm intelligence and differential privacy. As differential privacy proved to be an effective data privacy approach, we will look at it from a DIKW domain perspective. Swarm Intelligence could effectively optimize and reduce the number of items in DIKW used in differential privacy, this way accelerating both the effectiveness and the efficiency of differential privacy for crossing multiple modals of conceptual DIKW. The proposed approach is proved through the application of personalized data that is based on the open-sourse IRIS dataset. This experiment demonstrates the efficiency of Swarm Intelligence in reducing computing complexity.

In recent years, quantitative investment methods combined with artificial intelligence have attracted more and more attention from investors and researchers. Existing related methods based on the supervised learning are not very suitable for learning problems with long-term goals and delayed rewards in real futures trading. In this paper, therefore, we model the price prediction problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and optimize it by reinforcement learning with expert trajectory. In the proposed method, we employ more than 100 short-term alpha factors instead of price, volume and several technical factors in used existing methods to describe the states of MDP. Furthermore, unlike DQN (deep Q-learning) and BC (behavior cloning) in related methods, we introduce expert experience in training stage, and consider both the expert-environment interaction and the agent-environment interaction to design the temporal difference error so that the agents are more adaptable for inevitable noise in financial data. Experimental results evaluated on share price index futures in China, including IF (CSI 300) and IC (CSI 500), show that the advantages of the proposed method compared with three typical technical analysis and two deep leaning based methods.

In late November the U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved Benevolent AI's recommended arthritis drug Baricitnib as a COVID-19 treatment, just nine-months after the hypothesis was developed. The correlation between the properties of this existing Eli Lilly drug and a potential treatment for seriously ill COVID-19 patients, was made with the help of knowledge graphs, which represent data in context, in a manner that humans and machines can readily understand. Knowledge graphs apply semantics to give context and relationships to data, providing a framework for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing. Think of them as a flexible means of discovering facts and relationships between people, processes, applications and data, in ways that give companies new insights into their businesses, create new services and improve R&D research. Benevolent AI, a six-year-old London-based company which has developed a platform of computational and experimental technologies and processes that can draw on vast quantities of biomedical data to advance drug development, built-in the use of knowledge graphs from day one.

Artificial intelligence has been all over headlines for nearly a decade, as systems have made quick progress in long-standing AI challenges like image recognition, natural language processing, and games. Tech companies have sown machine learning algorithms into search and recommendation engines and facial recognition systems, and OpenAI's GPT-3 and DeepMind's AlphaFold promise even more practical applications, from writing to coding to scientific discoveries. Indeed, we're in the midst of an AI spring, with investment in the technology burgeoning and an overriding sentiment of optimism and possibility towards what it can accomplish and when. This time may feel different than previous AI springs due to the aforementioned practical applications and the proliferation of narrow AI into technologies many of us use every day--like our smartphones, TVs, cars, and vacuum cleaners, to name just a few. But it's also possible that we're riding a wave of short-term progress in AI that will soon become part of the ebb and flow in advancement, funding, and sentiment that has characterized the field since its founding in 1956. AI has fallen short of many predictions made over the last few decades; 2020, for example, was heralded by many as the year self-driving cars would start filling up roads, seamlessly ferrying passengers around as they sat back and enjoyed the ride.

Machine Learning is an artificial intelligence subset that focusses on developing applications that enable machines to self-learn. The ultimate purpose of machine learning is to enable machines to work automatically without any human intervention. Coding ML algorithms require a very high level of coding expertise. ML frameworks simplify the process of creating algorithms. An ML framework can be any interface, tool, library, or platform that helps you easily build ML models without having to build intensive algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence is already part of our lives in the tools and services we use every day. As AI development accelerates, how can authors and small businesses use it as leverage to expand income and opportunities? Ash Fontana gives some ideas in this interview on The AI-First Company.

In March 1950, an RAF wing commander and trained accountant called Charles Reep turned his eye for numbers to football. Reep, who had become interested in the sport in the 1930s and was fascinated by Herbert Chapman's pioneering Arsenal team, had returned from the Second World War to find that the tactical revolution he'd witnessed before had stalled. Finally, at half-time during a drab Division Three game between Swindon Town and Bristol City during which he watched countless attacks amount to nothing, Reep's patience ran out. He grabbed a notebook and a pencil and began furiously jotting down what happened on the pitch – he started counting the number of passes and shots, in one of the first systematic attempts to use data to analyse football. Seven decades later, the data revolution has reached the grassroots – fans are fluent in xG and net spend, and the top teams pluck statistics PhD students straight from university in the search for an edge.

This course focuses on using state-of-the-art Natural Language processing techniques to solve the problem of question generation in edtech. If we pick up any middle school textbook, at the end of every chapter we see assessment questions like MCQs, True/False questions, Fill-in-the-blanks, Match the following, etc. In this course, we will see how we can take any text content and generate these assessment questions using NLP techniques. This course will be a very practical use case of NLP where we put basic algorithms like word vectors (word2vec, Glove, etc) to recent advancements like BERT, openAI GPT-2, and T5 transformers to real-world use. We will use NLP libraries like Spacy, NLTK, AllenNLP, HuggingFace transformers, etc.