Summary: There have been several stories over the last several months around the theme that AI is about to hit a wall. That the rapid improvements we've experienced and the benefits we've accrued can't continue at the current pace. It's worth taking a look at these arguments to see if we should be adjusting our plans and expectations. There have been several stories over the last several months around the theme that AI is about to hit a wall. That the rapid improvements we've experienced and the benefits we've accrued can't continue at the current pace.

To judge from the hype, artificial intelligence is inches away from ripping through the economy and destroying everyone's jobs--save for the AI scientists who build the technology and the baristas and yoga instructors who minister to them. But one critic of that view comes from within the tent of AI itself: Gary Marcus. From an academic background in psychology and neuroscience--rather than computer science--Mr Marcus has long been an AI gadfly. He relishes poking holes in the popular AI technique of deep-learning because of its inability to perform abstractions even as it does an impressive job at pattern-matching. Yet his unease with the state of the art didn't prevent him from advancing the art with his own AI startup, Geometric Intelligence, which he sold to Uber in 2016.

Artificial and augmented intelligence are driving the future of medical imaging. Tectonic is the only way to describe the trend. And medical imaging is at the right place at the right time. Imaging stands to get better, stronger, faster and more efficient thanks to artificial intelligence, including machine learning, deep learning, convolutional neural networks and natural language processing. So why is medical imaging ripe for AI? Check out the opportunities and hear what experts have to say--and see what you should be doing now if you haven't already started.

Machine learning is progressing at an astounding rate, powered by complex models such as ensemble models and deep neural networks (DNNs). These models have a wide range of real-world applications, such as movie recommendations of Netflix, neural machine translation of Google, and speech recognition of Amazon Alexa. Despite the successes, machine learning has its own limitations and drawbacks. The most significant one is the lack of transparency behind their behaviors, which leaves users with little understanding of how particular decisions are made by these models. Consider, for instance, an advanced self-driving car equipped with various machine learning algorithms does not brake or decelerate when confronting a stopped firetruck. This unexpected behavior may frustrate and confuse users, making them wonder why. Even worse, the wrong decisions could cause severe consequences if the car is driving at highway speeds and might ultimately crash into the firetruck. The concerns about the black-box nature of complex models have hampered their further applications in our society, especially in those critical decision-making domains like self-driving cars. Interpretable machine learning would be an effective tool to mitigate these problems. It gives machine learning models the ability to explain or to present their behaviors in understandable terms to humans,10 which is called interpretability or explainability and we use them interchangeably in this article. Interpretability would be an indispensable part for machine learning models in order to better serve human beings and bring benefits to society. For end users, explanation will increase their trust and encourage them to adopt machine learning systems. From the perspective of machine learning system developers and researchers, the provided explanation can help them better understand the problem, the data and why a model might fail, and eventually increase the system safety. Thus, there is a growing interest among the academic and industrial community in interpreting machine learning models and gaining insights into their working mechanisms.

As in any tech-centric industry, new techniques and technologies in machine vision and image processing often create enthusiasm that morphs readily into hype. The line between hype and efficacy lies in successful implementation. Vision Systems Design, throughout 2019, has chronicled the space where the hype behind new technologies ends and the tally of useful applications begins. Our recent Solutions in Vision 2020 global audience survey necessarily focused on some of the hottest vision technologies--deep learning, hyperspectral/multispectral imaging, polarization, embedded vision, 3D imaging, and computational imaging--who is using them now, and when vision professionals expect to be using them in the future. We also have been covering these technologies throughout the year, by way of demonstrating their current importance and understanding the directions in which they will continue to mature in the vision industry.

The International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2020 is four months away but has already attracted more than its share of drama with a deluge of submissions and doubts about the qualifications of some reviewers. Yesterday the conference programme chairs finally put the selection process behind them, announcing 687 out of 2594 papers had made it to ICLR 2020 -- a 26.5 percent acceptance rate. ICLR 2020 will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from April 26 to 30. This will be the first trip to Africa for a major AI conference, a move long-encouraged by many leading AI researchers. All accepted papers will be presented as posters as usual, while 23 percent will have an oral presentation.

I used two of the hottest buzz words in one sentence: artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. It should be no surprise the two would be mentioned in the same sentence. Artificial intelligence and, specifically, the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image recognition has forever changed the automotive playing field by delivering higher levels of accuracy over more traditional computer vision algorithms. In fact, today's state-of-the-art image recognition algorithm--based on CNN--has been shown to deliver accuracy that is superior to humans. However, this accuracy comes at a price: highly accurate CNNs that are used to achieve level 5 autonomous driving can easily require 10s of 100s of teraflops of compute performance.

In this paper, we describe the Maximum Uniformity of Distribution (MUD) algorithm with the power-law nonlinearity. In this approach, we hypothesize that neural network training will become more stable if feature distribution is not too much skewed. We propose two different types of MUD approaches: power function-based MUD and histogram-based MUD. In these approaches, we first obtain the mel filterbank coefficients and apply nonlinearity functions for each filterbank channel. With the power function-based MUD, we apply a power-function based nonlinearity where power function coefficients are chosen to maximize the likelihood assuming that nonlinearity outputs follow the uniform distribution. With the histogram-based MUD, the empirical Cumulative Density Function (CDF) from the training database is employed to transform the original distribution into a uniform distribution. In MUD processing, we do not use any prior knowledge (e.g. logarithmic relation) about the energy of the incoming signal and the perceived intensity by a human. Experimental results using an end-to-end speech recognition system demonstrate that power-function based MUD shows better result than the conventional Mel Filterbank Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). On the LibriSpeech database, we could achieve 4.02 % WER on test-clean and 13.34 % WER on test-other without using any Language Models (LMs). The major contribution of this work is that we developed a new algorithm for designing the compressive nonlinearity in a data-driven way, which is much more flexible than the previous approaches and may be extended to other domains as well.

Daniel Manzano Unidad de An alisis Institucional y Datos Universidad de Chile Santiago, Chile danielmanzano@uchile.cl Abstract --Automatic bill classification is an attractive task with many potential applications such as automated detection and counting in images or videos. T o address this purpose we present a Deep Learning Model to classify Chilean Banknotes, because of its successful results in image processing applications. For optimal performance of the proposed model, data augmentation techniques are introduced due to the limited number of image samples. Positive results were achieved in this work, verifying that it could be a stating point to be extended to more complex applications. I NTRODUCTION The automatic classification of bills may be an interesting work as previous step for more complex applications for institutions such as banks or casinos.