Machine-learning engineer was the fastest growing job category in the five years to 2017, according to LinkedIn. But tech's hottest role isn't a simple field to break into, requiring at least high school math and some programming knowledge, even to get started. Luckily there are an increasing number of options for those wanting to get a grounding in the field, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the latest tech giant to release a set of machine-learning courses for free. That's in addition to the existing well-regarded material available online from the likes of fast.ai and Andrew Ng and Coursera. If you're interested in these courses, it's worth noting that you'll benefit more if you have a basic knowledge of Python and high school linear algebra, statistics, and calculus.

To live is to translate. When we listen, vibrating air particles are translated into words. When we see, bouncing electromagnetic (EM) waves become vision. The signals that surround us, whether they're EM waves or vibrating air, are constantly being transformed by our brains into information and understanding. In the last few years, machine learning algorithms have caused much excitement as they too have proven adept at such tasks. Accessing and interpreting the nervous system's signals is the domain of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI).

On Friday afternoons, Caitlin Kontgis and some of the other scientists at Descartes Labs convene in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, office and get down to work on a grassroots project that's not part of their jobs: watching hurricanes from above, and seeing if they can figure out what the storms will do.* They acquire data from GOES, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite operated by NOAA and NASA, which records images of the Western Hemisphere every five minutes. That's about how long it takes the team to process each image through a deep learning algorithm that detects the eye of a hurricane and centers the image processor over that. Then, they incorporate synthetic aperture data, which uses long-wave radar to see through clouds, and can discern water beneath based on reflectivity. That, in turn, can show almost real-time flooding, tracked over days, of cities in the path of hurricanes.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are commonly derived based on empirical observations. However, recent advances of technology enable us to collect and store massive amount of data, which offers new opportunities for data-driven discovery of PDEs. In this paper, we propose a new deep neural network, called PDE-Net 2.0, to discover (time-dependent) PDEs from observed dynamic data with minor prior knowledge on the underlying mechanism that drives the dynamics. The design of PDE-Net 2.0 is based on our earlier work \cite{Long2018PDE} where the original version of PDE-Net was proposed. PDE-Net 2.0 is a combination of numerical approximation of differential operators by convolutions and a symbolic multi-layer neural network for model recovery. Comparing with existing approaches, PDE-Net 2.0 has the most flexibility and expressive power by learning both differential operators and the nonlinear response function of the underlying PDE model. Numerical experiments show that the PDE-Net 2.0 has the potential to uncover the hidden PDE of the observed dynamics, and predict the dynamical behavior for a relatively long time, even in a noisy environment.

Deep learning within the context of point clouds has gained much research interest in recent years mostly due to the promising results that have been achieved on a number of challenging benchmarks, such as 3D shape recognition and scene semantic segmentation. In many realistic settings however, snapshots of the environment are often taken from a single view, which only contains a partial set of the scene due to the field of view restriction of commodity cameras. 3D scene semantic understanding on partial point clouds is considered as a challenging task. In this work, we propose a processing approach for 3D point cloud data based on a multiview representation of the existing 360{\deg} point clouds. By fusing the original 360{\deg} point clouds and their corresponding 3D multiview representations as input data, a neural network is able to recognize partial point sets while improving the general performance on complete point sets, resulting in an overall increase of 31.9% and 4.3% in segmentation accuracy for partial and complete scene semantic understanding, respectively. This method can also be applied in a wider 3D recognition context such as 3D part segmentation.

Like all sub-fields of machine learning Bayesian Deep Learning is driven by empirical validation of its theoretical proposals. Given the many aspects of an experiment it is always possible that minor or even major experimental flaws can slip by both authors and reviewers. One of the most popular experiments used to evaluate approximate inference techniques is the regression experiment on UCI datasets. However, in this experiment, models which have been trained to convergence have often been compared with baselines trained only for a fixed number of iterations. We find that a well-established baseline, Monte Carlo dropout, when evaluated under the same experimental settings shows significant improvements. In fact, the baseline outperforms or performs competitively with methods that claimed to be superior to the very same baseline method when they were introduced. Hence, by exposing this flaw in experimental procedure, we highlight the importance of using identical experimental setups to evaluate, compare, and benchmark methods in Bayesian Deep Learning.

In order to be able to act in real world scenarios and control a complex system such as an airplane, a car, or an industrial facility, an automated agent needs to process very complex high-dimensional data coming from different domains: video feeds from different cameras, LIDAR sensors on a car, altitude and speed sensors on an airplane, various sensors related to the internal state of the system, and so on. An important problem in this regard would be to map this rich stream of multimodal information into a lower-dimensional space that would compress all modalities into a uniform latent representation (embedding); the agent could then use this embedding to learn or otherwise construct control algorithms. Thus, representation learning lies at the heart of optimal control for complex systems with multimodal unstructured features. Over the last decade, deep neural networks have surpassed other methods in processing nearly all modalities ofhigh-dimensional unstructured data, including images, natural language texts, sounds, and time series. One of the most important properties of neural networks that has made the deep learning revolution possible is their ability to extract meaningful low-dimensional representations of raw unstructured input data. Representation learningwith deep neural networks is a large and well-established area of research [15, 12, 22].

Abstraction of Markov Decision Processes is a useful tool for solving complex problems, as it can ignore unimportant aspects of an environment, simplifying the process of learning an optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for finding abstract MDPs in environments with continuous state spaces. It is based on MDP homomorphisms, a structure-preserving mapping between MDPs. We demonstrate our algorithm's ability to learns abstractions from collected experience and show how to reuse the abstractions to guide exploration in new tasks the agent encounters. Our novel task transfer method beats a baseline based on a deep Q-network.

Since with massive data growth, the need for autonomous and generic anomaly detection system is increased. However, developing one stand-alone generic anomaly detection system that is accurate and fast is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose conventional time-series analysis approaches, the Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model and Seasonal Trend decomposition using Loess (STL), to detect complex and various anomalies. Usually, SARIMA and STL are used only for stationary and periodic time-series, but by combining, we show they can detect anomalies with high accuracy for data that is even noisy and non-periodic. We compared the algorithm to Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), a deep-learning-based algorithm used for anomaly detection system. We used a total of seven real-world datasets and four artificial datasets with different time-series properties to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Mobility datasets are fundamental for evaluating algorithms pertaining to geographic information systems and facilitating experimental reproducibility. But privacy implications restrict sharing such datasets, as even aggregated location-data is vulnerable to membership inference attacks. Current synthetic mobility dataset generators attempt to superficially match a priori modeled mobility characteristics which do not accurately reflect the real-world characteristics. Modeling human mobility to generate synthetic yet semantically and statistically realistic trajectories is therefore crucial for publishing trajectory datasets having satisfactory utility level while preserving user privacy. Specifically, long-range dependencies inherent to human mobility are challenging to capture with both discriminative and generative models. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of recurrent neural architectures (RNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs) and nonparametric copulas to generate synthetic mobility traces. We evaluate the generated trajectories with respect to their geographic and semantic similarity, circadian rhythms, long-range dependencies, training and generation time. We also include two sample tests to assess statistical similarity between the observed and simulated distributions, and we analyze the privacy tradeoffs with respect to membership inference and location-sequence attacks.