In music and audio production, attenuation of spectral resonances is an important step towards a technically correct result. In this paper we present a two-component system to automate the task of resonance equalization. The first component is a dynamic equalizer that automatically detects resonances and offers to attenuate them by a user-specified factor. The second component is a deep neural network that predicts the optimal attenuation factor based on the windowed audio. The network is trained and validated on empirical data gathered from an experiment in which sound engineers choose their preferred attenuation factors for a set of tracks. We test two distinct network architectures for the predictive model and find that a dilated residual network operating directly on the audio signal is on a par with a network architecture that requires a prior audio feature extraction stage. Both architectures predict human-preferred resonance attenuation factors significantly better than a baseline approach.

In this paper, we study the actor-action semantic segmentation problem, which requires joint labeling of both actor and action categories in video frames. One major challenge for this task is that when an actor performs an action, different body parts of the actor provide different types of cues for the action category and may receive inconsistent action labeling when they are labeled independently. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end region-based actor-action segmentation approach which relies on region masks from an instance segmentation algorithm. Our main novelty is to avoid labeling pixels in a region mask independently - instead we assign a single action label to these pixels to achieve consistent action labeling. When a pixel belongs to multiple region masks, max pooling is applied to resolve labeling conflicts. Our approach uses a two-stream network as the front-end (which learns features capturing both appearance and motion information), and uses two region-based segmentation networks as the back-end (which takes the fused features from the two-stream network as the input and predicts actor-action labeling). Experiments on the A2D dataset demonstrate that both the region-based segmentation strategy and the fused features from the two-stream network contribute to the performance improvements. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art results by more than 8% in mean class accuracy, and more than 5% in mean class IOU, which validates its effectiveness.

Knowledge graphs have emerged as an important model for studying complex multi-relational data. This has given rise to the construction of numerous large scale but incomplete knowledge graphs encoding information extracted from various resources. An effective and scalable approach to jointly learn over multiple graphs and eventually construct a unified graph is a crucial next step for the success of knowledge-based inference for many downstream applications. To this end, we propose LinkNBed, a deep relational learning framework that learns entity and relationship representations across multiple graphs. We identify entity linkage across graphs as a vital component to achieve our goal. We design a novel objective that leverage entity linkage and build an efficient multi-task training procedure. Experiments on link prediction and entity linkage demonstrate substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art relational learning approaches.

Activities in reinforcement learning (RL) revolve around learning the Markov decision process (MDP) model, in particular, the following parameters: state values, V; state-action values, Q; and policy, pi. These parameters are commonly implemented as an array. Scaling up the problem means scaling up the size of the array and this will quickly lead to a computational bottleneck. To get around this, the RL problem is commonly formulated to learn a specific task using hand-crafted input features to curb the size of the array. In this report, we discuss an alternative end-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach where the DRL attempts to learn general task representations which in our context refers to learning to play the Pong game from a sequence of screen snapshots without game-specific hand-crafted features. We apply artificial neural networks (ANN) to approximate a policy of the RL model. The policy network, via Policy Gradients (PG) method, learns to play the Pong game from a sequence of frames without any extra semantics apart from the pixel information and the score. In contrast to the traditional tabular RL approach where the contents in the array have clear interpretations such as V or Q, the interpretation of knowledge content from the weights of the policy network is more illusive. In this work, we experiment with various Deep ANN architectures i.e., Feed forward ANN (FFNN), Convolution ANN (CNN) and Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C). We also examine the activation of hidden nodes and the weights between the input and the hidden layers, before and after the DRL has successfully learnt to play the Pong game. Insights into the internal learning mechanisms and future research directions are then discussed.

Apple's virtual assistant Siri is about to be the most well-fed data science algorithm on the planet. Over the past year, Siri hasn't looked good compared to her peers in the bot world -- Facebook and Amazon have opened up their bot platforms to developers, while Siri has continued to be handcuffed to a handful of limited use cases. But with the announcement of Apple's new wireless earbuds, called AirPods, earlier this month, it looks like Siri is about to be exposed to the daily activities of Apple users all over the globe. Apple's dual hardware/software AirPod launch will, if the smartbuds become as ubiquitous as the iPhone, allow Siri to jump from novelty to the preeminent A.I. bot platform in the world. Since Apple clearly intends for users to leave their buds in throughout all of their daily activities, from work to commuting to travel to exercise, Siri will be able to make suggestions at any point based on geolocation, a particular iPhone activity, a Bluetooth pairing (i.e. with a car or entertainment system), and more.

Artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and neural networks represent incredibly exciting and powerful machine learning-based techniques used to solve many real-world problems. For a primer on machine learning, you may want to read this five-part series that I wrote. While human-like deductive reasoning, inference, and decision-making by a computer is still a long time away, there have been remarkable gains in the application of AI techniques and associated algorithms. The concepts discussed here are extremely technical, complex, and based on mathematics, statistics, probability theory, physics, signal processing, machine learning, computer science, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. That said, this article is not meant to provide such a technical treatment, but rather to explain these concepts at a level that can be understood by most non-practitioners, and can also serve as a reference or review for technical folks as well. The primary motivation and driving force for these areas of study, and for developing these techniques further, is that the solutions required to solve certain problems are incredibly complicated, not well understood, nor easy to determine manually.

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning or hierarchical learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. Deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, machine translation, bioinformatics, drug design, autonomous locomotion and board game programs, where they have produced results comparable to and in some cases superior to human experts. With massive amounts of computational power, machines can now recognize objects and translate speech in real time. Deep learning models are vaguely inspired by information processing and communication patterns in biological nervous systems yet have various differences from the structural and functional properties of biological brains, which make them incompatible with neuroscience evidences. Nevertheless, deep learning is one of the most talked-about topics in the domain of computer science and technology.

The majority of the deep learning applications that we see in the community are usually geared towards fields like marketing, sales, finance, etc. We hardly ever read articles or find resources about deep learning being used to protect these products, and the business, from malware and hacker attacks. While the big technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce have already embedded deep learning into their products, the cybersecurity industry is still playing catch up. It's a challenging field but one that needs our full attention. In this article, we briefly introduce Deep Learning (DL) along with a few existing Information Security (hereby referred to as InfoSec) applications it enables. We then deep dive into the interesting problem of anonymous tor traffic detection and also present a DL-based solution to detect TOR traffic.

I have been asked by quite a few people on how to start Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Here, I have curated a list of resources which I used and the path I took when I first learnt Machine Learning. I will keep on updating this article as I find more helpful resources. This will teach you the ropes of Machine Learning and will brush up your Linear Algebra skill a little bit. Make sure you do all the assignments and after you have completed the course, you will get a hold of Machine Learning concepts such as; Linear Regression, Logistics Regression, SVM, Neural Networks and K-means clustering.

Subcommittee on Research and Technology and Subcommittee on Energy Hearing - Artificial Intelligence - June 26th, 2018 Dr. Tim Persons, chief scientist, GAO Mr. Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer, OpenAI Dr. Fei-Fei Li, chairperson of the board and co-founder, AI4ALL OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman