Kuzushiji, a cursive writing style, had been used in Japan for over a thousand years starting from the 8th century. Over 3 millions books on a diverse array of topics, such as literature, science, mathematics and even cooking are preserved. However, following a change to the Japanese writing system in 1900, Kuzushiji has not been included in regular school curricula. Therefore, most Japanese natives nowadays cannot read books written or printed just 150 years ago. Museums and libraries have invested a great deal of effort into creating digital copies of these historical documents as a safeguard against fires, earthquakes and tsunamis. The result has been datasets with hundreds of millions of photographs of historical documents which can only be read by a small number of specially trained experts.

This paper explores the use of a novel form of Hierarchical Graph Neurons (HGN) for in-operation behaviour selection in a swarm of robotic agents. This new HGN is called Robotic-HGN (R-HGN), as it matches robot environment observations to environment labels via fusion of match probabilities from both temporal and intra-swarm collections. This approach is novel for HGN as it addresses robotic observations being pseudo-continuous numbers, rather than categorical values. Additionally, the proposed approach is memory and computation-power conservative and thus is acceptable for use in mobile devices such as single-board computers, which are often used in mobile robotic agents. This R-HGN approach is validated against individual behaviour implementation and random behaviour selection. This contrast is made in two sets of simulated environments: environments designed to challenge the held behaviours of the R-HGN, and randomly generated environments which are more challenging for the robotic swarm than R-HGN training conditions. R-HGN has been found to enable appropriate behaviour selection in both these sets, allowing significant swarm performance in pre-trained and unexpected environment conditions.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) aims at separating a whole-home energy signal into its appliance components. Such method can be harnessed to provide various services to better manage and control energy consumption (optimal planning and saving). NILM has been traditionally approached from signal processing and electrical engineering perspectives. Recently, machine learning has started to play an important role in NILM. While most work has focused on supervised algorithms, unsupervised approaches can be more interesting and of practical use in real case scenarios. Specifically, they do not require labelled training data to be acquired from individual appliances and the algorithm can be deployed to operate on the measured aggregate data directly. In this paper, we propose a fully unsupervised NILM framework based on Bayesian hierarchical mixture models. In particular, we develop a new method based on Gaussian Latent Dirichlet Allocation (GLDA) in order to extract global components that summarise the energy signal. These components provide a representation of the consumption patterns. Designed to cope with big data, our algorithm, unlike existing NILM ones, does not focus on appliance recognition. To handle this massive data, GLDA works online. Another novelty of this work compared to the existing NILM is that the data involves different utilities (e.g, electricity, water and gas) as well as some sensors measurements. Finally, we propose different evaluation methods to analyse the results which show that our algorithm finds useful patterns.

Glare is a phenomenon that occurs when the scene has a reflection of a light source or has one in it. This luminescence can hide useful information from the image, making text recognition virtually impossible. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect glare in images taken by users via mobile devices. Our method divides the document into blocks and collects luminance features from the original image and black-white strokes histograms of the binarized image. Finally, glare is detected using a convolutional neural network on the aforementioned histograms and luminance features. The network consists of several feature extraction blocks, one for each type of input, and the detection block, which calculates the resulting glare heatmap based on the output of the extraction part. The proposed solution detects glare with high recall and f-score.

Near real-time damage diagnosis of building structures after extreme events (e.g., earthquakes) is of great importance in structural health monitoring. Unlike conventional methods that are usually time-consuming and require human expertise, pattern recognition algorithms have the potential to interpret sensor recordings as soon as this information is available. This paper proposes a robust framework to build a damage prediction model for building structures. Support vector machines are used to predict the existence as well as the probable location of the damage. The model is designed to consider probabilistic approaches in determining hazard intensity given the existing attenuation models in performance-based earthquake engineering. Performance of the model regarding accurate and safe predictions is enhanced using Bayesian optimization. The proposed framework is evaluated on a reinforced concrete moment frame. Targeting a selected large earthquake scenario, 6,240 nonlinear time history analyses are performed using OpenSees. Simulation results are engineered to extract low-dimensional intensity-based features that can be used as damage indicators. For the given case study, the proposed model achieves a promising accuracy of 83.1% to identify damage location, demonstrating the great potential of model capabilities.

Deep learning1 has revolutionized the field of biomedical image analysis. Conventional approaches have used problem-specific algorithms to describe images with manually crafted features, such as cell morphology, count, intensity, and texture. Feature learning with deep convolutional neural networks is implicit, and training the network usually focuses on particular tasks, such as breast cancer detection in mammography2, subcellular protein localization3, or plant disease detection4. Training a deep network usually requires a large number of images, which limits its utility. For example, the classifier for plant disease detection by Mohanty et al.4 was trained on 54,306 images of diseased and healthy plants, and the yeast protein localization model by Kraus et al.3 was inferred from 22,000 annotated images, but not everyone who could benefit from image analysis has so many well-annotated images.

Three examples of machine learning methods and related algorithms.

Ever wonder how self-driving cars recognize a ball in the road? How about when Amazon magically knows what items you need before you do? This is all thanks to pattern recognition of artificial intelligence (AI). Analytical AI refers to the general process by which machines or computers replicate and replace human tasks and cognition. Machine learning is a branch of AI in which algorithms, inspired by the human brain, encourage the computer to continue recognizing patterns automatically (Figure 1).

Today's podcast features recent interviews with [two] experts in top AI management positions discussing recent developments within their companies and the overall sector: Dr. Danny Rittman, CTO of GBT Technologies Inc. (OTC PINK:GTCH), and Mr. Babak Hodjat, VP of Evolutionary AI, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (NasdaqGS:CTSH). Listen to the podcast interview with Dr. Danny Rittman, CTO of GBT Technologies Inc. (OTC PINK:GTCH) discussing the company's recently announced implementation and development of recurrent relational reasoning (RRN) in its AI, and its applications in the medical field. In a recently published press release, GBT Technologies CTO, Dr. Danny Rittman explained the company's rationale for incorporating recurrent relational reasoning (RRN) into its Avant! "Our goal is to implement a fundamental part of human intelligence called relational reasoning, which is planned to enable Avant! to acquire expertise on its own by understanding object's relations. Avant! will include an advanced artificial neural network (ANN) capable of pattern recognition and reasoning about those patterns which is very similar to the human brain."