Automatic speech recognition systems like those at the core of Alexa convert speech into text, and one of their components is a model that predicts which word will come after a sequence of words. They're typically n-gram based, meaning they suss out the probability of next words given the past n-1 words. But architectures like recurrent neural networks, which are commonly used in speech recognition because of their ability to learn long-range dependencies, are tough to incorporate into real-time systems and often struggle to ingest data from multiple corpora. That's why researchers at Amazon's Alexa research division investigated techniques to make such AI models more practical for speech recognition. In a blog post and accompanying paper ("Scalable Multi Corpora Neural Language Models for ASR") scheduled to be presented at the upcoming Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, they claim they can reduce word recognition error rate by 6.2% over the baseline.

It is not surprising that machines are an integral part of our eco-system driven by technology. Reaching a point in technical pinnacle was made easier from the time machine started learning and reasoning even without the intervention of a human being. The world is changing from the models developed by machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning which adapt themselves independently to a given scenario. Data being the lifeline of businesses obtaining machine learning training helps in better decision-making for the company to stay ahead of the competition. Machine learning interview questions may pop up from any part of the subject like it may be about algorithms and the theory that works behind it, your programming skills and the ability to work over those algorithms and theory or about your general insights about machine learning and its applicability.

An e xtreme wind speed estimation method that consider s wind hazard climate type s is critical for design wind load calculation for building structure s affected by mixed climate s . However, it is very difficult to obtain wind hazard climate type s from meteorologi cal data records, because they restrict the application of extreme wind speed estimation in mixed climates . This paper first proposes a wind hazard type identification algorithm based on a numerical pattern recognition method that utilizes feature extraction and generalization . Next, it compares six commonly used machine learning models using K - fold cross - validation. Finally, it takes meteorological data from three locations near the southeast coast of China as example s to examine t he algor ithm's performance . Based on classification results, the extreme wind speed s calculated based on mixed wind hazard types is compared with those obtained from conventional methods, and the effects on structural design for different return periods are discus sed . Extreme wind speed; Mixed climates; Data - driven method; Pattern Recognition; Machine Learning; 1. Introduction Wind effects are key factors in structural design, and extreme wind speeds are the starting point . F or flexible structures such as long - span bridges, long - span roofs and high - rise buildings, wind loads are normally the predominant loads. I n order to meet both the ultimate safety and performance requirements of wind - resistant structural design, it s necessary to accurately estimate the extreme wind speed s for different recurrence period s . For significant buildings and infrastructures, it is necessary to estimat e the extreme wind speed through probabilistic methods from local wind speed record s .

This week's opinion piece is from technology influencer and futurist Dr Sarah-Jayne Gratton The latest statistics around breast cancer send a stark reminder of just how important early detection is in combating this brutal disease. With revolutionary strides forward in Artificial Intelligence (AI) all that looks set to change for the better. One of the leading causes of death for cancer patients is a late diagnosis, too often brought about by inferior testing facilities, human factors, such as fatigue and loss of concentration, or by the patients themselves, who put off seeing a specialist due to the fear of what they might discover. But now, thanks to nothing short of revolutionary strides forward in Artificial Intelligence (AI) all that looks set to change for the better. AI is capable of advanced learning using large complex datasets and has the potential to perform tasks such as image interpretation.

Tell me if you've heard this: there is a new, advanced network intrusion device that uses modern super-smart Machine Learning (ML) to root out known and unknown intrusions. The IDS device is so smart it learns what's normal on your network and not, immediately informing you when it sees an anomaly. Or, maybe it's an intrusion prevention system (IPS) that will then block all malicious traffic. This AI-enabled solution boasts 99% accuracy detecting attacks. Even more, it can detect previously unknown attacks. That's an amazing sales pitch, but can we do it?

Aim: To review how machine learning (ML) is applied to imaging biomarkers in neuro-oncology, in particular for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment response monitoring. Materials and Methods: The PubMed and MEDLINE databases were searched for articles published before September 2018 using relevant search terms. The search strategy focused on articles applying ML to high-grade glioma biomarkers for treatment response monitoring, prognosis, and prediction. Results: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is typically used throughout the patient pathway because routine structural imaging provides detailed anatomical and pathological information and advanced techniques provide additional physiological detail. Using carefully chosen image features, ML is frequently used to allow accurate classification in a variety of scenarios. Rather than being chosen by human selection, ML also enables image features to be identified by an algorithm. Much research is applied to determining molecular profiles, histological tumour grade, and prognosis using MRI images acquired at the time that patients first present with a brain tumour. Differentiating a treatment response from a post-treatment-related effect using imaging is clinically important and also an area of active study (described here in one of two Special Issue publications dedicated to the application of ML in glioma imaging). Conclusion: Although pioneering, most of the evidence is of a low level, having been obtained retrospectively and in single centres. Studies applying ML to build neuro-oncology monitoring biomarker models have yet to show an overall advantage over those using traditional statistical methods. Development and validation of ML models applied to neuro-oncology require large, well-annotated datasets, and therefore multidisciplinary and multi-centre collaborations are necessary.

AutoML systems are currently rising in popularity, as they can build powerful models without human oversight. They often combine techniques from many different sub-fields of machine learning in order to find a model or set of models that optimize a user-supplied criterion, such as predictive performance. The ultimate goal of such systems is to reduce the amount of time spent on menial tasks, or tasks that can be solved better by algorithms while leaving decisions that require human intelligence to the end-user. In recent years, the importance of other criteria, such as fairness and interpretability, and many others have become more and more apparent. Current AutoML frameworks either do not allow to optimize such secondary criteria or only do so by limiting the system's choice of models and preprocessing steps. We propose to optimize additional criteria defined by the user directly to guide the search towards an optimal machine learning pipeline. In order to demonstrate the need and usefulness of our approach, we provide a simple multi-criteria AutoML system and showcase an exemplary application.

In the midst of the AI "gold rush," how can you separate the nuggets from the fool's gold? There's no shortage of cautionary tales involving overhyped AI claims. And applying AI technologies to health care, education, and law enforcement mean that getting it wrong can have real consequences for society--not just for investors who bet on the wrong unicorn. So IEEE Spectrum asked experts to share their tips for how to identify AI hype in press releases, news articles, research papers, and IPO filings. "It can be tricky, because I think the people who are out there selling the AI hype--selling this AI snake oil--are getting more sophisticated over time," says Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative.

Recently, a special type of data poisoning (DP) attack targeting Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers, known as a backdoor, was proposed. These attacks do not seek to degrade classification accuracy, but rather to have the classifier learn to classify to a target class whenever the backdoor pattern is present in a test example. Launching backdoor attacks does not require knowledge of the classifier or its training process - it only needs the ability to poison the training set with (a sufficient number of) exemplars containing a sufficiently strong backdoor pattern (labeled with the target class). Here we address post-training detection of backdoor attacks in DNN image classifiers, seldom considered in existing works, wherein the defender does not have access to the poisoned training set, but only to the trained classifier itself, as well as to clean examples from the classification domain. This is an important scenario because a trained classifier may be the basis of e.g. a phone app that will be shared with many users. Detecting backdoors post-training may thus reveal a widespread attack. We propose a purely unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) defense against imperceptible backdoor attacks that: i) detects whether the trained DNN has been backdoor-attacked; ii) infers the source and target classes involved in a detected attack; iii) we even demonstrate it is possible to accurately estimate the backdoor pattern. We test our AD approach, in comparison with alternative defenses, for several backdoor patterns, data sets, and attack settings and demonstrate its favorability. Our defense essentially requires setting a single hyperparameter (the detection threshold), which can e.g. be chosen to fix the system's false positive rate.

One of the most important challenges in the analysis of high-throughput genetic data is the development of efficient computational methods to identify statistically significant Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) use single-locus analysis where each SNP is independently tested for association with phenotypes. The limitation with this approach, however, is its inability to explain genetic variation in complex diseases. Alternative approaches are required to model the intricate relationships between SNPs. Our proposed approach extends GWAS by combining deep learning stacked autoencoders (SAEs) and association rule mining (ARM) to identify epistatic interactions between SNPs. Following traditional GWAS quality control and association analysis, the most significant SNPs are selected and used in the subsequent analysis to investigate epistasis. SAERMA controls the classification results produced in the final fully connected multi-layer feedforward artificial neural network (MLP) by manipulating the interestingness measures, support and confidence, in the rule generation process. The best classification results were achieved with 204 SNPs compressed to 100 units (77% AUC, 77% SE, 68% SP, 53% Gini, logloss=0.58, and MSE=0.20), although it was possible to achieve 73% AUC (77% SE, 63% SP, 45% Gini, logloss=0.62, and MSE=0.21) with 50 hidden units - both supported by close model interpretation.