There was a time when if anyone needed any news, he or she would wait for the next-day newspaper. However, with the growth of online newspapers who update news almost instantly, people have found a better and faster way to be informed of the matter of his/her interest. Nowadays social-networking systems, online news portals, and other online media have become the main sources of news through which interesting and breaking news are shared at a rapid pace. However, many news portals serve special interest by feeding with distorted, partially correct, and sometimes imaginary news that is likely to attract the attention of a target group of people. Fake news has become a major concern for being destructive sometimes spreading confusion and deliberate disinformation among the people.

Assemblies of modular subsystems are being pressed into service to perform sensing, reasoning, and decision making in high-stakes, time-critical tasks in such areas as transportation, healthcare, and industrial automation. We address the opportunity to maximize the utility of an overall computing system by employing reinforcement learning to guide the configuration of the set of interacting modules that comprise the system. The challenge of doing system-wide optimization is a combinatorial problem. Local attempts to boost the performance of a specific module by modifying its configuration often leads to losses in overall utility of the system's performance as the distribution of inputs to downstream modules changes drastically. We present metareasoning techniques which consider a rich representation of the input, monitor the state of the entire pipeline, and adjust the configuration of modules on-the-fly so as to maximize the utility of a system's operation. We show significant improvement in both real-world and synthetic pipelines across a variety of reinforcement learning techniques.

In statistical classification, machine learning, social and other sciences, a number of measures of association have been developed and used for assessing and comparing individual classifiers, raters, and their groups. Among the measures, we find the weighted kappa, extensively used by psychometricians, and the monotone and supremum correlation coefficients, prominently used by social scientists and statisticians. In this paper, we introduce, justify, and explore several new members of the class of functional correlation coefficients that naturally arise when comparing classifiers. We illustrate the performance of the coefficients by reanalyzing a number of confusion matrices that have appeared in the literature.

Deep learning based visual sensing has achieved attractive accuracy but is shown vulnerable to adversarial example attacks. Specifically, once the attackers obtain the deep model, they can construct adversarial examples to mislead the model to yield wrong classification results. Deployable adversarial examples such as small stickers pasted on the road signs and lanes have been shown effective in misleading advanced driver-assistance systems. Many existing countermeasures against adversarial examples build their security on the attackers' ignorance of the defense mechanisms. Thus, they fall short of following Kerckhoffs's principle and can be subverted once the attackers know the details of the defense. This paper applies the strategy of moving target defense (MTD) to generate multiple new deep models after system deployment, that will collaboratively detect and thwart adversarial examples. Our MTD design is based on the adversarial examples' minor transferability to models differing from the one (e.g., the factory-designed model) used for attack construction. The post-deployment quasi-secret deep models significantly increase the bar for the attackers to construct effective adversarial examples. We also apply the technique of serial data fusion with early stopping to reduce the inference time by a factor of up to 5 while maintaining the sensing and defense performance. Extensive evaluation based on three datasets including a road sign image database and a GPU-equipped Jetson embedded computing board shows the effectiveness of our approach.

Interpretable machine learning has become a strong competitor for traditional black-box models. However, the possible loss of the predictive performance for gaining interpretability is often inevitable, putting practitioners in a dilemma of choosing between high accuracy (black-box models) and interpretability (interpretable models). In this work, we propose a novel framework for building a Hybrid Predictive Model (HPM) that integrates an interpretable model with any black-box model to combine their strengths. The interpretable model substitutes the black-box model on a subset of data where the black-box is overkill or nearly overkill, gaining transparency at no or low cost of the predictive accuracy. We design a principled objective function that considers predictive accuracy, model interpretability, and model transparency (defined as the percentage of data processed by the interpretable substitute.) Under this framework, we propose two hybrid models, one substituting with association rules and the other with linear models, and we design customized training algorithms for both models. We test the hybrid models on structured data and text data where interpretable models collaborate with various state-of-the-art black-box models. Results show that hybrid models obtain an efficient trade-off between transparency and predictive performance, characterized by our proposed efficient frontiers.

Machine learning has evolved into an enabling technology for a wide range of highly successful applications. The potential for this success to continue and accelerate has placed machine learning (ML) at the top of research, economic and political agendas. Such unprecedented interest is fuelled by a vision of ML applicability extending to healthcare, transportation, defence and other domains of great societal importance. Achieving this vision requires the use of ML in safety-critical applications that demand levels of assurance beyond those needed for current ML applications. Our paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in the assurance of ML, i.e. in the generation of evidence that ML is sufficiently safe for its intended use. The survey covers the methods capable of providing such evidence at different stages of the machine learning lifecycle, i.e. of the complex, iterative process that starts with the collection of the data used to train an ML component for a system, and ends with the deployment of that component within the system. The paper begins with a systematic presentation of the ML lifecycle and its stages. We then define assurance desiderata for each stage, review existing methods that contribute to achieving these desiderata, and identify open challenges that require further research.

The recently introduced Tsetlin Machine (TM) has provided competitive pattern classification accuracy in several benchmarks, composing patterns with easy-to-interpret conjunctive clauses in propositional logic. In this paper, we go beyond pattern classification by introducing a new type of TMs, namely, the Regression Tsetlin Machine (RTM). In all brevity, we modify the inner inference mechanism of the TM so that input patterns are transformed into a single continuous output, rather than to distinct categories. We achieve this by: (1) using the conjunctive clauses of the TM to capture arbitrarily complex patterns; (2) mapping these patterns to a continuous output through a novel voting and normalization mechanism; and (3) employing a feedback scheme that updates the TM clauses to minimize the regression error. The feedback scheme uses a new activation probability function that stabilizes the updating of clauses, while the overall system converges towards an accurate input-output mapping. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using six different artificial datasets with and without noise. The performance of the RTM is compared with the Classical Tsetlin Machine (CTM) and the Multiclass Tsetlin Machine (MTM). Our empirical results indicate that the RTM obtains the best training and testing results for both noisy and noise-free datasets, with a smaller number of clauses.

Last year, Amazon announced the beta release of Alexa Guard, a new service that lets customers who are leaving the house instruct their Echo devices to listen for glass breaking or smoke and carbon dioxide alarms going off. At this year's International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, our team is presenting several papers on sound detection. I wrote about one of them a few weeks ago, a new method for doing machine learning with unbalanced data sets. Today I'll briefly discuss two others, both of which, like the first, describe machine learning systems. One paper addresses the problem of media detection, or recognizing when the speech captured by a digital-assistant device comes from a TV or radio rather than a human speaker.

UBS Card Center, which processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland, has won the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards, presented in London. UBS Card Center's fraud team used the the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO Falcon Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.

During the last decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the de facto standard for various Computer Vision and Machine Learning operations. CNNs are feed-forward Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with alternating convolutional and subsampling layers. Deep 2D CNNs with many hidden layers and millions of parameters have the ability to learn complex objects and patterns providing that they can be trained on a massive size visual database with ground-truth labels. With a proper training, this unique ability makes them the primary tool for various engineering applications for 2D signals such as images and video frames. Yet, this may not be a viable option in numerous applications over 1D signals especially when the training data is scarce or application-specific. To address this issue, 1D CNNs have recently been proposed and immediately achieved the state-of-the-art performance levels in several applications such as personalized biomedical data classification and early diagnosis, structural health monitoring, anomaly detection and identification in power electronics and motor-fault detection. Another major advantage is that a real-time and low-cost hardware implementation is feasible due to the simple and compact configuration of 1D CNNs that perform only 1D convolutions (scalar multiplications and additions). This paper presents a comprehensive review of the general architecture and principals of 1D CNNs along with their major engineering applications, especially focused on the recent progress in this field. Their state-of-the-art performance is highlighted concluding with their unique properties. The benchmark datasets and the principal 1D CNN software used in those applications are also publically shared in a dedicated website.