Are intelligent machines really intelligent? Is the underlying philosophical concept of intelligence satisfactory for describing how the present systems work? Is understanding a necessary and sufficient condition for intelligence? If a machine could understand, should we attribute subjectivity to it? This paper addresses the problem of deciding whether the so-called "intelligent machines" are capable of understanding, instead of merely processing signs. It deals with the relationship between syntaxis and semantics. The main thesis concerns the inevitability of semantics for any discussion about the possibility of building conscious machines, condensed into the following two tenets: "If a machine is capable of understanding (in the strong sense), then it must be capable of combining rules and intuitions"; "If semantics cannot be reduced to syntaxis, then a machine cannot understand." Our conclusion states that it is not necessary to attribute understanding to a machine in order to explain its exhibited "intelligent" behavior; a merely syntactic and mechanistic approach to intelligence as a task-solving tool suffices to justify the range of operations that it can display in the current state of technological development.

Question Answering (QA) in clinical notes has gained a lot of attention in the past few years. Existing machine reading comprehension approaches in clinical domain can only handle questions about a single block of clinical texts and fail to retrieve information about multiple patients and their clinical notes. To handle more complex questions, we aim at creating knowledge base from clinical notes to link different patients and clinical notes, and performing knowledge base question answering (KBQA). Based on the expert annotations available in the n2c2 dataset, we first created the ClinicalKBQA dataset that includes around 9K QA pairs and covers questions about seven medical topics using more than 300 question templates. Then, we investigated an attention-based aspect reasoning (AAR) method for KBQA and analyzed the impact of different aspects of answers (e.g., entity, type, path, and context) for prediction. The AAR method achieves better performance due to the well-designed encoder and attention mechanism. From our experiments, we find that both aspects, type and path, enable the model to identify answers satisfying the general conditions and produce lower precision and higher recall. On the other hand, the aspects, entity and context, limit the answers by node-specific information and lead to higher precision and lower recall.

Rule set learning has long been studied and has recently been frequently revisited due to the need for interpretable models. Still, existing methods have several shortcomings: 1) most recent methods require a binary feature matrix as input, while learning rules directly from numeric variables is understudied; 2) existing methods impose orders among rules, either explicitly or implicitly, which harms interpretability; and 3) currently no method exists for learning probabilistic rule sets for multi-class target variables (there is only one for probabilistic rule lists). We propose TURS, for Truly Unordered Rule Sets, which addresses these shortcomings. We first formalize the problem of learning truly unordered rule sets. To resolve conflicts caused by overlapping rules, i.e., instances covered by multiple rules, we propose a novel approach that exploits the probabilistic properties of our rule sets. We next develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm that learns rule sets by carefully growing rules. An important innovation is that we use a surrogate score to take the global potential of the rule set into account when learning a local rule. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that, compared to non-probabilistic and (explicitly or implicitly) ordered state-of-the-art methods, our method learns rule sets that not only have better interpretability but also better predictive performance.

The propagation of rumours on social media poses an important threat to societies, so that various techniques for rumour detection have been proposed recently. Yet, existing work focuses on \emph{what} entities constitute a rumour, but provides little support to understand \emph{why} the entities have been classified as such. This prevents an effective evaluation of the detected rumours as well as the design of countermeasures. In this work, we argue that explanations for detected rumours may be given in terms of examples of related rumours detected in the past. A diverse set of similar rumours helps users to generalize, i.e., to understand the properties that govern the detection of rumours. Since the spread of rumours in social media is commonly modelled using feature-annotated graphs, we propose a query-by-example approach that, given a rumour graph, extracts the $k$ most similar and diverse subgraphs from past rumours. The challenge is that all of the computations require fast assessment of similarities between graphs. To achieve an efficient and adaptive realization of the approach in a streaming setting, we present a novel graph representation learning technique and report on implementation considerations. Our evaluation experiments show that our approach outperforms baseline techniques in delivering meaningful explanations for various rumour propagation behaviours.

In recent years, data science has evolved significantly. Data analysis and mining processes become routines in all sectors of the economy where datasets are available. Vast data repositories have been collected, curated, stored, and used for extracting knowledge. And this is becoming commonplace. Subsequently, we extract a large amount of knowledge, either directly from the data or through experts in the given domain. The challenge now is how to exploit all this large amount of knowledge that is previously known for efficient decision-making processes. Until recently, much of the knowledge gained through a number of years of research is stored in static knowledge bases or ontologies, while more diverse and dynamic knowledge acquired from data mining studies is not centrally and consistently managed. In this research, we propose a novel model called ontology-based knowledge map to represent and store the results (knowledge) of data mining in crop farming to build, maintain, and enrich the process of knowledge discovery. The proposed model consists of six main sets: concepts, attributes, relations, transformations, instances, and states. This model is dynamic and facilitates the access, updates, and exploitation of the knowledge at any time. This paper also proposes an architecture for handling this knowledge-based model. The system architecture includes knowledge modelling, extraction, assessment, publishing, and exploitation. This system has been implemented and used in agriculture for crop management and monitoring. It is proven to be very effective and promising for its extension to other domains.

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to cybersecurity challenges has gained traction in industry and academia, partially as a result of widespread malware attacks on critical systems such as cloud infrastructures and government institutions. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), using some forms of AI, have received widespread adoption due to their ability to handle vast amounts of data with a high prediction accuracy. These systems are hosted in the organizational Cyber Security Operation Center (CSoC) as a defense tool to monitor and detect malicious network flow that would otherwise impact the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA). CSoC analysts rely on these systems to make decisions about the detected threats. However, IDSs designed using Deep Learning (DL) techniques are often treated as black box models and do not provide a justification for their predictions. This creates a barrier for CSoC analysts, as they are unable to improve their decisions based on the model's predictions. One solution to this problem is to design explainable IDS (X-IDS). This survey reviews the state-of-the-art in explainable AI (XAI) for IDS, its current challenges, and discusses how these challenges span to the design of an X-IDS. In particular, we discuss black box and white box approaches comprehensively. We also present the tradeoff between these approaches in terms of their performance and ability to produce explanations. Furthermore, we propose a generic architecture that considers human-in-the-loop which can be used as a guideline when designing an X-IDS. Research recommendations are given from three critical viewpoints: the need to define explainability for IDS, the need to create explanations tailored to various stakeholders, and the need to design metrics to evaluate explanations.

This primer is an attempt to provide a detailed summary of the different facets of lifelong learning. We start with Chapter 2 which provides a high-level overview of lifelong learning systems. In this chapter, we discuss prominent scenarios in lifelong learning (Section 2.4), provide 8 Introduction a high-level organization of different lifelong learning approaches (Section 2.5), enumerate the desiderata for an ideal lifelong learning system (Section 2.6), discuss how lifelong learning is related to other learning paradigms (Section 2.7), describe common metrics used to evaluate lifelong learning systems (Section 2.8). This chapter is more useful for readers who are new to lifelong learning and want to get introduced to the field without focusing on specific approaches or benchmarks. The remaining chapters focus on specific aspects (either learning algorithms or benchmarks) and are more useful for readers who are looking for specific approaches or benchmarks. Chapter 3 focuses on regularization-based approaches that do not assume access to any data from previous tasks. Chapter 4 discusses memory-based approaches that typically use a replay buffer or an episodic memory to save subset of data across different tasks. Chapter 5 focuses on different architecture families (and their instantiations) that have been proposed for training lifelong learning systems. Following these different classes of learning algorithms, we discuss the commonly used evaluation benchmarks and metrics for lifelong learning (Chapter 6) and wrap up with a discussion of future challenges and important research directions in Chapter 7.

Entity linking (EL) is the process of automatically linking entity mentions in text to the corresponding entries in a knowledge base (a database of facts that relate entities), such as Wikidata. For example, in the diagram below, we would aim to link the mention "England" to the entity "England Football Team" as opposed to the entity "England" the country. Entity linking is a common first step in natural-language-processing (NLP) applications such as question answering, information extraction, and natural-language understanding. It is critical for bridging unstructured text with knowledge bases, which enables access to vast amounts of curated data. Current EL systems exhibit great performance on standard datasets, but they have several limitations when deployed in real-world applications.

Within asset management particularly, modern-day computational modelling can identify trends and ... [ ] collect data points in the stock market within seconds, meaning traders can map out parameters for a more objective approach to trading. Family offices know better than most that we are in the throes of a technological revolution across the entire industry. Within asset management particularly, modern-day computational modelling and portfolio management software can identify trends and collect data points in the stock market within seconds, meaning traders can map out parameters for a more objective approach to trading. These parameters help define the rules guiding an entire portfolio's operation, in sharp contrast to traditional, reactive investing which largely uses numbers to quantify an asset's performance in a portfolio. More first-time investors are taking an interest in understanding portfolio management, and while it might sound like the robots have taken over, there's still very much a place for IRL thinking here.

The incorporation of data analytics in the healthcare industry has made significant progress, driven by the demand for efficient and effective big data analytics solutions. Knowledge graphs (KGs) have proven utility in this arena and are rooted in a number of healthcare applications to furnish better data representation and knowledge inference. However, in conjunction with a lack of a representative KG construction taxonomy, several existing approaches in this designated domain are inadequate and inferior. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive taxonomy and a bird's eye view of healthcare KG construction. Additionally, a thorough examination of the current state-of-the-art techniques drawn from academic works relevant to various healthcare contexts is carried out. These techniques are critically evaluated in terms of methods used for knowledge extraction, types of the knowledge base and sources, and the incorporated evaluation protocols. Finally, several research findings and existing issues in the literature are reported and discussed, opening horizons for future research in this vibrant area.