U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a nationwide injunction preventing the rules from taking effect, a day after another judge issued a more limited ruling blocking their enforcement in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam in Oakland granted a request by 14 Democratic attorneys general for a preliminary injunction. The rules, which are set to go into effect Jan. 14, allow businesses or nonprofits to obtain exemptions to an Obamacare requirement for contraceptive coverage on moral or religious grounds.

Cognitive scientists of the embodied cognition tradition have been providing evidence that a large part of our creative reasoning and problemsolving processes are carried out by means of conceptual metaphor and blending, grounded on our bodily experience with the world. In this talk I shall aim at fleshing out a mathematical model that has been proposed in the last decades for expressing and exploring conceptual metaphor and blending with greater precision than has previously been done. In particular, I shall focus on the notion of aptness of a metaphor or blend and on the validity of metaphorical entailment. Towards this end, I shall use a generalisation of the category-theoretic notion of colimit for modelling conceptual metaphor and blending in combination with the idea of reasoning at a distance as modelled in the Barwise-Seligman theory of information flow. I shall illustrate the adequacy of the proposed model with an example of creative reasoning about space and time for solving a classical brainteaser. Furthermore, I shall argue for the potential applicability of such mathematical model for ontology engineering, computational creativity, and problem-solving in general.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be poised to wipe out cervical cancer, after a study showed on Thursday computer algorithms can detect pre-cancerous lesions far better than trained experts or conventional screening tests. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer in women with an estimated 570,000 new cases globally in 2018. Despite major advances in screening and vaccination, which can prevent the spread of human papillomavirus which causes most cases of cervical cancer, those gains have mainly benefited women in rich nations. Some 266,000 women died of cervical cancer globally in 2012, 90% of them in low-and middle-income nations, according to the WHO. "Cervical cancer is now a disease of poverty, of low resources," said senior author Mark Schiffman, a doctor at the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics near Washington who has been searching for a cure to cervical cancer for 35 years.

Judge Haywood Gilliam previously blocked an interim version of those rules -- a decision that was upheld in December by an appeals court. But the case is before him again after the administration finalized the measures in November, prompting a renewed legal challenge by California and other states.

Among the stupider things I said in the 1980s was a comment about Artificial Intelligence, including neural nets - or perceptrons as we called them back then - saying we needed "maybe a processor that worked at a hundred megahertz and literally gigabytes of storage". I also believed that following our success using Fuzzy Logic to optimize Cement Kilns (from which my college made serious cash), Fuzzy was the future. I was wrong and am now envious of the power you have to play with. I now go to more conferences than any rational person, like Intel's recent Nervana show, and part of me feels like I'm revising my mid-1980s degree again. Neural networks can classify pictures of goats, despite the occasional confusing of women's feet and various species of crab.

Explanation in machine learning and related fields such as artificial intelligence aims at making machine learning models and their decisions understandable to humans. Existing work suggests that personalizing explanations might help to improve understandability. In this work, we derive a conceptualization of personalized explanation by defining and structuring the problem based on prior work on machine learning explanation, personalization (in machine learning) and concepts and techniques from other domains such as privacy and knowledge elicitation. We perform a categorization of explainee information used in the process of personalization as well as describing means to collect this information. We also identify three key explanation properties that are amendable to personalization: complexity, decision information and presentation. We also enhance existing work on explanation by introducing additional desiderata and measures to quantify the quality of personalized explanations.

This paper considers the learning of Boolean rules in either disjunctive normal form (DNF, OR-of-ANDs, equivalent to decision rule sets) or conjunctive normal form (CNF, AND-of-ORs) as an interpretable model for classification. An integer program is formulated to optimally trade classification accuracy for rule simplicity. Column generation (CG) is used to efficiently search over an exponential number of candidate clauses (conjunctions or disjunctions) without the need for heuristic rule mining. This approach also bounds the gap between the selected rule set and the best possible rule set on the training data. To handle large datasets, we propose an approximate CG algorithm using randomization. Compared to three recently proposed alternatives, the CG algorithm dominates the accuracy-simplicity trade-off in 8 out of 16 datasets. When maximized for accuracy, CG is competitive with rule learners designed for this purpose, sometimes finding significantly simpler solutions that are no less accurate.

We present an approach to map utterances in conversation to logical forms, which will be executed on a large-scale knowledge base. To handle enormous ellipsis phenomena in conversation, we introduce dialog memory management to manipulate historical entities, predicates, and logical forms when inferring the logical form of current utterances. Dialog memory management is embodied in a generative model, in which a logical form is interpreted in a top-down manner following a small and flexible grammar. We learn the model from denotations without explicit annotation of logical forms, and evaluate it on a large-scale dataset consisting of 200K dialogs over 12.8M entities. Results verify the benefits of modeling dialog memory, and show that our semantic parsing-based approach outperforms a memory network based encoder-decoder model by a huge margin.

Model interpretability is an increasingly important component of practical machine learning. Some of the most common forms of interpretability systems are example-based, local, and global explanations. One of the main challenges in interpretability is designing explanation systems that can capture aspects of each of these explanation types, in order to develop a more thorough understanding of the model. We address this challenge in a novel model called MAPLE that uses local linear modeling techniques along with a dual interpretation of random forests (both as a supervised neighborhood approach and as a feature selection method). MAPLE has two fundamental advantages over existing interpretability systems. First, while it is effective as a black-box explanation system, MAPLE itself is a highly accurate predictive model that provides faithful self explanations, and thus sidesteps the typical accuracy-interpretability trade-off. Specifically, we demonstrate, on several UCI datasets, that MAPLE is at least as accurate as random forests and that it produces more faithful local explanations than LIME, a popular interpretability system. Second, MAPLE provides both example-based and local explanations and can detect global patterns, which allows it to diagnose limitations in its local explanations.