For far too long, sales reps and commercial managers in the pharmaceutical industry have had their responsibilities eroded by wave after wave of IT implementations, each one supposedly making life easier - but doing the exact opposite. The time has come for a more intelligent solution. It's time for technology to empower, not overrule. It's time for sales and marketing managers to regain control. Single black-box'next best actions' which dictate and disempower If you want to re-empower your sales and marketing staff with a smarter generation of technology, enter your details.

Disruption to supply chains as the pandemic swept the globe has led many companies to reevaluate how well-equipped they are to handle system-wide volatility across networks. How is anyone to make sense of demand and supply patterns and manage overall health in the midst of this pandemic -- which has introduced a level of uncertainty that current enterprise tools are not designed to process? Working closely with our customers on a daily basis, we are being asked to help make sense of their demand signals across complex networks and hierarchies. We are also helping them predict and respond to impending supply imbalances within their 0-12 week execution windows, a critical source of value leakage and especially pertinent in current times. Faced with this fast-paced, multi-dimensional chess-game, customers need clear planning recommendations that improve fill rates, reduce inventory, minimize write-offs and control logistics spend.

In the conventional Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK)-type fuzzy models, constant or linear functions are usually utilized as the consequent parts of the fuzzy rules, but they cannot effectively describe the behavior within local regions defined by the antecedent parts. In this article, a theoretical and practical design methodology is developed to address this problem. First, the information granulation (Fuzzy C-Means) method is applied to capture the structure in the data and split the input space into subspaces, as well as form the antecedent parts. Second, the quadratic polynomials (QPs) are employed as the consequent parts. Compared with constant and linear functions, QPs can describe the input-output behavior within the local regions (subspaces) by refining the relationship between input and output variables. However, although QP can improve the approximation ability of the model, it could lead to the deterioration of the prediction ability of the model (e.g., overfitting). To handle this issue, we introduce an exponential weight approach inspired by the weight function theory encountered in harmonic analysis. More specifically, we adopt the exponential functions as the targeted penalty terms, which are equipped with l2 regularization (l2) (i.e., exponential weighted l2, ewl_2) to match the proposed reinforced second-order fuzzy rule-based model (RSFRM) properly. The advantage of el 2 compared to ordinary l2 lies in separately identifying and penalizing different types of polynomial terms in the coefficient estimation, and its results not only alleviate the overfitting and prevent the deterioration of generalization ability but also effectively release the prediction potential of the model.

State-of-the-art recommender systems have the ability to generate high-quality recommendations, but usually cannot provide intuitive explanations to humans due to the usage of black-box prediction models. The lack of transparency has highlighted the critical importance of improving the explainability of recommender systems. In this paper, we propose to extract causal rules from the user interaction history as post-hoc explanations for the black-box sequential recommendation mechanisms, whilst maintain the predictive accuracy of the recommendation model. Our approach firstly achieves counterfactual examples with the aid of a perturbation model, and then extracts personalized causal relationships for the recommendation model through a causal rule mining algorithm. Experiments are conducted on several state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models and real-world datasets to verify the performance of our model on generating causal explanations. Meanwhile, We evaluate the discovered causal explanations in terms of quality and fidelity, which show that compared with conventional association rules, causal rules can provide personalized and more effective explanations for the behavior of black-box recommendation models.

The right to contest a decision with consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Despite this right also being explicitly included in GDPR in reference to automated decision-making, its study seems to have received much less attention in the AI literature compared, for example, to the right for explanation. This paper investigates the type of assurances that are needed in the contesting process when algorithmic black boxes are involved, opening new questions about the interplay of contestability and explainability. We argue that specialised complementary methodologies to evaluate automated decision-making in the case of a particular decision being contested need to be developed. Further, we propose a combination of well-established software engineering and rule-based approaches as a possible socio-technical solution to the issue of contestability, one of the new democratic challenges posed by the automation of decision making.

Many systems have been developed in recent years to mine logical rules from large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the grounds that representing regularities as rules enables both the interpretable inference of new facts, and the explanation of known facts. Among these systems, the walk-based methods that generate the instantiated rules containing constants by abstracting sampled paths in KGs demonstrate strong predictive performance and expressivity. However, due to the large volume of possible rules, these systems do not scale well where computational resources are often wasted on generating and evaluating unpromising rules. In this work, we address such scalability issues by proposing new methods for pruning unpromising rules using rule hierarchies. The approach consists of two phases. Firstly, since rule hierarchies are not readily available in walk-based methods, we have built a Rule Hierarchy Framework (RHF), which leverages a collection of subsumption frameworks to build a proper rule hierarchy from a set of learned rules. And secondly, we adapt RHF to an existing rule learner where we design and implement two methods for Hierarchical Pruning (HPMs), which utilize the generated hierarchies to remove irrelevant and redundant rules. Through experiments over four public benchmark datasets, we show that the application of HPMs is effective in removing unpromising rules, which leads to significant reductions in the runtime as well as in the number of learned rules, without compromising the predictive performance.

A version of the situation calculus in which situations are represented as first-order terms is presented. Fluents can be computed from the term structure, and actions on the situations correspond to rewrite rules on the terms. Actions that only depend on or influence a subset of the fluents can be described as rewrite rules that operate on subterms of the terms in some cases. If actions are bidirectional then efficient completion methods can be used to solve planning problems. This representation for situations and actions is most similar to the fluent calculus of Thielscher \cite{Thielscher98}, except that this representation is more flexible and more use is made of the subterm structure. Some examples are given, and a few general methods for constructing such sets of rewrite rules are presented. This paper was submitted to FSCD 2020 on December 23, 2019.

The integrity and trustworthiness of data or any other master entity is enforced via data quality rules. Customers no longer want to rely on hand crafted rules that can number in the thousands, which in turn also need a lot of maintenance. Riding on the machine learning (ML) wave, customers can break free from their rule-based business logic and rely on data driven decisions within product information management systems (PIM). These processes are necessary for decreasing effort and saving time and costs. The IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) suite offers these ML capabilities in IBM MDM Product Master to help organize product and service information across the enterprise. As a PIM solution, IBM Product Master (formerly IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Collaborative Edition) aggregates information from any upstream system, enforces business processes to ensure data accuracy and consistency, and synchronizes trusted information with downstream systems.

Companies across industries are exploring and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) projects, from big data to robotics, to automate business processes, improve customer experience, and innovate product development. According to McKinsey, "embracing AI promises considerable benefits for businesses and economies through its contributions to productivity and growth." But with that promise comes challenges. Computers and machines don't come into this world with inherent knowledge or an understanding of how things work. Like humans, they need to be taught that a red light means stop and green means go.

In the last few months, millions of dollars have been stolen from unemployment systems during this time of immense pressure due to coronavirus-related claims. A skilled ring of international fraudsters has been submitting false unemployment claims for individuals that still have steady work. The attackers use previously acquired Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as social security numbers, addresses, names, phone numbers, and banking account information to trick public officials into accepting the claims. Payouts to these employed people are then redirected to money laundering accomplices who pass the money around to veil the illicit nature of the cash before depositing it into their own accounts. The acquisition of the PII that enabled these attacks, and the pattern of money laundering that financial institutions failed to detect highlight the importance of renewed security.