Technology has played a key role in retail for decades, from early innovations like barcode scanning and digital point of sale devices, to the global frontier of modern logistics. Through it all, however, the fundamentals remain the same: retailers generate huge quantities of data, face unpredictable environments, and need to continually adapt to the ever-evolving needs of the customer. Throw in the chaos of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and you've got one of the most complex enterprise challenges in the world. It's also a challenge tailor-made for AI: a technology that thrives on big data, adapts to change fluidly, and can deliver personalized experiences at scale. With the holiday rush upon us, let's take a look at how two Cloud AI customers--3PM for online shoppers and Tulip for in-store--are helping make retail more efficient, more personal, and more trustworthy.

Junning Huang* 1, Sirui Xie* 2, Jiankai Sun 4, Qiurui Ma 3, Chunxiao Liu 1, Jianping Shi 1, Dahua Lin 4, Bolei Zhou 4 Abstract -- Classical autonomous driving systems are mod-ularized as a pipeline of perception, decision, planning, and control. The driving decision plays a central role in processing the observation from the perception as well as directing the execution of downstream planning and control modules. Commonly the decision module is designed to be rule-based and is difficult to learn from data. Recently end-to-end neural control policy has been proposed to replace this pipeline, given its generalization ability. However, it remains challenging to enforce physical or logical constraints on the decision to ensure driving safety and stability. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework for learning a decision module, which is agnostic to the mechanisms of perception, planning, and control modules. By imitating the low-level control behavior, it learns the high-level driving decisions while bypasses the ambiguous annotation of high-level driving decisions. We demonstrate that the simulation agents with a learned decision module can be generalized to various complex driving scenarios where the rule-based approach fails. Furthermore, it can generate driving behaviors that are smoother and safer than end-to-end neural policies ‡ .

Data: As with all ML applications, quality data is foundational to building anti-fraud ML systems. Data sets are only growing larger, and as the volumes increase, so does the challenge of detecting fraud. Thankfully the adage that more data equals better models is true when it comes to fraud detection. The make-or-break factor is having a ML platform that can scale as data and complexity increase. Multiplicity: There's no single ML algorithm or method that works best for fraud detection.

SINGAPORE - Singapore-based regulatory technology firm Tookitaki has raised US$19.2 million (S$26.1 million) in Series A funding as it seeks to expand its presence in international markets. The company has received $11.7 million in investment, adding to the $7.5 million raised earlier this year. A group, led by Viola Fintech and SIG Asia Investment, was responsible for the fresh injection of funds, which will help Tookitaki increase its employee headcount across its three offices in Singapore, India and the United States by up to 100 per cent, as well as to fine-tune its products. "Our vision has always been for our compliance technology to become globally accepted by financial institutions around the world, and (the investments) put us in a better place to deliver on that vision," said Tookitaki co-founder and chief executive officer Abhishek Chatterjee on Monday (Nov 25) Tookitaki offers two artificial intelligence-powered software platforms. The first is an anti-money laundering solution that aims to help banks better monitor and detect suspicious transactions, and comply with regulatory requirements.

Early December marks the kickoff of Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and ahead of the festivities the tech giant has unveiled a slew of product enhancements. To this end, Amazon Translate, the company's cloud machine translation service that delivers language translation via API requests, today gained new languages and variants and expanded to new regions globally. By way of a refresher, Translate -- which debuted in preview in November 2017 ahead of general availability last April -- taps AI that aims to deliver more accurate and natural-sounding translation than statistical or rule-based approaches. It allows customers to define how brand names, character names, model names, and other unique terms get translated. When used in tandem with a natural language processing app, Translate also facilitates sentiment analysis.

T eaching Perception Jonathan H. Connell 1 Abstract -- The visual world is very rich and generally too complex to perceive in its entirety. Y et only certain features are typically required to adequately perform some task in a given situation. Rather than hardwire-in decisions about when and what to sense, this paper describes a robotic system whose behavioral policy can be set by verbal instructions it receives. These capabilities are demonstrated in an associated video [1] showing the fully implemented system guiding the perception of a physical robot in simple scenario. The structure and functioning of the underlying natural language based symbolic reasoning system is also discussed. I. INTRODUCTION Sensing is not without costs. For any given object there are many things that can be known about it. What constitutes a reasonable amount of information to obtain? For instance, to identify an object in a scene a robot could run a DNN recognizer. But, depending on the resources available, this may take a noticeable amount of time. And, while some recognizers have Nary outputs, others are designed as one-versus-all. In this case, to classify an object a robot might have to run N separate nets.

Home robots may come with many sophisticated built-in abilities, however there will always be a degree of customization needed for each user and environment. Ideally this should be accomplished through one-shot learning, as collecting the large number of examples needed for statistical inference is tedious. A particularly appealing approach is to simply explain to the robot, via speech, what it should be doing. In this paper we describe the ALIA cognitive architecture that is able to effectively incorporate user-supplied advice and prohibitions in this manner. The functioning of the implemented system on a small robot is illustrated by an associated video [11]. 1 INTRODUCTION A typical home robot of the future might have built-in navigation, object recognition, task planning, and dexterous manipulation. Y et, despite these sophisticated capabilities, there are still things it cannot know when it first arrives. For instance, what a particular room in the house is called, even if it can identify the general type.

OneClass SVM is a popular method for unsupervised anomaly detection. As many other methods, it suffers from the \textit{black box} problem: it is difficult to justify, in an intuitive and simple manner, why the decision frontier is identifying data points as anomalous or non anomalous. Such type of problem is being widely addressed for supervised models. However, it is still an uncharted area for unsupervised learning. In this paper, we describe a method to infer rules that justify why a point is labelled as an anomaly, so as to obtain intuitive explanations for models created using the OneClass SVM algorithm. We evaluate our proposal with different datasets, including real-world data coming from industry. With this, our proposal contributes to extend Explainable AI techniques to unsupervised machine learning models.

Representation learning on a knowledge graph (KG) is to embed entities and relations of a KG into low-dimensional continuous vector spaces. Early KG embedding methods only pay attention to structured information encoded in triples, which would cause limited performance due to the structure sparseness of KGs. Some recent attempts consider paths information to expand the structure of KGs but lack explainability in the process of obtaining the path representations. In this paper, we propose a novel Rule and Path-based Joint Embedding (RPJE) scheme, which takes full advantage of the explainability and accuracy of logic rules, the generalization of KG embedding as well as the supplementary semantic structure of paths. Specifically, logic rules of different lengths (the number of relations in rule body) in the form of Horn clauses are first mined from the KG and elaborately encoded for representation learning. Then, the rules of length 2 are applied to compose paths accurately while the rules of length 1 are explicitly employed to create semantic associations among relations and constrain relation embeddings. Besides, the confidence level of each rule is also considered in optimization to guarantee the availability of applying the rule to representation learning. Extensive experimental results illustrate that RPJE outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines on KG completion task, which also demonstrate the superiority of utilizing logic rules as well as paths for improving the accuracy and explainability of representation learning.

We investigate the application of inconsistency measures to the problem of analysing business rule bases. Due to some i ntri-cacies of the domain of business rule bases, a straightforwa rd application is not feasible. We therefore develop some new rat ionality postulates for this setting as well as adapt and modify exist ing inconsistency measures. We further adapt the notion of inconsistency values (or culpability measures) for this setting and give a comprehensive feasibility study.