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How your ACCENT can hinder your job prospects: Study reveals how people with foreign accents are seen as less competent

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Female pastor is suspended after her shocking Epstein link is exposed... as she compares herself to JESUS while defending their relationship'Tell me to my face': Republican senator torches Noem's replacement as their vicious personal feud spills into public Outrageous full story of scandalous affair that's the talk of Manhattan's exclusive private schools: Family insiders reveal humiliating sex secrets... shock'confession' letter... and the furious relative who exposed it all Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Perfect All-American family lived in stunning $1.1m Colorado mansion and bankrolled glamorous daughter's horse stables... now matriarch has sullied their good name with a HUGE scandal Meghan unveils new As Ever line with Lilibet... amid claims Netflix has been left with huge $10m surplus of her unsold products after'split' with streamer Woke Democrat, 26, who can't get out of bed in time for meetings loses primary to professor accused of inappropriate relationship by former student I watched the children's book author who poisoned her husband from 5ft away. This is the off-camera moment her mask finally slipped... it was truly chilling I ran America's only Supermax jail: What history's most notorious terrorists and serial killers told me as they waited to die Sinister truth about explosive resignation of Trump's top counter-terror chief Joe Kent... and his shock claim Israel is manipulating the president: MARK HALPERIN Hairdresser who weighs 300lbs says Southwest airport check-in worker looked him up and down and told him he'd have to buy extra seat Kim Kardashian takes a VERY dramatic tumble in towering $80 'stripper heels' and accidentally grabs an'old lady' as she falls on her way out of Vanity Fair Oscar party Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with Saudi, UAE and Qatar energy facilities are evacuated after Iran threatens'full scale economic war' as oil price jumps 5%: Live updates New PILL for psoriasis approved... giving hope to millions suffering from debilitating skin condition How I lost 8st in my 50s and now finally have the figure of my dreams. I've been large my whole life, but I now feel happier than I ever did in my 20s. New York City's accent is dying out, study finds It's something that's fixed from roughly the age of 14. But your accent could be hindering your job prospects, according to a new study.


A Quantum Leap for the Turing Award

WIRED

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard pioneered quantum information theory. Now they've been awarded the highest honor in computer science. Today it's widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm . Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable.


L.A. teachers union widely expected to announce strike date at massive Wednesday rally

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A. teachers union widely expected to announce strike date at massive Wednesday rally Members of the largest unions representing teachers and nonteachers participate in joint rally at Grand Park in March 2023. The scene will be repeated on Wednesday, with union members once again on the verge of a strike. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .


Noise-Tolerant Interactive Learning Using Pairwise Comparisons

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of interactively learning a binary classifier using noisy labeling and pairwise comparison oracles, where the comparison oracle answers which one in the given two instances is more likely to be positive. Learning from such oracles has multiple applications where obtaining direct labels is harder but pairwise comparisons are easier, and the algorithm can leverage both types of oracles. In this paper, we attempt to characterize how the access to an easier comparison oracle helps in improving the label and total query complexity. We show that the comparison oracle reduces the learning problem to that of learning a threshold function. We then present an algorithm that interactively queries the label and comparison oracles and we characterize its query complexity under Tsybakov and adversarial noise conditions for the comparison and labeling oracles. Our lower bounds show that our label and total query complexity is almost optimal.


Fast Rates for Bandit Optimization with Upper-Confidence Frank-Wolfe

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of bandit optimization, inspired by stochastic optimization and online learning problems with bandit feedback. In this problem, the objective is to minimize a global loss function of all the actions, not necessarily a cumulative loss. This framework allows us to study a very general class of problems, with applications in statistics, machine learning, and other fields. To solve this problem, we analyze the Upper-Confidence Frank-Wolfe algorithm, inspired by techniques for bandits and convex optimization. We give theoretical guarantees for the performance of this algorithm over various classes of functions, and discuss the optimality of these results.


Counterfactual Fairness

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made that are unfairly biased against certain subpopulations, for example those of a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation. Since this past data may be biased, machine learning predictors must account for this to avoid perpetuating or creating discriminatory practices. In this paper, we develop a framework for modeling fairness using tools from causal inference. Our definition of counterfactual fairness captures the intuition that a decision is fair towards an individual if it the same in (a) the actual world and (b) a counterfactual world where the individual belonged to a different demographic group. We demonstrate our framework on a real-world problem of fair prediction of success in law school.


Online Learning with Transductive Regret

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study online learning with the general notion of transductive regret, that is regret with modification rules applying to expert sequences (as opposed to single experts) that are representable by weighted finite-state transducers. We show how transductive regret generalizes existing notions of regret, including: (1) external regret; (2) internal regret; (3) swap regret; and (4) conditional swap regret. We present a general and efficient online learning algorithm for minimizing transductive regret. We further extend that to design efficient algorithms for the time-selection and sleeping expert settings. A by-product of our study is an algorithm for swap regret, which, under mild assumptions, is more efficient than existing ones, and a substantially more efficient algorithm for time selection swap regret.


Online Learning of Optimal Bidding Strategy in Repeated Multi-Commodity Auctions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the online learning problem of a bidder who participates in repeated auctions. With the goal of maximizing his T-period payoff, the bidder determines the optimal allocation of his budget among his bids for $K$ goods at each period. As a bidding strategy, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm, inspired by the dynamic programming approach to the knapsack problem. The proposed algorithm, referred to as dynamic programming on discrete set (DPDS), achieves a regret order of $O(\sqrt{T\log{T}})$. By showing that the regret is lower bounded by $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ for any strategy, we conclude that DPDS is order optimal up to a $\sqrt{\log{T}}$ term. We evaluate the performance of DPDS empirically in the context of virtual trading in wholesale electricity markets by using historical data from the New York market. Empirical results show that DPDS consistently outperforms benchmark heuristic methods that are derived from machine learning and online learning approaches.


Satisfying Real-world Goals with Dataset Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

The goal of minimizing misclassification error on a training set is often just one of several real-world goals that might be defined on different datasets. For example, one may require a classifier to also make positive predictions at some specified rate for some subpopulation (fairness), or to achieve a specified empirical recall. Other real-world goals include reducing churn with respect to a previously deployed model, or stabilizing online training. In this paper we propose handling multiple goals on multiple datasets by training with dataset constraints, using the ramp penalty to accurately quantify costs, and present an efficient algorithm to approximately optimize the resulting non-convex constrained optimization problem. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world industry datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.


Without-Replacement Sampling for Stochastic Gradient Methods

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled replacement. In contrast, sampling replacement is far less understood, yet in practice it is very common, often easier to implement, and usually performs better. In this paper, we provide competitive convergence guarantees for without-replacement sampling under several scenarios, focusing on the natural regime of few passes over the data. Moreover, we describe a useful application of these results in the context of distributed optimization with randomly-partitioned data, yielding a nearly-optimal algorithm for regularized least squares (in terms of both communication complexity and runtime complexity) under broad parameter regimes. Our proof techniques combine ideas from stochastic optimization, adversarial online learning and transductive learning theory, and can potentially be applied to other stochastic optimization and learning problems.