The design of modern recommender systems relies on understanding which parts of the feature space are relevant for solving a given recommendation task. However, real-world data sets in this domain are often characterized by their large size, sparsity, and noise, making it challenging to identify meaningful signals. Feature ranking represents an efficient branch of algorithms that can help address these challenges by identifying the most informative features and facilitating the automated search for more compact and better-performing models (AutoML). We introduce OutRank, a system for versatile feature ranking and data quality-related anomaly detection. OutRank was built with categorical data in mind, utilizing a variant of mutual information that is normalized with regard to the noise produced by features of the same cardinality. We further extend the similarity measure by incorporating information on feature similarity and combined relevance. The proposed approach's feasibility is demonstrated by speeding up the state-of-the-art AutoML system on a synthetic data set with no performance loss. Furthermore, we considered a real-life click-through-rate prediction data set where it outperformed strong baselines such as random forest-based approaches. The proposed approach enables exploration of up to 300% larger feature spaces compared to AutoML-only approaches, enabling faster search for better models on off-the-shelf hardware.

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Experts are warning of the threat posed by China's use of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a survellience state, and say the risk of such authoritarian behaviour spreading to other parts of the world is increasing. While Chinese technology company Huawei is making daily headlines at the moment, Greg Austin, professor of cyber security, strategy and diplomacy at the University of New South Wales, said there were more pressing concerns. "If I were asked which was the bigger threat from China to the West, is it Huawei or is it their research on artificial intelligence I would say it's their research on artificial intelligence," Professor Austin said. "That far outranks any of the concerns that we have from what Huawei might do in terms of foreign espionage." Huawei has been banned from taking part in the rollout of 5G mobile technology in Australia over national security concerns and has faced similar restrictions in other countries.