Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly applied to real-world problems involving complex and structured decisions, such as routing, scheduling, and assortment planning. These settings challenge standard RL algorithms, which struggle to scale, generalize, and exploit structure in the presence of combinatorial action spaces. We propose Structured Reinforcement Learning (SRL), a novel actor-critic framework that embeds combinatorial optimization layers into the actor neural network. We enable end-to-end learning of the actor via Fenchel-Young losses and provide a geometric interpretation of SRL as a primal-dual algorithm in the dual of the moment polytope. Across six environments with exogenous and endogenous uncertainty, SRL matches or surpasses the performance of unstructured RL and imitation learning on static tasks and improves over these baselines by up to 92% on dynamic problems, with improved stability and convergence speed.

Minimizing response times to meet legal requirements and serve patients in a timely manner is crucial for Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems. Achieving this goal necessitates optimizing operational decision-making to efficiently manage ambulances. Against this background, we study a centrally controlled EMS system for which we learn an online ambulance dispatching and redeployment policy that aims at minimizing the mean response time of ambulances within the system by dispatching an ambulance upon receiving an emergency call and redeploying it to a waiting location upon the completion of its service. We propose a novel combinatorial optimization-augmented machine learning pipeline that allows to learn efficient policies for ambulance dispatching and redeployment. In this context, we further show how to solve the underlying full-information problem to generate training data and propose an augmentation scheme that improves our pipeline's generalization performance by mitigating a possible distribution mismatch with respect to the considered state space. Compared to existing methods that rely on augmentation during training, our approach offers substantial runtime savings of up to 87.9% while yielding competitive performance. To evaluate the performance of our pipeline against current industry practices, we conduct a numerical case study on the example of San Francisco's 911 call data. Results show that the learned policies outperform the online benchmarks across various resource and demand scenarios, yielding a reduction in mean response time of up to 30%.

Deep learning (DL) systems have been widely adopted in many industrial and business applications, dramatically improving human productivity, and enabling new industries. However, deep learning has a carbon emission problem.a For example, training a single DL model can consume as much as 656,347 kilowatt-hours of energy and generate up to 626,155 pounds of CO2 emissions, approximately equal to the total lifetime carbon footprint of five cars. Therefore, in pursuit of sustainability, the computational and carbon costs of DL have to be reduced. Modeled after systems in the human brain and nervous system, neuromorphic computing has the potential to be the implementation of choice for low-power DL systems.

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI research, industry, geopolitics and startups during February 2023. We wrote an op-ed for Sifted on how generative AI will change the software landscape and commented for TIME's cover story on ChatGPT. On the politics side, we reviewed and recommended spinout policy reform in Tony Blair Institute for Global Change's paper A New National Purpose and were included in Politico's 20 people who matter in UK technology. Air Street was featured in Insider's list of top AI investors See some of you at London.AI on Thurs 9 March w/DeepMind, Adept, Palantir and Basecamp Research. Register for our one-day RAAIS conference on research and applied AI 23 June 2023 in London. We'll be hosting speakers from Meta AI, Cruise, Intercom, Genentech, Northvolt and more to come! FYI, you might have to read this issue in full online vs. in your inbox. As usual, we love hearing what you're up to and what's on your mind, just hit reply or forward to your friends:-) Building large-scale AI models requires enormous computing power, which has emerged as the soft power of our time.

Aging is a process that is characterized by physiological and molecular changes that increase an individual's risk of developing diseases and eventually dying. Being able to measure and estimate the biological signatures of aging can help researchers identify preventive measures to reduce disease risk and impact. Researchers have developed "aging clocks" based on markers such as blood proteins or DNA methylation to measure individuals' biological age, which is distinct from one's chronological age. These aging clocks help predict the risk of age-related diseases. But because protein and methylation markers require a blood draw, non-invasive ways to find similar measures could make aging information more accessible.

Physicians often query a patient's electronic health record for information that helps them make treatment decisions, but the cumbersome nature of these records hampers the process. Research has shown that even when a doctor has been trained to use an electronic health record (EHR), finding an answer to just one question can take, on average, more than eight minutes. The more time physicians must spend navigating an oftentimes clunky EHR interface, the less time they have to interact with patients and provide treatment. Researchers have begun developing machine-learning models that can streamline the process by automatically finding information physicians need in an EHR. However, training effective models requires huge datasets of relevant medical questions, which are often hard to come by due to privacy restrictions.

By 2017, it became clear that big tech companies were deeply interested in AI. In the same year, Pitchbook reported that companies around the world had spent USD 21.3 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, an amount believed to be 26 times more than its value in 2015. Jeff Wilke, former chief executive of Amazon worldwide consumer and close ally to company CEO Jeff Bezos then stated, "If you're a tech company and you're not building AI as a core competence, then you're setting yourself up for an invention from the outside." Between 2000 and 2016, companies like IBM and Microsoft were already investing heavily in AI research. Google and Facebook were only moderately involved in AI research and hiring researchers depending on how profitable the project they were working on was.

Artificial intelligence (AI) gets its "intelligence" by analyzing a given dataset and detecting patterns. It has no concept of the world beyond this dataset, which creates a variety of dangers. One changed pixel could confuse the AI system to think a horse is a frog or, even scarier, err on a medical diagnosis or a machine operation. Its exclusive reliance on the data sets also introduces a serious security vulnerability: Malicious agents can spoof the AI algorithm by introducing minor, nearly undetectable changes in the data. Finally, the AI system does not know what it does not know, and it can make incorrect predictions with a high degree of confidence.

Philadelphia, PA, July 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In an era of artificial intelligence, a Meta AI Research mathematician delves into how AI impacts our society, and its potential to defeat even the newest encryption techniques for safeguarding data. "How can you expect your data to be kept secure and private in an AI-driven future?" said Dr. Kristin Lauter, West Coast Director of Research Science at Meta AI Research, who will be presenting a free and livestreamed public lecture as part of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Meeting tomorrow, July 13. "AI may improve our lives, but without adequate safeguards, AI may also jeopardize the security of our private data," she added. Research in cryptography, the science of securing information, has to stay ahead of emerging threats and attacks in order to protect everyone's privacy. In her upcoming presentation entitled Artificial Intelligence & Cryptography: Privacy and Security in the AI era, Dr. Lauter will share how cryptosystems may be vulnerable, especially as the power of machine learning and AI models grows.