Graph-based frameworks are often used in network hardening to help a cyber defender understand how a network can be attacked and how the best defenses can be deployed. However, incorporating network connectivity parameters in the attack graph, reasoning about the attack graph when we do not have access to complete information, providing system administrator suggestions in an understandable format, and allowing them to do what-if analysis on various scenarios and attacker motives is still missing. We fill this gap by presenting SPEAR, a formal framework with tool support for security posture evaluation and analysis that keeps human-in-the-loop. SPEAR uses the causal formalism of AI planning to model vulnerabilities and configurations in a networked system. It automatically converts network configurations and vulnerability descriptions into planning models expressed in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). SPEAR identifies a set of diverse security hardening strategies that can be presented in a manner understandable to the domain expert. These allow the administrator to explore the network hardening solution space in a systematic fashion and help evaluate the impact and compare the different solutions.

There exists three main areas of study inside of the field of predictive maintenance: anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, and remaining useful life prediction. Notably, anomaly detection alerts the stakeholder that an anomaly is occurring. This raises two fundamental questions: what is causing the fault and how can we fix it? Inside of the field of explainable artificial intelligence, counterfactual explanations can give that information in the form of what changes to make to put the data point into the opposing class, in this case "healthy". The suggestions are not always actionable which may raise the interest in asking "what if we do this instead?" In this work, we provide a proof of concept for utilizing counterfactual explanations as what-if analysis. We perform this on the PRONOSTIA dataset with a temporal convolutional network as the anomaly detector. Our method presents the counterfactuals in the form of a what-if analysis for this base problem to inspire future work for more complex systems and scenarios.

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used to automate impactful decisions, which leads to concerns regarding their correctness, reliability, and fairness. We envision highly-automated software platforms to assist data scientists with developing, validating, monitoring, and analysing their ML pipelines. In contrast to existing work, our key idea is to extract "logical query plans" from ML pipeline code relying on popular libraries. Based on these plans, we automatically infer pipeline semantics and instrument and rewrite the ML pipelines to enable diverse use cases without requiring data scientists to manually annotate or rewrite their code. First, we developed such an abstract ML pipeline representation together with machinery to extract it from Python code. Next, we used this representation to efficiently instrument static ML pipelines and apply provenance tracking, which enables lightweight screening for common data preparation issues. Finally, we built machinery to automatically rewrite ML pipelines to perform more advanced what-if analyses and proposed using multi-query optimisation for the resulting workloads. In future work, we aim to interactively assist data scientists as they work on their ML pipelines.

Process simulation is gaining attention for its ability to assess potential performance improvements and risks associated with business process changes. The existing literature presents various techniques, generally grounded in process models discovered from event logs or built upon deep learning algorithms. These techniques have specific strengths and limitations. Traditional approaches rooted in process models offer increased interpretability, while those using deep learning excel at generalizing changes across large event logs. However, the practical application of deep learning faces challenges related to managing stochasticity and integrating information for what-if analysis. This paper introduces a novel recurrent neural architecture tailored to discover COnditioned process Simulation MOdels (CoSMo) based on user-based constraints or any other nature of a-priori knowledge. This architecture facilitates the simulation of event logs that adhere to specific constraints by incorporating declarative-based rules into the learning phase as an attempt to fill the gap of incorporating information into deep learning models to perform what-if analysis. Experimental validation illustrates CoSMo's efficacy in simulating event logs while adhering to predefined declarative conditions, emphasizing both control-flow and data-flow perspectives.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the adoption of blockchain-based systems in non-financial applications, looking to benefit from what the technology has to offer. Although many fields have managed to include blockchain in their core functionalities, the adoption of blockchain, in general, is constrained by the so-called trilemma trade-off between decentralization, scalability, and security. In our previous work, we have shown that using a digital twin for dynamically managing blockchain systems during runtime can be effective in managing the trilemma trade-off. Our Digital Twin leverages DDDAS feedback loop, which is responsible for getting the data from the system to the digital twin, conducting optimisation, and updating the physical system. This paper examines how leveraging DDDAS feedback loop can support the optimisation component of the trilemma benefiting from Reinforcement Learning agents and a simulation component to augment the quality of the learned model while reducing the computational overhead required for decision-making.

Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. As an independent analyst, he has authored numerous research reports in partnership with Forbes Insights, IDC, and Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. Building and supporting the artificial intelligence infrastructure that is guiding our businesses is not an easy job. The applications, data and networks behind the scenes have to perform as close to flawlessly as possible, in real time. The good news is AI itself can be employed to provide relief to stressed IT teams. AIOps - artificial intelligence for IT operations - is paving the way to autonomous operations of critical enterprise systems.

The Baseball Machine Learning Workbench is an interactive web application. What-If Analysis - Rules Engine This scenario showcases how a simple rules engine can be used to attempt to predict baseball Hall Of Fame Induction. No Machine Intelligence is used, rather a simple rule: If sum of career HRs 500 then Hall of Fame Induction is true (else Hall of Fame Induction is false). What-If Analysis - Single Model This scenario showcases how a Machine Intelligence model can be used to attempt to predict baseball Hall Of Fame Induction. Machine Intelligence is used to classify the batter baseball data.

This post is by Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft. Online transaction processing (OLTP) database applications have powered many enterprise user-cases in recent decades, with numerous implementations in banking, e-commerce, manufacturing and many other domains. Today, I'd like to highlight a new breed of applications that marry the latest OLTP advancements with advanced insights and machine learning. In particular, I'd like to describe how companies can predict a million events per second with the very latest algorithms, using readily available software. Take credit card transactions or loan applications, for instance.