AI research is increasingly industry-driven, making it crucial to understand company contributions to this field. We compare leading AI companies by research publications, citations, size of training runs, and contributions to algorithmic innovations. Our analysis reveals the substantial role played by Google, OpenAI and Meta. We find that these three companies have been responsible for some of the largest training runs, developed a large fraction of the algorithmic innovations that underpin large language models, and led in various metrics of citation impact. In contrast, leading Chinese companies such as Tencent and Baidu had a lower impact on many of these metrics compared to US counterparts. We observe many industry labs are pursuing large training runs, and that training runs from relative newcomers -- such as OpenAI and Anthropic -- have matched or surpassed those of long-standing incumbents such as Google. The data reveals a diverse ecosystem of companies steering AI progress, though US labs such as Google, OpenAI and Meta lead across critical metrics.
In this paper, we provide an analysis of a recently proposed multicontinuum homogenization technique. The analysis differs from those used in classical homogenization methods for several reasons. First, the cell problems in multicontinuum homogenization use constraint problems and can not be directly substituted into the differential operator. Secondly, the problem contains high contrast that remains in the homogenized problem. The homogenized problem averages the microstructure while containing the small parameter. In this analysis, we first based on our previous techniques, CEM-GMsFEM, to define a CEM-downscaling operator that maps the multicontinuum quantities to an approximated microscopic solution. Following the regularity assumption of the multicontinuum quantities, we construct a downscaling operator and the homogenized multicontinuum equations using the information of linear approximation of the multicontinuum quantities. The error analysis is given by the residual estimate of the homogenized equations and the well-posedness assumption of the homogenized equations.
Efficient allocation of resources to activities is pivotal in executing business processes but remains challenging. While resource allocation methodologies are well-established in domains like manufacturing, their application within business process management remains limited. Existing methods often do not scale well to large processes with numerous activities or optimize across multiple cases. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing two learning-based methods for resource allocation in business processes. The first method leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to learn near-optimal policies by taking action in the business process. The second method is a score-based value function approximation approach, which learns the weights of a set of curated features to prioritize resource assignments. To evaluate the proposed approaches, we first designed six distinct business processes with archetypal process flows and characteristics. These business processes were then connected to form three realistically sized business processes. We benchmarked our methods against traditional heuristics and existing resource allocation methods. The results show that our methods learn adaptive resource allocation policies that outperform or are competitive with the benchmarks in five out of six individual business processes. The DRL approach outperforms all benchmarks in all three composite business processes and finds a policy that is, on average, 13.1% better than the best-performing benchmark.
Using nonlinear projections and preserving structure in model order reduction (MOR) are currently active research fields. In this paper, we provide a novel differential geometric framework for model reduction on smooth manifolds, which emphasizes the geometric nature of the objects involved. The crucial ingredient is the construction of an embedding for the low-dimensional submanifold and a compatible reduction map, for which we discuss several options. Our general framework allows capturing and generalizing several existing MOR techniques, such as structure preservation for Lagrangian- or Hamiltonian dynamics, and using nonlinear projections that are, for instance, relevant in transport-dominated problems. The joint abstraction can be used to derive shared theoretical properties for different methods, such as an exact reproduction result. To connect our framework to existing work in the field, we demonstrate that various techniques for data-driven construction of nonlinear projections can be included in our framework.
We address modelling and computational issues for multiple treatment effect inference under many potential confounders. A primary issue relates to preventing harmful effects from omitting relevant covariates (under-selection), while not running into over-selection issues that introduce substantial variance and a bias related to the non-random over-inclusion of covariates. We propose a novel empirical Bayes framework for Bayesian model averaging that learns from data the extent to which the inclusion of key covariates should be encouraged, specifically those highly associated to the treatments. A key challenge is computational. We develop fast algorithms, including an Expectation-Propagation variational approximation and simple stochastic gradient optimization algorithms, to learn the hyper-parameters from data. Our framework uses widely-used ingredients and largely existing software, and it is implemented within the R package mombf featured on CRAN. This work is motivated by and is illustrated in two applications. The first is the association between salary variation and discriminatory factors. The second, that has been debated in previous works, is the association between abortion policies and crime. Our approach provides insights that differ from previous analyses especially in situations with weaker treatment effects.
Insurers increasingly use AI. We distinguish two situations in which insurers use AI: (i) data-intensive underwriting, and (ii) behaviour-based insurance. (i) First, insurers can use AI for data analysis to assess risks: data-intensive underwriting. Underwriting is, in short, calculating risks and amending the insurance premium accordingly. (ii) Second, insurers can use AI to monitor the behaviour of consumers in real-time: behaviour-based insurance. For example, some car insurers give a discount if a consumer agrees to being tracked by the insurer and drives safely. While the two trends bring many advantages, they may also have discriminatory effects. This paper focuses on the following question. Which discrimination-related effects may occur if insurers use data-intensive underwriting and behaviour-based insurance? We focus on two types of discrimination-related effects: discrimination and other unfair differentiation. (i) Discrimination harms certain groups who are protected by non-discrimination law, for instance people with certain ethnicities. (ii) Unfair differentiation does not harm groups that are protected by non-discrimination law, but it does seem unfair. We introduce four factors to consider when assessing the fairness of insurance practices. The paper builds on literature from various disciplines including law, philosophy, and computer science.
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have sparked a rethinking of artificial general intelligence possibilities. The increasing human-like capabilities of AI are also attracting attention in social science research, leading to various studies exploring the combination of these two fields. In this survey, we systematically categorize previous explorations in the combination of AI and social science into two directions that share common technical approaches but differ in their research objectives. The first direction is focused on AI for social science, where AI is utilized as a powerful tool to enhance various stages of social science research. While the second direction is the social science of AI, which examines AI agents as social entities with their human-like cognitive and linguistic capabilities. By conducting a thorough review, particularly on the substantial progress facilitated by recent advancements in large language models, this paper introduces a fresh perspective to reassess the relationship between AI and social science, provides a cohesive framework that allows researchers to understand the distinctions and connections between AI for social science and social science of AI, and also summarized state-of-art experiment simulation platforms to facilitate research in these two directions. We believe that as AI technology continues to advance and intelligent agents find increasing applications in our daily lives, the significance of the combination of AI and social science will become even more prominent.
In practically every industry today, artificial intelligence is one of the most effective ways for machines to assist humans. Since its inception, a large number of researchers throughout the globe have been pioneering the application of artificial intelligence in medicine. Although artificial intelligence may seem to be a 21st-century concept, Alan Turing pioneered the first foundation concept in the 1940s. Artificial intelligence in medicine has a huge variety of applications that researchers are continually exploring. The tremendous increase in computer and human resources has hastened progress in the 21st century, and it will continue to do so for many years to come. This review of the literature will highlight the emerging field of artificial intelligence in medicine and its current level of development.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Deep learning constitutes a recent, modern technique for image processing and data analysis, with promising results and large potential. As deep learning has been successfully applied in various domains, it has recently entered also the domain of agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of 40 research efforts that employ deep learning techniques, applied to various agricultural and food production challenges. We examine the particular agricultural problems under study, the specific models and frameworks employed, the sources, nature and pre-processing of data used, and the overall performance achieved according to the metrics used at each work under study. Moreover, we study comparisons of deep learning with other existing popular techniques, in respect to differences in classification or regression performance. Our findings indicate that deep learning provides high accuracy, outperforming existing commonly used image processing techniques.
Recommender systems (RSs) have been the most important technology for increasing the business in Taobao, the largest online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform in China. The billion-scale data in Taobao creates three major challenges to Taobao's RS: scalability, sparsity and cold start. In this paper, we present our technical solutions to address these three challenges. The methods are based on the graph embedding framework. We first construct an item graph from users' behavior history. Each item is then represented as a vector using graph embedding. The item embeddings are employed to compute pairwise similarities between all items, which are then used in the recommendation process. To alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems, side information is incorporated into the embedding framework. We propose two aggregation methods to integrate the embeddings of items and the corresponding side information. Experimental results from offline experiments show that methods incorporating side information are superior to those that do not. Further, we describe the platform upon which the embedding methods are deployed and the workflow to process the billion-scale data in Taobao. Using online A/B test, we show that the online Click-Through-Rate (CTRs) are improved comparing to the previous recommendation methods widely used in Taobao, further demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed methods in Taobao's live production environment.