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Roundup Let's get cracking with some machine-learning news.

Starksy Robotics is no more: Self-driving truck startup Starsky Robotics has shut down after running out of money and failing to raise more funds.

CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher bid a touching farewell to his upstart, founded in 2016, in a Medium post this month. He was upfront and honest about why Starsky failed: Supervised machine learning doesnt live up to the hype, he declared. It isnt actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, its a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.

Neural networks only learn to pick up on certain patterns after they are faced with millions of training examples. But driving is unpredictable, and the same route can differ day to day, depending on the weather or traffic conditions. Trying to model every scenario is not only impossible but expensive.

In fact, the better your model, the harder it is to find robust data sets of novel edge cases. Additionally, the better your model, the more accurate the data you need to improve it, Seltz-Axmacher said.

More time and money is needed to provide increasingly incremental improvements. Over time, only the most well funded startups can afford to stay in the game, he said.

Whenever someone says autonomy is ten years away thats almost certainly what their thought is. There arent many startups that can survive ten years without shipping, which means that almost no current autonomous team will ever ship AI decision makers if this is the case, he warned.

If Seltz-Axmacher is right, then we should start seeing smaller autonomous driving startups shutting down in the near future too. Watch this space.

Waymo to pause testing during Bay Area lockdown: Waymo, Googles self-driving car stablemate, announced it was pausing its operations in California to abide by the lockdown orders in place in Bay Area counties, including San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. Businesses deemed non-essential were advised to close and residents were told to stay at home, only popping out for things like buying groceries.

It will, however, continue to perform rides for deliveries and trucking services for its riders and partners in Phoenix, Arizona. These drives will be entirely driverless, however, to minimise the chance of spreading COVID-19.

Waymo also launched its Open Dataset Challenge. Developers can take part in a contest that looks for solutions to these problems:

Cash prizes are up for grabs too. The winner can expect to pocket $15,000, second place will get you $5,000, while third is $2,000.

You can find out more details on the rules of the competition and how to enter here. The challenge is open until 31 May.

More free resources to fight COVID-19 with AI: Tech companies are trying to chip in and do what they can to help quell the coronavirus pandemic. Nvidia and Scale AI both offered free resources to help developers using machine learning to further COVID-19 research.

Nvidia is providing a free 90-day license to Parabricks, a software package that speeds up the process of analyzing genome sequences using GPUs. The rush is on to analyze the genetic information of people that have been infected with COVID-19 to find out how the disease spreads and which communities are most at risk. Sequencing genomes requires a lot of number crunching, Parabricks slashes the time needed to complete the task.

Given the unprecedented spread of the pandemic, getting results in hours versus days could have an extraordinary impact on understanding the viruss evolution and the development of vaccines, it said this week.

Interested customers who have access to Nvidias GPUs should fill out a form requesting access to Parabricks.

Nvidia is inviting our family of partners to join us in matching this urgent effort to assist the research community. Were in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers to provide compute resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.

Next up is Scale AI, the San Francisco based startup focused on annotating data for machine learning models. It is offering its labeling services for free to any researcher working on a potential vaccine, or on tracking, containing, or diagnosing COVID-19.

Given the scale of the pandemic, researchers should have every tool at their disposal as they try to track and counter this virus, it said in a statement.

Researchers have already shown how new machine learning techniques can help shed new light on this virus. But as with all new diseases, this work is much harder when there is so little existing data to go on.

In those situations, the role of well-annotated data to train models o diagnostic tools is even more critical. If you have a lot of data to analyse and think Scale AI could help then apply for their help here.

PyTorch users, AWS has finally integrated the framework: Amazon has finally integrated PyTorch support into Amazon Elastic Inference, its service that allows users to select the right amount of GPU resources on top of CPUs rented out in its cloud services Amazon SageMaker and Amazon EC2, in order to run inference operations on machine learning models.

Amazon Elastic Inference works like this: instead of paying for expensive GPUs, users select the right amount of GPU-powered inference acceleration on top of cheaper CPUs to zip through the inference process.

In order to use the service, however, users will have to convert their PyTorch code into TorchScript, another framework. You can run your models in any production environment by converting PyTorch models into TorchScript, Amazon said this week. That code is then processed by an API in order to use Amazon Elastic Inference.

The instructions to convert PyTorch models into the right format for the service have been described here.

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Self-driving truck boss: 'Supervised machine learning doesnt live up to the hype. It isnt C-3PO, its sophisticated pattern matching' - The Register

COVID-19 will change how most of us live and work, at any rate temporarily. Its additionally making a test for tech organizations, for example, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, that usually depend on parcels and heaps of personal work to direct substance. Are AI furthermore, AI propelled enough to enable these organizations to deal with the interruption?

Its essential that, even though Facebook has initiated ageneral work-from-home strategy to ensure its laborers (alongside Google and arising number of different firms), it at first required its contractual workerswho moderate substance to keep on coming into the workplace. That circumstancejust changed after fights, as per The Intercept.

Presently, Facebook is paying those contractual workers. At thesame time, they sit at home since the idea of their work (examining peoplegroups posts for content that damages Facebooks terms of administration) isamazingly security delicate. Heres Facebooks announcement:

For both our full-time representatives and agreementworkforce, there is some work that is impossible from home because ofwellbeing, security, and legitimate reasons. We have played it safe to secureour laborers by chopping down the number of individuals in some random office,executing prescribed work from home all-inclusive, truly spreading individualsout at some random office, and doing extra cleaning. Given the quicklydeveloping general wellbeing concerns, we are finding a way to ensure ourgroups. We will be working with our accomplices throughout this week to sendall contractors who perform content survey home, until further notification.Well guarantee the payment of all employees during this time.

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and different organizations are inthe equivalent world-renowned pontoon: Theres an expanding need to politicizetheir stages, just to take out counterfeit news about COVID-19. Yetthe volunteers who handle such assignments cant do as such from home,particularly on their workstations. The potential arrangement? Human-madereasoning (AI) and AI calculations intended to examine the flawed substance andsettle on a choice about whether to dispense with it.

Heres Googles announcement on the issue, using its YouTube Creator Blog.

Our Community Guidelines requirement today depends on ablend of individuals and innovation: Machine learning recognizes possiblydestructive substance and afterward sends it to human analysts for evaluation.Because of the new estimates were taking, we will incidentally begin dependingmore on innovation to help with a portion of the work regularly done bycommentators. This implies computerized frameworks will begin evacuating somesubstance without human audit, so we can keep on acting rapidly to expelviolative substances and ensure our environment. At the same time, we have aworking environment assurances set up.

Also, the tech business has been traveling right now sometime.Depending on the multitudes of individuals to peruse each bit of substance onthe web is costly, tedious, and inclined to mistake. Be that as it may, AI,whats more, AI is as yet early, despite the promotion. Google itself, in thepreviously mentioned blog posting, brought up how its computerized frameworksmay hail inappropriate recordings. Facebook is additionally getting analysisthat its robotized against spam framework is whacking inappropriate posts,remembering those that offer essential data for the spread of COVID-19.

In the case of the COVID-19 emergency delay, more organizationswill not surely turn to machine learning as a potential answer forinterruptions in their work process and different procedures. That will drive aprecarious expectation to absorb information; over and over, the rollout of AIstages has exhibited that, while the capability of the innovation is there,execution is regularly an unpleasant and costly proceduresimply see GoogleDuplex.

In any case, a forceful grasp of AI will likewise make more opendoors for those technologists who have aced AI, whats more, AI aptitudes ofany kind; these people may wind up entrusted with making sense of how tomechanize center procedures to keep organizations running.

Before the infection developed, Burning Glass (which breaks downa great many activity postings from over the US), evaluated that employmentsthat include AI would grow 40.1 percent throughout the following decade. Thatrate could increase considerably higher if the emergency on a fundamental levelchanges how individuals over the world live and work. (The average compensationfor these positions is $105,007; for those with a Ph.D., it floats up to$112,300.)

With regards to irresistible illnesses, counteraction, surveillance,and fast reaction endeavors can go far toward easing back or slowing downflare-ups. At the point when a pandemic, for example, the ongoing coronavirusepisode occurs, it can make enormous difficulties for the administration andgeneral wellbeing authorities to accumulate data rapidly and facilitate areaction.

In such a circumstance, machine learning can assume an immensejob in foreseeing a flare-up and limiting or slowing down its spread.

Human-made intelligence calculations can help mine through newsreports and online substances from around the globe, assisting specialists inperceiving oddities even before it arrives at pestilence extents. The crownepisode itself is an extraordinary model where specialists applied AI toexamine flight voyager information to anticipate where the novel coronaviruscould spring up straightaway. A National Geographic report shows how checkingthe web or online life can help identify the beginning periods.

Practical usage of prescient demonstrating could speak to asignificant jump forward in the battle to free the universe of probably themost irresistible maladies. Substantial information examination can enablede-to to concentrate the procedure and empower the convenient investigation offar-reaching informational collections created through the Internet of Things(IoT) and cell phones progressively.

Artificial intelligence and colossal information examination have a significant task to carry out in current genome sequencing techniques. High.

As of late, weve all observed great pictures of medicinalservices experts over the globe working vigorously to treat COVID-19 patients,frequently putting their own lives in danger. Computer-based intelligence couldassume a critical job in relieving their burden while guaranteeing that thenature of care doesnt endure. For example, the Tampa General Hospital inFlorida is utilizing AI to recognize fever in guests with a primary facialoutput. Human-made intelligence is additionally helping specialists at theSheba Medical Center.

The job of AI and massive information in treating worldwidepandemics and other social insurance challenges is just set to develop. Hence,it does not shock anyone that interest for experts with AI aptitudes hasdramatically increased in recent years. Experts working in social insuranceinnovations, getting taught on the uses of AI in medicinal services, andbuilding the correct ranges of abilities will end up being critical.

As AI rapidly becomes standard, medicinal services isundoubtedly a territory where it will assume a significant job in keeping usmore secure and more advantageous.

The subject of how machine learning can add to controlling theCOVID-19 pandemic is being presented to specialists in human-made consciousness(AI) everywhere throughout the world.

Artificial intelligence instruments can help from multiplepoints of view. They are being utilized to foresee the spread of thecoronavirus, map its hereditary advancement as it transmits from human tohuman, accelerate analysis, and in the improvement of potential medications,while additionally helping policymakers adapt to related issues, for example,the effect on transport, nourishment supplies, and travel.

In any case, in every one of these cases, AI is just potent onthe off chance that it has adequate guides. As COVID-19 has brought the worldinto the unchartered domain, the profound learning frameworks,which PCs use to obtain new capacities, dont have the information they have todeliver helpful yields.

Machine leaning is acceptable at anticipating nonexclusiveconduct, yet isnt truly adept at extrapolating that to an emergencycircumstance when nearly everything that happens is new, alerts LeoKrkkinen, a teacher at the Department of Electrical Engineering andAutomation in Aalto University, Helsinki and an individual with Nokias BellLabs. On the off chance that individuals respond in new manners, at thatpoint AI cant foresee it. Until you have seen it, you cant gain fromit.

Regardless of this clause, Krkkinen says powerful AI-basednumerical models are assuming a significant job in helping policymakers see howCOVID-19 is spreading and when the pace of diseases is set to top. Bydrawing on information from the field, for example, the number of passings, AImodels can assist with identifying what number of contaminations areuninformed, he includes, alluding to undetected cases that are as yetirresistible. That information would then be able to be utilized to advise thefoundation regarding isolate zones and other social removing measures.

It is likewise the situation that AI-based diagnostics that arebeing applied in related zones can rapidly be repurposed for diagnosingCOVID-19 contaminations. Behold.ai, which has a calculation for consequentlyrecognizing both malignant lung growth and fallen lungs from X-beams, provideddetails regarding Monday that the count can rapidly distinguish chest X-beamsfrom COVID-19 patients as unusual. Right now, triage might accelerate findingand guarantee assets are dispensed appropriately.

The dire need to comprehend what sorts of approach intercessionsare powerful against COVID-19 has driven different governments to grant awardsto outfit AI rapidly. One beneficiary is David Buckeridge, a teacher in theDepartment of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGillUniversity in Montreal. Equipped with an award of C$500,000 (323,000), hisgroup is joining ordinary language preparing innovation with AI devices, forexample, neural systems (a lot of calculations intended to perceive designs),to break down more than 2,000,000 customary media and internet-based lifereports regarding the spread of the coronavirus from everywhere throughout theworld. This is unstructured free content traditional techniques cantmanage it, Buckeridge said. We need to remove a timetable fromonline media, that shows whats working where, accurately.

The group at McGill is utilizing a blend of managed and solo AI techniques to distill the key snippets of data from the online media reports. Directed learning includes taking care of a neural system with information that has been commented on, though solo adapting just utilizes crude information. We need a structure for predisposition various media sources have an alternate point of view, and there are distinctive government controls, says Buckeridge. People are acceptable at recognizing that, yet it should be incorporated with the AI models.

The data obtained from the news reports will be joined withother information, for example, COVID-19 case answers, to give policymakers andwellbeing specialists a significantly more complete image of how and why theinfection is spreading distinctively in various nations. This is appliedresearch in which we will hope to find significant solutions quick,Buckeridge noted. We ought to have a few consequences of significance togeneral wellbeing in April.

Simulated intelligence can likewise be utilized to helprecognize people who may be accidentally tainted with COVID-19. Chinese techorganization Baidu says its new AI-empowered infrared sensor framework canscreen the temperature of individuals in the nearness and rapidly decide ifthey may have a fever, one of the indications of the coronavirus. In an 11March article in the MIT Technology Review, Baidu said the innovation is beingutilized in Beijings Qinghe Railway Station to recognize travelers who areconceivably contaminated, where it can look at up to 200 individuals in asingle moment without upsetting traveler stream. A report given out fromthe World Health Organization on how China has reacted to the coronavirus saysthe nation has additionally utilized essential information and AI to reinforcecontact following and the administration of need populaces.

Human-made intelligence apparatuses are additionally being sent to all the more likely comprehend the science and science of the coronavirus and prepare for the advancement of viable medicines and an immunization. For instance, fire up Benevolent AI says its man-made intelligence determined information diagram of organized clinical data has empowered the recognizable proof of a potential restorative. In a letter to The Lancet, the organization depicted how its calculations questioned this chart to recognize a gathering of affirmed sedates that could restrain the viral disease of cells. Generous AI inferred that the medication baricitinib, which is endorsed for the treatment of rheumatoid joint inflammation, could be useful in countering COVID-19 diseases, subject to fitting clinical testing.

So also, US biotech Insilico Medicine is utilizing AI calculations to structure new particles that could restrict COVID-19s capacity to duplicate in cells. In a paper distributed in February, the organization says it has exploited late advances in profound figuring out how to expel the need to physically configuration includes and learn nonlinear mappings between sub-atomic structures and their natural and pharmacological properties. An aggregate of 28 AI models created atomic structures and upgraded them with fortification getting the hang of utilizing a scoring framework that mirrored the ideal attributes, the analysts said.

A portion of the worlds best-resourced programmingorganizations is likewise thinking about this test. DeepMind, the London-basedAI pro possessed by Googles parent organization Alphabet, accepts its neuralsystems that can accelerate the regularly painful procedure of settling thestructures of viral proteins. It has created two strategies for preparingneural networks to foresee the properties of a protein from its hereditaryarrangement. We would like to add to the logical exertion bydischarging structure forecasts of a few under-contemplated proteins related toSARS-CoV-2, the infection that causes COVID-19, the organization said.These can assist scientists with building comprehension of how the infectioncapacities and be utilized in medicate revelation.

The pandemic has driven endeavor programming organizationSalesforce to differentiate into life sciences, in an investigation showingthat AI models can gain proficiency with the language of science, similarly asthey can do discourse and picture acknowledgment. The thought is that the AIframework will, at that point, have the option to plan proteins, or recognizecomplex proteins, that have specific properties, which could be utilized totreat COVID-19.

Salesforce took care of the corrosive amino arrangements ofproteins and their related metadata into its ProGen AI framework. The frameworktakes each preparation test and details a game where it attempts to foresee thefollowing amino corrosive in succession.

Before the finish of preparing, ProGen has gotten aspecialist at foreseeing the following amino corrosive by playing this gameroughly one trillion times, said Ali Madani, an analyst at Salesforce.ProGen would then be able to be utilized practically speaking for proteinage by iteratively anticipating the following doubtlessly amino corrosive andproducing new proteins it has never observed. Salesforce is presentlylooking to collaborate with scholars to apply the innovation.

As governments and wellbeing associations scramble to containthe spread of coronavirus, they need all the assistance they with canning get,including from machine learning. Even though present AI innovations are a longway from recreating human knowledge, they are ending up being useful infollowing the episode, diagnosing patients, sanitizing regions, andaccelerating the way toward finding a remedy for COVID-19.

Information science and AI maybe two of the best weapons we havein the battle against the coronavirus episode.

Not long before the turn of the year, BlueDot, a human-madeconsciousness stage that tracks irresistible illnesses around the globe, haileda group of bizarre pneumonia cases occurring around a market inWuhan, China. After nine days, the World Health Organization (WHO) dischargedan announcement proclaiming the disclosure of a novel coronavirusin a hospitalized individual with pneumonia in Wuhan.

BlueDot utilizes everyday language preparation and AIcalculations to scrutinize data from many hotspots for early indications ofirresistible pestilences. The AI takes a gander at articulations from wellbeingassociations, business flights, animal wellbeing reports, atmosphere informationfrom satellites, and news reports. With so much information being created oncoronavirus consistently, the AI calculations can help home in on the bits thatcan give appropriate data on the spread of the infection. It can likewisediscover significant connections betweens information focuses, for example,the development examples of the individuals who are living in the zonesgenerally influenced by the infection.

The organization additionally utilizes many specialists who havesome expertise in the scope of orders, including geographic data frameworks,spatial examination, information perception, PC sciences, just as clinicalspecialists in irresistible clinical ailments, travel and tropical medication,and general wellbeing. The specialists audit the data that has been hailed bythe AI and convey writes about their discoveries.

Joined with the help of human specialists, BlueDots AI cananticipate the beginning of a pandemic, yet additionally, conjecture how itwill spread. On account of COVID-19, the AI effectively recognized the urbancommunities where the infection would be moved to after it surfaced in Wuhan.AI calculations considering make a trip design had the option to foresee wherethe individuals who had contracted coronavirus were probably going to travel.

Presently, AI calculations can play out the equivalenteverywhere scale. An AI framework created by Chinese tech monster Baiduutilizes cameras furnished with PC vision and infrared sensors to foreseeindividuals temperatures in open territories. The frame can screen up to 200individuals for every moment and distinguish their temperature inside the scopeof 0.5 degrees Celsius. The AI banners any individual who has a temperatureabove 37.3 degrees. The innovation is currently being used in Beijings QingheRailway Station.

Alibaba, another Chinese tech monster, has built up an AI framework that can recognize coronavirus in chest CT filters. As indicated by the analysts who built up the structure, the AI has a 96-percent exactness. The AI was prepared on information from 5,000 coronavirus cases and can play out the test in 20 seconds instead of the 15 minutes it takes a human master to analyze patients. It can likewise differentiate among coronavirus and common viral pneumonia. The calculation can give a lift to the clinical focuses that are as of now under a ton of strain to screen patients for COVID-19 disease. The framework is supposedly being embraced in 100 clinics in China.

A different AI created by specialists from Renmin Hospital ofWuhan University, Wuhan EndoAngel Medical Technology Company, and the ChinaUniversity of Geosciences purportedly shows 95-percent precision ondistinguishing COVID-19 in chest CT checks. The framework is a profoundlearning calculation prepared on 45,000 anonymized CT checks. As per a preprintpaper distributed on medRxiv, the AIs exhibition is practically identical tomaster radiologists.

One of the fundamental approaches to forestall the spread of thenovel coronavirus is to decrease contact between tainted patients andindividuals who have not gotten the infection. To this end, a few organizationsand associations have occupied with endeavors to robotize a portion of themethods that recently required wellbeing laborers and clinical staff tocooperate with patients.

Chinese firms are utilizing automatons and robots to performcontactless conveyance and to splash disinfectants in open zones to limit thedanger of cross-contamination. Different robots are checking individuals forfever and other COVID-19 manifestations and administering free hand sanitizerfoam and gel.

Inside emergency clinics, robots are conveying nourishment andmedication to patients and purifying their rooms to hinder the requirement forthe nearness of attendants. Different robots are caught up with cooking ricewithout human supervision, decreasing the quantity of staff required to run theoffice.

In Seattle, specialists utilized a robot to speak with and treatpatients remotely to limit the introduction of clinical staff to contaminatedindividuals.

By the days end, the war on the novel coronavirus isnt overuntil we build up an immunization that can vaccinate everybody against theinfection. Be that as it may, growing new medications and medication is anexceptionally protracted and expensive procedure. It can cost more than abillion dollars and take as long as 12 years. That is the sort of period wedont have as the infection keeps on spreading at a quickening pace.

Luckily, AI can assist speed with increasing the procedure.DeepMind, the AI investigate lab procured by Google in 2014, as of lateannounced that it has utilized profound figuring out how to discover new dataabout the structure of proteins related to COVID-19. This is a procedure thatcould have taken a lot more months.

Understanding protein structures can give significant insightsinto the coronavirus immunization recipe. DeepMind is one of a few associationsthat are occupied with the race to open the coronavirus immunization. It hasutilized the consequence of many years of AI progress, just as research onprotein collapsing.

Its imperative to take note of that our structureforecast framework is still being developed, and we cant be sure of theprecision of the structures we are giving, even though we are sure that theframework is more exact than our prior CASP13 framework, DeepMindsscientists composed on the AI labs site. We affirmed that our frameworkgave an exact forecast to the tentatively decided SARS-CoV-2 spike proteinstructure partook in the Protein Data Bank, and this gave us the certainty thatour model expectations on different proteins might be valuable.

Even though it might be too soon to tell whether were going thecorrect way, the endeavors are excellent. Consistently spared in finding thecoronavirus antibody can save hundredsor thousandsof lives.

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What Researches says on Machine learning with COVID-19 - Techiexpert.com - TechiExpert.com

A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry.

3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. It requires the careful configuration of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of components across multiple layers in a constrained area. Traditionally, engineers will manually design configurations that minimize the amount of wire used between components as a proxy for efficiency. They then use electronic design automation software to simulate and verify their performance, which can take up to 30 hours for a single floor plan.

Time lag: Because of the time investment put into each chip design, chips are traditionally supposed to last between two and five years. But as machine-learning algorithms have rapidly advanced, the need for new chip architectures has also accelerated. In recent years, several algorithms for optimizing chip floor planning have sought to speed up the design process, but theyve been limited in their ability to optimize across multiple goals, including the chips power draw, computational performance, and area.

Intelligent design: In response to these challenges, Google researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini took a new approach: reinforcement learning. Reinforcement-learning algorithms use positive and negative feedback to learn complicated tasks. So the researchers designed whats known as a reward function to punish and reward the algorithm according to the performance of its designs. The algorithm then produced tens to hundreds of thousands of new designs, each within a fraction of a second, and evaluated them using the reward function. Over time, it converged on a final strategy for placing chip components in an optimal way.

Validation: After checking the designs with the electronic design automation software, the researchers found that many of the algorithms floor plans performed better than those designed by human engineers. It also taught its human counterparts some new tricks, the researchers said.

Production line: Throughout the field's history, progress in AI has been tightly interlinked with progress in chip design. The hope is this algorithm will speed up the chip design process and lead to a new generation of improved architectures, in turn accelerating AI advancement.

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Google is using AI to design chips that will accelerate AI - MIT Technology Review

Andy Renshaw, Feedzai: It crosses borders but doesnt have a passport. Its meant to protect people but can make them angry. Its competitive by nature but doesnt want you to fail. What is it?

If the PSD2 regulations and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) feel like a riddle to you, youre not alone. SCA places strict two-factor authentication requirements upon financial institutions (FIs) at a time when FIs are facing stiff competition for customers. On top of that, the variety of payment types, along with the sheer number of transactions, continue to increase.

According to UK Finance, the number of debit card transactions surpassed cash transactions since 2017, while mobile banking surged over the past year, particularly for contactless payments. The number of contactless payment transactions per customer is growing; this increase in transactions also raises the potential for customer friction.

The number of transactions isnt the only thing thats shown an exponential increase; the speed at which FIs must process them is too. Customers expect to send, receive, and access money with the swipe of a screen. Driven by customer expectations, instant payments are gaining traction across the globe with no sign of slowing down.

Considering the sheer number of transactions combined with the need to authenticate payments in real-time, the demands placed on FIs can create a real dilemma. In this competitive environment, how can organisations reduce fraud and satisfy regulations without increasing customer friction?

For countries that fall under PSD2s regulation, the answer lies in the one known way to avoid customer friction while meeting the regulatory requirement: keep fraud rates at or below SCA exemption thresholds.

How machine learning keeps fraud rates below the exemption threshold to bypass SCA requirements

Demonstrating significantly low fraud rates allows financial institutions to bypass the SCA requirement. The logic behind this is simple: if the FIs systems can prevent fraud at such high rates, they've demonstrated their systems are secure without authentication.

SCA exemption thresholds are:

Exemption Threshold Value

Remote electronic card-based payment

Remote electronic credit transfers

EUR 500

below 0.01% fraud rate

below 0.01% fraud rate

EUR 250

below 0.06% fraud rate

below 0.01% fraud rate

EUR 100

below 0.13% fraud rate

below 0.015% fraud rate

Looking at these numbers, you might think that achieving SCA exemption thresholds is impossible. After all, bank transfer scams rose 40% in the first six months of 2019. But state-of-the-art technology rises to the challenge of increased fraud. Artificial intelligence, and more specifically machine learning, makes achieving SCA exemption thresholds possible.

How machine learning achieves SCA exemption threshold values

Every transaction has hundreds of data points, called entities. Entities include time, date, location, device, card, cardless, sender, receiver, merchant, customer age the possibilities are almost endless. When data is cleaned and connected, meaning it doesnt live in siloed systems, the power of machine learning to provide actionable insights on that data is historically unprecedented.

Robust machine learning technology uses both rules and models and learns from both historical and real-time profiles of virtually every data point or entity in a transaction. The more data we feed the machine, the better it gets at learning fraud patterns. Over time, the machine learns to accurately score transactions in less than a second without the need for customer authentication.

Machine learning creates streamlined and flexible workflows

Of course, sometimes, authentication is inevitable. For example, if a customer who generally initiates a transaction in Brighton, suddenly initiates a transaction from Mumbai without a travel note on the account, authentication should be required. But if machine learning platforms have flexible data science environments that embed authentication steps seamlessly into the transaction workflow, the experience can be as customer-centric as possible.

Streamlined workflows must extend to the fraud analysts job

Flexible workflows arent just important to instant payments theyre important to all payments. And they cant just be a back-end experience in the data science environment. Fraud analysts need flexibility in their workflows too. They're under pressure to make decisions quickly and accurately, which means they need a full view of the customer not just the transaction.

Information provided at a transactional level doesnt allow analysts to connect all the dots. In this scenario, analysts are left opening up several case managers in an attempt to piece together a complete and accurate fraud picture. Its time-consuming and ultimately costly, not to mention the wear and tear on employee satisfaction. But some machine learning risk platforms can show both authentication and fraud decisions at the customer level, ensuring analysts have a 360-degree view of the customer.

Machine learning prevents instant payments from becoming instant losses

Instant payments can provide immediate customer satisfaction, but also instant fraud losses. Scoring transactions in real-time means institutions can increase the security around the payments going through their system before its too late.

Real-time transaction scoring requires a colossal amount of processing power because it cant use batch processing, an efficient method when dealing with high volumes of data. Thats because the lag time between when a customer transacts and when a batch is processed makes this method incongruent with instant payments. Therefore, scoring transactions in real-time requires supercomputers with super processing powers. The costs associated with this make hosting systems on the cloud more practical than hosting at the FIs premises, often referred to as on prem. Of course, FIs need to consider other factors, including cybersecurity concerns before determining where they should host their machine learning platform.

Providing exceptional customer experiences by keeping fraud at or below PSD2s SCA threshold can seem like a magic trick, but its not. Its the combined intelligence of humans and machines to provide the most effective method we have today to curb and prevent fraud losses. Its how we solve the friction-security puzzle and deliver customer satisfaction while satisfying SCA.

About Andy Renshaw

Andy Renshaw, Vice President of Banking Solutions at Feedzai, has over 20 years of experience in banking and the financial services industry, leading large programs and teams in fraud management and AML. Prior to joining Feedzai, Andy held roles in global financial institutions such as Lloyds Banking Group, Citibank, and Capital One, where he helped fight against the ever-evolving financial crime landscape as a technical expert, fraud prevention expert, and a lead product owner for fraud transformation.

About Feedzai

Feedzai is the market leader in fighting fraud with AI. Were coding the future of commerce with todays most advanced risk management platform powered by big data and machine learning. Founded and developed by data scientists and aerospace engineers, Feedzai has one mission: to make banking and commerce safe. The worlds largest banks, processors, and retailers use Feedzais fraud prevention and anti-money laundering products to manage risk while improving customer experience.

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PSD2: How machine learning reduces friction and satisfies SCA - The Paypers

When searching through theoretical lists of possible new materials for particular applications, such as batteries or other energy-related devices, there are often millions of potential materials that could be considered, and multiple criteria that need to be met and optimized at once. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to dramatically streamline the discovery process, using a machine learning system.

As a demonstration, the team arrived at a set of the eight most promising materials, out of nearly 3 million candidates, for an energy storage system called a flow battery. This culling process would have taken 50 years by conventional analytical methods, they say, but they accomplished it in five weeks.

The findings are reported in the journal ACS Central Science, in a paper by MIT professor of chemical engineering Heather Kulik, Jon Paul Janet PhD 19, Sahasrajit Ramesh, and graduate student Chenru Duan.

The study looked at a set of materials called transition metal complexes. These can exist in a vast number of different forms, and Kulik says they are really fascinating, functional materials that are unlike a lot of other material phases. The only way to understand why they work the way they do is to study them using quantum mechanics.

To predict the properties of any one of millions of these materials would require either time-consuming and resource-intensive spectroscopy and other lab work, or time-consuming, highly complex physics-based computer modeling for each possible candidate material or combination of materials. Each such study could consume hours to days of work.

Instead, Kulik and her team took a small number of different possible materials and used them to teach an advanced machine-learning neural network about the relationship between the materials chemical compositions and their physical properties. That knowledge was then applied to generate suggestions for the next generation of possible materials to be used for the next round of training of the neural network. Through four successive iterations of this process, the neural network improved significantly each time, until reaching a point where it was clear that further iterations would not yield any further improvements.

This iterative optimization system greatly streamlined the process of arriving at potential solutions that satisfied the two conflicting criteria being sought. This kind of process of finding the best solutions in situations, where improving one factor tends to worsen the other, is known as a Pareto front, representing a graph of the points such that any further improvement of one factor would make the other worse. In other words, the graph represents the best possible compromise points, depending on the relative importance assigned to each factor.

Training typical neural networks requires very large data sets, ranging from thousands to millions of examples, but Kulik and her team were able to use this iterative process, based on the Pareto front model, to streamline the process and provide reliable results using only the few hundred samples.

In the case of screening for the flow battery materials, the desired characteristics were in conflict, as is often the case: The optimum material would have high solubility and a high energy density (the ability to store energy for a given weight). But increasing solubility tends to decrease the energy density, and vice versa.

Not only was the neural network able to rapidly come up with promising candidates, it also was able to assign levels of confidence to its different predictions through each iteration, which helped to allow the refinement of the sample selection at each step. We developed a better than best-in-class uncertainty quantification technique for really knowing when these models were going to fail, Kulik says.

The challenge they chose for the proof-of-concept trial was materials for use in redox flow batteries, a type of battery that holds promise for large, grid-scale batteries that could play a significant role in enabling clean, renewable energy. Transition metal complexes are the preferred category of materials for such batteries, Kulik says, but there are too many possibilities to evaluate by conventional means. They started out with a list of 3 million such complexes before ultimately whittling that down to the eight good candidates, along with a set of design rules that should enable experimentalists to explore the potential of these candidates and their variations.

Through that process, the neural net both gets increasingly smarter about the [design] space, but also increasingly pessimistic that anything beyond what weve already characterized can further improve on what we already know, she says.

Apart from the specific transition metal complexes suggested for further investigation using this system, she says, the method itself could have much broader applications. We do view it as the framework that can be applied to any materials design challenge where you're really trying to address multiple objectives at once. You know, all of the most interesting materials design challenges are ones where you have one thing you're trying to improve, but improving that worsens another. And for us, the redox flow battery redox couple was just a good demonstration of where we think we can go with this machine learning and accelerated materials discovery.

For example, optimizing catalysts for various chemical and industrial processes is another kind of such complex materials search, Kulik says. Presently used catalysts often involve rare and expensive elements, so finding similarly effective compounds based on abundant and inexpensive materials could be a significant advantage.

This paper represents, I believe, the first application of multidimensional directed improvement in the chemical sciences, she says. But the long-term significance of the work is in the methodology itself, because of things that might not be possible at all otherwise. You start to realize that even with parallel computations, these are cases where we wouldn't have come up with a design principle in any other way. And these leads that are coming out of our work, these are not necessarily at all ideas that were already known from the literature or that an expert would have been able to point you to.

This is a beautiful combination of concepts in statistics, applied math, and physical science that is going to be extremely useful in engineering applications, says George Schatz, a professor of chemistry and of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, who was not associated with this work. He says this research addresses how to do machine learning when there are multiple objectives. Kuliks approach uses leading edge methods to train an artificial neural network that is used to predict which combination of transition metal ions and organic ligands will be best for redox flow battery electrolytes.

Schatz says this method can be used in many different contexts, so it has the potential to transform machine learning, which is a major activity around the world.

The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the AAAS Mar ion Milligan Mason Award.

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Neural networks facilitate optimization in the search for new materials - MIT News