No Arabic abstract
We consider the problem of eliciting expert assessments of an uncertain parameter. The context is risk control, where there are, in fact, three uncertain parameters to be estimates. Two of these are probabilities, requiring the that the experts be guided in the concept of uncertainty about uncertainty. We propose a novel formulation for expert estimates, which relies on the range and the median, rather than the variance and the mean. We discuss the process of elicitation, and provide precise formulas for these new distributions.
There is significant concern that technological advances, especially in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), could lead to high levels of unemployment in the coming decades. Studies have estimated that around half of all current jobs are at risk of automation. To look into this issue in more depth, we surveyed experts in Robotics and AI about the risk, and compared their views with those of non-experts. Whilst the experts predicted a significant number of occupations were at risk of automation in the next two decades, they were more cautious than people outside the field in predicting occupations at risk. Their predictions were consistent with their estimates for when computers might be expected to reach human level performance across a wide range of skills. These estimates were typically decades later than those of the non-experts. Technological barriers may therefore provide society with more time to prepare for an automated future than the public fear. In addition, public expectations may need to be dampened about the speed of progress to be expected in Robotics and AI.
Predicting the outcomes of future events is a challenging problem for which a variety of solution methods have been explored and attempted. We present an empirical comparison of a variety of online and offline adaptive algorithms for aggregating experts predictions of the outcomes of five years of US National Football League games (1319 games) using expert probability elicitations obtained from an Internet contest called ProbabilitySports. We find that it is difficult to improve over simple averaging of the predictions in terms of prediction accuracy, but that there is room for improvement in quadratic loss. Somewhat surprisingly, a Bayesian estimation algorithm which estimates the variance of each experts prediction exhibits the most consistent superior performance over simple averaging among our collection of algorithms.
The solution to prevent maternal complications are known and preventable by trained health professionals. But in countries like Ethiopia where the patient to physician ratio is 1 doctor to 1000 patients, maternal mortality and morbidity rate is high. To fill the gap of highly trained health professionals, Ethiopia introduced health extension programs. Task shifting to health extension workers (HEWs) contributed in decreasing mortality and morbidity rate in Ethiopia. Knowledge-gap has been one of the major challenges to HEWs. The reasons are trainings are not given in regular manner, there is no midwife, gynecologists or doctors around for consultation, and all guidelines are paper-based which are easily exposed to damage. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a web-based expert system for maternal care. We only targeted the major 10 diseases and complication of maternal health issues seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The expert system can be accessed through the use of web browsers from computers as well as smart phones. Forward chaining rule-based expert system is used in order to give suggestions and create a new knowledge from the knowledge-base. This expert system can be used to train HEWs in the field of maternal health. Keywords: expert system, maternal care, forward-chaining, rule-based expert system, PHLIPS
The paper presents a possible solution to the problem of algorithmization for quantifying inno-vativeness indicators of technical products, inventions and technologies. The concepts of technological nov-elty, relevance and implementability as components of product innovation criterion are introduced. Authors propose a model and algorithm to calculate every of these indicators of innovativeness under conditions of incompleteness and inaccuracy, and sometimes inconsistency of the initial information. The paper describes the developed specialized software that is a promising methodological tool for using interval estimations in accordance with the theory of evidence. These estimations are used in the analysis of complex multicomponent systems, aggregations of large volumes of fuzzy and incomplete data of various structures. Composition and structure of a multi-agent expert system are presented. The purpose of such system is to process groups of measurement results and to estimate indicators values of objects innovativeness. The paper defines active elements of the system, their functionality, roles, interaction order, input and output inter-faces, as well as the general software functioning algorithm. It describes implementation of software modules and gives an example of solving a specific problem to determine the level of technical products innovation.
In this paper, we study Reinforcement Learning from Demonstrations (RLfD) that improves the exploration efficiency of Reinforcement Learning (RL) by providing expert demonstrations. Most of existing RLfD methods require demonstrations to be perfect and sufficient, which yet is unrealistic to meet in practice. To work on imperfect demonstrations, we first define an imperfect expert setting for RLfD in a formal way, and then point out that previous methods suffer from two issues in terms of optimality and convergence, respectively. Upon the theoretical findings we have derived, we tackle these two issues by regarding the expert guidance as a soft constraint on regulating the policy exploration of the agent, which eventually leads to a constrained optimization problem. We further demonstrate that such problem is able to be addressed efficiently by performing a local linear search on its dual form. Considerable empirical evaluations on a comprehensive collection of benchmarks indicate our method attains consistent improvement over other RLfD counterparts.