NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
Join us at Mila in October for a three-day workshop to explore the transformative potential of language technologies and their implications for society.
This program is designed to provide decision-makers, policymakers and professional working in policy with a foundational understanding of AI technology.
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Publications
A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction
Greenhouses are a key component of modernised agriculture, aiming for producing high-quality crops and plants. Furthermore, a network of gre… (see more)enhouses has enormous potential as part of demand response programs. Saving energy during off-peak time, reducing power consumption and delaying the start time of subsystems during on-peak time are some strategies that can be used to limit power exchanged with the main grid. In this work, a hierarchical distributed alternating direction method of multipliers-based model predictive control framework is proposed that has two main objectives: 1) providing appropriate conditions for greenhouses' crops and plants to grow, and 2) limiting the total power exchanged with the main grid. At each time step in the framework, an aggregator coordinates the greenhouses to reach a consensus and limit the total electric power exchanged while managing shared resources, e.g., reservoir water. The proposed framework's performance is investigated through a case study.
2023-01-01
IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy (published)
This paper is concerned with the identification in the limit from positive data of sub-stitutable context-free languages cfl s) over infinit… (see more)e alphabets. Clark and Eyraud (2007) showed that substitutable cfl s over finite alphabets are learnable in this learning paradigm. We show that substitutable cfl s generated by grammars whose production rules may have predicates that represent sets of potentially infinitely many terminal symbols in a compact manner are learnable if the terminal symbol sets represented by those predicates are learnable, under a certain condition. This can be seen as a result parallel to Argyros and D’Antoni’s work (2018) that amplifies the query learnability of predicate classes to that of symbolic automata classes. Our result is the first that shows such amplification is possible for identifying some cfl s in the limit from positive data.
The restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic required software development teams to adapt, being forced to work remotely and adjust the… (see more) software engineering activities accordingly. In the studies evaluating these effects, a few have assessed the impact on software engineering activities from a broader perspective and after a period of time when teams had time to adjust to the changes. No studies have been found comparing software startups and established companies either. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on software development activities after one year of the pandemic restrictions, comparing the results between startups and established companies. Our approach was to design a cross-sectional survey and distribute it online among software development companies worldwide. The participants were asked about their perception of COVID-19’s pandemic impact on different software engineering activities: requirements engineering, software architecture, user experience design, software implementation, and software quality assurance. The survey received 170 valid answers from 29 countries, and for all the software engineering activities, we found that most respondents did not observe a significant impact. The results also showed that software startups and established companies were affected differently since, in some activities, we found a negative impact in the former and a positive impact in the latter. Regarding the time spent on each software engineering activity, most of the answers reported no change, but on those that did, the result points to an increase in time. Thus, we cannot find any relation between the change in time of effort and the reported positive or negative impact.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is increasingly applied in large-scale productions like Netflix and Facebook. As with most data-driven sys… (see more)tems, DRL systems can exhibit undesirable behaviors due to environmental drifts, which often occur in constantly-changing production settings. Continual Learning (CL) is the inherent self-healing approach for adapting the DRL agent in response to the environment's conditions shifts. However, successive shifts of considerable magnitude may cause the production environment to drift from its original state. Recent studies have shown that these environmental drifts tend to drive CL into long, or even unsuccessful, healing cycles, which arise from inefficiencies such as catastrophic forgetting, warm-starting failure, and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose Dr. DRL, an effective self-healing approach for DRL systems that integrates a novel mechanism of intentional forgetting into vanilla CL (i.e., standard CL) to overcome its main issues. Dr. DRL deliberately erases the DRL system's minor behaviors to systematically prioritize the adaptation of the key problem-solving skills. Using well-established DRL algorithms, Dr. DRL is compared with vanilla CL on various drifted environments. Dr. DRL is able to reduce, on average, the healing time and fine-tuning episodes by, respectively, 18.74% and 17.72%. Dr. DRL successfully helps agents to adapt to 19.63% of drifted environments left unsolved by vanilla CL while maintaining and even enhancing by up to 45% the obtained rewards for drifted environments that are resolved by both approaches.
2023-01-01
2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (published)
We present a dataset of videos and comments from the social media platform TikTok, centred around the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an event … (see more)that launched TikTok into the geopolitical arena. The discourse around the invasion exposed myriad political behaviours and dynamics that are unexplored on this platform. To this end we provide a mass scale language and interaction dataset for further research into these processes. An initial investigation of language and social interaction dynamics are explored in this paper. The dataset and the library used to collect it are open sourced to the public.