The Pipeline for the Continuous Development of Artificial Intelligence Models -- Current State of Research and Practice

Companies struggle to continuously develop and deploy AI models to complex production systems due to AI characteristics while assuring quality. To ease the development process, continuous pipelines for AI have become an active research area where consolidated and in-depth analysis regarding the terminology, triggers, tasks, and challenges is required. This paper includes a Multivocal Literature Review where we consolidated 151 relevant formal and informal sources. In addition, nine-semi structured interviews with participants from academia and industry verified and extended the obtained information. Based on these sources, this paper provides and compares terminologies for DevOps and CI/CD for AI, MLOps, (end-to-end) lifecycle management, and CD4ML. Furthermore, the paper provides an aggregated list of potential triggers for reiterating the pipeline, such as alert systems or schedules. In addition, this work uses a taxonomy creation strategy to present a consolidated pipeline comprising tasks regarding the continuous development of AI. This pipeline consists of four stages: Data Handling, Model Learning, Software Development and System Operations. Moreover, we map challenges regarding pipeline implementation, adaption, and usage for the continuous development of AI to these four stages.Comment: accepted in the Journal Systems and Softwar

Dynamics of human security and regional social and economic development: A case study of the Lake Chad basin

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDTransboundary river basins (TRBs), and its array of biodiversity, have created a web of complex security, socio-economic and political interdependencies among populations, communities and multiplicity of actors across the world. However, the continuous degradation of these vital resources, resulting from natural and anthropogenic factors, has serious implications for global development, peace and security. Indeed, it further threatens regional resource base, induce livelihoods impairment, scarcities and conflicts over the utilisation and control of strategic resources, particularly in the Global South. The study explored the causeeffect analysis of the desiccation of Lake Chad basin and the dreadful Boko Haram crisis within the prisms of human security and regional development. It reflects on the interconnections among environmental change, human development, livelihoods, conflicts and the outcomes of interventions - military and humanitarian in reconstructing human security and regional development narratives in the Lake Chad Basin. The research was contextualised within two theoretical frameworks: eco-violence, and the capability approach. This was conceived to provide an improved understanding of both the micro (individual or group interactions) and macro (large scale - national and multinational actors) development processes, the enablers and constraints of human security in the region. Their implications for regional development, security, sustainability and stabilisation process are also elucidated. Mixed-method research and a case study design was adopted to specifically study the Lake Chad impact area, covering 542,829 km2, across the four riparian countries - Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Although, the conventional or active basin of the lake - an estimated 984,455 km2 area was generally referenced. Purposive sampling was used to select participants for semi-structured interviews, focused group discussions (FGD) and document review. A total of 34 key informants, six (6) FGDs and 33 institutional documents (18 intervention and policy documents and 15 official bulletins) were utilised. These enable the substantiation of primary data with secondary data – qualitative and quantitative (derived from documents review). A thematic analysis of the causality of resource scarcities, livelihoods, and conflict relationships in the region was undertaken. This includes an assessment of the regional development process and the efficacies of security and humanitarian interventions in the Lake Chad Basin.The study revealed that the desiccation of Lake Chad and the destructive Boko Haram crisis (since 2009) impede development in the region. The lake’s shrinkage (estimated above 90percent from 1963 till date), caused by environmental change and unsustainable human practices or exploitation of the basin’s resources, have transboundary effects. These and the humanitarian catastrophes caused by Boko Haram menace have heightened human insecurity, and threaten communities’ fragility and transborder cooperation in the region. While regional development processes and intervention have marginal impacts on the population and their resilience capacities. Indeed, the complexity of the challenges overlaps with inconsistencies in the region’s development processes and the interventions regime – security and humanitarian management. Thus, addressing the consequences, while neglecting the root causes of human security threats in the Lake Chad Basin, further heightens the population’s deprivations amidst challenges of resource curse, geopolitics and its alteration of regional political economy. The above underscores the dialectics between human security and regional development. From these submissions, improved water resources and environmental management; inclusive development - to address the root causes of insecurity; monitoring and harnessing of national and regional development priorities; and integrated regional security-development strategy, against the military-led humanitarian approach, are recommended as critical solutions. These enhance a rethinking of human security and regional development matrix in the Lake Chad and other TRBs in the Global South. Therefore, the study highlighted the imperative of mediating exhaustive discourse on TRBs as Special Economic Zones (SEZ); constructive interactions between development processes and actors (stakeholders); the use of groundwater as a palliative; and the intrinsic mobility, multiactivity and multi-functionality of livelihoods in the Lake Chad Basin. These can be pondered in (future research and policy) discourses to enhance regional resilience, human security and sustainable development in the Lake Chad Basin

Challenging Academia: A Critical Space for Controversial Social Issues

Some social issues and practices have become dangerous areas for academics to research and write about. ‘Academic freedom’ is increasingly constrained, not just by long established ‘normal’ factors (territoriality, power differentials, competition, protectionism), but also by the increased significance of social media and the rise of identity politics (and activists who treat work which challenges their world view as abusive hate-speech). So extreme are these pressures that some institutions and even statutory bodies now adopt policies and practices which contravene relevant regulations and laws. This book seeks to draw attention to the limiting and damaging effects of academic ‘gagging’. The book, drawn from a special edition of Societies, offers an eclectic series of international articles which may annoy some people. The book challenges taken for granted mainstream assumptions and practices in a number of areas, including gender mainstreaming, social work education, child sexual abuse, the ethnic disaggregation of population groups, fatherhood and masculinity, the erosion of democratic legitimacy, the trap of victimhood and vulnerability, employment practices in universities, and the challenges presented by the widespread and deliberate suppression of scholarship and research. In an analytic postscript Laurent Dubreuil discusses the nature of identity politics and the manner in which its effects can be identified across the many topics covered in these challenging articles

Multiple Sacralities: Rethinking Sacralizations in European History. Ein Europa der Differenzen, Band 3

We live in a present of multiple and conflicting sacralities. How do we account for the persistence and remarkable adaptability of traditional forms of the Christian sacred? How do we explain the ongoing allure of instrumentalizing the sacred for political purposes? And what do we make of the spread of nature spiritualities that have been so pertinent over the last half century? This volume seeks to reflect upon how these multiple sacralizations can be studied and understood in historical and cross-disciplinary perspective

Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2021

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Generalising weighted model counting

Given a formula in propositional or (finite-domain) first-order logic and some non-negative weights, weighted model counting (WMC) is a function problem that asks to compute the sum of the weights of the models of the formula. Originally used as a flexible way of performing probabilistic inference on graphical models, WMC has found many applications across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other domains. Areas of AI that rely on WMC include explainable AI, neural-symbolic AI, probabilistic programming, and statistical relational AI. WMC also has applications in bioinformatics, data mining, natural language processing, prognostics, and robotics. In this work, we are interested in revisiting the foundations of WMC and considering generalisations of some of the key definitions in the interest of conceptual clarity and practical efficiency. We begin by developing a measure-theoretic perspective on WMC, which suggests a new and more general way of defining the weights of an instance. This new representation can be as succinct as standard WMC but can also expand as needed to represent less-structured probability distributions. We demonstrate the performance benefits of the new format by developing a novel WMC encoding for Bayesian networks. We then show how existing WMC encodings for Bayesian networks can be transformed into this more general format and what conditions ensure that the transformation is correct (i.e., preserves the answer). Combining the strengths of the more flexible representation with the tricks used in existing encodings yields further efficiency improvements in Bayesian network probabilistic inference. Next, we turn our attention to the first-order setting. Here, we argue that the capabilities of practical model counting algorithms are severely limited by their inability to perform arbitrary recursive computations. To enable arbitrary recursion, we relax the restrictions that typically accompany domain recursion and generalise circuits (used to express a solution to a model counting problem) to graphs that are allowed to have cycles. These improvements enable us to find efficient solutions to counting fundamental structures such as injections and bijections that were previously unsolvable by any available algorithm. The second strand of this work is concerned with synthetic data generation. Testing algorithms across a wide range of problem instances is crucial to ensure the validity of any claim about one algorithm’s superiority over another. However, benchmarks are often limited and fail to reveal differences among the algorithms. First, we show how random instances of probabilistic logic programs (that typically use WMC algorithms for inference) can be generated using constraint programming. We also introduce a new constraint to control the independence structure of the underlying probability distribution and provide a combinatorial argument for the correctness of the constraint model. This model allows us to, for the first time, experimentally investigate inference algorithms on more than just a handful of instances. Second, we introduce a random model for WMC instances with a parameter that influences primal treewidth—the parameter most commonly used to characterise the difficulty of an instance. We show that the easy-hard-easy pattern with respect to clause density is different for algorithms based on dynamic programming and algebraic decision diagrams than for all other solvers. We also demonstrate that all WMC algorithms scale exponentially with respect to primal treewidth, although at differing rates

Morehead State University 1994 Alumni Directory

1994 Alumni Directory of Morehead State University.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/college_histories/1186/thumbnail.jp

Morehead State University Directory 1997

The 1997 Directory of Morehead State University.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/college_histories/1187/thumbnail.jp