The scientific evaluation of music content analysis systems: Valid empirical foundations for future real-world impact

We discuss the problem of music content analysis within the formal framework of experimental design

Machine Learning for Software Engineering: Models, Methods, and Applications

Machine Learning (ML) is the discipline that studies methods for automatically inferring models from data. Machine learning has been successfully applied in many areas of software engineering ranging from behaviour extraction, to testing, to bug fixing. Many more applications are yet be defined. However, a better understanding of ML methods, their assumptions and guarantees would help software engineers adopt and identify the appropriate methods for their desired applications. We argue that this choice can be guided by the models one seeks to infer. In this technical briefing, we review and reflect on the applications of ML for software engineering organised according to the models they produce and the methods they use. We introduce the principles of ML, give an overview of some key methods, and present examples of areas of software engineering benefiting from ML. We also discuss the open challenges for reaching the full potential of ML for software engineering and how ML can benefit from software engineering methods

ICE: Enabling Non-Experts to Build Models Interactively for Large-Scale Lopsided Problems

Quick interaction between a human teacher and a learning machine presents numerous benefits and challenges when working with web-scale data. The human teacher guides the machine towards accomplishing the task of interest. The learning machine leverages big data to find examples that maximize the training value of its interaction with the teacher. When the teacher is restricted to labeling examples selected by the machine, this problem is an instance of active learning. When the teacher can provide additional information to the machine (e.g., suggestions on what examples or predictive features should be used) as the learning task progresses, then the problem becomes one of interactive learning. To accommodate the two-way communication channel needed for efficient interactive learning, the teacher and the machine need an environment that supports an interaction language. The machine can access, process, and summarize more examples than the teacher can see in a lifetime. Based on the machine's output, the teacher can revise the definition of the task or make it more precise. Both the teacher and the machine continuously learn and benefit from the interaction. We have built a platform to (1) produce valuable and deployable models and (2) support research on both the machine learning and user interface challenges of the interactive learning problem. The platform relies on a dedicated, low-latency, distributed, in-memory architecture that allows us to construct web-scale learning machines with quick interaction speed. The purpose of this paper is to describe this architecture and demonstrate how it supports our research efforts. Preliminary results are presented as illustrations of the architecture but are not the primary focus of the paper

Quantum machine learning: a classical perspective

Recently, increased computational power and data availability, as well as algorithmic advances, have led machine learning techniques to impressive results in regression, classification, data-generation and reinforcement learning tasks. Despite these successes, the proximity to the physical limits of chip fabrication alongside the increasing size of datasets are motivating a growing number of researchers to explore the possibility of harnessing the power of quantum computation to speed-up classical machine learning algorithms. Here we review the literature in quantum machine learning and discuss perspectives for a mixed readership of classical machine learning and quantum computation experts. Particular emphasis will be placed on clarifying the limitations of quantum algorithms, how they compare with their best classical counterparts and why quantum resources are expected to provide advantages for learning problems. Learning in the presence of noise and certain computationally hard problems in machine learning are identified as promising directions for the field. Practical questions, like how to upload classical data into quantum form, will also be addressed.Comment: v3 33 pages; typos corrected and references adde

Machine learning-based prediction of a BOS reactor performance from operating parameters

A machine learning-based analysis was applied to process data obtained from a Basic Oxygen Steelmaking (BOS) pilot plant. The first purpose was to identify correlations between operating parameters and reactor performance, defined as rate of decarburization (dc/dt). Correlation analysis showed, as expected a strong positive correlation between the rate of decarburization (dc/dt) and total oxygen flow. On the other hand, the decarburization rate exhibited a negative correlation with lance height. Less obviously, the decarburization rate, also showed a positive correlation with temperature of the waste gas and CO2 content in the waste gas. The second purpose was to train the pilot-plant dataset and develop a neural network based regression to predict the decarburization rate. This was used to predict the decarburization rate in a BOS furnace in an actual manufacturing plant based on lance height and total oxygen flow. The performance was satisfactory with a coefficient of determination of 0.98, confirming that the trained model can adequately predict the variation in the decarburization rate (dc/dt) within BOS reactors. View Full-Tex