Regulatory Markets: The Future of AI Governance

Appropriately regulating artificial intelligence is an increasingly urgent policy challenge. Legislatures and regulators lack the specialized knowledge required to best translate public demands into legal requirements. Overreliance on industry self-regulation fails to hold producers and users of AI systems accountable to democratic demands. Regulatory markets, in which governments require the targets of regulation to purchase regulatory services from a private regulator, are proposed. This approach to AI regulation could overcome the limitations of both command-and-control regulation and self-regulation. Regulatory market could enable governments to establish policy priorities for the regulation of AI, whilst relying on market forces and industry R&D efforts to pioneer the methods of regulation that best achieve policymakers' stated objectives

A Deep Learning Approach for Multi-View Engagement Estimation of Children in a Child-Robot Joint Attention Task

International audienceIn this work we tackle the problem of child engagement estimation while children freely interact with a robot in a friendly, room-like environment. We propose a deep-based multi-view solution that takes advantage of recent developments in human pose detection. We extract the child's pose from different RGB-D cameras placed regularly in the room, fuse the results and feed them to a deep neural network trained for classifying engagement levels. The deep network contains a recurrent layer, in order to exploit the rich temporal information contained in the pose data. The resulting method outperforms a number of baseline classifiers, and provides a promising tool for better automatic understanding of a child's attitude, interest and attention while cooperating with a robot. The goal is to integrate this model in next generation social robots as an attention monitoring tool during various Child Robot Interaction (CRI) tasks both for Typically Developed (TD) children and children affected by autism (ASD)

Change in Emiliania huxleyi virus assemblage diversity but not in host genetic composition during an ocean acidification mesocosm experiment

Effects of elevated pCO2 on Emiliania huxleyi genetic diversity and the viruses that infect E. huxleyi (EhVs) have been investigated in large volume enclosures in a Norwegian fjord. Triplicate enclosures were bubbled with air enriched with CO2 to 760 ppmv whilst the other three enclosures were bubbled with air at ambient pCO2; phytoplankton growth was initiated by the addition of nitrate and phosphate. E. huxleyi was the dominant coccolithophore in all enclosures, but no difference in genetic diversity, based on DGGE analysis using primers specific to the calcium binding protein gene (gpa) were detected in any of the treatments. Chlorophyll concentrations and primary production were lower in the three elevated pCO2 treatments than in the ambient treatments. However, although coccolithophores numbers were reduced in two of the high-pCO2 treatments; in the third, there was no suppression of coccolithophores numbers, which were very similar to the three ambient treatments. In contrast, there was considerable variation in genetic diversity in the EhVs, as determined by analysis of the major capsid protein (mcp) gene. EhV diversity was much lower in the high-pCO2 treatment enclosure that did not show inhibition of E. huxleyi growth. Since virus infection is generally implicated as a major factor in terminating phytoplankton blooms, it is suggested that no study of the effect of ocean acidification in phytoplankton can be complete if it does not include an assessment of viruses

High-uniformity atomic layer deposition of superconducting niobium nitride thin films for quantum photonic integration

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) has been identified as a promising growth method for high-uniformity superconducting thin films for superconducting quantum photonic applications, offering superior uniformity, thickness control and conformality to techniques such as reactive sputtering. The potential scalability of ALD makes this method especially appealing for fabrication of superconducting nanowires and resonators across large areas. We report on the growth of highly uniform superconducting NbN thin films via plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) with radio frequency (RF) substrate biasing, on a 200 mm (8-inch) Si wafer, specifically for superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) applications. Niobium nitride films were grown using (tert-butylimido)-tris(diethylamido)-niobium(V) (TBTDEN) precursor and a H2/Ar plasma. The superconducting properties of a variable thickness series of films (5 – 30 nm) show critical temperature (Tc) of 13.5 K approaching bulk thickness (30 nm) with low suppression down to the ultrathin regime (5 nm) with Tc > 11 K. Tc across the 200 mm wafer with 8 nm thick NbN, measured in 15 mm intervals, exhibits minimal variation (< 7%). Microbridge structures fabricated on 8 nm thick NbN films also exhibit high critical current densities (Jc), > 10 MA/cm2 at 2.6 K. PEALD could therefore be a pivotal technique in enabling large-scale fabrication of integrated quantum photonic devices across a variety of applications

Impact of early enteral versus parenteral nutrition on mortality in patients requiring mechanical ventilation and catecholamines: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (NUTRIREA-2)

BACKGROUND: Nutritional support is crucial to the management of patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) and the most commonly prescribed treatment in intensive care units (ICUs). International guidelines consistently indicate that enteral nutrition (EN) should be preferred over parenteral nutrition (PN) whenever possible and started as early as possible. However, no adequately designed study has evaluated whether a specific nutritional modality is associated with decreased mortality. The primary goal of this trial is to assess the hypothesis that early first-line EN, as compared to early first-line PN, decreases day 28 all-cause mortality in patients receiving IMV and vasoactive drugs for shock. METHODS/DESIGN: The NUTRIREA-2 study is a multicenter, open-label, parallel-group, randomized controlled trial comparing early PN versus early EN in critically ill patients requiring IMV for an expected duration of at least 48 hours, combined with vasoactive drugs, for shock. Patients will be allocated at random to first-line PN for at least 72 hours or to first-line EN. In both groups, nutritional support will be started within 24 hours after IMV initiation. Calorie targets will be 20 to 25 kcal/kg/day during the first week, then 25 to 30 kcal/kg/day thereafter. Patients receiving PN may be switched to EN after at least 72 hours in the event of shock resolution (no vasoactive drugs for 24 consecutive hours and arterial lactic acid level below 2 mmol/L). On day 7, all patients receiving PN and having no contraindications to EN will be switched to EN. In both groups, supplemental PN may be added to EN after day 7 in patients with persistent intolerance to EN and inadequate calorie intake. We plan to recruit 2,854 patients at 44 participating ICUs. DISCUSSION: The NUTRIREA-2 study is the first large randomized controlled trial designed to assess the hypothesis that early EN improves survival compared to early PN in ICU patients. Enrollment started on 22 March 2013 and is expected to end in November 2015. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01802099 (registered 27 February 2013)