The field of Artificial Intelligence powered by Machine Learning and Deep Learning has gone through some phenomenal changes over the last decade. Starting off as just a pure academic and research-oriented domain, we have seen widespread industry adoption across diverse domains including retail, technology, healthcare, science and many more. More than often, the standard toolbox of machine learning, statistical or deep learning models remain the same. New models do come into existence like Capsule Networks, but industry adoption of the same usually takes several years. Hence, in the industry, the main focus of data science or machine learning is more ‘applied’ rather than theoretical and effective application of these models on the right data to solve complex real-world problems is of paramount importance.

A machine learning or deep learning model by itself consists of an algorithm which tries to learn latent patterns and relationships from data without hard-coding fixed rules. Hence, explaining how a model works to the business always poses its own set of challenges. There are some domains in the industry especially in the world of finance like insurance or banking where data scientists often end up having to use more traditional machine learning models (linear or tree-based). The reason being that model interpretability is very important for the business to explain each and every decision being taken by the model.However, this often leads to a sacrifice in performance. This is where complex models like ensembles and neural networks typically give us better and more accurate performance (since true relationships are rarely linear in nature).We, however, end up being unable to have proper interpretations for model decisions.

To address and talk about these gaps, I will take a conceptual yet hands-on approach where we will explore some of these challenges in-depth about explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and human interpretable machine learning and even showcase with some examples using state-of-the-art model interpretation frameworks in Python!

Feature selection is one of the most important processes for pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining problems. A successful feature selection method facilitates improvement of learning model performance and interpretability as well as reduces computational cost of the classifier by dimensionality reduction of the data. Feature selection is computationally expensive and becomes intractable even for few 100 features. This is a relevant problem because text, image and next generation sequence data all are inherently high dimensional. In this talk, I will discuss about few algorithms we have developed in last 5/6 years. Firstly, we will set the context of feature selection ,with some open issues , followed by definition and taxonomy. Which will take about 20 odd minutes. Then in next 20 minutes we will discuss couple of research efforts where we have improved feature selection for textual data and proposed a graph based mechanism to view the feature interaction. After the talk, participants will be appreciate the need of feature selection, the basic principles of feature selection algorithm and finally how they can start developing their own models

Data is the new oil and unstructured data, especially text, images and videos contain a wealth of information. However, due to the inherent complexity in processing and analyzing this data, people often refrain from spending extra time and effort in venturing out from structured datasets to analyze these unstructured sources of data, which can be a potential gold mine. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is all about leveraging tools, techniques and algorithms to process and understand natural language based unstructured data - text, speech and so on.

Being specialized in domains like computer vision and natural language processing is no longer a luxury but a necessity which is expected of any data scientist in today’s fast-paced world! With a hands-on and interactive approach, we will understand essential concepts in NLP along with extensive case- studies and hands-on examples to master state-of-the-art tools, techniques and frameworks for actually applying NLP to solve real- world problems. We leverage Python 3 and the latest and best state-of- the-art frameworks including NLTK, Gensim, SpaCy, Scikit-Learn, TextBlob, Keras and TensorFlow to showcase our examples. You will be able to learn a fair bit of machine learning as well as deep learning in the context of NLP during this bootcamp.

In our journey in this field, we have struggled with various problems, faced many challenges, and learned various lessons over time. This workshop is our way of giving back a major chunk of the knowledge we’ve gained in the world of text analytics and natural language processing, where building a fancy word cloud from a bunch of text documents is not enough anymore. You might have had questions like ‘What is the right technique to solve a problem?’, ‘How does text summarization really work?’ and ‘Which are the best frameworks to solve multi-class text categorization?’ among many other questions! Based on our prior knowledge and learnings from publishing a couple of books in this domain, this workshop should help readers avoid some of the pressing issues in NLP and learn effective strategies to master NLP.

The intent of this workshop is to make you a hero in NLP so that you can start applying NLP to solve real-world problems. We start from zero and follow a comprehensive and structured approach to make you learn all the essentials in NLP. We will be covering the following aspects during the course of this workshop with hands-on examples and projects!

• Basics of Natural Language and Python for NLP tasks
• Text Processing and Wrangling
• Text Understanding - POS, NER, Parsing
• Text Representation - BOW, Embeddings, Contextual Embeddings
• Text Similarity and Content Recommenders
• Text Clustering
• Topic Modeling
• Text Summarization
• Sentiment Analysis - Unsupervised & Supervised
• Text Classification with Machine Learning and Deep Learning
• Multi-class & Multi-Label Text Classification
• Deep Transfer Learning and it's promise
• Applying Deep Transfer Learning - Universal Sentence Encoders, ELMo and BERT for NLP tasks
• Generative Deep Learning for NLP
• Next Steps

With over 10 hands-on projects, the bootcamp will be packed with plenty of hands-on examples for you to go through, try out and practice and we will try to keep theory to a minimum considering the limited time we have and the amount of ground we want to cover. We hope at the end of this workshop you can takeaway some useful methodologies to apply for solving NLP problems in the future. We will be using Python to showcase all our examples.

Multi-Modalities

Having multiple modalities in a system gives more affordance to users and can contribute to a more robust system. Having more also allows for greater accessibility for users who work more effectively with certain modalities. Multiple modalities can be used as backup when certain forms of communication are not possible. This is especially true in the case of redundant modalities in which two or more modalities are used to communicate the same information. Certain combinations of modalities can add to the expression of a computer-human or human-computer interaction because the modalities each may be more effective at expressing one form or aspect of information than others. For example, MUST researchers are working on a personalized humanoid built and equipped with various types of input devices and sensors to allow them to receive information from humans, which are interchangeable and a standardized method of communication with the computer, affording practical adjustments to the user, providing a richer interaction depending on the context, and implementing robust system with features like; keyboard; pointing device; touchscreen; computer vision; speech recognition; motion, orientation etc.

There are six types of cooperation between modalities, and they help define how a combination or fusion of modalities work together to convey information more effectively.

• Equivalence: information is presented in multiple ways and can be interpreted as the same information
• Specialization: when a specific kind of information is always processed through the same modality
• Redundancy: multiple modalities process the same information
• Complimentarity: multiple modalities take separate information and merge it
• Transfer: a modality produces information that another modality consumes
• Concurrency: multiple modalities take in separate information that is not merged

Computer - Human Modalities

Computers utilize a wide range of technologies to communicate and send information to humans:

• Vision - computer graphics typically through a screen
• Audition - various audio outputs

Project Features

Adaptive: They MUST learn as information changes, and as goals and requirements evolve. They MUST resolve ambiguity and tolerate unpredictability. They MUST be engineered to feed on dynamic data in real time.

Interactive: They MUST interact easily with users so that those users can define their needs comfortably. They MUST interact with other processors, devices, services, as well as with people.

Iterative and Stateful: They MUST aid in defining a problem by asking questions or finding additional source input if a problem statement is ambiguous or incomplete. They MUST remember previous interactions in a process and return information that is suitable for the specific application at that point in time.

Contextual: They MUST understand, identify, and extract contextual elements such as meaning, syntax, time, location, appropriate domain, regulation, user profile, process, task and goal. They may draw on multiple sources of information, including both structured and unstructured digital information, as well as sensory inputs (visual, gestural, auditory, or sensor-provided).

Project Demos

Multi-Modal Interaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ8Gq2HWxiA

Gesture Detection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDSuCnC8Ei0

Speech Recognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AewM3TsjoBk

Assignment (Hands-on Challenge for Attendees)

Real-time multi-modal access control system for authorized access to work environment - All the key concepts and individual steps will be demonstrated and explained in this workshop, and the attendees need to customize the generic code or approach for this assignment or hands-on challenge.

Knowledge representation has been a research for many years in AI world and its continuing further too. Once knowledge is represented, reasoning from that extracted knowledge is done by various inferencing techniques. Initial knowledge bases were built using rules from domain experts and different inferencing techniques like Fuzzy inference, Bayesian inference were applied to extract reasoning from those knowledge bases. Semantic networks is another form of knowledge representation which can represent structured data like WordNet, DBpedia which solves problems in a specific domain by storing entities and relations among entities using onotologies.

Knowledge graph is another representation technique deeply researched in academia as well as used by businesses in production to augment search relevancy in information retrieval(Google knowledgegraph), improve recommender systems, semantic search applications and also Question answering problems.In this talk i will illustrate the benefits of semantic knowledge graph, how it differs from Semantic ontologies, different technologies involved in building knowledge graph, how i built one to analyse unstructured (twitter data) to discover hidden relationships from the twitter corpus. I will also show how Knowledge graph is data scientist's tool kit to discover hidden relationships and insights from unstructured data quickly.

In this talk i will show the technology and architecture used to determine entity reputation and entity co-occurence using Knowledge graph.Scoring an entity for reputation is useful in many Natural language processing tasks and applications such as Recommender systems.

Cleaning, preparing , transforming, exploring data and modeling it's what we hear all the time about data science, and these steps maybe the most important ones. But that's not the only thing about data science, in this talk you will learn how the combination of Apache Spark, Optimus, the Python ecosystem and Data Operations can form a whole framework for data science that will allow you and your company to go further, and beyond common sense and intuition to solve complex business problems.

Telematics data have a potential to unlock revenue of 1.5 trillion. Unfortunately this data has not been tapped by many users.

In this case study Karthik Thirumalai would discuss how we can use telematics data to identify driver behaviour and do preventive maintenance in automobile.

The following section describes Telco Domain Real-time advertising based on browsing use case in terms of :

• Potential business benefits to earn.
• Functional use case architecture depicted.
• Data sources (attributes required).
• Analytic to be performed,
• Output to be provided and target systems to be integrated with.

This use case is part of the monetization category. The goal of the use case is to provide a kind of DataMart to either Telecom business parties or external third parties sufficient, relevant and customized information to produce real-time advertising to Telecom end users. The customer targets are all Telecom network end-users.

The customization information to be delivered to advertise are based on several dimensions:

• Customer characteristics: demographic, telco profile.
• Customer usage: Telco products or any other interests.
• Customer time/space identification: location, zoning areas, usage time windows.

Use case requirements are detailed in the description below as “ Targeting method”

1. Search Engine Targeting:

The telco will use users web history to track what users are looking at and to gather information about them. When a user goes onto a website, their web browsing history will show information of the user, what he or she searched, where they are from, found by the ip address, and then build a profile around them, allowing Telco to easily target ads to the user more specifically.

3. Content and Contextual Targeting:

This is when advertisers can put ads in a specific place, based on the relative content present. This targeting method can be used across different mediums, for example in an article online, about purchasing homes would have an advert associated with this context, like an insurance ad. This is achieved through an ad matching system which analyses the contents on a page or finds keywords and presents a relevant advert, sometimes through pop-ups.

4. Technical Targeting

This form of targeting is associated with the user’s own software or hardware status. The advertisement is altered depending on the user’s available network bandwidth, for example if a user is on their mobile phone that has a limited connection, the ad delivery system will display a version of the ad that is smaller for a faster data transfer rate.

5. Time Targeting:

This type of targeting is centered around time and focuses on the idea of fitting in around people’s everyday lifestyles. For example, scheduling specific ads at a timeframe from 5-7pm, when the

6. Sociodemographic Targeting:

This form of targeting focuses on the characteristics of consumers, including their age, gender, and nationality. The idea is to target users specifically, using this data about them collected, for example, targeting a male in the age bracket of 18-24. The telco will use this form of targeting by showing advertisements relevant to the user’s individual demographic profile. this can show up in forms of banner ads, or commercial videos.

7. Geographical and Location-Based Targeting:

This type of advertising involves targeting different users based on their geographic location. IP addresses can signal the location of a user and can usually transfer the location through different cells.

8. Behavioral Targeting:

This form of targeted advertising is centered around the activity/actions of users and is more easily achieved on web pages. Information from browsing websites can be collected, which finds patterns in users search history.

9. Retargeting:

Is where advertising uses behavioral targeting to produce ads that follow you after you have looked or purchased are a particular item. Retargeting is where advertisers use this information to ‘follow you’ and try and grab your attention so you do not forget.

10. Opinions, attitudes, interests, and hobbies:

Psychographic segmentation also includes opinions on gender and politics, sporting and recreational activities, views on the environment and arts and cultural issues.

There are many attempts to classify and structure the various AI techniques in the internet produced by a variety of sources with specific interests in this emerging market and the fact that some new technologies make use of multiple techniques does not make the task easier to provide an easy, top-down access and guideline through AI for business decision makers. Most sources structure the AI techniques by their core ability (e.g. supervised vs. unsupervised learning) but even this sometimes controversial (e.g. genetic algorithms). The approach taken here is to find groups of use cases that represent similar problem-solving strategies (just like distinguishing "search" from "sort" without reference to a particular technique like "Huffman search" or "qsort"). Of course, most AI techniques are combinations but with a different focus.

There are many different sorting criteria to cluster use cases and these criteria determine how well and if at all the above objectives may be achieved. The target is to find “natural” classes of problems that in an abstract way can be applied to all the corresponding use cases. Since the clustering is used to determine which AI techniques are applicable, the classes should correspond to the typical characteristics of AI technique.

Future of Technology covered trends in technology across the globe and innovation changing the future

Abstract:

How to accurately detect Key Performance Indicator (KPI) anomalies is a critical issue in cellular network management. In this talk I shall introduce CNR(Cellular Network Regression) a unified performance anomaly detection framework for KPI time-series data. CNR realizes simple statistical modelling and machine-learning-based regression for anomaly detection; in particular, it specifically takes into account seasonality and trend components as well as supports automated prediction model retraining based on prior detection results. I demonstrate here how CNR detects two types of anomalies of practical interest, namely sudden drops and correlation changes, based on a large-scale real-world KPI dataset collected from a metropolitan LTE network. I explore various prediction algorithms and feature selection strategies, and provide insights into how regression analysis can make automated and accurate KPI anomaly detection viable.

Index Terms—anomaly detection, NPAR (Network Performance Analysis)

1. INTRODUCTION

The continuing advances of cellular network technologies make high-speed mobile Internet access a norm. However, cellular networks are large and complex by nature, and hence production cellular networks often suffer from performance degradations or failures due to various reasons, such as back- ground interference, power outages, malfunctions of network elements, and cable disconnections. It is thus critical for network administrators to detect and respond to performance anomalies of cellular networks in real time, so as to maintain network dependability and improve subscriber service quality. To pinpoint performance issues in cellular networks, a common practice adopted by network administrators is to monitor a diverse set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which provide time-series data measurements that quantify specific performance aspects of network elements and resource usage. The main task of network administrators is to identify any KPI anomalies, which refer to unexpected patterns that occur at a single time instant or over a prolonged time period.

Today’s network diagnosis still mostly relies on domain experts to manually configure anomaly detection rules such a practice is error-prone, labour intensive, and inflexible. Recent studies propose to use (supervised) machine learning for anomaly detection in cellular networks . ellular networks, a common practice adopted by network administrators is to monitor a diverse set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which provide time-series data measurements that quantify specific performance aspects of network elements and resource usage. The main task of network administrators is to identify any KPI anomalies, which refer to unexpected patterns that occur at a single time instant or over a prolonged time period.

Today’s network diagnosis still mostly relies on domain experts to manually configure anomaly detection rules such a practice is error-prone, labour intensive, and inflexible. Recent studies propose to use (supervised) machine learning for anomaly detection in cellular networks .

Introduction

“Alexa, launch Netflix!”

No longer limited to providing basic phone and Internet service, the telecom industry is at the epicentre of technological growth, led by its mobile and broadband services in the Internet of Things (IoT) era.This growth is expected to continue,The driver for this growth? Artificial intelligence (AI).

Artificial Intelligent applications are revolutionizing the way telecoms operate, optimize and provide service to their customers

Today’s communications service providers (CSPs) face increasing customer demands for higher quality services and better customer experiences (CX). Telecoms are addressing these opportunities by leveraging the vast amounts of data collected over the years from their massive customer base. This data is culled from devices, networks, mobile applications, geolocations, detailed customer profiles, services usage and billing data.

Telecoms are harnessing the power of AI to process and analyse these huge volumes of Big Data in order to extract actionable insights to provide better customer experiences, improve operations, and increase revenue through new products and services.

With Gartner forecasting that 20.4 billion connected devices will be in use worldwide by 2020, more and more CSPs are jumping on the bandwagon, recognizing the value of artificial intelligence applications in the telecommunications industry.

Forward-thinking CSPs have focused their efforts on four main areas where AI has already made significant inroads in delivering tangible business results: Network optimization, preventive maintenance, Virtual Assistants, and robotic process automation (RPA)

Network optimisation

AI is essential for helping CSPs build self-optimizing networks (SONs), where operators have the ability to automatically optimize network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone. Artificial intelligence applications in the telecommunications industry use advanced algorithms to look for patterns within the data, enabling telecoms to both detect and predict network anomalies, and allowing operators to proactively fix problems before customers are negatively impacted.

Some popular AI solutions for telecoms are ZeroStack’s ZBrain Cloud Management, which analyses private cloud telemetry storage and use for improved capacity planning, upgrades and general management; Aria Networks, an AI-based network optimization solution that counts a growing number of Tier-1 telecom companies as customers, and Sedona Systems’ NetFusion, which optimizes the routing of traffic and speed delivery of 5G-enabled services like AR/VR. Nokia launched its own machine learning-based AVA platform, a cloud-based network management solution to better manage capacity planning, and to predict service degradations on cell sites up to seven days in advance.

Predictive maintenance

AI-driven predictive analytics are helping telecoms provide better services by utilizing data, sophisticated algorithms and machine learning techniques to predict future results based on historical data. This means telecoms can use data-driven insights to can monitor the state of equipment, predict failure based on patterns, and proactively fix problems with communications hardware, such as cell towers, power lines, data centre servers, and even set-top boxes in customers’ homes.

In the short-term, network automation and intelligence will enable better root cause analysis and prediction of issues. Long term, these technologies will underpin more strategic goals, such as creating new customer experiences and dealing efficiently with business demands. An innovative solution by AT&Tis using AI to support its maintenance procedures: the company is testing a drone to expand its LTE network coverage and to utilize the analysis of video data captured by drones for tech support and infrastructure maintenance of its cell towers.Preventive maintenance is not only effective on the network side, but on the customer’s side as well.Dutch telecom KPN analyses the notes generated by its call centre agents, and uses the insights generated to make changes to the interactive voice response (IVR) system.

Virtual Assistants

Conversational AI platforms — known as virtual assistants — have learned to automate and scale one-on-one conversations so efficiently that they are projected to cut business expenses by as much as $8 billion in the next five years. Telecoms have turned to virtual assistants to help contend with the massive number of support requests for installation, set up, troubleshooting and maintenance, which often overwhelm customer support centre Using AI, telecoms can implement self-service capabilities that instruct customers how to install and operate their own devices.

Vodafone introduced its new chatbot — TOBi to handle a range of customer service-type questions. The chatbotscales responses to simple customer queries, thereby delivering the speed that customers demand. Nokia’s virtual assistant MIKA suggests solutions for network issues, leading to a 20% to 40% improvement in first-time resolution.

Robotic process automation (RPA)

CSPs all have vast numbers of customers and an endless volume of daily transactions, each susceptible to human error. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on AI. RPA can bring greater efficiency to telecommunications functions by allowing telecoms to more easily manage their back office operations and the large volumes of repetitive and rules-based processes. By streamlining execution of once complex, labor-intensive and time-consuming processes such as billing, data entry, workforce management and order fulfillment, RPA frees CSP staff for higher value-add work.

According to a survey by Deloitte, 40% of Telecom, Media and Tech executives say they have garnered “substantial” benefits from cognitive technologies, with 25% having invested $10 million or more. More than three-quarters expect cognitive computing to “substantially transform” their companies within the next three years.

Summary

Artificial intelligence applications in the telecommunications industry is increasingly helping CSPs manage, optimize and maintain not only their infrastructure, but their customer support operations as well. Network optimization, predictive maintenance, virtual assistants and RPA are examples of use cases where AI has impacted the telecom industry, delivering an enhanced CX and added value for the enterprise overall.

The problem of network behavior prediction has been an ongoing study by researchers for quite a while now. Network behavior typically exhibits a complex sequential pattern and is often difficult to predict. Nowadays there are several techniques to predict the degradation in Network KPIs like throughput, latency etc., using various machine learning techniques like Deep Neural Networks, where the initial layers have learnt to map the raw features like performance counter measurements, weather, system configuration details etc into a feature space where classification by the final layers can be performed.

Given the initial number of counters( which constitutes the dimensions) is substantial (more than 2000 in number) the problem requires huge amount of data to train the Deep Neural Networks. Often this needs resources and time and more importantly this requires provisioning of huge amount of data for every trial. Given each node generates huge amount of data ( data on every 2000 counters generated at 15 minutes interval for each of 6 cells in an eNodeB) and the data needs to be transported across several hundred of eNodeBs to one central data center, it requires a very fat data pipe and consequently huge investment to enable a predictive fault prediction apparatus across the network.

The alernative is to have a compute infrastructure at the node and take the intelligence at the edge. However the challenge is given the huge amount of data generated in a single node having a compute at each node was proving to be expensive. Nowadays this compute requirement at node could be reduced through use of transfer learning. However the other challenge is on sharing the intelligence and developing a system which is collectively intelligent across nodes.

Network topology, climate features and user patterns vary across regions and service providers and hence an unique model is often necesarry to serve the node. However in order to deal with unseen patterns intelligence from other nodes can be useful which leads us to building an global model which again leads to the challenge of fat data pipeline requirement which makes it commercially less attractive.

In order to get around this challenge, an combination of federated learning is used in combination with transfer learning.

This presentation details such deep learning architectures which combines federated learning with transfer learning to enable construction and updation of Global models which imbibes intelligence from nodes but can be constructed by a consensus mechanism whereby weights and changes to weights of local models are shared to global. Also the local models are periodically updated once global model update iteration is complete. Further updation of local models is only done in final layers and initial layers are freezed. This reduces the compute requirement at node also...

The above principles are being implemented as First of a kind implementation and has prooved to be a success across multiple customers in delivering a compelling ML enabled fault prediction and self-healing mechanism but keeping the investments in infrastructure lower than would have been required in traditional Deep Learning architectures

This talk will specifically detail the leverage of above principles of federated and transfer learning on LSTMs..