Active and Adaptive Sequential Learning
A framework is introduced for actively and adaptively solving a sequence of machine learning problems, which are changing in bounded manner from one time step to the next. An algorithm is developed that actively queries the labels of the most informative samples from an unlabeled data pool, and that adapts to the change by utilizing the information acquired in the previous steps. Our analysis shows that the proposed active learning algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent achieves a near-optimal excess risk performance for maximum likelihood estimation. Furthermore, an estimator of the change in the learning problems using the active learning samples is constructed, which provides an adaptive sample size selection rule that guarantees the excess risk is bounded for sufficiently large number of time steps. Experiments with synthetic and real data are presented to validate our algorithm and theoretical results. …

Multiple Team Formation Problem (MTFP)
Allocating of people in multiple projects is an important issue considering the efficiency of groups from the point of view of social interaction. In this paper, based on previous works, the Multiple Team Formation Problem (MTFP) based on sociometric techniques is formulated as an optimization problem taking into account the social interaction among team members. To solve the resulting optimization problem we propose a Genetic Algorithm due to the NP-hard nature of the problem. The social cohesion is an important issue that directly impacts the productivity of the work environment. So, maintaining an appropriate level of cohesion keeps a group together, which will bring positive impacts on the results of a project. The aim of the proposal is to ensure the best possible effectiveness from the point of view of social interaction. In this way, the presented algorithm serves as a decision-making tool for managers to build teams of people in multiple projects. In order to analyze the performance of the proposed method, computational experiments with benchmarks were performed and compared with the exhaustive method. The results are promising and show that the algorithm generally obtains near-optimal results within a short computational time. …

Maple
Maple combines the world’s most powerful math engine with an interface that makes it extremely easy to analyze, explore, visualize, and solve mathematical problems. …

Proximal Alternating Direction Network
Deep learning models have gained great success in many real-world applications. However, most existing networks are typically designed in heuristic manners, thus lack of rigorous mathematical principles and derivations. Several recent studies build deep structures by unrolling a particular optimization model that involves task information. Unfortunately, due to the dynamic nature of network parameters, their resultant deep propagation networks do \emph{not} possess the nice convergence property as the original optimization scheme does. This paper provides a novel proximal unrolling framework to establish deep models by integrating experimentally verified network architectures and rich cues of the tasks. More importantly, we \emph{prove in theory} that 1) the propagation generated by our unrolled deep model globally converges to a critical-point of a given variational energy, and 2) the proposed framework is still able to learn priors from training data to generate a convergent propagation even when task information is only partially available. Indeed, these theoretical results are the best we can ask for, unless stronger assumptions are enforced. Extensive experiments on various real-world applications verify the theoretical convergence and demonstrate the effectiveness of designed deep models. …