Microsoft (India)

Change detection has long been used for various tasks. With advancements in robotic systems and computer vision, change detection techniques can be further explored for diverse applications. Current state-of-the-art methods primarily use either satellite images or street-level images to detect changes. However, the techniques used for these two types of images differ substantially, though their core objective remains identical.We introduce a spectral-temporal attention network capable of detecting changes in both satellite and street-level images across multiple temporal instances. Additionally, we present an indoor environmental dataset featuring significantly more frequent changes. We analyze the impact of temporal and spatial domain shifts on the performance of various methods and demonstrate that performing attention in the spectral domain not only enhances overall performance but also increases robustness against spatial domain shifts.

A critical capability in the development of complex human-AI collaborative systems is the ability of AI agents to understand the natural language and perform tasks accordingly.

Automated insight generation is a common tactic for helping knowledge workers, such as data scientists, to quickly understand the potential value of new and unfamiliar data. Unfortunately, automated insights produced by large-language models can generate code that does not correctly correspond (or align) to the insight. In this paper, we leverage the semantic knowledge of large language models to generate targeted and insightful questions about data and the corresponding code to answer those questions. Then through an empirical study on data from Open-WikiTable, we show that embeddings can be effectively used for filtering out semantically unaligned pairs of question and code. Additionally, we found that generating questions and code together yields more diverse questions.

The proliferation of big data and analytic workloads has driven the need for cloud compute and cluster-based job processing. With Apache Spark, users can process terabytes of data at ease with hundreds of parallel executors. Providing low latency access to Spark clusters and sessions is a challenging problem due to the large overheads of cluster creation and session startup. In this paper, we introduce Intelligent Pooling, a system for proactively provisioning compute resources to combat the aforementioned overheads. Our system (1) predicts usage patterns using an innovative hybrid Machine Learning (ML) model with low latency and high accuracy; and (2) optimizes the pool size dynamically to meet customer demand while reducing extraneous COGS. The proposed system auto-tunes its hyper-parameters to balance between performance and operational cost with minimal to no engineering input. Evaluated using large-scale production data, Intelligent Pooling achieves up to 43% reduction in cluster idle time compared to static pooling when targeting 99% pool hit rate. Currently deployed in production, Intelligent Pooling is on track to save tens of million dollars in COGS per year as compared to traditional pre-provisioned pools.

To construct an informative and comprehensive Chapter 9 on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector, it's crucial to delve into the multifaceted challenges and opportunities this technology presents. The chapter aims to navigate through the technical, organizational, and regulatory hurdles and the nuanced market dynamics that shape the landscape of AI adoption within the sector. This exploration is not just about highlighting the hurdles but also about showcasing the innovative strides being made in overcoming these challenges, ensuring a balanced narrative that reflects both the potential and the pitfalls of AI in BFSI.

Query auto-completion (QAC) aims at suggesting plausible completions for a given query prefix. Traditionally, QAC systems have leveraged tries curated from historical query logs to suggest most popular completions. In this context, there are two specific scenarios that are difficult to handle for any QAC system: short prefixes (which are inherently ambiguous) and unseen prefixes. Recently, personalized Natural Language Generation (NLG) models have been proposed to leverage previous session queries as context for addressing these two challenges. However, such NLG models suffer from two drawbacks: (1) some of the previous session queries could be noisy and irrelevant to the user intent for the current prefix, and (2) NLG models cannot directly incorporate historical query popularity. This motivates us to propose a novel NLG model for QAC, Trie-NLG, which jointly leverages popularity signals from trie and personalization signals from previous session queries. We train the Trie-NLG model by augmenting the prefix with rich context comprising of recent session queries and top trie completions. This simple modeling approach overcomes the limitations of trie-based and NLG-based approaches, and leads to state-of-the-art performance. We evaluate the Trie-NLG model using two large QAC datasets. On average, our model achieves huge ∼57% and ∼14% boost

ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot, offers coherent and useful replies based on analysis of large volumes of data. In this article, leading academics, scientists, distinguish researchers and engineers discuss the transformative effects of ChatGPT on modern education. This research discusses ChatGPT capabilities and its use in the education sector, identifies potential concerns and challenges. Our preliminary evaluation shows that ChatGPT perform differently in different subject areas including finance, coding, maths, and general public queries. While ChatGPT has the ability to help educators by creating instructional content, offering suggestions and acting as an online educator to learners by answering questions, transforming education through smartphones and IoT gadgets, and promoting group work, there are clear drawbacks in its use, such as the possibility of producing inaccurate or false data and circumventing duplicate content (plagiarism) detectors where originality is essential. The often reported “hallucinations” within GenerativeAI in general, and also relevant for ChatGPT, can render its use of limited benefit where accuracy is essential. What ChatGPT lacks is a stochastic measure to help provide sincere and sensitive communication with its users. Academic regulations and evaluation practices used in educational institutions need to be updated, should ChatGPT be used as a tool in education. To address the transformative effects of ChatGPT on the learning environment, educating teachers and students alike about its capabilities and limitations will be crucial.