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Today, open data platforms host a wide and heterogeneous catalog of datasets. However, these datasets are often neglected in Machine Learning (ML) and other related tasks. This mainly happens because there are few available open data catalogs specialized in ML applications and because it is often unclear whether Machine Learning algorithms would be adequate and well performing on such datasets. Therefore, several open datasets go unused while they could be leveraged by the ML community to explain, evaluate, and challenge existing methods on real open data. For instance, these real-world data could be used by professors teaching ML courses, by students taking these courses, by researchers testing current and novel ML approaches, and possibly to promote the intersection of open data, ML and public policy. In this talk we will show you how we are tackling this issue working on datasets from data.gouv.fr (DGF), the French open data government platform. We aim to answer the question of what makes a dataset suitable and well performing for Machine Learning tasks by leveraging open source tools. Our goal is to establish a first small empirical assessment of the characteristics of a dataset (size, balance of its categorical variables and so on) that make it a "good fit" for Machine Learning algorithms. Specifically, we first manually select an adequate subset of datasets from DGF. Then we perform a statistic profiling on each of these datasets. Thirdly, we automatically train and validate a set of ML algorithms on them and we cluster the datasets according to their evaluation results. These steps help us to better understand the nature of each dataset and thus determine which ones seem suitable for ML applications. Based on these datasets, and inspired by existing resources, we build the first version of a catalog of open datasets for ML. We hope that this platform will be a first stepping stone towards the reuse of open datasets in Machine Learning contexts.

Recent revelations concerning data firm Cambridge Analytica's illegitimate use of the data of millions of Facebook users highlights the ethical and, relatedly, legal issues arising from the use of machine learning techniques. Cambridge Analytica is, or was – the revelations brought about its demise - a firm that used machine learning processes to try to influence elections in the US and elsewhere by, for instance, targeting 'vulnerable' voters in marginal seats with political advertising. Of course, there is nothing new about political candidates and parties employing firms to engage in political advertising on their behalf, but if a data firm has access to the personal information of millions of voters, and is skilled in the use of machine learning techniques, then it can develop detailed, fine-grained voter profiles that enable political actors to reach a whole new level of manipulative influence over voters. My focus in this paper is not with the highly publicised ethical and legal issues arising from Cambridge Analytic's activities but rather with some important ethical issues arising from the use of machine learning techniques that have not received the attention and analysis that they deserve. I focus on three areas in which machine learning techniques are used or, it is claimed, should be used, and which give rise to problems at the interface of law and ethics (or law and morality, I use the terms "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably). The three areas are profiling and predictive policing (Saunders et al. 2016), legal adjudication (Zeleznikow, 2017), and machines' compliance with legally enshrined moral principles (Arkin 2010). I note that here, as elsewhere, new and emerging technologies are developing rapidly making it difficult to predict what might or might not be able to be achieved in the future. For this reason, I have adopted the conservative stance of restricting my ethical analysis to existing machine learning techniques and applications rather than those that are the object of speculation or even informed extrapolation (Mittelstadt et al. 2015). This has the consequence that what I might regard as a limitation of machine learning techniques, e.g. in respect of predicting novel outcomes or of accommodating moral principles, might be thought by others to be merely a limitation of currently available techniques. After all, has not the history of AI recently shown the naysayers to have been proved wrong? Certainly, AI has seen some impressive results, including the construction of computers that can defeat human experts in complex games, such as chess and Go (Silver et al. 2017), and others that can do a better job than human medical experts at identifying the malignancy of moles and the like (Esteva et al. 2017). However, since by definition future machine learning techniques and applications are not yet with us the general claim that current limitations will be overcome cannot at this time be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of empirical evidence.

Machine learning (ML) is changing virtually every aspect of our lives. Today ML algorithms accomplish tasks that until recently only expert humans could perform. As it relates to finance, this is the most exciting time to adopt a disruptive technology that will transform how everyone invests for generations. Readers will learn how to structure Big data in a way that is amenable to ML algorithms; how to conduct research with ML algorithms on that data; how to use supercomputing methods; how to backtest your discoveries while avoiding false positives. The book addresses real-life problems faced by practitioners on a daily basis, and explains scientifically sound solutions using math, supported by code and examples. Readers become active users who can test the proposed solutions in their particular setting. Written by a recognized expert and portfolio manager, this book will equip investment professionals with the groundbreaking tools needed to succeed in modern finance.

Nowadays, we are surrounded by electric appliances. Either at home by the washing machine, kettle, or oven, or work by the computer, cellphone, or printer. Such devices help us daily, but their popularization increased the energy consumption to concerning values. In an attempt to reduce energy consumption, governments started enforcing policies regarding energy education to teach homeowners how to reduce energy wastage on the demand side. One of those policies was the deployment of smart meters, which allow the consumer to know how much energy is being consumed at any given time through a display on the household energy meter. Even though this measure was well received, the studies show that the best results in energy conservation are obtained through real-time appliance level feedback. To get such feedback, one can either measure every outlet in a household, which is unviable for a broad deployment solution, or disaggregate the energy recorded by the smart meter. NILM or Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring is the name we give to the second option where we use the aggregated readings of a household to find the energy consumed by each appliance. There were many proposals to solve NILM ranging from HMMs to GSP, where deep learning models showed remarkable results, obtaining state-of-the-art results. With the intent to create a complete NILM solution, Withus partnered with the University of Aveiro and proposed this dissertation. The initial objective was to develop a machine learning model to solve NILM. Still, during the background analysis, we found the need to create a new dataset which led to the expansion of the initial proposal to include the dataset preprocessing and conversion. Regarding NILM, we proposed three new deep learning models: a convolutional neural network with residual blocks, a recurrent neural network, and a multilayer perceptron that uses discrete wavelet transforms as features. These models went through multiple iterations, being evaluated first in the simpler ON/OFF classification task and later ...

This paper highlights how machine learning can help explain terrorism. We note that even though machine learning has a reputation for black box prediction, in fact, it can provide deeply nuanced explanations of terrorism. Moreover, machine learning is not sensitive to the sometimes heroic statistical assumptions necessary when parametric econometrics is applied to the study of terrorism. This increases the reliability of explanations while adding contextual nuance that captures the flavor of individualized case analysis. Nevertheless, this approach also gives us a sense of the replicability of results. We, therefore, suggest that it further expands the role of science in terrorism research.