TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Quick interaction between a human teacher and a learning machine presents numerous benefits and challenges when working with web-scale data. The human teacher guides the machine towards accomplishing the task of interest. The learning machine leverages big data to find examples that maximize the training value of its interaction with the teacher. When the teacher is restricted to labeling examples selected by the machine, this problem is an instance of active learning. When the teacher can provide additional information to the machine (e.g., suggestions on what examples or predictive features should be used) as the learning task progresses, then the problem becomes one of interactive learning. To accommodate the two-way communication channel needed for efficient interactive learning, the teacher and the machine need an environment that supports an interaction language. The machine can access, process, and summarize more examples than the teacher can see in a lifetime. Based on the machine’s output, the teacher can revise the definition of the task or make it more precise. Both the teacher and the machine continuously learn and benefit from the interaction. We have built a platform to (1) produce valuable and deployable models and (2) support research on both the machine learning and user interface challenges of the interactive learning problem. The platform relies on a dedicated, low-latency, distributed, in-memory architecture that allows us to construct web-scale learning machines with quick interaction speed. The purpose of this paper is to describe this architecture and demonstrate how it supports our research efforts. Preliminary results are presented as illustrations of the architecture but are not the primary focus of the paper.

SOLUTION: ICE: Enabling Non-Experts to Build Models Interactively for Large-Scale Lopsided Problems

PROBLEM: This paper deals with the problem of esti­ mating the probability that one event was a cause of another in a given scenario. Us­ ing structural-semantical definitions of the probabilities of necessary or sufficient cau­ sation (or both), we show how to optimally bound these quantities from data obtained in experimental and observational studies, making minimal assumptions concerning the data-generating process. In particular, we strengthen the results of Pearl (1999) by weakening the data-generation assumptions and deriving theoretically sharp bounds on the probabilities of causation. These results delineate precisely how empirical data can be used both in settling questions of attribution and in solving attribution-related problems of decision making.

SOLUTION: Probabilities of Causation: Bounds and Identification

PROBLEM: Observable operator models (OOMs) and related models are one of the most important and powerful tools for modeling and analyzing stochastic systems. They can exactly describe dynamics of finite-rank systems, and be efficiently learned from data by moment based algorithms. Almost all OOM learning algorithms are developed based on the assumption of equilibrium data which is very difficult to guarantee in real life, especially for complex processes with large time scales. In this paper, we derive a nonequilibrium learning algorithm for OOMs, which dismisses this assumption and can effectively extract the equilibrium dynamics of a system from nonequilibrium observation data. In addition, we propose binless OOMs for the application of nonequilibrium learning to continuous-valued systems. In comparison with the other OOMs with continuous observations, binless OOMs can achieve consistent estimation from nonequilibrium data with only linear computational complexity.

SOLUTION:
Spectral learning of dynamic systems from nonequilibrium data∗