Connectionists: Evolutionary AI site; COVID-19 intervention demo

[Risto Miikkulainen]

The AI research group at Sentient has moved to Cognizant Technology
solutions, and we have a new website, https://evolution.ml. In
particular, the earlier content, such as the video interviews with 17
academic and industry leaders on "The Future of AI", is there, as well
as the "Evolution is the New Deep Learning" microsite.

There is also a new site on decision making (https://evolution.ml/esp),
featuring research on "Evolutionary Surrogate-assisted Prescription."
The goal is to extend AI from predicting what will happen to
prescribing what we should do about it.  The idea is to first train a
predictor neural network through supervised learning, and then use it
as a surrogate to evolve a prescriptor neural network to make good
decisions. The site features papers, visualizations, and demos on
various game domains (including FlappyBird!) showing how this approach
can be sample-efficient, reliable, and safe in sequential decision
tasks.

A major new part of the site focuses on a COVID-19 application
(https://evolution.ml/esp/npi): It demonstrates how the same
technology can be used to model the potential effects of
non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) strategies to contain and
mitigate the pandemic.  The predictor is trained with historical data
on the number of cases and the NPIs over time in various countries,
i.e. restrictions on schools and workplaces, public events and
gatherings, and transportation. A Pareto front of prescriptors is then
evolved to discover the best tradeoffs between minimizing cases and
restrictions.  To illustrate this principle, the site includes an
interactive demo: you can explore how, given your preferred tradeoff,
the pandemic could be contained and mitigated in different countries.

We invite you to explore the "evolution.ml" site---and perhaps also
bring your own expertise in AI to help deal with COVID-19!