Amazon.com

About: Amazon.com is a company organization based out in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Service (business) & Service provider. The organization has 13363 authors who have published 17317 publications receiving 266589 citations.

MultiWOZ 2.1: A Consolidated Multi-Domain Dialogue Dataset with State Corrections and State Tracking Baselines.

Abstract: MultiWOZ 2.0 (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is a recently released multi-domain dialogue dataset spanning 7 distinct domains and containing over 10,000 dialogues. Though immensely useful and one of the largest resources of its kind to-date, MultiWOZ 2.0 has a few shortcomings. Firstly, there are substantial noise in the dialogue state annotations and dialogue utterances which negatively impact the performance of state-tracking models. Secondly, follow-up work (Lee et al., 2019) has augmented the original dataset with user dialogue acts. This leads to multiple co-existent versions of the same dataset with minor modifications. In this work we tackle the aforementioned issues by introducing MultiWOZ 2.1. To fix the noisy state annotations, we use crowdsourced workers to re-annotate state and utterances based on the original utterances in the dataset. This correction process results in changes to over 32% of state annotations across 40% of the dialogue turns. In addition, we fix 146 dialogue utterances by canonicalizing slot values in the utterances to the values in the dataset ontology. To address the second problem, we combined the contributions of the follow-up works into MultiWOZ 2.1. Hence, our dataset also includes user dialogue acts as well as multiple slot descriptions per dialogue state slot. We then benchmark a number of state-of-the-art dialogue state tracking models on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset and show the joint state tracking performance on the corrected state annotations. We are publicly releasing MultiWOZ 2.1 to the community, hoping that this dataset resource will allow for more effective models across various dialogue subproblems to be built in the future.

Transformative effects of IoT, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence on cloud computing: Evolution, vision, trends and open challenges

Abstract: Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies’ interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this study, we aim to explore how three emerging paradigms (Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence) will influence future cloud computing systems. Further, we identify several technologies driving these paradigms and invite international experts to discuss the current status and future directions of cloud computing. Finally, we proposed a conceptual model for cloud futurology to explore the influence of emerging paradigms and technologies on evolution of cloud computing.

Increasing world consumption of beef as a driver of regional and global change: A call for policy action based on evidence from Queensland (Australia), Colombia and Brazil

Abstract: While the global community is seeking to reduce fossil fuel consumption, a parallel but equally important issue is the environmental impacts of increased world consumption of beef. We provide a comparative analysis and synthesis of the expansion of beef cattle production and its regional and global environmental impacts for Queensland (Australia), Colombia and Brazil. Evidence assembled indicates that rising beef consumption is a major driver of regional and global change, and warrants greater policy attention. We propose four policy imperatives to help mitigate escalating environmental impacts of beef: stop subsidising beef production and promoting beef consumption; control future expansion of soybeans and extensive grazing; protect and restore regrowth forests in grazing lands; and allocate resources to less environmentally damaging alternative land uses.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Hydroelectric Reservoir (Brazil’s Tucuruí Dam) and the Energy Policy Implications

Abstract: Greenhouse gas emissions from hydroelectric dams are oftenportrayed as nonexistent by the hydropower industry, and havebeen largely ignored in global calculations of emissions fromland-use change. Brazil’s Tucurui Dam provides an example with important lessons for policy debates on Amazonian development and on how to assess the global warming impact ofdifferent energy options. Tucurui is better from the pointof view of power density, and hence greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity, than both the average for existing dams in Amazonia and the planned dams that, if all built, wouldflood 3% of Brazil’s Amazon forest. Tucurui’s emission of greenhouse gases in 1990 is equivalent to 7.0–10.1 × 106 tons of CO2-equivalent carbon, an amount substantially greater than the fossil fuel emission of Brazil’s biggest city, Sao Paulo. Emissions need to beproperly weighed in decisions on dam construction. Althoughmany proposed dams in Amazonia are expected to have positivebalances as compared to fossil fuels, substantial emissionsindicated by the present study reduce the benefits often attributed to the planned dams.