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Starmer 'appeasing' big tech firms, says online safety campaigner

BBC News

Starmer'appeasing' big tech firms, says online safety campaigner A leading campaigner has accused the prime minister of appeasing big tech companies and being late to the party in regulating social media and artificial intelligence. Crossbench peer Baroness Kidron told the BBC Sir Keir Starmer needed to get on with it rather than launching more consultations. She also criticised the PM for citing his own experience as a father of two teenage children on social media, arguing that this did not make him an expert on the subject and that his family were sheltered compared to others. The government rejected the claims, with a spokesperson saying it had already introduced some of the strongest online safety protections in the world. Sir Keir has launched a consultation on banning under-16s from social media and promised to crackdown on the addictive elements of the apps.





deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

Castrillon-Candas, Julio Enrique, Gu, Hanfeng, Meredith, Caleb, Li, Yulin, Tang, Xiaojing, Olofsson, Pontus, Kon, Mark

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Loève (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92.19\,km \times 91.80\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.


Unlocking the Potential of Global Human Expertise

Neural Information Processing Systems

For example, in the Pandemic Response Challenge experiment, the context consisted of data about the geographic region for which the predictions were made, e.g., historical data of COVID-19 cases and intervention policies; actions were future schedules of intervention policies for the region; and outcomes were predicted future cases of COVID-19 along with the stringency



Europe Pledges 600 Billion for Clean Energy Projects in Africa

WIRED

The EU's Global Gateway plan is challenging China's Belt and Road Initiative to influence Africa, by providing funding that will expand access to electricity. Nearly 600 million Africans--half the continent's population--are without electricity, largely because of the continent's limited distribution network, and Africans make up the vast majority of those worldwide without electricity access. But the European Union wants to change this. At the end of September, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a €545 million ($636 million) investment package to support renewable energy and electrification in Africa. New EU-funded projects will include a high-voltage transmission line in Côte d'Ivoire, the electrification of hundreds of rural communities in Cameroon, the exploitation of wind and hydro energy in Lesotho, and the installation of mini-grids in remote areas of Madagascar.


ColdGANs: Taming Language GANs with Cautious Sampling Strategies Supplementary Material

Neural Information Processing Systems

We used a single RTX 2080 Ti GPU. While T5-small underperforms its larger version, T5-11B, the latter has 11 billion parameters. Gabon and South Africa, are ranked 119th and 121st, respectively . ANSWER: 119th HUMAN: What is Gabon ' s ranking? ColdGAN: What is Gabon ' s rank on the HDI?


Data interference: emojis, homoglyphs, and issues of data fidelity in corpora and their results

Di Cristofaro, Matteo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tokenisation - "the process of splitting text into atomic parts" (Brezina & Timperley, 2017: 1) - is a crucial step for corpus linguistics, as it provides the basis for any applicable quantitative method (e.g. collocations) while ensuring the reliability of qualitative approaches. This paper examines how discrepancies in tokenisation affect the representation of language data and the validity of analytical findings: investigating the challenges posed by emojis and homoglyphs, the study highlights the necessity of preprocessing these elements to maintain corpus fidelity to the source data. The research presents methods for ensuring that digital texts are accurately represented in corpora, thereby supporting reliable linguistic analysis and guaranteeing the repeatability of linguistic interpretations. The findings emphasise the necessity of a detailed understanding of both linguistic and technical aspects involved in digital textual data to enhance the accuracy of corpus analysis, and have significant implications for both quantitative and qualitative approaches in corpus-based research.