Current state-of-the-art models demonstrate capacity to leverage in-context learning to translate into previously unseen language contexts. Tanzer et al. [2024] utilize language materials (e.g. a grammar) to improve translation quality for Kalamang using large language models (LLMs). We focus on Kanuri, a language that, despite having substantial speaker population, has minimal digital resources. We design two datasets for evaluation: one focused on health and humanitarian terms, and another containing generalized terminology, investigating how domain-specific tasks impact LLM translation quality. By providing different combinations of language resources (grammar, dictionary, and parallel sentences), we measure LLM translation effectiveness, comparing results to native speaker translations and human linguist performance. We evaluate using both automatic metrics and native speaker assessments of fluency and accuracy. Results demonstrate that parallel sentences remain the most effective data source, outperforming other methods in human evaluations and automatic metrics. While incorporating grammar improves over zero-shot translation, it fails as an effective standalone data source. Human evaluations reveal that LLMs achieve accuracy (meaning) more effectively than fluency (grammaticality). These findings suggest LLM translation evaluation benefits from multidimensional assessment beyond simple accuracy metrics, and that grammar alone, without parallel sentences, does not provide sufficient context for effective domain-specific translation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing various fields, including public health surveillance. In Africa, where health systems frequently encounter challenges such as limited resources, inadequate infrastructure, failed health information systems and a shortage of skilled health professionals, AI offers a transformative opportunity. This paper investigates the applications of AI in public health surveillance across the continent, presenting successful case studies and examining the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of implementing AI technologies in African healthcare settings. Our paper highlights AI's potential to enhance disease monitoring and health outcomes, and support effective public health interventions. The findings presented in the paper demonstrate that AI can significantly improve the accuracy and timeliness of disease detection and prediction, optimize resource allocation, and facilitate targeted public health strategies. Additionally, our paper identified key barriers to the widespread adoption of AI in African public health systems and proposed actionable recommendations to overcome these challenges.

Widely used deep learning models are found to have poor robustness. Little noises can fool state-of-the-art models into making incorrect predictions. While there is a great deal of high-performance attack generation methods, most of them directly add perturbations to original data and measure them using L_p norms; this can break the major structure of data, thus, creating invalid attacks. In this paper, we propose a black-box attack, which, instead of modifying original data, modifies latent features of data extracted by an autoencoder; then, we measure noises in semantic space to protect the semantics of data. We trained autoencoders on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets and found optimal adversarial perturbations using a genetic algorithm. Our approach achieved a 100% attack success rate on the first 100 data of MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with less perturbation than FGSM.