Africa
What is the Future of Artificial Intelligence?
Us humans have always worked towards making our lives easier and better, and this constant struggle to achieve something better worked as bliss for humans. Isn't it so fascinating to look back at our cave-devilling ancestors and realise how far we have advanced as humans? We went through various milestones to achieve the technology we have today. As we further surpassed in technology, we stumbled upon exploring artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence (AI) we have today is in a golden age right now. Every industry is undergoing a sea change due to AI's inflection point. Specific applications of AI have already been discussed in great detail. Consider this post a complete guide on the practical use and foreseeing of artificial intelligence and how it impacts our lives. As a starter, I offer five bold predictions about how artificial intelligence will fundamentally alter our economy and society in the next decade.
Ai-Da becomes first robot to speak at House of Lords
Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid AI robot artist, has made history once again due to her appearance in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the UK Parliament, where she addressed the question of whether creativity is under attack in today's ever-changing, technology-driven world. Ai-Da's address to members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee was part of the House of Lords' inquiry into the future of the creative industries. During her speech, she explored the topic of AI and how this new technology is pushing the boundaries of how we think about creativity. We are entering a new era of machine creativity that presents new possibilities of creativity and technology beyond what humans can do. Ai-Da's creativity, which is driven by AI, sparks an in-depth conversation on what it means to be human in a post-human society, at a time when technology is fostering creativity like never before.
Russia's Use Of Iranian Drones Shows Up Domestic Weakness
The use by Russia of Iranian drones in its war against Ukraine makes clear the weaknesses of its domestic industry and Tehran's growing claim on the market for unmanned aircraft, experts say. Washington believes Iran has delivered hundreds of drones, which Ukrainian officials say are now being used in strikes like those launched against cities and energy infrastructure on Monday. So far two models of Iranian drone have been identified in Ukraine's skies, built for two different purposes. One of them, the Shahed 136, is a relatively low-cost "kamikaze drone" that can be programmed to fly automatically to a set of GPS coordinates with a payload of explosives. "It flies quite low, striking a target that must be stationary at a range of a few hundred kilometres," said Pierre Grasser, a researcher tied to Paris' Sorbonne University.
The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence
Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute's founder and executive director. She was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. The public's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture -- by blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" and their doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert's millions of viewers.
Mohamed Nabil, an Entrepreneur who founded the leading AI communication startup across the MENA region
He overcame surrender and did not despair despite his projects having been rejected, at the beginning of his career, but eventually became an entrepreneur in technology across Middle East-wide through his company "WideBot," which specializes in artificial intelligence "AI" and its influential role in customer relationship management (CRM) and digital business management. He is "Mohamed Nabil," a 35-year-old, from Alexandria who graduated from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Mansoura University in 2007. Immediately after graduation, he began to think seriously about how to start his own business, he had already set up companies, some companies have failed miserably and some have succeeded, but it was not a great and overwhelming success. During Mohamed's struggle, he supported him and stood by his side, Ahmed was his college friend, and he is also with his technical co-founder. And their work on that idea took about two years, they presented their idea to more than one large supermarket in Egypt and abroad, but unfortunately, it was not successful enough and the idea of their project was very new to the market.
Learning to Find Proofs and Theorems by Learning to Refine Search Strategies: The Case of Loop Invariant Synthesis
Laurent, Jonathan, Platzer, Andrรฉ
We propose a new approach to automated theorem proving where an AlphaZero-style agent is self-training to refine a generic high-level expert strategy expressed as a nondeterministic program. An analogous teacher agent is self-training to generate tasks of suitable relevance and difficulty for the learner. This allows leveraging minimal amounts of domain knowledge to tackle problems for which training data is unavailable or hard to synthesize. As a specific illustration, we consider loop invariant synthesis for imperative programs and use neural networks to refine both the teacher and solver strategies.
Recovering Private Text in Federated Learning of Language Models
Gupta, Samyak, Huang, Yangsibo, Zhong, Zexuan, Gao, Tianyu, Li, Kai, Chen, Danqi
Federated learning allows distributed users to collaboratively train a model while keeping each user's data private. Recently, a growing body of work has demonstrated that an eavesdropping attacker can effectively recover image data from gradients transmitted during federated learning. However, little progress has been made in recovering text data. In this paper, we present a novel attack method FILM for federated learning of language models (LMs). For the first time, we show the feasibility of recovering text from large batch sizes of up to 128 sentences. Unlike image-recovery methods that are optimized to match gradients, we take a distinct approach that first identifies a set of words from gradients and then directly reconstructs sentences based on beam search and a prior-based reordering strategy. We conduct the FILM attack on several large-scale datasets and show that it can successfully reconstruct single sentences with high fidelity for large batch sizes and even multiple sentences if applied iteratively. We evaluate three defense methods: gradient pruning, DPSGD, and a simple approach to freeze word embeddings that we propose. We show that both gradient pruning and DPSGD lead to a significant drop in utility. However, if we fine-tune a public pre-trained LM on private text without updating word embeddings, it can effectively defend the attack with minimal data utility loss. Together, we hope that our results can encourage the community to rethink the privacy concerns of LM training and its standard practices in the future.
Fine-tuned Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine-Related Social Media Data: Comparative Study
Melton, Chad A, White, Brianna M, Davis, Robert L, Bednarczyk, Robert A, Shaban-Nejad, Arash
This study investigated and compared public sentiment related to COVID-19 vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter, harvested from January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022. To accomplish this task, we created a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model to predict sentiments of approximately 9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments. To fine-tune our model, our team manually labeled the sentiment of 3600 Tweets and then augmented our dataset by the method of back-translation. Text sentiment for each social media platform was then classified with our fine-tuned model using Python and the Huggingface sentiment analysis pipeline. Our results determined that the average sentiment expressed on Twitter was more negative (52% positive) than positive and the sentiment expressed on Reddit was more positive than negative (53% positive). Though average sentiment was found to vary between these social media platforms, both displayed similar behavior related to sentiment shared at key vaccine-related developments during the pandemic. Considering this similar trend in shared sentiment demonstrated across social media platforms, Twitter and Reddit continue to be valuable data sources that public health officials can utilize to strengthen vaccine confidence and combat misinformation. As the spread of misinformation poses a range of psychological and psychosocial risks (anxiety, fear, etc.), there is an urgency in understanding the public perspective and attitude toward shared falsities. Comprehensive educational delivery systems tailored to the population's expressed sentiments that facilitate digital literacy, health information-seeking behavior, and precision health promotion could aid in clarifying such misinformation.
Social Biases in Automatic Evaluation Metrics for NLG
Many studies have revealed that word embeddings, language models, and models for specific downstream tasks in NLP are prone to social biases, especially gender bias. Recently these techniques have been gradually applied to automatic evaluation metrics for text generation. In the paper, we propose an evaluation method based on Word Embeddings Association Test (WEAT) and Sentence Embeddings Association Test (SEAT) to quantify social biases in evaluation metrics and discover that social biases are also widely present in some model-based automatic evaluation metrics. Moreover, we construct gender-swapped meta-evaluation datasets to explore the potential impact of gender bias in image caption and text summarization tasks. Results show that given gender-neutral references in the evaluation, model-based evaluation metrics may show a preference for the male hypothesis, and the performance of them, i.e. the correlation between evaluation metrics and human judgments, usually has more significant variation after gender swapping.
Predicting Dynamic Stability from Static Features in Power Grid Models using Machine Learning
Titz, Maurizio, Kaiser, Franz, Kruse, Johannes, Witthaut, Dirk
A reliable supply with electric power is vital for our society. Transmission line failures are among the biggest threats for power grid stability as they may lead to a splitting of the grid into mutual asynchronous fragments. New conceptual methods are needed to assess system stability that complement existing simulation models. In this article we propose a combination of network science metrics and machine learning models to predict the risk of desynchronisation events. Network science provides metrics for essential properties of transmission lines such as their redundancy or centrality. Machine learning models perform inherent feature selection and thus reveal key factors that determine network robustness and vulnerability. As a case study, we train and test such models on simulated data from several synthetic test grids. We find that the integrated models are capable of predicting desynchronisation events after line failures with an average precision greater than $0.996$ when averaging over all data sets. Learning transfer between different data sets is generally possible, at a slight loss of prediction performance. Our results suggest that power grid desynchronisation is essentially governed by only a few network metrics that quantify the networks ability to reroute flow without creating exceedingly high static line loadings.