Africa
'Fox News Sunday' on December 5, 2021
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and former under Secretary of Defense for policy Michรจle Flournoy discuss possible actions to take if Russia invades Ukraine. This is a rush transcript of "Fox News Sunday" on December 5, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. President Biden and Russia's Vladimir Putin will hold a superpower phone JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't accept anybody's red We'll discuss the standoff with Senate Armed Services Committee member Joni Just how much of a threat is China? We'll talk about how to keep law and order in space with the vice chief of So, we need to be ready. U.S. faces around the world.
Ron Klain promotes op-ed claiming 'sentiment analysis' proves media treats Biden worse than Trump
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, reacts to the former CNN anchor being fired over his role in former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's sexual harassment scandal. White House chief of staff Ronald Klain confused readers Sunday as he promoted a Washington Post op-ed that argued President Biden gets worse media treatment than his predecessor, former President Trump, whose verbal duels with the press were weekly staples during his four-year residency at 1600 Penn. "For your consideration," Klain tweeted with a link to the op-ed from Dana Millbank, titled, "The media treats Biden as badly as - or worse than - Trump. WHITE HOUSE'S RON KLAIN PANNED FOR RETWEETING POST ON'ULTIMATE WORK AROUND' FOR FEDERAL VACCINE MANDATE Millbank's "proof" was research from Forge.ai, a data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote. The study used algorithms focused on adjectives and their placement in articles - more than 200,000 of them - to rate the coverage Biden received in the first 11 months of 2021 and the coverage Trump got in the first 11 months of 2020. The process was referred to as "sentiment analysis." "My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy," Millbank said. "Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction.
STNN-DDI: A Substructure-aware Tensor Neural Network to Predict Drug-Drug Interactions
Yu, Hui, Zhao, ShiYu, Shi, JianYu
Motivation: Computational prediction of multiple-type drug-drug interaction (DDI) helps reduce unexpected side effects in poly-drug treatments. Although existing computational approaches achieve inspiring results, they ignore that the action of a drug is mainly caused by its chemical substructures. In addition, their interpretability is still weak. Results: In this paper, by supposing that the interactions between two given drugs are caused by their local chemical structures (sub-structures) and their DDI types are determined by the linkages between different substructure sets, we design a novel Substructure-ware Tensor Neural Network model for DDI prediction (STNN-DDI). The proposed model learns a 3-D tensor of (substructure, in-teraction type, substructure) triplets, which characterizes a substructure-substructure interaction (SSI) space. According to a list of predefined substructures with specific chemical meanings, the mapping of drugs into this SSI space enables STNN-DDI to perform the multiple-type DDI prediction in both transductive and inductive scenarios in a unified form with an explicable manner. The compar-ison with deep learning-based state-of-the-art baselines demonstrates the superiority of STNN-DDI with the significant improvement of AUC, AUPR, Accuracy, and Precision. More importantly, case studies illustrate its interpretability by both revealing a crucial sub-structure pair across drugs regarding a DDI type of interest and uncovering interaction type-specific substructure pairs in a given DDI. In summary, STNN-DDI provides an effective approach to predicting DDIs as well as explaining the interaction mechanisms among drugs.
NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation
Dhole, Kaustubh D., Gangal, Varun, Gehrmann, Sebastian, Gupta, Aadesh, Li, Zhenhao, Mahamood, Saad, Mahendiran, Abinaya, Mille, Simon, Srivastava, Ashish, Tan, Samson, Wu, Tongshuang, Sohl-Dickstein, Jascha, Choi, Jinho D., Hovy, Eduard, Dusek, Ondrej, Ruder, Sebastian, Anand, Sajant, Aneja, Nagender, Banjade, Rabin, Barthe, Lisa, Behnke, Hanna, Berlot-Attwell, Ian, Boyle, Connor, Brun, Caroline, Cabezudo, Marco Antonio Sobrevilla, Cahyawijaya, Samuel, Chapuis, Emile, Che, Wanxiang, Choudhary, Mukund, Clauss, Christian, Colombo, Pierre, Cornell, Filip, Dagan, Gautier, Das, Mayukh, Dixit, Tanay, Dopierre, Thomas, Dray, Paul-Alexis, Dubey, Suchitra, Ekeinhor, Tatiana, Di Giovanni, Marco, Gupta, Rishabh, Gupta, Rishabh, Hamla, Louanes, Han, Sang, Harel-Canada, Fabrice, Honore, Antoine, Jindal, Ishan, Joniak, Przemyslaw K., Kleyko, Denis, Kovatchev, Venelin, Krishna, Kalpesh, Kumar, Ashutosh, Langer, Stefan, Lee, Seungjae Ryan, Levinson, Corey James, Liang, Hualou, Liang, Kaizhao, Liu, Zhexiong, Lukyanenko, Andrey, Marivate, Vukosi, de Melo, Gerard, Meoni, Simon, Meyer, Maxime, Mir, Afnan, Moosavi, Nafise Sadat, Muennighoff, Niklas, Mun, Timothy Sum Hon, Murray, Kenton, Namysl, Marcin, Obedkova, Maria, Oli, Priti, Pasricha, Nivranshu, Pfister, Jan, Plant, Richard, Prabhu, Vinay, Pais, Vasile, Qin, Libo, Raji, Shahab, Rajpoot, Pawan Kumar, Raunak, Vikas, Rinberg, Roy, Roberts, Nicolas, Rodriguez, Juan Diego, Roux, Claude, S., Vasconcellos P. H., Sai, Ananya B., Schmidt, Robin M., Scialom, Thomas, Sefara, Tshephisho, Shamsi, Saqib N., Shen, Xudong, Shi, Haoyue, Shi, Yiwen, Shvets, Anna, Siegel, Nick, Sileo, Damien, Simon, Jamie, Singh, Chandan, Sitelew, Roman, Soni, Priyank, Sorensen, Taylor, Soto, William, Srivastava, Aman, Srivatsa, KV Aditya, Sun, Tony, T, Mukund Varma, Tabassum, A, Tan, Fiona Anting, Teehan, Ryan, Tiwari, Mo, Tolkiehn, Marie, Wang, Athena, Wang, Zijian, Wang, Gloria, Wang, Zijie J., Wei, Fuxuan, Wilie, Bryan, Winata, Genta Indra, Wu, Xinyi, Wydmaลski, Witold, Xie, Tianbao, Yaseen, Usama, Yee, M., Zhang, Jing, Zhang, Yue
Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (\url{https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter}).
How Do AI Represent the Urban?
It's important to remember that these images aren't created from scratch. They're built from "training sets" of images that human researchers feed into the AI to help it learn and recognise patterns. If you're not familiar with how such AI apps work, this old article from 2015 does a pretty good job of explaining this. I suspect that while the process has become more sophisticated over the years, the basic principle of recursively feeding images back into neural nets until the AI "gets it" hasn't changed. Therefore, human biases do exist in the patterns chosen and images generated, which turns these images into AI interpretations of human biases.
AI Weekly: Recognition of bias in AI continues to grow
This week, the Partnership on AI (PAI), a nonprofit committed to responsible AI use, released a paper addressing how technology -- particularly AI -- can accentuate various forms of biases. While most proposals to mitigate algorithmic discrimination require the collection of data on so-called sensitive attributes -- which usually include things like race, gender, sexuality, and nationality -- the coauthors of the PAI report argue that these efforts can actually cause harm to marginalized people and groups. Rather than trying to overcome historical patterns of discrimination and social inequity with more data and "clever algorithms," they say, the value assumptions and trade-offs associated with the use of demographic data must be acknowledged. "Harmful biases have been found in algorithmic decision-making systems in contexts such as health care, hiring, criminal justice, and education, prompting increasing social concern regarding the impact these systems are having on the wellbeing ...
Ex-Google scientist Gebru opens AI institute year after tumultuous exit - ET Telecom
By Paresh Dave Timnit Gebru, the computer scientist whose disputed exit from Google's artificial intelligence research team prompted debate across the tech industry about diversity and censorship, said on Thursday she has launched a small lab to continue her work freely. The Distributed AI Research Institute has raised $3.7 million from foundations and aims to critically study services from big tech companies as well as propose AI-based solutions to issues such as food insecurity and climate change, Gebru said. It joins several non-governmental projects such as the Algorithmic Justice League that are advancing ethical use of AI. Critics worry that without proper safeguards systems including for facial recognition and credit scoring could lead to mass surveillance and racial discrimination. Gebru has hired a fellow based in South Africa and expects to add other researchers next year.
Global Big Data Conference
One year after her controversial exit from Alphabet's Google, AI scientist Timnit Gebru launches small lab to continue her research The former Google computer scientist whose controversial exit from the search engine giant this time last year, has resurfaced in a new role. Reuters has reported that Timnit Gebru on Thursday revealed she has launched a small lab to continue her research work freely. Indeed, the Distributed AI Research Institute has reportedly raised $3.7 million so far, and aims to critically study services from big tech companies, as well as propose AI-based solutions to issues such as food insecurity and climate change, Gebru reportedly said. The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) joins a number of other projects such as the Algorithmic Justice League that are advancing ethical use of AI. For many years now critics have worried about the ethical use and safeguards for AI and facial recognition systems, along with credit scoring, which could lead to mass surveillance and racial discrimination.
LoNLI: An Extensible Framework for Testing Diverse Logical Reasoning Capabilities for NLI
Tarunesh, Ishan, Aditya, Somak, Choudhury, Monojit
Natural Language Inference (NLI) is considered a representative task to test natural language understanding (NLU). In this work, we propose an extensible framework to collectively yet categorically test diverse Logical reasoning capabilities required for NLI (and by extension, NLU). Motivated by behavioral testing, we create a semi-synthetic large test-bench (363 templates, 363k examples) and an associated framework that offers following utilities: 1) individually test and analyze reasoning capabilities along 17 reasoning dimensions (including pragmatic reasoning), 2) design experiments to study cross-capability information content (leave one out or bring one in); and 3) the synthetic nature enable us to control for artifacts and biases. The inherited power of automated test case instantiation from free-form natural language templates (using CheckList), and a well-defined taxonomy of capabilities enable us to extend to (cognitively) harder test cases while varying the complexity of natural language. Through our analysis of state-of-the-art NLI systems, we observe that our benchmark is indeed hard (and non-trivial even with training on additional resources). Some capabilities stand out as harder. Further fine-grained analysis and fine-tuning experiments reveal more insights about these capabilities and the models -- supporting and extending previous observations. Towards the end we also perform an user-study, to investigate whether behavioral information can be utilised to generalize much better for some models compared to others.
Visual Persuasion in COVID-19 Social Media Content: A Multi-Modal Characterization
Unal, Mesut Erhan, Kovashka, Adriana, Chung, Wen-Ting, Lin, Yu-Ru
Social media content routinely incorporates multi-modal design to covey information and shape meanings, and sway interpretations toward desirable implications, but the choices and outcomes of using both texts and visual images have not been sufficiently studied. This work proposes a computational approach to analyze the outcome of persuasive information in multi-modal content, focusing on two aspects, popularity and reliability, in COVID-19-related news articles shared on Twitter. The two aspects are intertwined in the spread of misinformation: for example, an unreliable article that aims to misinform has to attain some popularity. This work has several contributions. First, we propose a multi-modal (image and text) approach to effectively identify popularity and reliability of information sources simultaneously. Second, we identify textual and visual elements that are predictive to information popularity and reliability. Third, by modeling cross-modal relations and similarity, we are able to uncover how unreliable articles construct multi-modal meaning in a distorted, biased fashion. Our work demonstrates how to use multi-modal analysis for understanding influential content and has implications to social media literacy and engagement.