Africa
Machine learning methods to detect money laundering in the Bitcoin blockchain in the presence of label scarcity
Lorenz, Joana, Silva, Maria Inês, Aparício, David, Ascensão, João Tiago, Bizarro, Pedro
Every year, criminals launder billions of dollars acquired from serious felonies (e.g., terrorism, drug smuggling, or human trafficking) harming countless people and economies. Cryptocurrencies, in particular, have developed as a haven for money laundering activity. Machine Learning can be used to detect these illicit patterns. However, labels are so scarce that traditional supervised algorithms are inapplicable. Here, we address money laundering detection assuming minimal access to labels. First, we show that existing state-of-the-art solutions using unsupervised anomaly detection methods are inadequate to detect the illicit patterns in a real Bitcoin transaction dataset. Then, we show that our proposed active learning solution is capable of matching the performance of a fully supervised baseline by using just 5\% of the labels. This solution mimics a typical real-life situation in which a limited number of labels can be acquired through manual annotation by experts.
A frame semantics based approach to comparative study of digitized corpus
Lakhfif, Abdelaziz, Laskri, Mohamed Tayeb
in this paper, we present a corpus linguistics based approach applied to analyzing digitized classical multilingual novels and narrative texts, from a semantic point of view. Digitized novels such as "the hobbit (Tolkien J. R. R., 1937)" and "the hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle A. C. 1901-1902)", which were widely translated to dozens of languages, provide rich materials for analyzing languages differences from several perspectives and within a number of disciplines like linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science. Taking motion events conceptualization as a case study, this paper, focus on the morphologic, syntactic, and semantic annotation process of English-Arabic aligned corpus created from a digitized novels, in order to re-examine the linguistic encodings of motion events in English and Arabic in terms of Frame Semantics. The present study argues that differences in motion events conceptualization across languages can be described with frame structure and frame-to-frame relations.
The Future for Contactless Delivery
The future for contactless product delivery is already here, and a pandemic seems to already be moving this trend forward. It just needs companies to implement and customers to accept the new delivery and tracking methods, along with other innovations, that will make this so. When this happens, we may one day look back and quietly thank the lowly coronavirus for catapulting us into a brighter future. One of the more iconic images from the early days of this disease comes from late March 2020, during San Francisco's citywide coronavirus lockdown, when "aspiring drone racing pilot" David Chen delivered a single roll of much-needed toilet paper to his friend Ian Chan in another part of the city. Chan captured the delivery on video and posted it to his Twitter feed, which ironically went viral.
'Largest drone war in the world': How airpower saved Tripoli
Air power has played an increasingly important role in the Libyan conflict. The relatively flat featureless desert terrain of the north and coast means that ground units are easily spotted, with few places to hide. The air forces of both the United Nations-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) and eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) use French and Soviet-era fighter jets, antiquated and poorly maintained. While manned fighter aircraft have been used, for the most part the air war has been fought by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. With nearly 1,000 air strikes conducted by UAVs, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame called the conflict "the largest drone war in the world".
Optimizing carbon tax for decentralized electricity markets using an agent-based model
Kell, Alexander J. M., McGough, A. Stephen, Forshaw, Matthew
Averting the effects of anthropogenic climate change requires a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon technology. A way to achieve this is to decarbonize the electricity grid. However, further efforts must be made in other fields such as transport and heating for full decarbonization. This would reduce carbon emissions due to electricity generation, and also help to decarbonize other sources such as automotive and heating by enabling a low-carbon alternative. Carbon taxes have been shown to be an efficient way to aid in this transition. In this paper, we demonstrate how to to find optimal carbon tax policies through a genetic algorithm approach, using the electricity market agent-based model ElecSim. To achieve this, we use the NSGA-II genetic algorithm to minimize average electricity price and relative carbon intensity of the electricity mix. We demonstrate that it is possible to find a range of carbon taxes to suit differing objectives. Our results show that we are able to minimize electricity cost to below \textsterling10/MWh as well as carbon intensity to zero in every case. In terms of the optimal carbon tax strategy, we found that an increasing strategy between 2020 and 2035 was preferable. Each of the Pareto-front optimal tax strategies are at least above \textsterling81/tCO2 for every year. The mean carbon tax strategy was \textsterling240/tCO2.
Machine learning time series regressions with an application to nowcasting
Babii, Andrii, Ghysels, Eric, Striaukas, Jonas
The statistical imprecision of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, along with the fact that the first estimate is available with a delay of nearly a month, pose a significant challenge to policy makers, market participants, and other observers with an interest in monitoring the state of the economy in real time; see, e.g., Ghysels, Horan, and Moench (2018) for a recent discussion of macroeconomic data revision and publication delays. A term originated in meteorology, nowcasting pertains to the prediction of the present and very near future. Nowcasting is intrinsically a mixed frequency data problem as the object of interest is a low-frequency data series (e.g., quarterly GDP), whereas the real-time information (e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly) can be used to update the state, or to put it differently, to nowcast the low-frequency series of interest. Traditional methods used for nowcasting rely on dynamic factor models that treat the underlying low frequency series of interest as a latent process with high frequency data noisy observations. These models are naturally cast in a state-space form and inference can be performed using likelihood-based methods and Kalman filtering techniques; see Bańbura, Giannone, Modugno, and Reichlin (2013) for a recent survey.
Covid-19 news: Boris Johnson admits UK was unprepared for pandemic
"We didn't learn the lesson on SARS and MERS," UK prime minister Boris Johnson said today as he faced questions from the House of Commons Liaison Committee, referencing the government's pandemic planning and a lack of capacity at Public Health England to detect outbreaks of coronavirus around the country. He also said that there would not be an official inquiry to investigate whether his senior aide Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules. More than 40 Conservative party MPs have now called for Cummings' resignation. During the meeting, Johnson announced that England's test and trace system will be launched tomorrow. Under the new system, contact tracers will ask people who test positive for coronavirus to self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of symptoms, and to provide details of any recent close contacts. The secretary of state will have the power to "mandate" people to isolate if they do not isolate voluntarily. The government announced earlier today that localised lockdowns, ...
ARM just showed 2021's smartphone CPUs, led by the powerful Cortex-X1
Like the prior Cortex-A77, the Cortex-A78 will consist of what ARM calls its big.LITTLE octacore architecture, with four high-performance A78 cores and four A55 cores optimized for long battery life. ARM said that a Cortex-A78 core running at 3GHz would deliver 20 percent more sustained, single-core performance than the Cortex-A77 core running at 2.6GHz, assuming 1 watt per core. The performance is based on simulated estimates. Alternatively, a phone maker could clock the A78 to consume half the power at the same performance as the A77, Williamson said. ARM believes that the octacore Cortex-A78 layout will require 15 percent less die space than the Cortex-A77, leading to smaller phones.
Zipline will use its drones to deliver PPE to US healthcare workers
While drone delivery services are yet to become a practical reality in the consumer world, they're already proving their mettle in terms of crisis response. After deploying its UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in parts of Africa to facilitate medical care, Californian robotics company Zipline is now using its technology closer to home, to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic in the US. In partnership with Novant Health, Zipline's drones will undertake 32-mile flights on two routes between Novant's emergency drone fulfilment centre in Kannapolis, North Carolina, and its medical center in Huntersville. Each delivery will ferry personal protective gear and medical equipment to frontline healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients. The two companies were already in talks about a potential partnership prior to the coronavirus outbreak, but the escalating situation helped to catalyze the deal.
Poll reveals declining trust in UK government before Cummings crisis
Only 38 per cent of people supported the UK government's change to coronavirus restrictions announced on 10 May, compared to 90 per cent of people who said they supported the lockdown measures announced on 23 March, according to a survey conducted by researchers at King's College London and Ipsos MORI. The measures brought in on 10 May largely affected England. They included a stronger emphasis on people going to work if they are unable to work from home, encouraging people to avoid public transport as much as possible, letting people exercise outside more than once a day and allowing people to meet up with one person from a household other than their own, providing the meeting takes place outside and at a distance of at least 2 metres. The poll, which surveyed 2254 people in the UK aged 16 to 75, was conducted between 20 and 22 May, before it emerged that prime ministerial aide Dominic Cummings drove more than 260 miles from home with his son and ill wife in March, at a time when the ...