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Watch: Footage shows second claimed attack on Greta Thunberg Gaza flotilla

BBC News

Campaigners say a vessel, part of a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza, has been struck in a suspected drone attack. It's the second such suspected attack in two days. Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg is amongst the activists travelling to Gaza with the flotilla to try and break Israel's naval blockade. BBC Verify has been analysing footage of the incident and has spoken to two weapons experts who say a device found on board after the attack appears to be a grenade. 'I witnessed war crimes' in Gaza, former worker at GHF aid site tells BBC A retired US soldier reveals why he quit working at Israel and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid hubs.


The Cost Perspective of Liquid Democracy: Feasibility and Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We examine an approval-based model of Liquid Democracy with a budget constraint on voting and delegating costs, aiming to centrally select casting voters ensuring complete representation of the electorate. From a computational complexity perspective, we focus on minimizing overall costs, maintaining short delegation paths, and preventing excessive concentration of voting power. Furthermore, we explore computational aspects of strategic control, specifically, whether external agents can change election components to influence the voting power of certain voters.


Why birds love a good chat during migration - and how they 'buddy up' with a pal for the long journey

Daily Mail - Science & tech

On a long-haul flight, there's nothing worse than being sat next to a chatty stranger. But songbirds don't seem to mind, as a new study suggests they are likely to'talk' to other species as they migrate. Last year, a team of scientists discovered that birds seem to'buddy up' with other species at stopover sites during migration, but there was no evidence that different species pair up or communicate vocally on the wing. But now it's been found that the birds may even chat to gather important information about the journey they are on. For their new study the researchers, from the University of Illinois, analysed more than 18,000 hours of recorded flight calls made over three years in eastern North America.


Husky: A Unified, Open-Source Language Agent for Multi-Step Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Language agents perform complex tasks by using tools to execute each step precisely. However, most existing agents are based on proprietary models or designed to target specific tasks, such as mathematics or multi-hop question answering. We introduce Husky, a holistic, open-source language agent that learns to reason over a unified action space to address a diverse set of complex tasks involving numerical, tabular, and knowledge-based reasoning. Husky iterates between two stages: 1) generating the next action to take towards solving a given task and 2) executing the action using expert models and updating the current solution state. We identify a thorough ontology of actions for addressing complex tasks and curate high-quality data to train expert models for executing these actions. Our experiments show that Husky outperforms prior language agents across 14 evaluation datasets. Moreover, we introduce HuskyQA, a new evaluation set which stress tests language agents for mixed-tool reasoning, with a focus on retrieving missing knowledge and performing numerical reasoning. Despite using 7B models, Husky matches or even exceeds frontier LMs such as GPT-4 on these tasks, showcasing the efficacy of our holistic approach in addressing complex reasoning problems. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/agent-husky/Husky-v1.


Personalized Adapter for Large Meteorology Model on Devices: Towards Weather Foundation Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper demonstrates that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are strong foundation models for on-device meteorological variables modeling. We present LM-Weather, a generic approach to taming PLMs, that have learned massive sequential knowledge from the universe of natural language databases, to acquire an immediate capability to obtain highly customized models for heterogeneous meteorological data on devices while keeping high efficiency. Concretely, we introduce a lightweight personalized adapter into PLMs and endows it with weather pattern awareness. During communication between clients and the server, low-rank-based transmission is performed to effectively fuse the global knowledge among devices while maintaining high communication efficiency and ensuring privacy. Experiments on real-wold dataset show that LM-Weather outperforms the state-of-the-art results by a large margin across various tasks (e.g., forecasting and imputation at different scales). We provide extensive and in-depth analyses experiments, which verify that LM-Weather can (1) indeed leverage sequential knowledge from natural language to accurately handle meteorological sequence, (2) allows each devices obtain highly customized models under significant heterogeneity, and (3) generalize under data-limited and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.


Discussion Paper: The Threat of Real Time Deepfakes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative deep learning models are able to create realistic audio and video. This technology has been used to impersonate the faces and voices of individuals. These ``deepfakes'' are being used to spread misinformation, enable scams, perform fraud, and blackmail the innocent. The technology continues to advance and today attackers have the ability to generate deepfakes in real-time. This new capability poses a significant threat to society as attackers begin to exploit the technology in advances social engineering attacks. In this paper, we discuss the implications of this emerging threat, identify the challenges with preventing these attacks and suggest a better direction for researching stronger defences.


Protecting Autonomous Cars from Phantom Attacks

Communications of the ACM

Early computer vision studies aimed at developing computerized driver intelligence appeared in the mid-1980s when scientists first demonstrated a road-following robot.36 Studies performed from the mid-1980s until 2000 established the fundamentals for automated driver intelligence in related tasks, including detection of pedestrians,39 lanes,3 and road signs.9 However, the vast majority of initial computer vision algorithms aimed at detecting objects required developers to manually program dedicated features. The increase in computational power available in recent years changed the way AI models are created: Features are automatically extracted by training various neural network architectures on raw data. Automatic feature extraction outperformed and replaced the traditional approach of manually programming an object's features.


Introduction to the Special Track on Artificial Intelligence and COVID-19

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

The human race is facing one of the most meaningful public health emergencies in the modern era caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic introduced various challenges, from lock-downs with significant economic costs to fundamentally altering the way of life for many people around the world. The battle to understand and control the virus is still at its early stages yet meaningful insights have already been made. The uncertainty of why some patients are infected and experience severe symptoms, while others are infected but asymptomatic, and others are not infected at all, makes managing this pandemic very challenging. Furthermore, the development of treatments and vaccines relies on knowledge generated from an ever evolving and expanding information space. Given the availability of digital data in the modern era, artificial intelligence (AI) is a meaningful tool for addressing the various challenges introduced by this unexpected pandemic. Some of the challenges include: outbreak prediction, risk modeling including infection and symptom development, testing strategy optimization, drug development, treatment repurposing, vaccine development, and others.