It is a well-known fact that current AI-based language technology -- language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries and corpora -- focuses on the world's 2-3% most widely spoken languages. Recent research efforts have attempted to expand the coverage of AI technology to `under-resourced languages.' The goal of our paper is to bring attention to a phenomenon that we call linguistic bias: multilingual language processing systems often exhibit a hardwired, yet usually involuntary and hidden representational preference towards certain languages. Linguistic bias is manifested in uneven per-language performance even in the case of similar test conditions. We show that biased technology is often the result of research and development methodologies that do not do justice to the complexity of the languages being represented, and that can even become ethically problematic as they disregard valuable aspects of diversity as well as the needs of the language communities themselves. As our attempt at building diversity-aware language resources, we present a new initiative that aims at reducing linguistic bias through both technological design and methodology, based on an eye-level collaboration with local communities.

The transition to a sustainable energy supply challenges the operation of electric power systems in manifold ways. Transmission grid loads increase as wind and solar power are often installed far away from the consumers. In extreme cases, system operators must intervene via countertrading or redispatch to ensure grid stability. In this article, we provide a data-driven analysis of congestion in the German transmission grid. We develop an explainable machine learning model to predict the volume of redispatch and countertrade on an hourly basis. The model reveals factors that drive or mitigate grid congestion and quantifies their impact. We show that, as expected, wind power generation is the main driver, but hydropower and cross-border electricity trading also play an essential role. Solar power, on the other hand, has no mitigating effect. Our results suggest that a change to the market design would alleviate congestion.

To enhance the quality of generated stories, recent story generation models have been investigating the utilization of higher-level attributes like plots or commonsense knowledge. The application of prompt-based learning with large language models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-3, has exhibited remarkable performance in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This paper conducts a comprehensive investigation, utilizing both automatic and human evaluation, to compare the story generation capacity of LLMs with recent models across three datasets with variations in style, register, and length of stories. The results demonstrate that LLMs generate stories of significantly higher quality compared to other story generation models. Moreover, they exhibit a level of performance that competes with human authors, albeit with the preliminary observation that they tend to replicate real stories in situations involving world knowledge, resembling a form of plagiarism.

Russia launched another wave of attacks on the Black Sea port of Odesa early on Sunday, killing one person and wounding 18, including four children, according to Ukrainian officials. A Ukrainian drone attack on the annexed Crimean Peninsula on Saturday blew up an ammunition depot and prompted evacuations along a 5km (3 miles) radius, according to Moscow-installed officials. It also halted road traffic along a bridge connecting Crimea to Russia. Footage shared by state media showed a thick cloud of grey smoke at the site. Russian news agencies quoted the Health Ministry as saying 12 people required medical assistance and four were taken to hospital. Ukraine said its army destroyed an oil depot and Russian army warehouses in the "temporarily occupied" district of Oktiabrske in central Crimea.

The governor of Russia's Belgorod region has said that Ukraine fired cluster munitions at a village near the Ukrainian border on Friday, but that there were no casualties or damage. The governor made the statement on Saturday during a daily briefing on his Telegram channel, without providing visual evidence. There was no immediate comment from Ukrainian authorities. "In Belgorod district, 21 artillery shells and three cluster munitions from a multiple-launch rocket system were fired at the village of Zhuravlevka," Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Ukraine received cluster bombs from the United States this month, but it has pledged to use them only to dislodge concentrations of enemy soldiers. They contain dozens of small bomblets that rain shrapnel over a wide area, but are banned in many countries due to the potential danger they pose to civilians.

Large-dimensional empirical data in science and engineering frequently has low-rank structure and can be represented as a combination of just a few eigenmodes. Because of this structure, we can use just a few spatially localized sensor measurements to reconstruct the full state of a complex system. The quality of this reconstruction, especially in the presence of sensor noise, depends significantly on the spatial configuration of the sensors. Multiple algorithms based on gappy interpolation and QR factorization have been proposed to optimize sensor placement. Here, instead of an algorithm that outputs a singular "optimal" sensor configuration, we take a thermodynamic view to compute the full landscape of sensor interactions induced by the training data. The landscape takes the form of the Ising model in statistical physics, and accounts for both the data variance captured at each sensor location and the crosstalk between sensors. Mapping out these data-induced sensor interactions allows combining them with external selection criteria and anticipating sensor replacement impacts.

"Oppenheimer" director Christopher Nolan spoke of the historical significance in artificial intelligence and compared it to the creation of the atomic bomb. 'OPPENHEIMER MOMENT': Hollywood director Christopher Nolan spoke with Fox News Digital on artificial intelligence's "Oppenheimer moment." Nolan compared AI to the creation of the atomic bomb and stated, "It's really the looking back through Oppenheimer's story and saying, 'Okay, what could have been done differently? What are the responsibilities of people who create technology that can go out and have unintended impacts?'" Continue reading… 'MINING OUR PERSONHOODS': Companies like OpenAI and Google have taken your data to train AI systems, attorney Ryan J. Clarkson writes in an op-ed. If you posted it, its most likely been taken.

The leader of the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, gave a rare speech in Prague Wednesday during which he encouraged Russians opposed to the war in Ukraine to spy for the British, telling any defectors from the Kremlin, "Our door is always open." "There are many Russians today who are silently appalled by the sight of their armed forces pulverizing Ukrainian cities, expelling innocent families from their homes and kidnapping thousands of children," MI6 chief Richard Moore said from the British embassy in Prague, according to The Telegraph. "They are watching in horror as their soldiers ravage a kindred country. They know in their hearts that Putin's case for attacking a fellow Slavic nation is fraudulent, a miasma of lies and fantasy." Moore stated that "many Russians are wrestling with the same dilemmas and the same tugs of conscience" as those a generation ago did in 1968 when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague spring uprisings. "I invite them to do what others have already done this past 18 months and join hands with us. Our door is always open," the U.K. Secret Intelligence Service chief said.

Russia launched overnight air attacks on Ukraine's south and east using drones and possibly ballistic missiles, Ukrainian officials said. The southern port of Odesa and the Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions were under threat of Russian drone attacks. Ukraine's air force said it downed 31 out of 36 Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones, all six Kalibr cruise missiles and one reconnaissance drone launched by Russia overnight. Russia's defence ministry said it carried out overnight attacks on two Ukrainian port cities in what it called "a mass revenge strike", a day after an attack on the Crimean Bridge. The ministry said in a statement it struck Odesa and Mykolaiv and hit all targets.

With the increasing application of robots, stable and efficient Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms are becoming more and more important. Based on the Fourier Mellin Transformation (FMT) algorithm, the extended Fourier Mellin Transformation (eFMT) is an image registration approach that can be applied to downward-looking cameras, for example on aerial and underwater vehicles. eFMT extends FMT to multi-depth scenes and thus more application scenarios. It is a visual odometry method which estimates the pose transformation between three overlapping images. On this basis, we develop an optimized eFMT algorithm that improves certain aspects of the method and combines it with back-end optimization for the small loop of three consecutive frames. For this we investigate the extraction of uncertainty information from the eFMT registration, the related objective function and the graph-based optimization. Finally, we design a series of experiments to investigate the properties of this approach and compare it with other VO and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms. The results show the superior accuracy and speed of our o-eFMT approach, which is published as open source.