This paper aims to present new alarming trends in the field of child sexual abuse through imagery, as part of SafeLine's research activities in the field of cybercrime, child sexual abuse material and the protection of children's rights to safe online experiences. It focuses primarily on the phenomenon of AI-generated CSAM, sophisticated ways employed for its production which are discussed in dark web forums and the crucial role that the open-source AI models play in the evolution of this overwhelming phenomenon. The paper's main contribution is a correlation analysis between the hotline's reports and domain names identified in dark web forums, where users' discussions focus on exchanging information specifically related to the generation of AI-CSAM. The objective was to reveal the close connection of clear net and dark web content, which was accomplished through the use of the ATLAS dataset of the Voyager system. Furthermore, through the analysis of a set of posts' content drilled from the above dataset, valuable conclusions on forum members' techniques employed for the production of AI-generated CSAM are also drawn, while users' views on this type of content and routes followed in order to overcome technological barriers set with the aim of preventing malicious purposes are also presented. As the ultimate contribution of this research, an overview of the current legislative developments in all country members of the INHOPE organization and the issues arising in the process of regulating the AI- CSAM is presented, shedding light in the legal challenges regarding the regulation and limitation of the phenomenon.

This study developed an explainable AI for ship collision avoidance. Initially, a critic network composed of sub-task critic networks was proposed to individually evaluate each sub-task in collision avoidance to clarify the AI decision-making processes involved. Additionally, an attempt was made to discern behavioral intentions through a Q-value analysis and an Attention mechanism. The former focused on interpreting intentions by examining the increment of the Q-value resulting from AI actions, while the latter incorporated the significance of other ships in the decision-making process for collision avoidance into the learning objective. AI's behavioral intentions in collision avoidance were visualized by combining the perceived collision danger with the degree of attention to other ships. The proposed method was evaluated through a numerical experiment. The developed AI was confirmed to be able to safely avoid collisions under various congestion levels, and AI's decision-making process was rendered comprehensible to humans. The proposed method not only facilitates the understanding of DRL-based controllers/systems in the ship collision avoidance task but also extends to any task comprising sub-tasks.

Aiming at accurate recognition of relations, we introduce local alignment kernels and explore various possibilities of using them for this task. We give a definition of a local alignment (LA) kernel based on the Smith-Waterman score as a sequence similarity measure and proceed with a range of possibilities for computing similarity between elements of sequences. We show how distributional similarity measures obtained from unlabeled data can be incorporated into the learning task as semantic knowledge. Our experiments suggest that the LA kernel yields promising results on various biomedical corpora outperforming two baselines by a large margin. Additional series of experiments have been conducted on the data sets of seven general relation types, where the performance of the LA kernel is comparable to the current state-of-the-art results.