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More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

The Guardian

Workers say the firm's'warp-speed' approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissions More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing "serious concerns" about AI development, saying that the company's "all-costs justified, warp speed" approach The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations. Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates. Reflecting broader AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 workers from companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft . The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment. Staffers are calling on the company to power all its data centers with clean energy, make sure its AI-powered products and services do not enable "violence, surveillance and mass deportation", and form a working group comprised of non-managers "that will have significant ownership over org-level goals and how or if AI should be used in their orgs, how or if AI-related layoffs or headcount freezes are implemented, and how to mitigate or minimize the collateral effects of AI use, such as environmental impact".


A Framework for Adaptive Stabilisation of Nonlinear Stochastic Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the adaptive control problem for discrete-time, nonlinear stochastic systems with linearly parameterised uncertainty. Assuming access to a parameterised family of controllers that can stabilise the system in a bounded set within an informative region of the state space when the parameter is well-chosen, we propose a certainty equivalence learning-based adaptive control strategy, and subsequently derive stability bounds on the closed-loop system that hold for some probabilities. We then show that if the entire state space is informative, and the family of controllers is globally stabilising with appropriately chosen parameters, high probability stability guarantees can be derived.


Dynamic Priors in Bayesian Optimization for Hyperparameter Optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO), for example, based on Bayesian optimization (BO), supports users in designing models well-suited for a given dataset. HPO has proven its effectiveness on several applications, ranging from classical machine learning for tabular data to deep neural networks for computer vision and transformers for natural language processing. However, HPO still sometimes lacks acceptance by machine learning experts due to its black-box nature and limited user control. Addressing this, first approaches have been proposed to initialize BO methods with expert knowledge. However, these approaches do not allow for online steering during the optimization process. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that enables repeated interventions to steer BO via user input, specifying expert knowledge and user preferences at runtime of the HPO process in the form of prior distributions. To this end, we generalize an existing method, $ฯ€$BO, preserving theoretical guarantees. We also introduce a misleading prior detection scheme, which allows protection against harmful user inputs. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our method can effectively incorporate multiple priors, leveraging informative priors, whereas misleading priors are reliably rejected or overcome. Thereby, we achieve competitiveness to unperturbed BO.



Graph Neural Networks and Arithmetic Circuits

Neural Information Processing Systems

Relevant to this paper are examinations of the computational power of neural networks after training, i.e., the training process is not taken into account but instead the computational power of an optimally trained network is studied. Starting already in the nineties, the expressive power of feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) has been related to Boolean threshold circuits, see, e.g., [Maass et al., 1991, Siegelmann and Sontag, 1995,


Requirements Elicitation Follow-Up Question Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Interviews are a widely used technique in eliciting requirements to gather stakeholder needs, preferences, and expectations for a software system. Effective interviewing requires skilled interviewers to formulate appropriate interview questions in real time while facing multiple challenges, including lack of familiarity with the domain, excessive cognitive load, and information overload that hinders how humans process stakeholders' speech. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited state-of-the-art performance in multiple natural language processing tasks, including text summarization and entailment. To support interviewers, we investigate the application of GPT-4o to generate follow-up interview questions during requirements elicitation by building on a framework of common interviewer mistake types. In addition, we describe methods to generate questions based on interviewee speech. We report a controlled experiment to evaluate LLM-generated and human-authored questions with minimal guidance, and a second controlled experiment to evaluate the LLM-generated questions when generation is guided by interviewer mistake types. Our findings demonstrate that, for both experiments, the LLM-generated questions are no worse than the human-authored questions with respect to clarity, relevancy, and informativeness. In addition, LLM-generated questions outperform human-authored questions when guided by common mistakes types. This highlights the potential of using LLMs to help interviewers improve the quality and ease of requirements elicitation interviews in real time.


maneuverRecognition -- A Python package for Timeseries Classification in the domain of Vehicle Telematics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the domain of vehicle telematics the automated recognition of driving maneuvers is used to classify and evaluate driving behaviour. This not only serves as a component to enhance the personalization of insurance policies, but also to increase road safety, reduce accidents and the associated costs as well as to reduce fuel consumption and support environmentally friendly driving. In this context maneuver recognition technically requires a continuous application of time series classification which poses special challenges to the transfer, preprocessing and storage of telematic sensor data, the training of predictive models, and the prediction itself. Although much research has been done in the field of gathering relevant data or regarding the methods to build predictive models for the task of maneuver recognition, there is a practical need for python packages and functions that allow to quickly transform data into the required structure as well as to build and evaluate such models. The maneuverRecognition package was therefore developed to provide the necessary functions for preprocessing, modelling and evaluation and also includes a ready to use LSTM based network structure that can be modified. The implementation of the package is demonstrated using real driving data of three different persons recorded via smartphone sensors.