Attard
Enhancing AI and Dynamical Subseasonal Forecasts with Probabilistic Bias Correction
Guan, Hannah, Mouatadid, Soukayna, Orenstein, Paulo, Cohen, Judah, Dong, Haiyu, Ni, Zekun, Berman, Jeremy, Flaspohler, Genevieve, Lu, Alex, Schloer, Jakob, Talib, Joshua, Weyn, Jonathan A., Mackey, Lester
Decision-makers rely on weather forecasts to plant crops, manage wildfires, allocate water and energy, and prepare for weather extremes. Today, such forecasts enjoy unprecedented accuracy out to two weeks thanks to steady advances in physics-based dynamical models and data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) models. However, model skill drops precipitously at subseasonal timescales (2 - 6 weeks ahead), due to compounding errors and persistent biases. To counter this degradation, we introduce probabilistic bias correction (PBC), a machine learning framework that substantially reduces systematic error by learning to correct historical probabilistic forecasts. When applied to the leading dynamical and AI models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), PBC doubles the subseasonal skill of the AI Forecasting System and improves the skill of the operationally-debiased dynamical model for 91% of pressure, 92% of temperature, and 98% of precipitation targets. We designed PBC for operational deployment, and, in ECMWF's 2025 real-time forecasting competition, its global forecasts placed first for all weather variables and lead times, outperforming the dynamical models from six operational forecasting centers, an international dynamical multi-model ensemble, ECMWF's AI Forecasting System, and the forecasting systems of 34 teams worldwide. These probabilistic skill gains translate into more accurate prediction of extreme events and have the potential to improve agricultural planning, energy management, and disaster preparedness in vulnerable communities.
A Game-Theoretic Negotiation Framework for Cross-Cultural Consensus in LLMs
Zhang, Guoxi, Chen, Jiawei, Yang, Tianzhuo, Ji, Jiaming, Yang, Yaodong, Dai, Juntao
The increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) is influencing global value systems. However, these models frequently exhibit a pronounced WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural bias due to lack of attention to minority values. This monocultural perspective may reinforce dominant values and marginalize diverse cultural viewpoints, posing challenges for the development of equitable and inclusive AI systems. In this work, we introduce a systematic framework designed to boost fair and robust cross-cultural consensus among LLMs. We model consensus as a Nash Equilibrium and employ a game-theoretic negotiation method based on Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) to simulate an organized cross-cultural negotiation process. To evaluate this approach, we construct regional cultural agents using data transformed from the World Values Survey (WVS). Beyond the conventional model-level evaluation method, We further propose two quantitative metrics, Perplexity-based Acceptence and Values Self-Consistency, to assess consensus outcomes. Experimental results indicate that our approach generates consensus of higher quality while ensuring more balanced compromise compared to baselines. Overall, it mitigates WEIRD bias by guiding agents toward convergence through fair and gradual negotiation steps.
New AI test can predict which men will benefit from prostate cancer drug
Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict which men with prostate cancer will benefit from a drug that halves the risk of dying. Abiraterone has been described as a "gamechanger" treatment for the disease, which is the most common form of cancer in men in more than 100 countries. It has already helped hundreds of thousands with advanced prostate cancer to live longer. But some countries, including England, have stopped short of offering the "spectacular" drug more widely to men whose disease has not spread. Now a team from the US, UK and Switzerland have built an AI test that shows which men would most likely benefit from abiraterone. The "exciting" breakthrough will enable healthcare systems to roll out the drug to more men, and spare others unnecessary treatment.
Comparative Analysis of Image, Video, and Audio Classifiers for Automated News Video Segmentation
Attard, Jonathan, Seychell, Dylan
News videos require efficient content organisation and retrieval systems, but their unstructured nature poses significant challenges for automated processing. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of image, video, and audio classifiers for automated news video segmentation. This work presents the development and evaluation of multiple deep learning approaches, including ResNet, ViViT, AST, and multimodal architectures, to classify five distinct segment types: advertisements, stories, studio scenes, transitions, and visualisations. Using a custom-annotated dataset of 41 news videos comprising 1,832 scene clips, our experiments demonstrate that image-based classifiers achieve superior performance (84.34\% accuracy) compared to more complex temporal models. Notably, the ResNet architecture outperformed state-of-the-art video classifiers while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Binary classification models achieved high accuracy for transitions (94.23\%) and advertisements (92.74\%). These findings advance the understanding of effective architectures for news video segmentation and provide practical insights for implementing automated content organisation systems in media applications. These include media archiving, personalised content delivery, and intelligent video search.
Semantic Web and Creative AI -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2023
Ahmad, Raia Abu, Alharbi, Reham, Barile, Roberto, Bรถckling, Martin, Bolanos, Francisco, Bonfitto, Sara, Bruns, Oleksandra, Celino, Irene, Chudasama, Yashrajsinh, Critelli, Martin, d'Amato, Claudia, D'Ippolito, Giada, Dasoulas, Ioannis, De Giorgis, Stefano, De Leo, Vincenzo, Di Bonaventura, Chiara, Di Panfilo, Marco, Dobriy, Daniil, Domingue, John, Duan, Xuemin, Dumontier, Michel, Efeoglu, Sefika, Eschauzier, Ruben, Ginwa, Fakih, Ferranti, Nicolas, Graciotti, Arianna, Hanisch, Philipp, Hannah, George, Heidari, Golsa, Hogan, Aidan, Hussein, Hassan, Jouglar, Alexane, Kalo, Jan-Christoph, Kieffer, Manoรฉ, Klironomos, Antonis, Koch, Inรชs, Lajewska, Weronika, Lazzari, Nicolas, Lindekrans, Mikael, Lippolis, Anna Sofia, Llugiqi, Majlinda, Mancini, Eleonora, Marzi, Eleonora, Menotti, Laura, Flores, Daniela Milon, Nagowah, Soulakshmee, Neubert, Kerstin, Niazmand, Emetis, Norouzi, Ebrahim, Martinez, Beatriz Olarte, Oudshoorn, Anouk Michelle, Poltronieri, Andrea, Presutti, Valentina, Purohit, Disha, Raoufi, Ensiyeh, Ringwald, Celian, Rockstroh, Johanna, Rudolph, Sebastian, Sack, Harald, Saeed, Zafar, Saeedizade, Mohammad Javad, Sahbi, Aya, Santini, Cristian, Simic, Aleksandra, Sommer, Dennis, Sousa, Rita, Tan, Mary Ann, Tarikere, Vidyashree, Tietz, Tabea, Tirpitz, Liam, Tomasino, Arnaldo, van Harmelen, Frank, Vissoci, Joao, Woods, Caitlin, Zhang, Bohui, Zhang, Xinyue, Zheng, Heng
The International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS) is a week-long intensive program designed to immerse participants in the field. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by ten teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending ISWS 2023. Each team provided a different perspective to the topic of creative AI, substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. The 2023 edition of ISWS focuses on the intersection of Semantic Web technologies and Creative AI. ISWS 2023 explored various intersections between Semantic Web technologies and creative AI. A key area of focus was the potential of LLMs as support tools for knowledge engineering. Participants also delved into the multifaceted applications of LLMs, including legal aspects of creative content production, humans in the loop, decentralised approaches to multimodal generative AI models, nanopublications and AI for personal scientific knowledge graphs, commonsense knowledge in automatic story and narrative completion, generative AI for art critique, prompt engineering, automatic music composition, commonsense prototyping and conceptual blending, and elicitation of tacit knowledge. As Large Language Models and semantic technologies continue to evolve, new exciting prospects are emerging: a future where the boundaries between creative expression and factual knowledge become increasingly permeable and porous, leading to a world of knowledge that is both informative and inspiring.
TOAST Framework: A Multidimensional Approach to Ethical and Sustainable AI Integration in Organizations
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative technology with the potential to revolutionize various sectors, from healthcare to finance, education, and beyond. However, successfully implementing AI systems remains a complex challenge, requiring a comprehensive and methodologically sound framework. This paper contributes to this challenge by introducing the Trustworthy, Optimized, Adaptable, and Socio-Technologically harmonious (TOAST) framework. It draws on insights from various disciplines to align technical strategy with ethical values, societal responsibilities, and innovation aspirations. The TOAST framework is a novel approach designed to guide the implementation of AI systems, focusing on reliability, accountability, technical advancement, adaptability, and socio-technical harmony. By grounding the TOAST framework in healthcare case studies, this paper provides a robust evaluation of its practicality and theoretical soundness in addressing operational, ethical, and regulatory challenges in high-stakes environments, demonstrating how adaptable AI systems can enhance institutional efficiency, mitigate risks like bias and data privacy, and offer a replicable model for other sectors requiring ethically aligned and efficient AI integration.
ROSMonitoring 2.0: Extending ROS Runtime Verification to Services and Ordered Topics
Saadat, Maryam Ghaffari, Ferrando, Angelo, Dennis, Louise A., Fisher, Michael
Formal verification of robotic applications presents challenges due to their hybrid nature and distributed architecture. This paper introduces ROSMonitoring 2.0, an extension of ROSMonitoring designed to facilitate the monitoring of both topics and services while considering the order in which messages are published and received. The framework has been enhanced to support these novel features for ROS1 -- and partially ROS2 environments -- offering improved real-time support, security, scalability, and interoperability. We discuss the modifications made to accommodate these advancements and present results obtained from a case study involving the runtime monitoring of specific components of a fire-fighting Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV).
Graph Based Traffic Analysis and Delay Prediction
Borg, Gabriele, Abela, Charlie
This research is focused on traffic congestion in the small island of Malta which is the most densely populated country in the EU with about 1,672 inhabitants per square kilometre (4,331 inhabitants/sq mi). Furthermore, Malta has a rapid vehicle growth. Based on our research, the number of vehicles increased by around 11,000 in a little more than 6 months, which shows how important it is to have an accurate and comprehensive means of collecting data to tackle the issue of fluctuating traffic in Malta. In this paper, we first present the newly built comprehensive traffic dataset, called MalTra. This dataset includes realistic trips made by members of the public across the island over a period of 200 days. We then describe the methodology we adopted to generate syntactic data to complete our data set as much as possible. In our research, we consider both MalTra and the Q-Traffic dataset, which has been used in several other research studies. The statistical ARIMA model and two graph neural networks, the spatial temporal graph convolutional network (STGCN) and the diffusion convolutional recurrent network (DCRNN) were used to analyse and compare the results with existing research. From the evaluation, we found that the DCRNN model outperforms the STGCN with the former resulting in MAE of 3.98 (6.65 in the case of the latter) and a RMSE of 7.78 (against 12.73 of the latter).
"It Might be Technically Impressive, But It's Practically Useless to Us": Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Cross-Functional Collaboration around AI within the News Industry
Xiao, Qing, Fan, Xianzhe, Simon, Felix M., Zhang, Bingbing, Eslami, Motahhare
Recently, an increasing number of news organizations have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows, leading to a further influx of AI technologists and data workers into the news industry. This has initiated cross-functional collaborations between these professionals and journalists. While prior research has explored the impact of AI-related roles entering the news industry, there is a lack of studies on how cross-functional collaboration unfolds between AI professionals and journalists. Through interviews with 17 journalists, 6 AI technologists, and 3 AI workers with cross-functional experience from leading news organizations, we investigate the current practices, challenges, and opportunities for cross-functional collaboration around AI in today's news industry. We first study how journalists and AI professionals perceive existing cross-collaboration strategies. We further explore the challenges of cross-functional collaboration and provide recommendations for enhancing future cross-functional collaboration around AI in the news industry.
Beyond Algorithmic Fairness: A Guide to Develop and Deploy Ethical AI-Enabled Decision-Support Tools
Gonzalez, Rosemarie Santa, Piansky, Ryan, Bae, Sue M, Biddle, Justin, Molzahn, Daniel
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization is transforming the landscape of engineered systems, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance efficiency, reliability, and resilience across domains (Palle, 2023) such as power systems (Thirunavukkarasu et al., 2023), supply chains, and logistics (Joel et al., 2024). As these networked systems become more dependent on AI-enabled decision support tools, the ethical challenges associated with their deployment grow more complex (Whittlestone and Clarke, 2022). Traditional ethical concerns in AI--such as fairness, accountability, and transparency--take on new dimensions when applied to systems characterized by complex networks and optimization processes, where decisions have far-reaching societal impacts (Jobin et al., 2019). Governments and organizations worldwide have responded to these ethical concerns by introducing frameworks and regulations aimed at ensuring trustworthy AI (Harrison and Luna-Reyes, 2022; Weaver, 2021; Aoki et al., 2024; Madhavan et al., 2020). Initiatives like the European Union's AI Act (Parliament and of the European Union, 2024) and the Biden-Harris administration's AI Bill of Rights (Biden, 2021) aim to safeguard fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems (White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2023; OECD, 2020; Radu, 2021).