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Scammers use AI-generated images of lost dogs to target pet owners

Popular Science

A scammer took a real image of a this German shepherd and used AI to make it seem like it was injured. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Increasingly realistic, easy-to-make AI-generated images are a major asset for online scammers looking to trick unsuspecting victims. While past AI-generated scams have tried to deceive people with fake celebrities or potential love interests, attackers increasingly have a new target: distraught pet owners searching for their lost companions . Over the past few months, numerous reports have surfaced following a similar pattern.


US Navy's 'Doomsday Plane' spotted over California as Iranian drone threat on West Coast emerges

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting Ben Affleck'scores $600m deal' with Netflix to sell his AI film start-up Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' US Navy's'Doomsday Plane' spotted over California as Iranian drone threat on West Coast emerges America's so-called'Doomsday plane' has been spotted over the West Coast as fears of a potential Iranian attack on California have come to light this week. The US Navy's E-6B Mercury strategic airborne command aircraft was captured on camera flying unusually low and repeatedly circling the city of Fresno on March 8. These giant unmarked planes, constructed using the frames of the Boeing 707, are built to survive a nuclear war and coordinate America's military response from the air if bases on the ground are attacked .


Windshield wipers' overlooked female inventor

Popular Science

Windshield wipers' overlooked female inventor On November 10, 1903, Birmingham businesswoman Mary Anderson was issued U.S. Patent No. 743,801 for her "Window-Cleaning Device." We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Before cars and buses became ubiquitous features of the modern cityscape, many cities installed streetcars to shuttle residents from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the summer months, the journey was a sweltering one, with dozens of sticky, sweaty passengers crammed together in the heat. The biggest problem wasn't that trolleys were unheated--that advancement came with their electrification in the 1890s--it was that sleet and snow made it impossible for streetcar drivers to see.


Death Valley National Park needs help ID'ing joyriding vandals

Popular Science

Environment Animals Wildlife Endangered Species Death Valley National Park needs help ID'ing joyriding vandals A truck illegally tore through the California park, leaving five miles of tracks and damaging'sensitive desert plants.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Death Valley National Park officials are searching for a couple of brazen blockheads, and they could use your help finding them. Specifically, they're looking for at least two people last spotted in Eureka Dunes . The region located about 120 miles east of Fresno, California features what are likely the tallest sand dunes in North America.


The study of short texts in digital politics: Document aggregation for topic modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Statistical topic modeling is widely used in political science to study text. Researchers examine documents of varying lengths, from tweets to speeches. There is ongoing debate on how document length affects the interpretability of topic models. We investigate the effects of aggregating short documents into larger ones based on natural units that partition the corpus. In our study, we analyze one million tweets by U.S. state legislators from April 2016 to September 2020. We find that for documents aggregated at the account level, topics are more associated with individual states than when using individual tweets. This finding is replicated with Wikipedia pages aggregated by birth cities, showing how document definitions can impact topic modeling results.


Biased or Flawed? Mitigating Stereotypes in Generative Language Models by Addressing Task-Specific Flaws

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent studies have shown that generative language models often reflect and amplify societal biases in their outputs. However, these studies frequently conflate observed biases with other task-specific shortcomings, such as comprehension failure. For example, when a model misinterprets a text and produces a response that reinforces a stereotype, it becomes difficult to determine whether the issue arises from inherent bias or from a misunderstanding of the given content. In this paper, we conduct a multi-faceted evaluation that distinctly disentangles bias from flaws within the reading comprehension task. We propose a targeted stereotype mitigation framework that implicitly mitigates observed stereotypes in generative models through instruction-tuning on general-purpose datasets. We reduce stereotypical outputs by over 60% across multiple dimensions -- including nationality, age, gender, disability, and physical appearance -- by addressing comprehension-based failures, and without relying on explicit debiasing techniques. We evaluate several state-of-the-art generative models to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach while maintaining the overall utility. Our findings highlight the need to critically disentangle the concept of `bias' from other types of errors to build more targeted and effective mitigation strategies. CONTENT WARNING: Some examples contain offensive stereotypes.


FLEX: Expert-level False-Less EXecution Metric for Reliable Text-to-SQL Benchmark

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Text-to-SQL systems have become crucial for translating natural language into SQL queries in various industries, enabling non-technical users to perform complex data operations. The need for accurate evaluation methods has increased as these systems have grown more sophisticated. However, the Execution Accuracy (EX), the most prevalent evaluation metric, still shows many false positives and negatives. Thus, this paper introduces FLEX (False-Less EXecution), a novel approach to evaluating text-to-SQL systems using large language models (LLMs) to emulate human expert-level evaluation of SQL queries. Our metric improves agreement with human experts (from 62 to 87.04 in Cohen's kappa) with comprehensive context and sophisticated criteria. Our extensive experiments yield several key insights: (1) Models' performance increases by over 2.6 points on average, substantially affecting rankings on Spider and BIRD benchmarks; (2) The underestimation of models in EX primarily stems from annotation quality issues; and (3) Model performance on particularly challenging questions tends to be overestimated. This work contributes to a more accurate and nuanced evaluation of text-to-SQL systems, potentially reshaping our understanding of state-of-the-art performance in this field.


AI-based Drone Assisted Human Rescue in Disaster Environments: Challenges and Opportunities

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this survey we are focusing on utilizing drone-based systems for the detection of individuals, particularly by identifying human screams and other distress signals. This study has significant relevance in post-disaster scenarios, including events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, military conflicts, wildfires, and more. These drones are capable of hovering over disaster-stricken areas that may be challenging for rescue teams to access directly. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, are frequently deployed for search-and-rescue missions during disaster situations. Typically, drones capture aerial images to assess structural damage and identify the extent of the disaster. They also employ thermal imaging technology to detect body heat signatures, which can help locate individuals. In some cases, larger drones are used to deliver essential supplies to people stranded in isolated disaster-stricken areas. In our discussions, we delve into the unique challenges associated with locating humans through aerial acoustics. The auditory system must distinguish between human cries and sounds that occur naturally, such as animal calls and wind. Additionally, it should be capable of recognizing distinct patterns related to signals like shouting, clapping, or other ways in which people attempt to signal rescue teams. To tackle this challenge, one solution involves harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze sound frequencies and identify common audio signatures. Deep learning-based networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can be trained using these signatures to filter out noise generated by drone motors and other environmental factors. Furthermore, employing signal processing techniques like the direction of arrival (DOA) based on microphone array signals can enhance the precision of tracking the source of human noises.


Causal Discovery-Driven Change Point Detection in Time Series

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Change point detection in time series seeks to identify times when the probability distribution of time series changes. It is widely applied in many areas, such as human-activity sensing and medical science. In the context of multivariate time series, this typically involves examining the joint distribution of high-dimensional data: If any one variable changes, the whole time series is assumed to have changed. However, in practical applications, we may be interested only in certain components of the time series, exploring abrupt changes in their distributions in the presence of other time series. Here, assuming an underlying structural causal model that governs the time-series data generation, we address this problem by proposing a two-stage non-parametric algorithm that first learns parts of the causal structure through constraint-based discovery methods. The algorithm then uses conditional relative Pearson divergence estimation to identify the change points. The conditional relative Pearson divergence quantifies the distribution disparity between consecutive segments in the time series, while the causal discovery method enables a focus on the causal mechanism, facilitating access to independent and identically distributed (IID) samples. Theoretically, the typical assumption of samples being IID in conventional change point detection methods can be relaxed based on the Causal Markov Condition. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we validate the correctness and utility of our approach.


MetaKP: On-Demand Keyphrase Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Traditional keyphrase prediction methods predict a single set of keyphrases per document, failing to cater to the diverse needs of users and downstream applications. To bridge the gap, we introduce on-demand keyphrase generation, a novel paradigm that requires keyphrases that conform to specific high-level goals or intents. For this task, we present MetaKP, a large-scale benchmark comprising four datasets, 7500 documents, and 3760 goals across news and biomedical domains with human-annotated keyphrases. Leveraging MetaKP, we design both supervised and unsupervised methods, including a multi-task fine-tuning approach and a self-consistency prompting method with large language models. The results highlight the challenges of supervised fine-tuning, whose performance is not robust to distribution shifts. By contrast, the proposed self-consistency prompting approach greatly improves the performance of large language models, enabling GPT-4o to achieve 0.548 SemF1, surpassing the performance of a fully fine-tuned BART-base model. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our method to serve as a general NLP infrastructure, exemplified by its application in epidemic event detection from social media.