Progress in machine understanding of sign languages has been slow and hampered by limited data. In this paper, we present FSboard, an American Sign Language fingerspelling dataset situated in a mobile text entry use case, collected from 147 paid and consenting Deaf signers using Pixel 4A selfie cameras in a variety of environments. Fingerspelling recognition is an incomplete solution that is only one small part of sign language translation, but it could provide some immediate benefit to Deaf/Hard of Hearing signers as more broadly capable technology develops. At >3 million characters in length and >250 hours in duration, FSboard is the largest fingerspelling recognition dataset to date by a factor of >10x. As a simple baseline, we finetune 30 Hz MediaPipe Holistic landmark inputs into ByT5-Small and achieve 11.1% Character Error Rate (CER) on a test set with unique phrases and signers. This quality degrades gracefully when decreasing frame rate and excluding face/body landmarks: plausible optimizations to help models run on device in real time.

Dana Goodyear's article about the scientist He Jiankui captured the terrifying potential of gene editing ("Dangerous Designs," September 11th). However, many of the problems that certain scientists are trying to remedy with the gene-editing tool CRISPR already have controversy-free solutions. Conditions such as Batten disease, caused when a baby inherits one pathogenic gene from each parent, can be prevented by pre-conception screenings of would-be parents. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is inherited from one parent, can be averted using pre-implant genetic diagnosis, a common I.V.F. Gene editing will eventually have a place in clinical medicine, but its use will likely be minimal, compared with these currently accessible, effective, and less buzzworthy techniques.

In graph machine learning, data collection, sharing, and analysis often involve multiple parties, each of which may require varying levels of data security and privacy. To this end, preserving privacy is of great importance in protecting sensitive information. In the era of big data, the relationships among data entities have become unprecedentedly complex, and more applications utilize advanced data structures (i.e., graphs) that can support network structures and relevant attribute information. To date, many graph-based AI models have been proposed (e.g., graph neural networks) for various domain tasks, like computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we focus on reviewing privacy-preserving techniques of graph machine learning. We systematically review related works from the data to the computational aspects. We first review methods for generating privacy-preserving graph data. Then we describe methods for transmitting privacy-preserved information (e.g., graph model parameters) to realize the optimization-based computation when data sharing among multiple parties is risky or impossible. In addition to discussing relevant theoretical methodology and software tools, we also discuss current challenges and highlight several possible future research opportunities for privacy-preserving graph machine learning. Finally, we envision a unified and comprehensive secure graph machine learning system.

Conventional rule learning algorithms aim at finding a set of simple rules, where each rule covers as many examples as possible. In this paper, we argue that the rules found in this way may not be the optimal explanations for each of the examples they cover. Instead, we propose an efficient algorithm that aims at finding the best rule covering each training example in a greedy optimization consisting of one specialization and one generalization loop. These locally optimal rules are collected and then filtered for a final rule set, which is much larger than the sets learned by conventional rule learning algorithms. A new example is classified by selecting the best among the rules that cover this example. In our experiments on small to very large datasets, the approach's average classification accuracy is higher than that of state-of-the-art rule learning algorithms. Moreover, the algorithm is highly efficient and can inherently be processed in parallel without affecting the learned rule set and so the classification accuracy. We thus believe that it closes an important gap for large-scale classification rule induction.

A chilling video reminiscent of Black Mirror of a robot dog opening fire with a submachine gun strapped to its back - uploaded by the Russian founder of a hoverbike company - is a preview of future warfare. Alexander Atamanov, the founder of a Russian hoverbike company, uploaded the viral video, which shows a UnitreeYushu dogbot that retails online for about $3,000 shooting at snow-covered hills outside, and it appears he was simply creating something to play around with. At a time when autonomous drones are being used to target terrorists and the US Army has its own sniper rifle-armed robot dog, the video is a terrifying reminder that this type weapon is already a reality. The robot dog, called a'technology dog' by its manufacturer, appears to be carrying a Russian gun known as a PP-19 Vityaz, a type of submachine gun that's based on the AK-47 design The robot dog, called a'technology dog' by its manufacturer, appears to be carrying a Russian gun known as a PP-19 Vityaz, a type of submachine gun that's based on the AK-47 design, according to Vice. The robot also has strips of Velcro on its sides and a Russian flag is seen on its left flank.

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) is committed to achieving optimal information fusion from a set of base kernels. Constructing precise and local kernel matrices is proved to be of vital significance in applications since the unreliable distant-distance similarity estimation would degrade clustering per-formance. Although existing localized MKC algorithms exhibit improved performance compared to globally-designed competi-tors, most of them widely adopt KNN mechanism to localize kernel matrix by accounting for {\tau} -nearest neighbors. However, such a coarse manner follows an unreasonable strategy that the ranking importance of different neighbors is equal, which is impractical in applications. To alleviate such problems, this paper proposes a novel local sample-weighted multiple kernel clustering (LSWMKC) model. We first construct a consensus discriminative affinity graph in kernel space, revealing the latent local structures. Further, an optimal neighborhood kernel for the learned affinity graph is output with naturally sparse property and clear block diagonal structure. Moreover, LSWMKC im-plicitly optimizes adaptive weights on different neighbors with corresponding samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our LSWMKC possesses better local manifold representation and outperforms existing kernel or graph-based clustering algo-rithms. The source code of LSWMKC can be publicly accessed from https://github.com/liliangnudt/LSWMKC.

An enormous robotic yak, strong enough to carry up to 352 pounds, and able to sprint along at up to 6 miles per hour, has been developed by Chinese scientists. The robot can deal with all sorts of road and weather conditions, according to the Chinese state run People's Daily, which shared a video of the yak on a road. When deployed, it will join soldiers from the Chinese army on logistics and reconnaissance missions across complex environments including snowfields, deserts and mountains. The missions will include working in remote border regions, as well as in high risk combat zones, according to reports by Chinese state media. The robot comes with multiple sensors, giving it a high degree of situational awareness that analysts say can be fed into commanders in a battlefield environment. The robot can deal with all sorts of road and weather conditions, according to the Chinese state run People's Daily, that shared a video of the yak on a road The full details of the Chinese robot yak haven't been revealed, but it can carry up to 352lb of goods.

Data-driven AI systems can lead to discrimination on the basis of protected attributes like gender or race. One reason for this behavior is the encoded societal biases in the training data (e.g., females are underrepresented), which is aggravated in the presence of unbalanced class distributions (e.g., "granted" is the minority class). State-of-the-art fairness-aware machine learning approaches focus on preserving the \emph{overall} classification accuracy while improving fairness. In the presence of class-imbalance, such methods may further aggravate the problem of discrimination by denying an already underrepresented group (e.g., \textit{females}) the fundamental rights of equal social privileges (e.g., equal credit opportunity). To this end, we propose AdaFair, a fairness-aware boosting ensemble that changes the data distribution at each round, taking into account not only the class errors but also the fairness-related performance of the model defined cumulatively based on the partial ensemble. Except for the in-training boosting of the group discriminated over each round, AdaFair directly tackles imbalance during the post-training phase by optimizing the number of ensemble learners for balanced error performance (BER). AdaFair can facilitate different parity-based fairness notions and mitigate effectively discriminatory outcomes. Our experiments show that our approach can achieve parity in terms of statistical parity, equal opportunity, and disparate mistreatment while maintaining good predictive performance for all classes.

A robot dog design armed with a 6.5 mm Creedmoor sniper rifle capable of precisely hitting targets from 3,940 feet away has been unveiled at the US Army trade show. The'Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle' (SPUR) is the brainchild of Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics and arms manufacturer SWORD International of Sparks, Nevada. Placed on top of one of Ghost Robotics' existing'quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle' designs, SPUR can be remotely instructed to load, unload and fire its rifle. The firms have yet to reveal the exact configuration of the weapon, nor how much ammunition the machine is capable of carrying or its reload rate. However, tests have shown that the 6.5mm rounds used in the Creedmoor rifle offer an increase in range over the 7.62x51mm cartridges currently used by US forces. It is also presently unclear how much each robot unit and SPUR attachment will cost to purchase and maintain.

The optimization of submodular functions constitutes a viable way to perform clustering. Strong approximation guarantees and feasible optimization w.r.t. streaming data make this clustering approach favorable. Technically, submodular functions map subsets of data to real values, which indicate how "representative" a specific subset is. Optimal sets might then be used to partition the data space and to infer clusters. Exemplar-based clustering is one of the possible submodular functions, but suffers from high computational complexity. However, for practical applications, the particular real-time or wall-clock run-time is decisive. In this work, we present a novel way to evaluate this particular function on GPUs, which keeps the necessities of optimizers in mind and reduces wall-clock run-time. To discuss our GPU algorithm, we investigated both the impact of different run-time critical problem properties, like data dimensionality and the number of data points in a subset, and the influence of required floating-point precision. In reproducible experiments, our GPU algorithm was able to achieve competitive speedups of up to 72x depending on whether multi-threaded computation on CPUs was used for comparison and the type of floating-point precision required. Half-precision GPU computation led to large speedups of up to 452x compared to single-precision, single-thread CPU computations.