Laredo
Baby spider monkeys rescued in Texas
Animal traffickers face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It should go without saying, but please don't smuggle spider monkeys. While responding to a human trafficking case earlier this year, United States Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, found two of these tiny primates . The driver failed to yield and fled the scene, leading officers to respond.
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.25)
- North America > Mexico (0.06)
- South America > Chile (0.05)
- (5 more...)
- Government (0.52)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety (0.37)
- Law (0.37)
- North America > Mexico (0.16)
- North America > El Salvador (0.06)
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.05)
- (3 more...)
Inside CORE-KG: Evaluating Structured Prompting and Coreference Resolution for Knowledge Graphs
Meher, Dipak, Domeniconi, Carlotta
Human smuggling networks are increasingly adaptive and difficult to analyze. Legal case documents offer critical insights but are often unstructured, lexically dense, and filled with ambiguous or shifting references, which pose significant challenges for automated knowledge graph (KG) construction. While recent LLM-based approaches improve over static templates, they still generate noisy, fragmented graphs with duplicate nodes due to the absence of guided extraction and coreference resolution. The recently proposed CORE-KG framework addresses these limitations by integrating a type-aware coreference module and domain-guided structured prompts, significantly reducing node duplication and legal noise. In this work, we present a systematic ablation study of CORE-KG to quantify the individual contributions of its two key components. Our results show that removing coreference resolution results in a 28.25% increase in node duplication and a 4.32% increase in noisy nodes, while removing structured prompts leads to a 4.29% increase in node duplication and a 73.33% increase in noisy nodes. These findings offer empirical insights for designing robust LLM-based pipelines for extracting structured representations from complex legal texts.
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.04)
- North America > United States > Texas > Bexar County > San Antonio (0.04)
- North America > United States > New Mexico (0.04)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Text Processing (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.93)
CORE-KG: An LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Human Smuggling Networks
Meher, Dipak, Domeniconi, Carlotta, Correa-Cabrera, Guadalupe
Human smuggling networks are increasingly adaptive and difficult to analyze. Legal case documents offer valuable insights but are unstructured, lexically dense, and filled with ambiguous or shifting references-posing challenges for automated knowledge graph (KG) construction. Existing KG methods often rely on static templates and lack coreference resolution, while recent LLM-based approaches frequently produce noisy, fragmented graphs due to hallucinations, and duplicate nodes caused by a lack of guided extraction. We propose CORE-KG, a modular framework for building interpretable KGs from legal texts. It uses a two-step pipeline: (1) type-aware coreference resolution via sequential, structured LLM prompts, and (2) entity and relationship extraction using domain-guided instructions, built on an adapted GraphRAG framework. CORE-KG reduces node duplication by 33.28%, and legal noise by 38.37% compared to a GraphRAG-based baseline-resulting in cleaner and more coherent graph structures. These improvements make CORE-KG a strong foundation for analyzing complex criminal networks.
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.05)
- North America > Mexico (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York (0.04)
- (2 more...)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety > Crime Prevention & Enforcement (1.00)
- Law (1.00)
- Government > Immigration & Customs (0.93)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (0.93)
Deep Learning in Renewable Energy Forecasting: A Cross-Dataset Evaluation of Temporal and Spatial Models
Sua, Lutfu, Wang, Haibo, Huang, Jun
Unpredictability of renewable energy sources coupled with the complexity of those methods used for various purposes in this area calls for the development of robust methods such as DL models within the renewable energy domain. Given the nonlinear relationships among variables in renewable energy datasets, DL models are preferred over traditional machine learning (ML) models because they can effectively capture and model complex interactions between variables. This research aims to identify the factors responsible for the accuracy of DL techniques, such as sampling, stationarity, linearity, and hyperparameter optimization for different algorithms. The proposed DL framework compares various methods and alternative training/test ratios. Seven ML methods, such as Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), Stacked LSTM, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), CNN-LSTM, Deep Neural Network (DNN), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and Encoder-Decoder (ED), were evaluated on two different datasets. The first dataset contains the weather and power generation data. It encompasses two distinct datasets, hourly energy demand data and hourly weather data in Spain, while the second dataset includes power output generated by the photovoltaic panels at 12 locations. This study deploys regularization approaches, including early stopping, neuron dropping, and L2 regularization, to reduce the overfitting problem associated with DL models. The LSTM and MLP models show superior performance. Their validation data exhibit exceptionally low root mean square error values.
- Europe > Spain > Galicia > Madrid (0.05)
- North America > Trinidad and Tobago > Trinidad > Arima > Arima (0.04)
- North America > United States > Nevada > Clark County > Las Vegas (0.04)
- (8 more...)
- Research Report > New Finding (1.00)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.94)
Renewable Energy Prediction: A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Models for Complex Dataset Analysis
Wang, Haibo, Huang, Jun, Sua, Lutfu, Alidaee, Bahram
The increasing focus on predicting renewable energy production aligns with advancements in deep learning (DL). The inherent variability of renewable sources and the complexity of prediction methods require robust approaches, such as DL models, in the renewable energy sector. DL models are preferred over traditional machine learning (ML) because they capture complex, nonlinear relationships in renewable energy datasets. This study examines key factors influencing DL technique accuracy, including sampling and hyperparameter optimization, by comparing various methods and training and test ratios within a DL framework. Seven machine learning methods, LSTM, Stacked LSTM, CNN, CNN-LSTM, DNN, Time-Distributed MLP (TD-MLP), and Autoencoder (AE), are evaluated using a dataset combining weather and photovoltaic power output data from 12 locations. Regularization techniques such as early stopping, neuron dropout, L1 and L2 regularization are applied to address overfitting. The results demonstrate that the combination of early stopping, dropout, and L1 regularization provides the best performance to reduce overfitting in the CNN and TD-MLP models with larger training set, while the combination of early stopping, dropout, and L2 regularization is the most effective to reduce the overfitting in CNN-LSTM and AE models with smaller training set.
- North America > United States > Mississippi > Lafayette County > Oxford (0.14)
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.04)
- North America > United States > Texas > Tom Green County > San Angelo (0.04)
- North America > United States > Louisiana > East Baton Rouge Parish > Baton Rouge (0.04)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.34)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.34)
Whistleblowers claim Border Patrol surveillance cameras 'out of service' as GOP demands answers from DHS
Fox News host Sean Hannity calls out Vice President Kamala Harris' far-left policies ahead of the November election on'Hannity.' Over the last year, Fox News correspondents Bill Melguin and Griff Jenkins have been following complaints from Border Patrol sources that many of the crucial remote surveillance cameras in multiple sectors along the southern border have not been operational. U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Republicans say whistleblowers came forward to the committee last week, claiming that "some of the busiest Southwest border sectors have nearly 50 or more cameras offline with multiple towers that have been out of service for more than a year." On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, claiming that whistleblowers came forward to the committee last week with concerning information on this issue. The letter from Republicans to Mayorkas demanded answers.
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.05)
- North America > United States > Texas > Maverick County > Eagle Pass (0.05)
- North America > Mexico (0.05)
Border Patrol facing large-scale surveillance camera outage with 'significant impacts': report
Former National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd on border agents threatening to leave if Kamala Harris wins the presidential election and explains agents' frustrations with the Biden-Harris administration. The Border Patrol is facing a large-scale outage of security cameras at the southern border with a memo reportedly warning it is having "significant impacts" on operations in apprehending migrants, although officials note there are other layers of security in place as well. NBC News reported that an October memo said nearly one-third of cameras, roughly 150 of 500 cameras on surveillance towers, were out due to technical issues. "The nationwide issue is having significant impacts on [Border Patrol] operations," the memo said. The Remote Video Surveillance Systems are nearly 15 years old and are used to monitor areas of the border without the need for regular on the ground patrols.
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.06)
- North America > United States > Colorado (0.06)
- North America > United States > California > San Diego County > San Diego (0.06)
- North America > Mexico (0.06)
Hybrid Heuristic Algorithms for Adiabatic Quantum Machine Learning Models
Alidaee, Bahram, Wang, Haibo, Sua, Lutfu, Liu, Wade
The recent developments of adiabatic quantum machine learning (AQML) methods and applications based on the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) model have received attention from academics and practitioners. Traditional machine learning methods such as support vector machines, balanced k-means clustering, linear regression, Decision Tree Splitting, Restricted Boltzmann Machines, and Deep Belief Networks can be transformed into a QUBO model. The training of adiabatic quantum machine learning models is the bottleneck for computation. Heuristics-based quantum annealing solvers such as Simulated Annealing and Multiple Start Tabu Search (MSTS) are implemented to speed up the training of AQML based on the QUBO model. The main purpose of this paper is to present a hybrid heuristic embedding an r-flip strategy to solve large-scale QUBO with an improved solution and shorter computing time compared to the state-of-the-art MSTS method. The results of the substantial computational experiments are reported to compare an r-flip strategy embedded hybrid heuristic and a multiple start tabu search algorithm on a set of benchmark instances and three large-scale QUBO instances. The r-flip strategy embedded algorithm provides very high-quality solutions within the CPU time limits of 60 and 600 seconds.
- North America > United States > Mississippi > Lafayette County > Oxford (0.14)
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York (0.04)
- North America > United States > Louisiana > East Baton Rouge Parish > Baton Rouge (0.04)
Enhancing supply chain security with automated machine learning
Wang, Haibo, Sua, Lutfu S., Alidaee, Bahram
This study tackles the complexities of global supply chains, which are increasingly vulnerable to disruptions caused by port congestion, material shortages, and inflation. To address these challenges, we explore the application of machine learning methods, which excel in predicting and optimizing solutions based on large datasets. Our focus is on enhancing supply chain security through fraud detection, maintenance prediction, and material backorder forecasting. We introduce an automated machine learning framework that streamlines data analysis, model construction, and hyperparameter optimization for these tasks. By automating these processes, our framework improves the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chain security measures. Our research identifies key factors that influence machine learning performance, including sampling methods, categorical encoding, feature selection, and hyperparameter optimization. We demonstrate the importance of considering these factors when applying machine learning to supply chain challenges. Traditional mathematical programming models often struggle to cope with the complexity of large-scale supply chain problems. Our study shows that machine learning methods can provide a viable alternative, particularly when dealing with extensive datasets and complex patterns. The automated machine learning framework presented in this study offers a novel approach to supply chain security, contributing to the existing body of knowledge in the field. Its comprehensive automation of machine learning processes makes it a valuable contribution to the domain of supply chain management.
- North America > United States > Mississippi > Lafayette County > Oxford (0.14)
- North America > United States > Texas > Webb County > Laredo (0.04)
- North America > United States > Louisiana > East Baton Rouge Parish > Baton Rouge (0.04)
- Overview (1.00)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.88)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety > Fraud (1.00)
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (1.00)
- Banking & Finance > Economy (1.00)