District of Columbia
Peek-a-boo, Big Tech sees you: Expert warns just 20 cloud images can make an AI deepfake video of your child
Texas high school student Elliston Berry joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the House's passage of a new bill that criminalizes the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, including content created with artificial intelligence. Parents love capturing their kids' big moments, from first steps to birthday candles. But a new study out of the U.K. shows many of those treasured images may be scanned, analyzed and turned into data by cloud storage services, and nearly half of parents don't even realize it. A survey of 2,019 U.K. parents, conducted by Perspectus Global and commissioned by Swiss privacy tech company Proton, found that 48% of parents were unaware providers like Google Photos, Apple iCloud, Amazon Photos and Dropbox can access and analyze the photos they upload. First lady Melania Trump, joined by President Donald Trump, delivers remarks before President Trump signed the Take it Down Act into law in the Rose Garden of the White House May 19, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) These companies use artificial intelligence to sort images into albums, recognize faces and locations and suggest memories.
Russian advances in Ukraine slow down despite growing force size
Russia's territorial gains in Ukraine are slowing down dramatically, two analyses have found, continuing a pattern from 2024 at a time when both nations are trying to project strength in the face of United States-mediated negotiations aimed at ending the war. Britain's Ministry of Defence last week estimated that Russian forces seized 143sq km (55sq miles) of Ukrainian land in March, compared with 196sq km (76sq miles) in February and 326sq km (126sq miles) in January. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC-based think tank, spotted the same trend, estimating Russian gains at 203sq km (78sq miles) in March, 354sq km (137sq miles) in February and 427sq km (165sq miles) in January. These estimates are based on satellite imagery and geolocated open-source photography rather than claims by either side. Should this trend continue, Russian forces could come to a standstill by early summer, roughly coinciding with US President Donald Trump's self-imposed early deadline for achieving a ceasefire.
Urban Safety Perception Through the Lens of Large Multimodal Models: A Persona-based Approach
Beneduce, Ciro, Lepri, Bruno, Luca, Massimiliano
Understanding how urban environments are perceived in terms of safety is crucial for urban planning and policymaking. Traditional methods like surveys are limited by high cost, required time, and scalability issues. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), specifically Llava 1.6 7B, as a novel approach to assess safety perceptions of urban spaces using street-view images. In addition, the research investigated how this task is affected by different socio-demographic perspectives, simulated by the model through Persona-based prompts. Without additional fine-tuning, the model achieved an average F1-score of 59.21% in classifying urban scenarios as safe or unsafe, identifying three key drivers of perceived unsafety: isolation, physical decay, and urban infrastructural challenges. Moreover, incorporating Persona-based prompts revealed significant variations in safety perceptions across the socio-demographic groups of age, gender, and nationality. Elder and female Personas consistently perceive higher levels of unsafety than younger or male Personas. Similarly, nationality-specific differences were evident in the proportion of unsafe classifications ranging from 19.71% in Singapore to 40.15% in Botswana. Notably, the model's default configuration aligned most closely with a middle-aged, male Persona. These findings highlight the potential of LMMs as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional methods for urban safety perceptions. While the sensitivity of these models to socio-demographic factors underscores the need for thoughtful deployment, their ability to provide nuanced perspectives makes them a promising tool for AI-driven urban planning.
Near Optimal Decision Trees in a SPLIT Second
Babbar, Varun, McTavish, Hayden, Rudin, Cynthia, Seltzer, Margo
Decision tree optimization is fundamental to interpretable machine learning. The most popular approach is to greedily search for the best feature at every decision point, which is fast but provably suboptimal. Recent approaches find the global optimum using branch and bound with dynamic programming, showing substantial improvements in accuracy and sparsity at great cost to scalability. An ideal solution would have the accuracy of an optimal method and the scalability of a greedy method. We introduce a family of algorithms called SPLIT (SParse Lookahead for Interpretable Trees) that moves us significantly forward in achieving this ideal balance. We demonstrate that not all sub-problems need to be solved to optimality to find high quality trees; greediness suffices near the leaves. Since each depth adds an exponential number of possible trees, this change makes our algorithms orders of magnitude faster than existing optimal methods, with negligible loss in performance. We extend this algorithm to allow scalable computation of sets of near-optimal trees (i.e., the Rashomon set).
Verification and Validation for Trustworthy Scientific Machine Learning
Jakeman, John D., Barba, Lorena A., Martins, Joaquim R. R. A., O'Leary-Roseberry, Thomas
Scientific machine learning (SciML) integrates machine learning (ML) into scientific workflows to enhance system simulation and analysis, with an emphasis on computational modeling of physical systems. This field emerged from Department of Energy workshops and initiatives starting in 2018, which also identified the need to increase "the scale, rigor, robustness, and reliability of SciML necessary for routine use in science and engineering applications" [5]. The field's subsequent growth through funding initiatives, conference themes, and high-profile publications stems from its ability to unite ML's predictive power with the domain knowledge and mathematical rigor of computational science and engineering (CSE). However, this surge in SciML development has outpaced good practices and reporting standards for building trust [66, 51, 109, 117]. SciML models must demonstrate trustworthiness to be safe and useful [44]. Organizational and computational trust definitions [92, 106] inform our criteria for trustworthy SciML: competence in basic performance, reliability across conditions, transparency about processes and limitations, and alignment with scientific objectives. These criteria span technical attributes (correctness, reliability, safety) and human-centric qualities (comprehensibility, transparency).
Harris' 'ice princess' demeanor, Bush's belly-tap were key expressions at Jimmy Carter's funeral: expert
Presidents Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump all pay respect to Jimmy Carter at his state funeral in Washington, D.C.. During the 2024 campaign cycle, Americans witnessed what appeared to be no love lost between President-elect Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama. However, at former President Jimmy Carter's funeral the two recent presidents appeared to be enjoying each other's company and largely ignored other dignitaries arriving around them, including Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden. Susan Constantine, a communication and body language expert, said Harris came off "as cool as could be." When she was walking she was very robotic.
Israel's past defiance in spotlight as US calls for Iran attack restraint
Washington, DC โ The response from US President Joe Biden's administration to Iran's historic missile and drone attack on Israel has been two-fold: Washington has re-upped its pledge to always stand by its "ironclad" ally Israel, while also appealing to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu not to take further action that could drag the region into wider war. The days ahead will show if those two options are compatible, or if the two governments' priorities are on collision course, analysts told Al Jazeera. In the short term, the Iranian attack is a coup for both Israel and its backers in the US: From their perspective, it offers renewed justification for military support to Israel while weakening the world's focus on alleged abuses committed in Gaza in seven months of war, according to Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Washington-based Quincy Institute. But defiance from Netanyahu to US calls for restraint could find the Biden administration further hamstrung by its political and ideological commitments to Israel, which could eventually drag Washington into a wider war, he added. "The Israelis have been told by Biden to take this as a win and stop here," Parsi told Al Jazeera.
Biden vows G7 response, 'ironclad' US support for Israel after Iran attacks
US President Joe Biden has condemned the Iranian drone attacks on military facilities in Israel, reiterating Washington DC's "ironclad" support and a coordinated Group of Seven (G7) diplomatic response, even as reports started to emerge that he is also seeking to de-escalate the situation. Biden cut short a trip to Delaware and returned to the US capital to meet advisers following the late Saturday night attack, the White House said in a statement. The statement said that US forces and facilities had not been hit, adding that the US helped Israel in taking down "nearly all" of the attacking drones and missiles. The US president also he reiterated the "ironclad" support for Israel's security in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has had strained relations over Israel's handling of the war in Gaza. "I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks โ sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel," the White House quoted Biden as saying.
Jewish organizations voice support for Israel's 'obligation' to defends themselves from Iran's attacks
Gen. Anthony Tata analyzes where America stands amid the Israeli-Iranian conflict on'The Big Weekend Show.' Jewish organizations shared their "strong" support for Israel's "right and obligation" to defend themselves from the onslaught of missile and drone attacks from Iran. Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein said that the nonprofit organization "strongly supports" Israel's "right and obligation" to defend themselves against Iran's attacks. "ZOA strongly supports Israel's right and obligation to aggressively defend itself from the attacks against it by the extremist, Jew-hating, America-hating Islamic Republic of Iran," he said. WHITE HOUSE SAYS US SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL IS'IRONCLAD,' WILL'SUPPORT THEIR DEFENSE' AMID IRAN ATTACK Morton Klein of Zionist Organization of America attends a hearing at the National Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2017. The organization's president encouraged Israel to "devastate" Iranian nuclear facilities, saying that they were "totally behind" Hamas' unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7. "We also strongly support Israel taking this opportunity to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being developed to destroy the Jewish State and massacre millions of Jews, and others," Klein said.
Fox News Politics: Trump and Hunter find common ground
Welcome to Fox News' Politics newsletter with the latest political news from Washington D.C. and updates from the 2024 campaign trail. Both Former President Trump and Hunter Biden have accused the Justice Department of bringing politically biased charges. Trump, ahead of campaign stops in the battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin, claimed Biden has "orchestrated" every lawsuit and indictment against him with the help of the Justice Department. "Please remember, ALL of these Lawsuits, Charges, and Indictments that have been brought against me have been orchestrated and coordinated by Crooked Joe Biden, the White House, and the DOJ, as an ATTACK ON CROOKED'S POLITICAL OPPONENT, ME," Trump posted on his Truth Social account Tuesday morning. Similarly, Hunter Biden's attorney blasted the decision by a federal judge who refused to dismiss tax charges against the first son, saying they will continue to fight the "abnormal way" Special Counsel David Weiss has handled the case.