Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.

Biometric authentication has become one of the most widely used tools in the current technological era to authenticate users and to distinguish between genuine users and imposters. Face is the most common form of biometric modality that has proven effective. Deep learning-based face recognition systems are now commonly used across different domains. However, these systems usually operate like black-box models that do not provide necessary explanations or justifications for their decisions. This is a major disadvantage because users cannot trust such artificial intelligence-based biometric systems and may not feel comfortable using them when clear explanations or justifications are not provided. This paper addresses this problem by applying an efficient method for explainable face recognition systems. We use a Class Activation Mapping (CAM)-based discriminative localization (very narrow/specific localization) technique called Scaled Directed Divergence (SDD) to visually explain the results of deep learning-based face recognition systems. We perform fine localization of the face features relevant to the deep learning model for its prediction/decision. Our experiments show that the SDD Class Activation Map (CAM) highlights the relevant face features very specifically compared to the traditional CAM and very accurately. The provided visual explanations with narrow localization of relevant features can ensure much-needed transparency and trust for deep learning-based face recognition systems.

Emojis are being frequently used in todays digital world to express from simple to complex thoughts more than ever before. Hence, they are also being used in sentiment analysis and targeted marketing campaigns. In this work, we performed sentiment analysis of Tweets as well as on emoji dataset from the Kaggle. Since tweets are sentences we have used Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) and Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (SBERT) end-to-end sentence embedding models to generate the embeddings which are used to train the Standard fully connected Neural Networks (NN), and LSTM NN models. We observe the text classification accuracy was almost the same for both the models around 98 percent. On the contrary, when the validation set was built using emojis that were not present in the training set then the accuracy of both the models reduced drastically to 70 percent. In addition, the models were also trained using the distributed training approach instead of a traditional singlethreaded model for better scalability. Using the distributed training approach, we were able to reduce the run-time by roughly 15% without compromising on accuracy. Finally, as part of explainable AI the Shap algorithm was used to explain the model behaviour and check for model biases for the given feature set.

Federated Learning enables diverse devices to collaboratively train a shared model while keeping training data locally stored, avoiding the need for centralized cloud storage. Despite existing privacy measures, concerns arise from potential reverse engineering of gradients, even with added noise, revealing private data. To address this, recent research emphasizes using encrypted model parameters during training. This paper introduces a novel federated learning algorithm, leveraging coded local gradients without encryption, exchanging coded proxies for model parameters, and injecting surplus noise for enhanced privacy. Two algorithm variants are presented, showcasing convergence and learning rates adaptable to coding schemes and raw data characteristics. Two encryption-free implementations with fixed and random coding matrices are provided, demonstrating promising simulation results from both federated optimization and machine learning perspectives.

As large language models (LLMs) become ubiquitous in our daily tasks and digital interactions, associated privacy risks are increasingly in focus. While LLM privacy research has primarily focused on the leakage of model training data, it has recently been shown that the increase in models' capabilities has enabled LLMs to make accurate privacy-infringing inferences from previously unseen texts. With the rise of multimodal vision-language models (VLMs), capable of understanding both images and text, a pertinent question is whether such results transfer to the previously unexplored domain of benign images posted online. To investigate the risks associated with the image reasoning capabilities of newly emerging VLMs, we compile an image dataset with human-annotated labels of the image owner's personal attributes. In order to understand the additional privacy risk posed by VLMs beyond traditional human attribute recognition, our dataset consists of images where the inferable private attributes do not stem from direct depictions of humans. On this dataset, we evaluate the inferential capabilities of 7 state-of-the-art VLMs, finding that they can infer various personal attributes at up to 77.6% accuracy. Concerningly, we observe that accuracy scales with the general capabilities of the models, implying that future models can be misused as stronger adversaries, establishing an imperative for the development of adequate defenses.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Jonathan Owens struck gold (pun intended) when he married one of the best gymnasts of all-time. The Green Bay Packers safety wifed up four-time Olympic gold medal winner Simone Biles earlier this year, but when they met, Owens had no idea of Biles' celebrity status. The irony of it all is the fact that the two had met on a celebrity dating app, Raya.

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing and understanding extensive text sequences, a critical aspect in applications requiring deep comprehension and synthesis of large volumes of information. Recognizing the inherent challenges in extending the context window for LLMs, primarily built on Transformer architecture, we propose a new model architecture, referred to as Zebra. This architecture efficiently manages the quadratic time and memory complexity issues associated with full attention in the Transformer by employing grouped local-global attention layers. Our model, akin to a zebra's alternating stripes, balances local and global attention layers, significantly reducing computational requirements and memory consumption. Comprehensive experiments, including pretraining from scratch, continuation of long context adaptation training, and long instruction tuning, are conducted to evaluate the Zebra's performance. The results show that Zebra achieves comparable or superior performance on both short and long sequence benchmarks, while also enhancing training and inference efficiency.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Now that he's a former NFL player, Donald Driver is allowed to play fantasy football, and he's loving every second of it. The Green Bay Packers legend played 14 seasons, all while calling Lambeau Field his home, and if he could, he probably would have picked himself plenty of times for his fantasy team. Driver had seven seasons of at least 1,000 yards, including six straight from 2004 to 2009.

Fox Nation's'Who Can Forget 2021?' revisits the year's biggest headlines. To watch the full program, visit foxnation.com "Jeopardy" fans are angry on behalf of nine-day champion Ben Chan after a spelling error caused his winning streak to come to an end. On Tuesday night's episode, Chan reached the Final Jeopardy category after a rocky start with a Daily Double loss that put him close with his opponents, Lynn Di Vito and Danny Lesserman. The category was "Shakespeare's Characters," and the clue was "Both of the names of these 2 lovers in a Shakespeare play come from Latin words for'blessed.'"

Jason Allen used software to generate the art that took home the blue ribbon. You don't need paintbrushes, chalk or oils anymore -- just type your idea on a keyboard and let a computer carry out your creativity. He also shows you what's possible with your inner Michaelangelo using a free website that generates works of art from the words you type in, an AI Art Maker at Hotpot. At the end, see what "3 Brilliant Minutes" looks like to the mind of a computer!