Oceania
Negativity Spreads Faster: A Large-Scale Multilingual Twitter Analysis on the Role of Sentiment in Political Communication
Antypas, Dimosthenis, Preece, Alun, Camacho-Collados, Jose
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agendas aiming to influence voter behaviour. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets of politicians from three European countries and explore the virality of their tweets. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. By utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models, we performed sentiment analysis on hundreds of thousands of tweets collected from members of parliament in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting differences between political parties as well as between politicians and the general population.
Elon Musk, critics of 'woke' AI tech set out to create their own chatbots
FOX Business correspondent Lydia Hu has the latest on jobs at risk as AI further develops on'America's Newsroom.' Critics who slammed OpenAI's ChatGPT system as "woke" and riddled with liberal bias are creating their own chatbots. Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk is reportedly assembling a team of artificial intelligence experts to build an alternative to ChatGPT – and other similar ideas may also be in development. The New York Times reported that the founder of Gab, a right-wing social media platform, is working on an AI software with "the ability to generate content freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its code." OpenAI's GPT-4 is the latest deep learning model from the company that "exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks," according to the lab.
Stability Bounds for Learning-Based Adaptive Control of Discrete-Time Multi-Dimensional Stochastic Linear Systems with Input Constraints
Siriya, Seth, Zhu, Jingge, Nešić, Dragan, Pu, Ye
We consider the problem of adaptive stabilization for discrete-time, multi-dimensional linear systems with bounded control input constraints and unbounded stochastic disturbances, where the parameters of the true system are unknown. To address this challenge, we propose a certainty-equivalent control scheme which combines online parameter estimation with saturated linear control. We establish the existence of a high probability stability bound on the closed-loop system, under additional assumptions on the system and noise processes. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate our results. Adaptive control (AC) is concerned with the design of controllers for dynamical systems whose model parameters are unknown.
4D iRIOM: 4D Imaging Radar Inertial Odometry and Mapping
Zhuang, Yuan, Wang, Binliang, Huai, Jianzhu, Li, Miao
Millimeter wave radar can measure distances, directions, and Doppler velocity for objects in harsh conditions such as fog. The 4D imaging radar with both vertical and horizontal data resembling an image can also measure objects' height. Previous studies have used 3D radars for ego-motion estimation. But few methods leveraged the rich data of imaging radars, and they usually omitted the mapping aspect, thus leading to inferior odometry accuracy. This paper presents a real-time imaging radar inertial odometry and mapping method, iRIOM, based on the submap concept. To deal with moving objects and multipath reflections, we use the graduated non-convexity method to robustly and efficiently estimate ego-velocity from a single scan. To measure the agreement between sparse non-repetitive radar scan points and submap points, the distribution-to-multi-distribution distance for matches is adopted. The ego-velocity, scan-to-submap matches are fused with the 6D inertial data by an iterative extended Kalman filter to get the platform's 3D position and orientation. A loop closure module is also developed to curb the odometry module's drift. To our knowledge, iRIOM based on the two modules is the first 4D radar inertial SLAM system. On our and third-party data, we show iRIOM's favorable odometry accuracy and mapping consistency against the FastLIO-SLAM and the EKFRIO. Also, the ablation study reveal the benefit of inertial data versus the constant velocity model, and scan-to-submap matching versus scan-to-scan matching.
Enhancing Cluster Quality of Numerical Datasets with Domain Ontology
Heiyanthuduwage, Sudath Rohitha, Rahman, Md Anisur, Islam, Md Zahidul
Ontology-based clustering has gained attention in recent years due to the potential benefits of ontology. Current ontology-based clustering approaches have mainly been applied to reduce the dimensionality of attributes in text document clustering. Reduction in dimensionality of attributes using ontology helps to produce high quality clusters for a dataset. However, ontology-based approaches in clustering numerical datasets have not been gained enough attention. Moreover, some literature mentions that ontology-based clustering can produce either high quality or low-quality clusters from a dataset. Therefore, in this paper we present a clustering approach that is based on domain ontology to reduce the dimensionality of attributes in a numerical dataset using domain ontology and to produce high quality clusters. For every dataset, we produce three datasets using domain ontology. We then cluster these datasets using a genetic algorithm-based clustering technique called GenClust++. The clusters of each dataset are evaluated in terms of Sum of Squared-Error (SSE). We use six numerical datasets to evaluate the performance of our ontology-based approach. The experimental results of our approach indicate that cluster quality gradually improves from lower to the higher levels of a domain ontology.
Can AI Chatbots Pass the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) and Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Structural Exams?
Naser, M. Z., Ross, Brandon, Ogle, Jennier, Kodur, Venkatesh, Hawileh, Rami, Abdalla, Jamal, Thai, Huu-Tai
The engineering community has recently witnessed the emergence of chatbot technology with the release of OpenAI ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard. While these chatbots have been reported to perform well and even pass various standardized tests, including medical and law exams, this forum paper explores whether these chatbots can also pass the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) and Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exams. A diverse range of civil and environmental engineering questions and scenarios are used to evaluate the chatbots' performance, as commonly present in the FE and PE exams. The chatbots' responses were analyzed based on their relevance, accuracy, and clarity and then compared against the recommendations of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). Our report shows that ChatGPT-4 and Bard, respectively scored 70.9% and 39.2% in the FE exam and 46.2% and 41% in the PE exam. It is evident that the current version of ChatGPT-4 could potentially pass the FE exam. While future editions are much more likely to pass both exams, this study also highlights the potential of using chatbots as teaching assistants and guiding engineers.
OutCenTR: A novel semi-supervised framework for predicting exploits of vulnerabilities in high-dimensional datasets
Eskandari, Hadi, Bewong, Michael, Rehman, Sabih ur
An ever-growing number of vulnerabilities are reported every day. Yet these vulnerabilities are not all the same; Some are more targeted than others. Correctly estimating the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited is a critical task for system administrators. This aids the system administrators in prioritizing and patching the right vulnerabilities. Our work makes use of outlier detection techniques to predict vulnerabilities that are likely to be exploited in highly imbalanced and high-dimensional datasets such as the National Vulnerability Database. We propose a dimensionality reduction technique, OutCenTR, that enhances the baseline outlier detection models. We further demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of OutCenTR empirically with 4 benchmark and 12 synthetic datasets. The results of our experiments show on average a 5-fold improvement of F1 score in comparison with state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA and GRP.
Video Pretraining Advances 3D Deep Learning on Chest CT Tasks
Ke, Alexander, Huang, Shih-Cheng, O'Connell, Chloe P, Klimont, Michal, Yeung, Serena, Rajpurkar, Pranav
Pretraining on large natural image classification datasets such as ImageNet has aided model development on data-scarce 2D medical tasks. 3D medical tasks often have much less data than 2D medical tasks, prompting practitioners to rely on pretrained 2D models to featurize slices. However, these 2D models have been surpassed by 3D models on 3D computer vision benchmarks since they do not natively leverage cross-sectional or temporal information. In this study, we explore whether natural video pretraining for 3D models can enable higher performance on smaller datasets for 3D medical tasks. We demonstrate video pretraining improves the average performance of seven 3D models on two chest CT datasets, regardless of finetuning dataset size, and that video pretraining allows 3D models to outperform 2D baselines. Lastly, we observe that pretraining on the large-scale out-of-domain Kinetics dataset improves performance more than pretraining on a typically-sized in-domain CT dataset. Our results show consistent benefits of video pretraining across a wide array of architectures, tasks, and training dataset sizes, supporting a shift from small-scale in-domain pretraining to large-scale out-of-domain pretraining for 3D medical tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/rajpurkarlab/chest-ct-pretraining
Adversary-Aware Partial label learning with Label distillation
Chen, Cheng, Lyu, Yueming, Tsang, Ivor W.
To ensure that the data collected from human subjects is entrusted with a secret, rival labels are introduced to conceal the information provided by the participants on purpose. The corresponding learning task can be formulated as a noisy partial-label learning problem. However, conventional partial-label learning (PLL) methods are still vulnerable to the high ratio of noisy partial labels, especially in a large labelling space. To learn a more robust model, we present Adversary-Aware Partial Label Learning and introduce the $\textit{rival}$, a set of noisy labels, to the collection of candidate labels for each instance. By introducing the rival label, the predictive distribution of PLL is factorised such that a handy predictive label is achieved with less uncertainty coming from the transition matrix, assuming the rival generation process is known. Nonetheless, the predictive accuracy is still insufficient to produce an sufficiently accurate positive sample set to leverage the clustering effect of the contrastive loss function. Moreover, the inclusion of rivals also brings an inconsistency issue for the classifier and risk function due to the intractability of the transition matrix. Consequently, an adversarial teacher within momentum (ATM) disambiguation algorithm is proposed to cope with the situation, allowing us to obtain a provably consistent classifier and risk function. In addition, our method has shown high resiliency to the choice of the label noise transition matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves promising results on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and CUB200 datasets.
Dungeons & Dragons Could Prevent the AI Apocalypse--or Kick It Off
Deep in some underground ruins below a drought-stricken village, four brave adventurers found themselves in grave danger. The dungeon belonged to the Order of the Pure, a potentially nefarious cult that may have had something to do with the droughts that have been wreaking havoc in the village of Havenshire. Despite the danger, the stakes were too high to turn back. After all, not only did the fate of the villagers depend on their success, but the town's mayor also promised a small fortune if they succeeded. Eventually, the heroes discovered a wooden chest hidden under a slab of rock in one of the inner chambers of the dungeon.