Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo on Friday confirmed they will strengthen cooperation toward realizing a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" amid China's growing assertiveness in the region and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Widodo said Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations stand ready to build cooperation with their partners, and Kishida, who is on the first stop of his trip to Southeast Asia and Europe, underscored the importance of upholding the rules-based international order. "We are facing many challenges, including the situations in Ukraine, the East and South China seas and North Korea, and maintaining and strengthening the rules-based, free and open international order has become more important," Kishida said during a joint news conference after the summit. Kishida said that based on such understanding, the two sides confirmed they will strengthen cooperation toward realizing a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, an initiative that Japan has been pushing, and the ASEAN Outlook spearheaded by Indonesia. Japan views Indonesia, this year's host of the Group of 20 summit to be held in November and a key economy in Southeast Asia, as a strategic partner sharing universal values such as democracy and the rule of law.

When most people think search, they think of a standard search box. Type words in, smack the search button, and pages of luscious results come back. But search is buried elsewhere too. Those customer support chatbots you know and love? But instead of returning pages of results, they only return the one most relevant hit, and do so in a conversational UI.

BOAO, China – Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday proposed a "global security initiative" that upholds the principle of "indivisible security," a concept also endorsed by Russia, although he gave no details of how it would be implemented. During a video speech to the annual Boao Asia Forum, Xi said that the world should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, while paying attention to the "legitimate" security concerns of all. "We should uphold the principle of indivisibility of security, build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture, and oppose the building of national security on the basis of insecurity in other countries," Xi told the gathering on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. In talks over Ukraine, Russia has insisted that Western governments respect a 1999 agreement based on the principle of "indivisible security" that no country can strengthen its own security at the expense of others'. China and Russia have grown increasingly close, and China has refused to condemn Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a "special operation" to demilitarize the country.

The ongoing Russian-Ukraine war and the unprecedented sanctions the United States and its allies have imposed on Russia could bring the world economy back to 1914, which signaled the end of early globalization and the revival of national and regional conflicts. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes," Mark Twain is rightly or wrongly quoted as saying, which is as timely today as it was in his time. At the turn of the 20th century, capitalism was on track to conquer the global economy, creating a global market without borders, a trade regime where commodities and resources could flow freely within and across borders. But unfortunately for the world community, it didn't happen. By the beginning of the second decade, this trend of early globalization stalled and, in some cases, forestalled by the rise of nationalism and trade protectionism, not to mention the destruction of the two World Wars. For instance, increased trade protectionism limited the flow of resources and commodities across national borders.

Beijing (Gasgoo)- On April 14th, the island province in the South China Sea, Hainan, saw its Bo'ao Dongyu Island V2X project completed and start trial operation. According to the Hainan Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, the V2X project covers two autonomous driving connection routes, one of which starts from the Bo'ao Airport to the Pelan Bridge, consisting of 13 kilometers of fully open roads, and the other 4-km inbound route stretches from the Pelan Bridge to the Golden Coast Hotel. The testing area features all-around 5G connectivity, four smart bus stops, and a command center. The area also allows digital twin monitoring and control via its roadside demonstration for 5G and C-V2X. Primarily, there are four Robotaxis, four Robobuses, two crewless street cleaning vehicles, and two autonomous vending vehicles in use for the pilot demonstration.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Some say, "data is the new oil," with an air of seriousness. And while the phrase may capture a certain truth about the modern digital economy, it fails to model the way that bits can be copied again and again. Sometimes the ease of sharing creates a distinct absence of scarcity and that changes the economics of the entire game. One of the best ways to visualize this is to tap into some open source datasets that are proliferating on the Internet.

Optimisation problems often have multiple conflicting objectives that can be computationally and/or financially expensive. Mono-surrogate Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a popular model-based approach for optimising such black-box functions. It combines objective values via scalarisation and builds a Gaussian process (GP) surrogate of the scalarised values. The location which maximises a cheap-to-query acquisition function is chosen as the next location to expensively evaluate. While BO is an effective strategy, the use of GPs is limiting. Their performance decreases as the problem input dimensionality increases, and their computational complexity scales cubically with the amount of data. To address these limitations, we extend previous work on BO by density-ratio estimation (BORE) to the multi-objective setting. BORE links the computation of the probability of improvement acquisition function to that of probabilistic classification. This enables the use of state-of-the-art classifiers in a BO-like framework. In this work we present MBORE: multi-objective Bayesian optimisation by density-ratio estimation, and compare it to BO across a range of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We find that MBORE performs as well as or better than BO on a wide variety of problems, and that it outperforms BO on high-dimensional and real-world problems.

The InstructGPT research did recruit 40 contracters to generate a dataset that GPT-3 was then fine-tuned on. But I [Quach] don't think those contractors are employed on an ongoing process to edit responses generated by the model. A spokesperson from the company just confirmed to me: "OpenAI does not hire copywriters to edit generated answers," so I don't think the claims are correct." So the above post was misleading. I'd originally titled it, "Open AI gets GPT-3 to work by hiring an army of humans to fix GPT's bad answers." I changed it to "Interesting questions involving the mix of humans and computer algorithms in Open AI's GPT-3 program." I appreciate all the helpful comments! Stochastic algorithms are hard to understand, especially when they include tuning parameters. I'd still like to know whassup with Google's LaMDA chatbot (see item 2 in this post).

Natural language offers a highly intuitive interface for image editing. In this paper, we introduce the first solution for performing local (region-based) edits in generic natural images, based on a natural language description along with an ROI mask. We achieve our goal by leveraging and combining a pretrained language-image model (CLIP), to steer the edit towards a user-provided text prompt, with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to generate natural-looking results. To seamlessly fuse the edited region with the unchanged parts of the image, we spatially blend noised versions of the input image with the local text-guided diffusion latent at a progression of noise levels. In addition, we show that adding augmentations to the diffusion process mitigates adversarial results. We compare against several baselines and related methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and show that our method outperforms these solutions in terms of overall realism, ability to preserve the background and matching the text. Finally, we show several text-driven editing applications, including adding a new object to an image, removing/replacing/altering existing objects, background replacement, and image extrapolation. Code is available at: https://omriavrahami.com/blended-diffusion-page/