Pacific Ocean
Russian-Ukraine War Could Bring The World Economy Back To 1914
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.
Hainan province launches V2X pilot operation
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.
22 open source datasets to boost AI modeling
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.
MBORE: Multi-objective Bayesian Optimisation by Density-Ratio Estimation
De Ath, George, Chugh, Tinkle, Rahat, Alma A. M.
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.
Open AI gets GPT-3 to work by hiring an army of humans to fix GPT's bad answers. Interesting questions involving the mix of humans and computer algorithms in Open AI's GPT-3 program
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).
Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images
Avrahami, Omri, Lischinski, Dani, Fried, Ohad
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/
Deep Learning First: Drive.ai's Path to Autonomous Driving
Last month, IEEE Spectrum went out to California to take a ride in one of Drive.ai's It's only been about a year since Drive.ai "This is in contrast to a traditional robotics approach," says Sameep Tandon, one of Drive.ai's "A lot of companies are just using deep learning for this component or that component, while we view it more holistically." Often, deep learning is used in perception, since there's so much variability inherent in how robots see the world.
Barr warns China is 'biggest threat' to US, warns of 'highly aggressive' tech plan
Former Attorney General William Barr criticized the media for pushing the "lie" that former President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Former Attorney General Bill Barr warned that China is the "biggest threat" facing the United States, warning that Beijing has a "highly aggressive plan" to take control of "key" technologies of the future. During an interview with Fox News Digital about his new memoir, "One Damn Thing After Another," in which he details long-term national security challenges facing the U.S., Barr warned the Chinese will continue to be "a huge challenge" for the U.S. "China is the biggest threat that the country faces, not only militarily – because they are building a very capable military -- but also technologically," Barr said, noting that the United States has been "the world's technological leader and people are accustomed to that." Barr told Fox News the Biden administration, in its efforts to combat the threat China poses, should "focus on the fact that it has been that leadership that makes us so prosperous and creates all the opportunity for future generations and provides for our security." "The Chinese have a comprehensive, highly aggressive plan to take control of all of the key technologies of the future, such as 5G communications, robotics, artificial intelligence – all of the technologies that are going to be pivotal in the years to come," Barr said.
Teleconnection patterns of different El Ni\~no types revealed by climate network curvature
Strnad, Felix M., Schlör, Jakob, Fröhlich, Christian, Goswami, Bedartha
The diversity of El Ni\~no events is commonly described by two distinct flavors, the Eastern Pacific (EP) and Central Pacific (CP) types. While the remote impacts, i.e. teleconnections, of EP and CP events have been studied for different regions individually, a global picture of their teleconnection patterns is still lacking. Here, we use Forman-Ricci curvature applied on climate networks constructed from 2-meter air temperature data to distinguish regional links from teleconnections. Our results confirm that teleconnection patterns are strongly influenced by the El Ni\~no type. EP events have primarily tropical teleconnections whereas CP events involve tropical-extratropical connections, particularly in the Pacific. Moreover, the central Pacific region does not have many teleconnections, even during CP events. It is mainly the eastern Pacific that mediates the remote influences for both El Ni\~no types.