Pacific Ocean
Ohio Republican Senate candidates clash over border security, drone strikes in Mexico
Ohio Republican candidates who are vying to take on Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown clashed over border security and drone strikes in Mexico during Monday's first statewide debate. Facing off at WJW Fox 8 Studios in Cleveland, businessman Bernie Moreno, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan generally agreed on a few issues, including calling for fully securing the U.S.-Mexico border, but then quickly clashed upon delving into the immigration crisis further. Dolan accused Moreno, who was endorsed by former President Trump, of wanting "to militarize the federal government and deport children" for his stance calling for deporting anybody in the country illegally. LaRose called earlier Monday for President Biden to deploy three military divisions to the border, which Dolan said was irresponsible. "We need to work with the Mexican government, we need to be tough with the Mexican government," Dolan said.
Leveraging Social Media Data to Identify Factors Influencing Public Attitude Towards Accessibility, Socioeconomic Disparity and Public Transportation
Momin, Khondhaker Al, Sadri, Arif Mohaimin, Hasnine, Md Sami
This study proposes a novel method to understand the factors affecting individuals' perception of transport accessibility, socioeconomic disparity, and public infrastructure. As opposed to the time consuming and expensive survey-based approach, this method can generate organic large-scale responses from social media and develop statistical models to understand individuals' perceptions of various transportation issues. This study retrieved and analyzed 36,098 tweets from New York City from March 19, 2020, to May 15, 2022. A state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithm is used for text mining and classification. A data fusion technique has been adopted to generate a series of socioeconomic traits that are used as explanatory variables in the model. The model results show that females and individuals of Asian origin tend to discuss transportation accessibility more than their counterparts, with those experiencing high neighborhood traffic also being more vocal. However, disadvantaged individuals, including the unemployed and those living in low-income neighborhoods or in areas with high natural hazard risks, tend to communicate less about such issues. As for socioeconomic disparity, individuals of Asian origin and those experiencing various types of air pollution are more likely to discuss these topics on Twitter, often with a negative sentiment. However, unemployed, or disadvantaged individuals, as well as those living in areas with high natural hazard risks or expected losses, are less inclined to tweet about this subject. Lack of internet accessibility could be a reason why many disadvantaged individuals do not tweet about transport accessibility and subsidized internet could be a possible solution.
AI for social science and social science of AI: A Survey
Xu, Ruoxi, Sun, Yingfei, Ren, Mengjie, Guo, Shiguang, Pan, Ruotong, Lin, Hongyu, Sun, Le, Han, Xianpei
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have sparked a rethinking of artificial general intelligence possibilities. The increasing human-like capabilities of AI are also attracting attention in social science research, leading to various studies exploring the combination of these two fields. In this survey, we systematically categorize previous explorations in the combination of AI and social science into two directions that share common technical approaches but differ in their research objectives. The first direction is focused on AI for social science, where AI is utilized as a powerful tool to enhance various stages of social science research. While the second direction is the social science of AI, which examines AI agents as social entities with their human-like cognitive and linguistic capabilities. By conducting a thorough review, particularly on the substantial progress facilitated by recent advancements in large language models, this paper introduces a fresh perspective to reassess the relationship between AI and social science, provides a cohesive framework that allows researchers to understand the distinctions and connections between AI for social science and social science of AI, and also summarized state-of-art experiment simulation platforms to facilitate research in these two directions. We believe that as AI technology continues to advance and intelligent agents find increasing applications in our daily lives, the significance of the combination of AI and social science will become even more prominent.
Simulating Nighttime Visible Satellite Imagery of Tropical Cyclones Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Yao, Jinghuai, Du, Puyuan, Zhao, Yucheng, Wang, Yubo
Visible (VIS) imagery of satellites has various important applications in meteorology, including monitoring Tropical Cyclones (TCs). However, it is unavailable at night because of the lack of sunlight. This study presents a Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN) model that generates highly accurate nighttime visible reflectance using infrared (IR) bands and sunlight direction parameters as input. The model was trained and validated using target area observations of the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) in the daytime. This study also presents the first nighttime model validation using the Day/Night Band (DNB) of the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The daytime statistical results of the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Correlation Coefficient (CC), and Bias are 0.885, 28.3, 0.0428, 0.984, and -0.0016 respectively, completely surpassing the model performance of previous studies. The nighttime statistical results of SSIM, PSNR, RMSE, and CC are 0.821, 24.4, 0.0643, and 0.969 respectively, which are slightly negatively impacted by the parallax between satellites. We performed full-disk model validation which proves our model could also be readily applied in the tropical ocean without TCs in the northern hemisphere. This model contributes to the nighttime monitoring of meteorological phenomena by providing accurate AI-generated visible imagery with adjustable virtual sunlight directions.
Can the power of artificial intelligence be harnessed help to predict Australia's weather?
Kerry Plowright had his feet up and was watching TV one evening late last year when his phone warned of incoming hail. "I was stunned when I walked out the door because there was just this roar," he says, describing the sound of hailstones hitting roofs in the New South Wales town of Kingscliff. He had just enough time to move his cars under canvas sails, sparing them from damage. This season may include a second tropical cyclone to strike Queensland. The Albanese government has launched an inquiry into warnings issued by the Bureau of Meteorology and emergency authorities after complaints by councils and others that some alerts lacked accuracy and timeliness.
Doomed 108 million Peregrine One lunar lander carrying JFK's remains is destroyed in fiery reentry of Earth over Pacific Ocean
While the hope of the US returning to the moon has been temporarily dashed, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton expressed high hopes for its future Griffin lunar lander missions. 'What a wild adventure we were just on,' Thornton said. 'Certainly not the outcome we were hoping for and certainly challenging right up front.' Like the Peregrine, these robotic lunar landers are expected to serve as a scout for the NASA's Artemis astronauts before they make their own moon landing in 2026. The CEO and trained mechanical engineer described'victory' after'victory' as his team scrambled to make the most of the scrapped Peregrine mission.
Artwork Protection Against Neural Style Transfer Using Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack
Guo, Zhongliang, Wang, Kaixuan, Li, Weiye, Qian, Yifei, Arandjelović, Ognjen, Fang, Lei
Neural style transfer (NST) is widely adopted in computer vision to generate new images with arbitrary styles. This process leverages neural networks to merge aesthetic elements of a style image with the structural aspects of a content image into a harmoniously integrated visual result. However, unauthorized NST can exploit artwork. Such misuse raises socio-technical concerns regarding artists' rights and motivates the development of technical approaches for the proactive protection of original creations. Adversarial attack is a concept primarily explored in machine learning security. Our work introduces this technique to protect artists' intellectual property. In this paper Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack (LAACA), a method for altering images in a manner imperceptible to the human eyes but disruptive to NST. Specifically, we design perturbations targeting image areas rich in high-frequency content, generated by disrupting intermediate features. Our experiments and user study confirm that by attacking NST using the proposed method results in visually worse neural style transfer, thus making it an effective solution for visual artwork protection.
MSHyper: Multi-Scale Hypergraph Transformer for Long-Range Time Series Forecasting
Demystifying interactions between temporal patterns of different scales is fundamental to precise long-range time series forecasting. However, previous works lack the ability to model high-order interactions. To promote more comprehensive pattern interaction modeling for long-range time series forecasting, we propose a Multi-Scale Hypergraph Transformer (MSHyper) framework. Specifically, a multi-scale hypergraph is introduced to provide foundations for modeling high-order pattern interactions. Then by treating hyperedges as nodes, we also build a hyperedge graph to enhance hypergraph modeling. In addition, a tri-stage message passing mechanism is introduced to aggregate pattern information and learn the interaction strength between temporal patterns of different scales. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that MSHyper achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing prediction errors by an average of 8.73% and 7.15% over the best baseline in MSE and MAE, respectively.
AboutMe: Using Self-Descriptions in Webpages to Document the Effects of English Pretraining Data Filters
Lucy, Li, Gururangan, Suchin, Soldaini, Luca, Strubell, Emma, Bamman, David, Klein, Lauren, Dodge, Jesse
Large language models' (LLMs) abilities are drawn from their pretraining data, and model development begins with data curation. However, decisions around what data is retained or removed during this initial stage is under-scrutinized. In our work, we ground web text, which is a popular pretraining data source, to its social and geographic contexts. We create a new dataset of 10.3 million self-descriptions of website creators, and extract information about who they are and where they are from: their topical interests, social roles, and geographic affiliations. Then, we conduct the first study investigating how ten "quality" and English language identification (langID) filters affect webpages that vary along these social dimensions. Our experiments illuminate a range of implicit preferences in data curation: we show that some quality classifiers act like topical domain filters, and langID can overlook English content from some regions of the world. Overall, we hope that our work will encourage a new line of research on pretraining data curation practices and its social implications.
Deep Learning-based Group Causal Inference in Multivariate Time-series
Ahmad, Wasim, Shadaydeh, Maha, Denzler, Joachim
Causal inference in a nonlinear system of multivariate timeseries is instrumental in disentangling the intricate web of relationships among variables, enabling us to make more accurate predictions and gain deeper insights into real-world complex systems. Causality methods typically identify the causal structure of a multivariate system by considering the cause-effect relationship of each pair of variables while ignoring the collective effect of a group of variables or interactions involving more than two-time series variables. In this work, we test model invariance by group-level interventions on the trained deep networks to infer causal direction in groups of variables, such as climate and ecosystem, brain networks, etc. Extensive testing with synthetic and real-world time series data shows a significant improvement of our method over other applied group causality methods and provides us insights into real-world time series. The code for our method can be found at:https://github.com/wasimahmadpk/gCause.