South America
Auditing Fairness by Betting
We provide practical, efficient, and nonparametric methods for auditing the fairness of deployed classification and regression models. Whereas previous work relies on a fixed-sample size, our methods are sequential and allow for the continuous monitoring of incoming data, making them highly amenable to tracking the fairness of real-world systems. We also allow the data to be collected by a probabilistic policy as opposed to sampled uniformly from the population. This enables auditing to be conducted on data gathered for another purpose. Moreover, this policy may change over time and different policies may be used on different subpopulations. Finally, our methods can handle distribution shift resulting from either changes to the model or changes in the underlying population. Our approach is based on recent progress in anytime-valid inference and game-theoretic statistics---the ``testing by betting'' framework in particular. These connections ensure that our methods are interpretable, fast, and easy to implement. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on three benchmark fairness datasets.
FLamby: Datasets and Benchmarks for Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Realistic Healthcare Settings
Federated Learning (FL) is a novel approach enabling several clients holding sensitive data to collaboratively train machine learning models, without centralizing data. The cross-silo FL setting corresponds to the case of few ($2$--$50$) reliable clients, each holding medium to large datasets, and is typically found in applications such as healthcare, finance, or industry. While previous works have proposed representative datasets for cross-device FL, few realistic healthcare cross-silo FL datasets exist, thereby slowing algorithmic research in this critical application. In this work, we propose a novel cross-silo dataset suite focused on healthcare, FLamby (Federated Learning AMple Benchmark of Your cross-silo strategies), to bridge the gap between theory and practice of cross-silo FL.FLamby encompasses 7 healthcare datasets with natural splits, covering multiple tasks, modalities, and data volumes, each accompanied with baseline training code. As an illustration, we additionally benchmark standard FL algorithms on all datasets.Our flexible and modular suite allows researchers to easily download datasets, reproduce results and re-use the different components for their research.
Hubble spots massive sandwich shaped blob in deep-space
Nicknamed Dracula's Chivito, the disk is 1,000 light-years away from Earth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists are leaving space fans with one more treat before the year comes to a close. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers captured a stunning image of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed, which just happens to be shaped like a giant celestial sandwich. The massive formation of dust and gas, which astronomers call Dracula's Chivito, resides about 1,000 light-years from Earth and spans roughly 400 billion miles.
Towards robust vision by multi-task learning on monkey visual cortex
Deep neural networks set the state-of-the-art across many tasks in computer vision, but their generalization ability to simple image distortions is surprisingly fragile. In contrast, the mammalian visual system is robust to a wide range of perturbations. Recent work suggests that this generalization ability can be explained by useful inductive biases encoded in the representations of visual stimuli throughout the visual cortex. Here, we successfully leveraged these inductive biases with a multi-task learning approach: we jointly trained a deep network to perform image classification and to predict neural activity in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) in response to the same natural stimuli. We measured the out-of-distribution generalization abilities of our resulting network by testing its robustness to common image distortions.
22 breathtaking images from the 2025 Landscape Photographer of the Year awards
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. From Iceland's spectacular fire and ice landscapes to Yemen's otherworldly Socotra dragon trees, our home planet hosts a diverse lineup of jaw-dropping scenery. The 12th annual International Landscape Photographer of the Year award honor professional and amateur photographers who venture far and wide to capture nature's beauty. Why do we have five fingers and toes? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.
Minimax Classification with 0-1 Loss and Performance Guarantees
Supervised classification techniques use training samples to find classification rules with small expected 0-1 loss. Conventional methods achieve efficient learning and out-of-sample generalization by minimizing surrogate losses over specific families of rules. This paper presents minimax risk classifiers (MRCs) that do not rely on a choice of surrogate loss and family of rules. MRCs achieve efficient learning and out-of-sample generalization by minimizing worst-case expected 0-1 loss w.r.t.
Three killed after Russia launches 'massive' attack across Ukraine
Three killed after Russia launches'massive' attack across Ukraine Russia carried out a massive overnight attack on several Ukrainian cities, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, a day after he warned of strikes over the Christmas period. At least three people were killed, according to Ukrainian officials, including a four-year-old child, while energy infrastructure was also targeted, leaving several regions without power. Russia launched 635 drones and 38 missiles, Ukraine's air force said, adding that 621 of them were downed. Zelensky said people simply want to be with their families, at home, and safe in the run-up to Christmas, and said the strikes sent an extremely clear signal about Russia's priorities despite ongoing peace talks. He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin still cannot accept that he must stop killing.
Watch: AI app apologises over false crime alerts across US
A company behind an AI-powered app called CrimeRadar has apologised for the distress caused by false crime alerts issued to local US communities after a BBC Verify investigation. CrimeRadar uses artificial intelligence to monitor openly available police radio communications, automatically generating a transcript and then producing crime alerts for users across the US. BBC Verify has found multiple instances from Florida to Oregon of CrimeRadar sending misleading and inaccurate alerts about serious crime to local residents - as Thomas Copeland explains. The barge that wrecked in 1918, famous for a dramatic rescue, is now shifting closer to the falls as recent movements carry it further from its original resting spot. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer participated in the annual ceremony that commemorates the eight days of Hanukkah.