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Secret Service changes the agency has made post-Trump Butler assassination attempt

FOX News

Former Secret Service special agent Richard Staropoli weighs in on new details about President Donald Trump's second assassination attempt on'The Story.' The Secret Service has ushered in a series of changes to beef up its security measures in the aftermath of the July 2024 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania – including suspending six of its agents due to their response to the crisis. Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn disclosed the suspensions Wednesday in an interview with CBS News, and said the consequences ranged from 10 days to 42 days of unpaid leave. Additionally, he said the agents would return to restricted roles following the suspension, and said the agency was "laser focused on fixing the root cause of the problem." "Secret Service is totally accountable for Butler," Quinn told CBS. "Butler was an operational failure and we are focused today on ensuring that it never happens again."


Fox News 'Antisemitism Exposed' Newsletter: Trump Gets Peace Prize Push from Bibi

FOX News

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet over dinner. Fox News' "Antisemitism Exposed" newsletter brings you stories on the rising anti-Jewish prejudice across the U.S. and the world. TOP STORY: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent a letter to the Nobel Prize Committee to nominate President Donald Trump for the peace prize. "He forged the Abraham Accords. He's forging peace as we speak, in one country and one region after the other," Netanyahu said at a White House meeting.


Assessing the Prevalence of AI-assisted Cheating in Programming Courses: A Pilot Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Tools that can generate computer code in response to inputs written in natural language, such as ChatGPT, pose an existential threat to Computer Science education in its current form, since students can now use these tools to solve assignments without much effort. While that risk has already been recognized by scholars, the proportion of the student body that is incurring in this new kind of plagiarism is still an open problem. We conducted a pilot study in a large CS class (n=120) to assess the feasibility of estimating AI plagiarism through anonymous surveys and interviews. More than 25% of the survey respondents admitted to committing AI plagiarism. Conversely, only one student accepted to be interviewed. Given the high levels of misconduct acknowledgment, we conclude that surveys are an effective method for studies on the matter, while interviews should be avoided or designed in a way that can entice participation. 1 INTRODUCTION Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI, not to be confused with general The generation is usually guided by an input text known as the "prompt". For example, giving the prompt "a vase of red flowers" to a GenAI model would generate an image depicting red flowers in a vase. Practical applications of GenAI are now mainstream thanks to advances in neural networks. In particular, the clever use of attention mechanisms and the subsequent development of the transformer architecture made efficient learning possible over large text corpora (Vaswani et al., 2023) . AI application based on a LLM, can convincingly engage in a conversation and answer questions across multiple subjects (OpenAI, 2022) . Research on applications of LLMs in education is still in its infancy, but looks promising. Personal tutoring systems (Chang, 2022), content explanation (Leinonen et al., 2023) and assignment generation ( Jury et al., 2024) are a few of the ideas that have been explored. From another perspective, LLMs are already a reality in schools.


The Download: a conversation with Karen Hao, and how did life begin?

MIT Technology Review

In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review. They discussed how the AI industry now functions like an empire and went on to examine what ethically-made AI looks like. Read the transcript of the conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed. And, if you're already a subscriber, you can watch the on-demand recording of the event here.


Inside OpenAI's empire: A conversation with Karen Hao

MIT Technology Review

These are our subscriber-only events where you get to listen in to conversations between editors and reporters. Now, I'm delighted to say we've got an absolute cracker of an event today. I'm very happy to have our prodigal daughter, Karen Hao, a fabulous AI journalist, here with us to talk about her new book. Hello, Karen, how are you doing? Thank you so much for having me back, Niall.


Constella: Supporting Storywriters' Interconnected Character Creation through LLM-based Multi-Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Creating a cast of characters by attending to their relational dynamics is a critical aspect of most long-form storywriting. However, our formative study (N=14) reveals that writers struggle to envision new characters that could influence existing ones, to balance similarities and differences among characters, and to intricately flesh out their relationships. Based on these observations, we designed Constella, an LLM-based multi-agent tool that supports storywriters' interconnected character creation process. Constella suggests related characters (FRIENDS DISCOVERY feature), reveals the inner mindscapes of several characters simultaneously (JOURNALS feature), and manifests relationships through inter-character responses (COMMENTS feature). Our 7-8 day deployment study with storywriters (N=11) shows that Constella enabled the creation of expansive communities composed of related characters, facilitated the comparison of characters' thoughts and emotions, and deepened writers' understanding of character relationships. We conclude by discussing how multi-agent interactions can help distribute writers' attention and effort across the character cast.


DocIE@XLLM25: In-Context Learning for Information Extraction using Fully Synthetic Demonstrations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large, high-quality annotated corpora remain scarce in document-level entity and relation extraction in zero-shot or few-shot settings. In this paper, we present a fully automatic, LLM-based pipeline for synthetic data generation and in-context learning for document-level entity and relation extraction. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on manually annotated demonstrations or direct zero-shot inference, our method combines synthetic data generation with retrieval-based in-context learning, using a reasoning-optimized language model. This allows us to build a high-quality demonstration database without manual annotation and to dynamically retrieve relevant examples at inference time. Based on our approach we produce a synthetic dataset of over $5k$ Wikipedia abstracts with approximately $59k$ entities and $30k$ relation triples. Finally, we evaluate in-context learning performance on the DocIE shared task, extracting entities and relations from long documents in a zero-shot setting. We find that in-context joint entity and relation extraction at document-level remains a challenging task, even for state-of-the-art large language models.


Hungary and AI: efforts and opportunities in comparison with Singapore

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The study assesses Hungary's National AI Strategy and its implementation through the analysis of strategic documents, publicly available financial records, and expert interviews with the Hungarian AI Coalition President and Chief Strategic Advisor to the Government Commissioner for AI. 22 goals from Hungary's strategy were evaluated through conceptual, governance, temporal, and financial dimensions before being benchmarked against Singapore's National AI Strategies (NAIS 1.0 and NAIS 2.0). Key findings include an estimated total of EUR 4.65 billion in AI-related public investment in Hungary. Openly available financial data was found for only half of the evaluated goals, and just three projects made up 98\% of all documented funding. The research also reveals Hungary's implementation challenges, including fragmented execution following ministerial reorganizations and the absence of designated biennial reviews since 2020. Furthermore, the paper provides targeted recommendations for Hungary's forthcoming AI strategy, drawing on Singapore's framework as a reference point. These include adapting to the era of large language models, restructuring the existing triple helix network to foster more effective dialogue and advocacy, and positioning the country as an East-West bridge for automotive AI experimentation.


Evaluating AI Counseling in Japanese: Counselor, Client, and Evaluator Roles Assessed by Motivational Interviewing Criteria

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study provides the first comprehensive evaluation of large language model (LLM) performance across three counseling roles in Japanese-language therapeutic contexts. We simultaneously assessed counselor artificial intelligence (AI) systems (GPT-4-turbo with zeroshot prompting or Structured Multi-step Dialogue Prompts (SMDP), Claude-3-Opus-SMDP), client AI simulations, and evaluation AI systems (o3, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, Gemini-2.5-pro). Human experts (n = 15) with extensive counseling experience evaluated AI-generated dialogues using the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) Coding Manual 4.2.1. Notably, SMDP implementation significantly enhanced counselor AI performance across all MITI global ratings compared with zeroshot prompting, with no significant differences between GPT-SMDP and Opus-SMDP. Evaluation AIs showed comparable performance to human raters for Cultivating Change Talk but systematically overestimated Softening Sustain Talk and the overall quality metrics. Model-specific biases emerged: Gemini emphasized power-sharing, o3 focused on technical proficiency, and Sonnet prioritized emotional expression. Client AI simulations exhibited a limited emotional range and unnaturally high compliance, indicating the need for enhanced realism. These findings establish benchmarks for AI-assisted counseling in non-English contexts and identify critical areas for improvement through advanced prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and targeted fine-tuning, with important implications for developing culturally sensitive AI mental health tools.


Model selection for stochastic dynamics: a parsimonious and principled approach

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This thesis focuses on the discovery of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) from noisy and discrete time series. A major challenge is selecting the simplest possible correct model from vast libraries of candidate models, where standard information criteria (AIC, BIC) are often limited. We introduce PASTIS (Parsimonious Stochastic Inference), a new information criterion derived from extreme value theory. Its penalty term, $n_\mathcal{B} \ln(n_0/p)$, explicitly incorporates the size of the initial library of candidate parameters ($n_0$), the number of parameters in the considered model ($n_\mathcal{B}$), and a significance threshold ($p$). This significance threshold represents the probability of selecting a model containing more parameters than necessary when comparing many models. Benchmarks on various systems (Lorenz, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, Lotka-Volterra for SDEs; Gray-Scott for SPDEs) demonstrate that PASTIS outperforms AIC, BIC, cross-validation (CV), and SINDy (a competing method) in terms of exact model identification and predictive capability. Furthermore, real-world data can be subject to large sampling intervals ($Δt$) or measurement noise ($σ$), which can impair model learning and selection capabilities. To address this, we have developed robust variants of PASTIS, PASTIS-$Δt$ and PASTIS-$σ$, thus extending the applicability of the approach to imperfect experimental data. PASTIS thus provides a statistically grounded, validated, and practical methodological framework for discovering simple models for processes with stochastic dynamics.