Personal
Exploring the Design of Generative AI in Supporting Music-based Reminiscence for Older Adults
Jin, Yucheng, Cai, Wanling, Chen, Li, Zhang, Yizhe, Doherty, Gavin, Jiang, Tonglin
Music-based reminiscence has the potential to positively impact the psychological well-being of older adults. However, the aging process and physiological changes, such as memory decline and limited verbal communication, may impede the ability of older adults to recall their memories and life experiences. Given the advanced capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as generated conversations and images, and their potential to facilitate the reminiscing process, this study aims to explore the design of generative AI to support music-based reminiscence in older adults. This study follows a user-centered design approach incorporating various stages, including detailed interviews with two social workers and two design workshops (involving ten older adults). Our work contributes to an in-depth understanding of older adults' attitudes toward utilizing generative AI for supporting music-based reminiscence and identifies concrete design considerations for the future design of generative AI to enhance the reminiscence experience of older adults.
How Max Tani Became the Go-To Guy for Horrible News About Media Layoffs
Maxwell Tani is known for his work on an obituary beat of sorts. A media reporter at Semafor, he always seems to be the first person to break news whenever something terrible happens for journalists at one outlet or another. He's been busy: According to one tabulation, more than 500 journalists were laid off just in January. A scroll through Tani's account on X surfaces a glut of executive memos, couched in corporate-speak, informing staff that they'll soon be laid off--at Business Insider, Engadget, the Messenger, Vice, and the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes he shares the news of an impending layoff before these memos even go out--and before employees have been informed. Slate spoke with Tani about what it's like to document the worst moments on the media beat, and how he feels about his place in the news-about-the-news ecosystem. We also tried to diagnose the ills of the industry--and find bright spots ahead.
#AAAI2024 invited talk: Milind Tambe – using ML for social good
Milind Tambe is the winner of the 2024 AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. This award recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways. Milind gave an invited talk at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in which he spoke about some of the work that won him the award. For more than 15 years, Milind and his team have been focused on advancing AI and multi-agent systems for three purposes: public health, conservation, and public safety and security. The emphasis in all cases has been to optimise limited intervention resources.
Authors' Values and Attitudes Towards AI-bridged Scalable Personalization of Creative Language Arts
Kim, Taewook, Han, Hyomin, Adar, Eytan, Kay, Matthew, Chung, John Joon Young
Generative AI has the potential to create a new form of interactive media: AI-bridged creative language arts (CLA), which bridge the author and audience by personalizing the author's vision to the audience's context and taste at scale. However, it is unclear what the authors' values and attitudes would be regarding AI-bridged CLA. To identify these values and attitudes, we conducted an interview study with 18 authors across eight genres (e.g., poetry, comics) by presenting speculative but realistic AI-bridged CLA scenarios. We identified three benefits derived from the dynamics between author, artifact, and audience: those that 1) authors get from the process, 2) audiences get from the artifact, and 3) authors get from the audience. We found how AI-bridged CLA would either promote or reduce these benefits, along with authors' concerns. We hope our investigation hints at how AI can provide intriguing experiences to CLA audiences while promoting authors' values.
Metamorpheus: Interactive, Affective, and Creative Dream Narration Through Metaphorical Visual Storytelling
Wan, Qian, Feng, Xin, Bei, Yining, Gao, Zhiqi, Lu, Zhicong
Human emotions are essentially molded by lived experiences, from which we construct personalised meaning. The engagement in such meaning-making process has been practiced as an intervention in various psychotherapies to promote wellness. Nevertheless, to support recollecting and recounting lived experiences in everyday life remains under explored in HCI. It also remains unknown how technologies such as generative AI models can facilitate the meaning making process, and ultimately support affective mindfulness. In this paper we present Metamorpheus, an affective interface that engages users in a creative visual storytelling of emotional experiences during dreams. Metamorpheus arranges the storyline based on a dream's emotional arc, and provokes self-reflection through the creation of metaphorical images and text depictions. The system provides metaphor suggestions, and generates visual metaphors and text depictions using generative AI models, while users can apply generations to recolour and re-arrange the interface to be visually affective. Our experience-centred evaluation manifests that, by interacting with Metamorpheus, users can recall their dreams in vivid detail, through which they relive and reflect upon their experiences in a meaningful way.
How DNA's discovery changed the world - and my life
Paul Nurse: DNA contains the genetic code found in all known life on our planet. In each of nearly all of your roughly 30 trillion cells, there are 6.4 billion letters of DNA. If the DNA in all of your cells was used to store computer data, it could hold the equivalent of all the digital data we currently store on Earth. I'm Paul Nurse, and I've spent much of my working life thinking about DNA, in particular how it's copied and distributed inside cells every time they divide. I was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work in 2001. Our understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, has grown enormously since its discovery in the 19th century.
AIhub monthly digest: February 2024 – causal relations in text, applied reinforcement learning, and AAAI 2024
Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we meet three AAAI doctoral consortium participants, find out how machine learning can help monitor bird flocks, and cover the 38th AAAI conference. The AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. We're meeting the participants in a series of interviews to find out about their research, PhD life, and why they decided to study AI. This month, we caught up with Fiona Anting Tan, Elizabeth Ondula, and Célian Ringwald.
HearHere: Mitigating Echo Chambers in News Consumption through an AI-based Web System
Jeon, Youngseung, Kim, Jaehoon, Park, Sohyun, Ko, Yunyong, Ryu, Seongeun, Kim, Sang-Wook, Han, Kyungsik
This practice can lead to more rational decision-making that is not heavily influenced by specific opinions or positions [12, 22, 23]. As the Internet is a primary source of information for many people and the volume of online information is immense, effectively helping people consume and share information from diverse perspectives is necessary but challenging [57, 93]. Researchers have proposed various support methods for this, including the development and use of computer technology. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendation systems have been designed to support efficient information consumption by learning users' demographic characteristics or online activity patterns and providing tailored information based on their preferences [77]. Although computer technology plays an important role in enabling people to access and share online information, it should be noted that providing information solely based on individuals' preferences and tendencies can inadvertently contribute to the formation of echo chambers [77], a phenomenon where individuals are exposed primarily to the like-minded groups or information, leading to a reinforcement of shared narratives [28]. Research has shown that echo chambers can have many negative outcomes, including the creation and dissemination of biased information [77], increased susceptibility to fake news [8, 27], resistance towards accepting scientific evidence [63], and the adoption of unbalanced perspectives [36]. To prevent users from becoming polarized towards a specific political stance, many studies have proposed the use of computer-based tools designed to present information from diverse perspectives [31, 48, 53, 62].
RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations
Huang, Jing, Wu, Zhengxuan, Potts, Christopher, Geva, Mor, Geiger, Atticus
Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute-Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/explanare/ravel.
Underwater Acoustic Source Seeking Using Time-Difference-of-Arrival Measurements
Mandić, Filip, Mišković, Nikola, Lončar, Ivan
The research presented in this paper is aimed at developing a control algorithm for an autonomous surface system carrying a two-sensor array consisting of two acoustic receivers, capable of measuring the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) of a quasiperiodic underwater acoustic signal and utilizing this value to steer the system toward the acoustic source in the horizontal plane. Stability properties of the proposed algorithm are analyzed using the Lie bracket approximation technique. Furthermore, simulation results are presented, where particular attention is given to the relationship between the time difference of arrival measurement noise and the sensor baseline - the distance between the two acoustic receivers. Also, the influence of a constant disturbance caused by sea currents is considered. Finally, experimental results in which the algorithm was deployed on two autonomous surface vehicles, each equipped with a single acoustic receiver, are presented. The algorithm successfully steers the vehicle formation toward the acoustic source, despite the measurement noise and intermittent measurements, thus showing the feasibility of the proposed algorithm in real-life conditions.