Personal
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.
Congratulations to the #AAAI2024 outstanding paper winners
The AAAI 2024 outstanding paper awards were announced at the conference on Thursday 22 February. Papers are recommended for consideration during the review process by members of the Program Committee. This year, three papers have been selected as outstanding papers. Abstract: Multi-view learning aims to combine multiple features to achieve more comprehensive descriptions of data. Most previous works assume that multiple views are strictly aligned.
Deconstructing the Veneer of Simplicity: Co-Designing Introductory Generative AI Workshops with Local Entrepreneurs
Kotturi, Yasmine, Anderson, Angel, Ford, Glenn, Skirpan, Michael, Bigham, Jeffrey P.
Generative AI platforms and features are permeating many aspects of work. Entrepreneurs from lean economies in particular are well positioned to outsource tasks to generative AI given limited resources. In this paper, we work to address a growing disparity in use of these technologies by building on a four-year partnership with a local entrepreneurial hub dedicated to equity in tech and entrepreneurship. Together, we co-designed an interactive workshops series aimed to onboard local entrepreneurs to generative AI platforms. Alongside four community-driven and iterative workshops with entrepreneurs across five months, we conducted interviews with 15 local entrepreneurs and community providers. We detail the importance of communal and supportive exposure to generative AI tools for local entrepreneurs, scaffolding actionable use (and supporting non-use), demystifying generative AI technologies by Figure 1: We designed an introductory generative AI workshop emphasizing entrepreneurial power, while simultaneously deconstructing series with entrepreneurs and tech providers which centered the veneer of simplicity to address the many operational communal experience, supportive exposure, tangible skills needed for successful application.
ASEM: Enhancing Empathy in Chatbot through Attention-based Sentiment and Emotion Modeling
Hamad, Omama, Hamdi, Ali, Shaban, Khaled
Effective feature representations play a critical role in enhancing the performance of text generation models that rely on deep neural networks. However, current approaches suffer from several drawbacks, such as the inability to capture the deep semantics of language and sensitivity to minor input variations, resulting in significant changes in the generated text. In this paper, we present a novel solution to these challenges by employing a mixture of experts, multiple encoders, to offer distinct perspectives on the emotional state of the user's utterance while simultaneously enhancing performance. We propose an end-to-end model architecture called ASEM that performs emotion analysis on top of sentiment analysis for open-domain chatbots, enabling the generation of empathetic responses that are fluent and relevant. In contrast to traditional attention mechanisms, the proposed model employs a specialized attention strategy that uniquely zeroes in on sentiment and emotion nuances within the user's utterance. This ensures the generation of context-rich representations tailored to the underlying emotional tone and sentiment intricacies of the text. Our approach outperforms existing methods for generating empathetic embeddings, providing empathetic and diverse responses. The performance of our proposed model significantly exceeds that of existing models, enhancing emotion detection accuracy by 6.2% and lexical diversity by 1.4%.
'Amazing Grace': the name behind Nvidia's 2tn chip empire
In the arid tech sphere of semiconductor manufacturing, one hardback book-sized processor stands out: Nvidia's H-100. On Friday, the Santa Clara, California, company surpassed 2tn in valuation. Where it goes next will be down to a chip named after "Amazing Grace" Hopper, a US navy rear admiral who became instrumental in the development of design and implementation of programming languages. Nvidia supplies approximately 80% of the global market in chips used in AI applications. The company's H-100 chips – the H is for Hopper – are now so valuable they have to be transported by armored car, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, and demand is so great that some customers are waiting as long as six months to receive it.