Personal
China's car companies are turning into tech companies
Both EV makers and AI startups have published aggressive roadmaps for national rollouts of their city NOA services, claiming their customers in dozens or hundreds of Chinese cities will soon be able to experience being driven by their cars through narrow city streets. This morning, I published a story that took a closer look at how city NOAs have become the industry darling in 2023, including how they actually perform and the difficulty in educating drivers on using the system responsibly. You can read all of it here. But during my interview with Zhang Xiang, a Chinese auto industry analyst and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology College, one comment stuck out to me. "The auto industry is very competitive now. Consumers are expecting those vehicles to be tech products, like smartphones. It'd be hard for auto brands to sell their cars if they didn't advertise their products this way," he said.
A list of resources, articles, and opinion pieces relating to large language models โ August 2023 update
We've collected some of the articles, opinion pieces, videos and resources relating to large language models (LLMs). Some of these links also cover other generative models. We will periodically update this list to add any further resources of interest. This article represents the third in the series.
The Strange: Scifi Mars robots meet real-world bounded rationality
Even with the addition of a strange mineral, robots still obey the principle of bounded rationality in artificial intelligence set forth by Herb Simon. I cover bounded rationality in my Science Robotics review (image courtesy of @SciRobotics) but I am adding some more details here. Did you like the Western True Grit? If yes to any or all of the above, The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud is for you! First off, let's talk about the book. The Strange is set in a counterfactual Confederate States of America colony on Mars circa 1930s, evocative of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.
CMISR: Circular Medical Image Super-Resolution
Li, Honggui, Trocan, Maria, Galayko, Dimitri, Sawan, Mohamad
Classical methods of medical image super-resolution (MISR) utilize open-loop architecture with implicit under-resolution (UR) unit and explicit super-resolution (SR) unit. The UR unit can always be given, assumed, or estimated, while the SR unit is elaborately designed according to various SR algorithms. The closed-loop feedback mechanism is widely employed in current MISR approaches and can efficiently improve their performance. The feedback mechanism may be divided into two categories: local and global feedback. Therefore, this paper proposes a global feedback-based closed-cycle framework, circular MISR (CMISR), with unambiguous UR and SR elements. Mathematical model and closed-loop equation of CMISR are built. Mathematical proof with Taylor-series approximation indicates that CMISR has zero recovery error in steady-state. In addition, CMISR holds plug-and-play characteristic which can be established on any existing MISR algorithms. Five CMISR algorithms are respectively proposed based on the state-of-the-art open-loop MISR algorithms. Experimental results with three scale factors and on three open medical image datasets show that CMISR is superior to MISR in reconstruction performance and is particularly suited to medical images with strong edges or intense contrast.
A Comparative Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluating Evolutionary Processes in Multi-objective Optimization
Huang, Yansong, Zhang, Zherui, Jiao, Ao, Ma, Yuxin, Cheng, Ran
Evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective in solving multi-criteria decision-making problems. In real-world applications, analysts often employ several algorithms concurrently and compare their solution sets to gain insight into the characteristics of different algorithms and explore a broader range of feasible solutions. However, EMO algorithms are typically treated as black boxes, leading to difficulties in performing detailed analysis and comparisons between the internal evolutionary processes. Inspired by the successful application of visual analytics tools in explainable AI, we argue that interactive visualization can significantly enhance the comparative analysis between multiple EMO algorithms. In this paper, we present a visual analytics framework that enables the exploration and comparison of evolutionary processes in EMO algorithms. Guided by a literature review and expert interviews, the proposed framework addresses various analytical tasks and establishes a multi-faceted visualization design to support the comparative analysis of intermediate generations in the evolution as well as solution sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through case studies on benchmarking and real-world multi-objective optimization problems to elucidate how analysts can leverage our framework to inspect and compare diverse algorithms.
GPT-4 Can't Reason
GPT-4 was released in March 2023 to wide acclaim, marking a very substantial improvement across the board over GPT-3.5 (OpenAI's previously best model, which had powered the initial release of ChatGPT). However, despite the genuinely impressive improvement, there are good reasons to be highly skeptical of GPT-4's ability to reason. This position paper discusses the nature of reasoning; criticizes the current formulation of reasoning problems in the NLP community, as well as the way in which LLM reasoning performance is currently evaluated; introduces a small collection of 21 diverse reasoning problems; and performs a detailed qualitative evaluation of GPT-4's performance on those problems. Based on this analysis, the paper concludes that, despite its occasional flashes of analytical brilliance, GPT-4 at present is utterly incapable of reasoning.
Developing Effective Educational Chatbots with ChatGPT prompts: Insights from Preliminary Tests in a Case Study on Social Media Literacy (with appendix)
Koyuturk, Cansu, Yavari, Mona, Theophilou, Emily, Bursic, Sathya, Donabauer, Gregor, Telari, Alessia, Testa, Alessia, Boiano, Raffaele, Gabbiadini, Alessandro, Hernandez-Leo, Davinia, Ruskov, Martin, Ognibene, Dimitri
Educational chatbots come with a promise of interactive and personalized learning experiences, yet their development has been limited by the restricted free interaction capabilities of available platforms and the difficulty of encoding knowledge in a suitable format. Recent advances in language learning models with zero-shot learning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, suggest a new possibility for developing educational chatbots using a prompt-based approach. We present a case study with a simple system that enables mixed-turn chatbot interactions and discuss the insights and preliminary guidelines obtained from initial tests. We examine ChatGPT's ability to pursue multiple interconnected learning objectives, adapt the educational activity to users' characteristics, such as culture, age, and level of education, and its ability to use diverse educational strategies and conversational styles. Although the results are encouraging, challenges are posed by the limited history maintained for the conversation and the highly structured form of responses by ChatGPT, as well as their variability, which can lead to an unexpected switch of the chatbot's role from a teacher to a therapist. We provide some initial guidelines to address these issues and to facilitate the development of effective educational chatbots.
Georgia woman sues hospital after baby allegedly decapitated during delivery
With ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools mom and dad can now access massive amounts of parenting knowledge at their fingertips. A lawsuit has been filed against an Atlanta-area hospital after a baby was allegedly decapitated as his mother was giving birth last month. Jessica Ross, 20, went to the emergency room at the Southern Regional Medical Center in Riverdale on July 9, after her water broke at around 10 a.m., FOX Atlanta reported. At 8:40 p.m., she was fully dilated and began pushing. The baby stopped descending because of shoulder dystocia while being delivered vaginally, meaning the baby's shoulders could not fit through the pelvic area, the lawsuit said.
#ICML2023 invited talk: Jennifer Doudna on machine learning for biological research
The programme of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) featured an invited talk by Jennifer Doudna entitled "The future of ML in biology: CRISPR for health and climate". Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of a method for genome editing". The method in question is often referred to as CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using this technique, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has already had a huge impact on the biological sciences.
Comparing How a Chatbot References User Utterances from Previous Chatting Sessions: An Investigation of Users' Privacy Concerns and Perceptions
Cox, Samuel Rhys, Lee, Yi-Chieh, Ooi, Wei Tsang
Chatbots are capable of remembering and referencing previous conversations, but does this enhance user engagement or infringe on privacy? To explore this trade-off, we investigated the format of how a chatbot references previous conversations with a user and its effects on a user's perceptions and privacy concerns. In a three-week longitudinal between-subjects study, 169 participants talked about their dental flossing habits to a chatbot that either, (1-None): did not explicitly reference previous user utterances, (2-Verbatim): referenced previous utterances verbatim, or (3-Paraphrase): used paraphrases to reference previous utterances. Participants perceived Verbatim and Paraphrase chatbots as more intelligent and engaging. However, the Verbatim chatbot also raised privacy concerns with participants. To gain insights as to why people prefer certain conditions or had privacy concerns, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 participants. We discuss implications from our findings that can help designers choose an appropriate format to reference previous user utterances and inform in the design of longitudinal dialogue scripting.