We introduce a goal-oriented conversational AI system enhanced with American Sign Language (ASL) instructions, presenting the first implementation of such a system on a worldwide multimodal conversational AI platform. Accessible through a touch-based interface, our system receives input from users and seamlessly generates ASL instructions by leveraging retrieval methods and cognitively based gloss translations. Central to our design is a sign translation module powered by Large Language Models, alongside a token-based video retrieval system for delivering instructional content from recipes and wikiHow guides. Our development process is deeply rooted in a commitment to community engagement, incorporating insights from the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community, as well as experts in cognitive and ASL learning sciences. The effectiveness of our signing instructions is validated by user feedback, achieving ratings on par with those of the system Figure 1: An overview of our multimodal dialogue system, in its non-signing variant. Additionally, our capable of giving signed instructions to Deaf or system demonstrates exceptional performance Hard-of-Hearing users in ASL. We first translate task in retrieval accuracy and text-generation quality, instructions to an intermediate textual representation measured by metrics such as BERTScore.

This paper examines the integration of AI's carbon footprint into the risk management frameworks (RMFs) of the banking sector, emphasising its importance in aligning with sustainability goals and regulatory requirements. As AI becomes increasingly central to banking operations, its energy-intensive processes contribute significantly to carbon emissions, posing environmental, regulatory, and reputational risks. Regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the Prudential Regulation Authority's SS1/23 are driving banks to incorporate environmental considerations into their AI model governance. Recent advancements in AI research, like the Open Mixture-of-Experts (OLMoE) framework and the Agentic RAG framework, offer more efficient and dynamic AI models, reducing their carbon footprint without compromising performance. Using these technological examples, the paper outlines a structured approach for banks to identify, assess, and mitigate AI's carbon footprint within their RMFs, including adopting energy-efficient models, utilising green cloud computing, and implementing lifecycle management.

Google just released its annual sustainability report on Tuesday, and the numbers aren't great. The company revealed its greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 50 percent over the last five years, which hasn't been helped by AI's considerable energy consumption. It looks like Google has a long way to go before its anywhere near its goal of net zero emissions by 2030. The most egregious statistic in Google's 2024 Environmental Report is the tech giant's whopping 48 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2019, the base year against which the company's progress is tracked. For comparison, the average car produces 4.6 tonnes per annum, meaning Google emitted more greenhouse gas than over 3.1 million cars last year.

We present ESG-FTSE, the first corpus comprised of news articles with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) relevance annotations. In recent years, investors and regulators have pushed ESG investing to the mainstream due to the urgency of climate change. This has led to the rise of ESG scores to evaluate an investment's credentials as socially responsible. While demand for ESG scores is high, their quality varies wildly. Quantitative techniques can be applied to improve ESG scores, thus, responsible investing. To contribute to resource building for ESG and financial text mining, we pioneer the ESG-FTSE corpus. We further present the first of its kind ESG annotation schema. It has three levels: a binary classification (relevant versus irrelevant news articles), ESG classification (ESG-related news articles), and target company. Both supervised and unsupervised learning experiments for ESG relevance detection were conducted to demonstrate that the corpus can be used in different settings to derive accurate ESG predictions.

In the field of control engineering, the connection between Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) has attracted considerable attention. CBFs have demonstrated notable success in ensuring the safety of critical applications by imposing constraints on system states, while STL allows for precisely specifying spatio-temporal constraints on the behavior of robotic systems. Leveraging these methodologies, this paper addresses the safety-critical navigation problem, in Socially Responsible Navigation (SRN) context, presenting a CBF-based STL motion planning methodology. This methodology enables task completion at any time within a specified time interval considering a dynamic system subject to velocity constraints. The proposed approach involves real-time computation of a smooth CBF, with the computation of a dynamically adjusted parameter based on the available path space and the maximum allowable velocity. A simulation study is conducted to validate the methodology, ensuring safety in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles and demonstrating its compliance with spatio-temporal constraints under non-linear velocity constraints.

The burgeoning integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives within the financial sector represents a paradigm shift towards more sus-tainable and equitable financial practices. This paper surveys the industrial landscape to delineate the necessity and impact of AI in bolstering ESG frameworks. With the advent of stringent regulatory requirements and heightened stakeholder awareness, financial institutions (FIs) are increasingly compelled to adopt ESG criteria. AI emerges as a pivotal tool in navigating the complex in-terplay of financial activities and sustainability goals. Our survey categorizes AI applications across three main pillars of ESG, illustrating how AI enhances analytical capabilities, risk assessment, customer engagement, reporting accuracy and more. Further, we delve into the critical con-siderations surrounding the use of data and the development of models, underscoring the importance of data quality, privacy, and model robustness. The paper also addresses the imperative of responsible and sustainable AI, emphasizing the ethical dimensions of AI deployment in ESG-related banking processes. Conclusively, our findings suggest that while AI offers transformative potential for ESG in banking, it also poses significant challenges that necessitate careful consideration. The final part of the paper synthesizes the survey's insights, proposing a forward-looking stance on the adoption of AI in ESG practices. We conclude with recommendations with a reference architecture for future research and development, advocating for a balanced approach that leverages AI's strengths while mitigating its risks within the ESG domain.

Over the last decade, several regulatory bodies have started requiring the disclosure of non-financial information from publicly listed companies, in light of the investors' increasing attention to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. Publicly released information on sustainability practices is often disclosed in diverse, unstructured, and multi-modal documentation. This poses a challenge in efficiently gathering and aligning the data into a unified framework to derive insights related to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Thus, using Information Extraction (IE) methods becomes an intuitive choice for delivering insightful and actionable data to stakeholders. In this study, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs), In-Context Learning, and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm to extract structured insights related to ESG aspects from companies' sustainability reports. We then leverage graph-based representations to conduct statistical analyses concerning the extracted insights. These analyses revealed that ESG criteria cover a wide range of topics, exceeding 500, often beyond those considered in existing categorizations, and are addressed by companies through a variety of initiatives. Moreover, disclosure similarities emerged among companies from the same region or sector, validating ongoing hypotheses in the ESG literature. Lastly, by incorporating additional company attributes into our analyses, we investigated which factors impact the most on companies' ESG ratings, showing that ESG disclosure affects the obtained ratings more than other financial or company data.

In the face of climate change, are companies really taking substantial steps toward more sustainable operations? A comprehensive answer lies in the dense, information-rich landscape of corporate sustainability reports. However, the sheer volume and complexity of these reports make human analysis very costly. Therefore, only a few entities worldwide have the resources to analyze these reports at scale, which leads to a lack of transparency in sustainability reporting. Empowering stakeholders with LLM-based automatic analysis tools can be a promising way to democratize sustainability report analysis. However, developing such tools is challenging due to (1) the hallucination of LLMs and (2) the inefficiency of bringing domain experts into the AI development loop. In this paper, we ChatReport, a novel LLM-based system to automate the analysis of corporate sustainability reports, addressing existing challenges by (1) making the answers traceable to reduce the harm of hallucination and (2) actively involving domain experts in the development loop. We make our methodology, annotated datasets, and generated analyses of 1015 reports publicly available.

Large language models are quickly gaining momentum, yet are found to demonstrate gender bias in their responses. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of social media discussions to gauge public perceptions of gender bias in LLMs which are trained in different cultural contexts, i.e., ChatGPT, a US-based LLM, or Ernie, a China-based LLM. People shared both observations of gender bias in their personal use and scientific findings about gender bias in LLMs. A difference between the two LLMs was seen -- ChatGPT was more often found to carry implicit gender bias, e.g., associating men and women with different profession titles, while explicit gender bias was found in Ernie's responses, e.g., overly promoting women's pursuit of marriage over career. Based on the findings, we reflect on the impact of culture on gender bias and propose governance recommendations to regulate gender bias in LLMs.

With rapid development and deployment of generative language models in global settings, there is an urgent need to also scale our measurements of harm, not just in the number and types of harms covered, but also how well they account for local cultural contexts, including marginalized identities and the social biases experienced by them. Current evaluation paradigms are limited in their abilities to address this, as they are not representative of diverse, locally situated but global, socio-cultural perspectives. It is imperative that our evaluation resources are enhanced and calibrated by including people and experiences from different cultures and societies worldwide, in order to prevent gross underestimations or skews in measurements of harm. In this work, we demonstrate a socio-culturally aware expansion of evaluation resources in the Indian societal context, specifically for the harm of stereotyping. We devise a community engaged effort to build a resource which contains stereotypes for axes of disparity that are uniquely present in India. The resultant resource increases the number of stereotypes known for and in the Indian context by over 1000 stereotypes across many unique identities. We also demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of such expanded resources for evaluations of language models. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains examples of stereotypes that may be offensive.