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Spatial Temporal Approach for High-Resolution Gridded Wind Forecasting across Southwest Western Australia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate forecasting of wind speed and direction is paramount across various domains, playing a pivotal role in weather prediction, renewable energy generation, agricultural management, and bushfire mitigation efforts. Accurate predictions enable meteorologists to deepen their understanding of atmospheric processes, leading to more precise weather forecasts and timely alerts for severe weather events [1]. In the realm of renewable energy, precise forecasts of wind conditions are indispensable to optimise the performance of wind farms and integrate wind energy efficiently into the power grid [2-4]. In agriculture, wind forecasts inform critical decisions such as crop spraying, sprinkler or central pivot irrigation timing, and pest control, ultimately improving crop yields and water management [5]. For bush-fire management, timely and accurate predictions of wind speed and direction are crucial for modelling fire behaviour, planning firefighter deployment, and planning evacuations, thereby reducing the impact of bushfires on communities and ecosystems [6, 7]. Given the multifaceted applications of wind forecasting, advancements in machine learning-based techniques for predicting wind speed and direction hold immense promise for bolstering societal resilience and fostering sustainable development. Traditionally, wind forecasting models fall into three categories: physical, statistical time series analysis and machine learning.


Portal needed for victims to report AI deepfakes, federal police union says

The Guardian

A one-stop portal for victims to report AI deepfakes to police should be established, the federal police union has said, lamenting that police were forced to "cobble together" laws to charge the first person to face prosecution for spreading deepfake images of womenlast year. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, introduced legislation in parliament in June that will create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. The Australian Federation Police Association (Afpa) supports the bill, arguing in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry that the current law is too difficult for officers to use. They pointed to the case of a man who was arrested and charged in October last year for allegedly sending deepfake imagery to Brisbane schools and sporting associations. The eSafety commissioner separately launched proceedings against the man over his failure to remove "intimate images" of several prominent Australians last year from a deepfake pornography website.


SecGenAI: Enhancing Security of Cloud-based Generative AI Applications within Australian Critical Technologies of National Interest

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies offers transformative opportunities within Australia's critical technologies of national interest while introducing unique security challenges. This paper presents SecGenAI, a comprehensive security framework for cloud-based GenAI applications, with a focus on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. SecGenAI addresses functional, infrastructure, and governance requirements, integrating end-to-end security analysis to generate specifications emphasizing data privacy, secure deployment, and shared responsibility models. Aligned with Australian Privacy Principles, AI Ethics Principles, and guidelines from the Australian Cyber Security Centre and Digital Transformation Agency, SecGenAI mitigates threats such as data leakage, adversarial attacks, and model inversion. The framework's novel approach combines advanced machine learning techniques with robust security measures, ensuring compliance with Australian regulations while enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of GenAI systems. This research contributes to the field of intelligent systems by providing actionable strategies for secure GenAI implementation in industry, fostering innovation in AI applications, and safeguarding national interests.


MIRAI: Evaluating LLM Agents for Event Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered LLM agents to autonomously collect world information, over which to conduct reasoning to solve complex problems. Given this capability, increasing interests have been put into employing LLM agents for predicting international events, which can influence decision-making and shape policy development on an international scale. Despite such a growing interest, there is a lack of a rigorous benchmark of LLM agents' forecasting capability and reliability. To address this gap, we introduce MIRAI, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLM agents as temporal forecasters in the context of international events. Our benchmark features an agentic environment with tools for accessing an extensive database of historical, structured events and textual news articles. We refine the GDELT event database with careful cleaning and parsing to curate a series of relational prediction tasks with varying forecasting horizons, assessing LLM agents' abilities from short-term to long-term forecasting. We further implement APIs to enable LLM agents to utilize different tools via a code-based interface. In summary, MIRAI comprehensively evaluates the agents' capabilities in three dimensions: 1) autonomously source and integrate critical information from large global databases; 2) write codes using domain-specific APIs and libraries for tool-use; and 3) jointly reason over historical knowledge from diverse formats and time to accurately predict future events. Through comprehensive benchmarking, we aim to establish a reliable framework for assessing the capabilities of LLM agents in forecasting international events, thereby contributing to the development of more accurate and trustworthy models for international relation analysis.


On Ambiguity and the Expressive Function of Law: The Role of Pragmatics in Smart Legal Ecosystems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This is a long paper, an essay, on ambiguity, pragmatics, legal ecosystems, and the expressive function of law. It is divided into two parts and fifteen sections. The first part (Pragmatics) addresses ambiguity from the perspective of linguistic and cognitive pragmatics in the legal field. The second part (Computing) deals with this issue from the point of view of human-centered design and artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on the notion and modelling of rules and what it means to comply with the rules. This is necessary for the scaffolding of smart legal ecosystems (SLE). I will develop this subject with the example of the architecture, information flows, and smart ecosystem of OPTIMAI, an EU project of Industry 4.0 for zero-defect manufacturing (Optimizing Manufacturing Processes through Artificial Intelligence and Virtualization).


Making deepfake images is increasingly easy โ€“ controlling their use is proving all but impossible

The Guardian

"Very creepy," was April's first thought when she saw her face on a generative AI website. April is one half of the Maddison twins. She and her sister Amelia make content for OnlyFans, Instagram and other platforms, but they also existed as a custom generative AI model โ€“ made without their consent. "It was really weird to see our faces, but not really our faces," she says. Deepfakes โ€“ the creation of realistic but false imagery, video and audio using artificial intelligence โ€“ is on the political agenda after the federal government announced last week it would introduce legislation to ban the creation and sharing of deepfake pornography as part of measures to combat violence against women.


Automating Thematic Analysis: How LLMs Analyse Controversial Topics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising analytical tools. They can augment human epistemic, cognitive and reasoning abilities, and support'sensemaking' - making sense of a complex environment or subject - by analysing large volumes of data with a sensitivity to context and nuance absent in earlier text processing systems. This paper presents a pilot experiment that explores how LLMs can support thematic analysis of controversial topics. We compare how human researchers and two LLMs (GPT-4 and Llama 2) categorise excerpts from media coverage of the controversial Australian Robodebt scandal. Our findings highlight intriguing overlaps and variances in thematic categorisation between human and machine agents, and suggest where LLMs can be effective in supporting forms of discourse and thematic analysis. We argue LLMs should be used to augment - and not replace - human interpretation, and we add further methodological insights and reflections to existing research on the application of automation to qualitative research methods. We also introduce a novel card-based design toolkit, for both researchers and practitioners to further interrogate LLMs as analytical tools.


Modelling Opaque Bilateral Market Dynamics in Financial Trading: Insights from a Multi-Agent Simulation Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Exploring complex adaptive financial trading environments through multi-agent based simulation methods presents an innovative approach within the realm of quantitative finance. Despite the dominance of multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches in financial markets with observable data, there exists a set of systematically significant financial markets that pose challenges due to their partial or obscured data availability. We, therefore, devise a multi-agent simulation approach employing small-scale meta-heuristic methods. This approach aims to represent the opaque bilateral market for Australian government bond trading, capturing the bilateral nature of bank-to-bank trading, also referred to as "over-the-counter" (OTC) trading, and commonly occurring between "market makers". The uniqueness of the bilateral market, characterized by negotiated transactions and a limited number of agents, yields valuable insights for agent-based modelling and quantitative finance. The inherent rigidity of this market structure, which is at odds with the global proliferation of multilateral platforms and the decentralization of finance, underscores the unique insights offered by our agent-based model. We explore the implications of market rigidity on market structure and consider the element of stability, in market design. This extends the ongoing discourse on complex financial trading environments, providing an enhanced understanding of their dynamics and implications.


Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations requires high-quality instructional dialogues, which can be achieved by raising diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions that deepen interactions. Existing methods target instructions from real instruction dialogues as a learning goal and fine-tune a user simulator for posing instructions. However, the user simulator struggles to implicitly model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions. In this paper, we take inspiration from the cognitive abilities inherent in human learning and propose the explicit modeling of complex dialogue flows through instructional strategy reuse. Specifically, we first induce high-level strategies from various real instruction dialogues. These strategies are applied to new dialogue scenarios deductively, where the instructional strategies facilitate high-quality instructions. Experimental results show that our method can generate diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history. The constructed multi-turn instructional dialogues can outperform competitive baselines on the downstream chat model.


Modeling Large-Scale Walking and Cycling Networks: A Machine Learning Approach Using Mobile Phone and Crowdsourced Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Walking and cycling are known to bring substantial health, environmental, and economic advantages. However, the development of evidence-based active transportation planning and policies has been impeded by significant data limitations, such as biases in crowdsourced data and representativeness issues of mobile phone data. In this study, we develop and apply a machine learning based modeling approach for estimating daily walking and cycling volumes across a large-scale regional network in New South Wales, Australia that includes 188,999 walking links and 114,885 cycling links. The modeling methodology leverages crowdsourced and mobile phone data as well as a range of other datasets on population, land use, topography, climate, etc. The study discusses the unique challenges and limitations related to all three aspects of model training, testing, and inference given the large geographical extent of the modeled networks and relative scarcity of observed walking and cycling count data. The study also proposes a new technique to identify model estimate outliers and to mitigate their impact. Overall, the study provides a valuable resource for transportation modelers, policymakers and urban planners seeking to enhance active transportation infrastructure planning and policies with advanced emerging data-driven modeling methodologies.