Government
Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. An unmanned Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan in 2010. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . MQ-9 Predator drones were deployed over Los Angeles to monitor anti-ICE protests in June.
This medical startup uses LLMs to run appointments and make diagnoses
"Our focus is really on what we can do to pull the doctor out of the visit," says Akido's CTO. Imagine this: You've been feeling unwell, so you call up your doctor's office to make an appointment. At the appointment, you aren't rushed through describing your health concerns; instead, you have a full half hour to share your symptoms and worries and the exhaustive details of your health history with someone who listens attentively and asks thoughtful follow-up questions. You leave with a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and the sense that, for once, you've been able to discuss your health with the care that it merits. AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren't doctors Once cautious, OpenAI, Grok, and others will now dive into giving unverified medical advice with virtually no disclaimers. You might not have spoken to a doctor, or other licensed medical practitioner, at all.
If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review โ how AI could kill us all
W hat if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you'd say, until I mentioned that the reason you'd stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it's wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway. We don't know what form this extinction will take exactly - perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true.
More Britons view AI as economic risk than opportunity, Tony Blair thinktank finds
Britons are concerned about AI's impact on the economy and jobs in particular. Britons are concerned about AI's impact on the economy and jobs in particular. TBI says poll data threatens Keir Starmer's ambition for UK to become artificial intelligence'superpower' The Tony Blair Institute warned that the poll findings threatened Keir Starmer's ambition for the UK to become an AI "superpower" and urged the government to convince the public of the technology's benefits. TBI commissioned a survey that found 38% of Britons see AI as an economic risk while 20% see it as an opportunity. The poll of more than 3,700 adults also showed that lack of trust was the biggest barrier to adoption.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,306
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? A Ukrainian drone attack killed three people and injured 16 near the town of Foros on the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian-appointed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, wrote in a post on Telegram. Russia's Ministry of Defence said the attack occurred "using strike drones equipped with high-explosive payloads", in a resort area "where there are no military targets whatsoever".
Algorithmic Fairness: Not a Purely Technical but Socio-Technical Property
Bian, Yijun, You, Lei, Sasaki, Yuya, Maeda, Haruka, Igarashi, Akira
The rapid trend of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems in socially consequential domains has raised growing concerns about their trustworthiness, including potential discriminatory behaviours. Research in algorithmic fairness has generated a proliferation of mathematical definitions and metrics, yet persistent misconceptions and limitations -- both within and beyond the fairness community -- limit their effectiveness, such as an unreached consensus on its understanding, prevailing measures primarily tailored to binary group settings, and superficial handling for intersectional contexts. Here we critically remark on these misconceptions and argue that fairness cannot be reduced to purely technical constraints on models; we also examine the limitations of existing fairness measures through conceptual analysis and empirical illustrations, showing their limited applicability in the face of complex real-world scenarios, challenging prevailing views on the incompatibility between accuracy and fairness as well as that among fairness measures themselves, and outlining three worth-considering principles in the design of fairness measures. We believe these findings will help bridge the gap between technical formalisation and social realities and meet the challenges of real-world AI/ML deployment.
A Rigorous Evaluation of LLM Data Generation Strategies for Low-Resource Languages
Anikina, Tatiana, Cegin, Jan, Simko, Jakub, Ostermann, Simon
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate synthetic textual data for training smaller specialized models. However, a comparison of various generation strategies for low-resource language settings is lacking. While various prompting strategies have been proposed, such as demonstrations, label-based summaries, and self-revision, their comparative effectiveness remains unclear, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the performance of these generation strategies and their combinations across 11 typologically diverse languages, including several extremely low-resource ones. Using three NLP tasks and four open-source LLMs, we assess downstream model performance on generated versus gold-standard data. Our results show that strategic combinations of generation methods, particularly target-language demonstrations with LLM-based revisions, yield strong performance, narrowing the gap with real data to as little as 5% in some settings. We also find that smart prompting techniques can reduce the advantage of larger LLMs, highlighting efficient generation strategies for synthetic data generation in low-resource scenarios with smaller models.
HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning
Tan, Xingyu, Wang, Xiaoyang, Liu, Qing, Xu, Xiwei, Yuan, Xin, Zhu, Liming, Zhang, Wenjie
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Current hybrid RAG system retrieves evidence from both knowledge graphs (KGs) and text documents to support LLM reasoning. However, it faces challenges like handling multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, multi-source verification, and effective graph utilization. To address these limitations, we present HydraRAG, a training-free framework that unifies graph topology, document semantics, and source reliability to support deep, faithful reasoning in LLMs. HydraRAG handles multi-hop and multi-entity problems through agent-driven exploration that combines structured and unstructured retrieval, increasing both diversity and precision of evidence. To tackle multi-source verification, HydraRAG uses a tri-factor cross-source verification (source trustworthiness assessment, cross-source corroboration, and entity-path alignment), to balance topic relevance with cross-modal agreement. By leveraging graph structure, HydraRAG fuses heterogeneous sources, guides efficient exploration, and prunes noise early. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that HydraRAG achieves overall state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks with GPT-3.5-Turbo, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by an average of 20.3% and up to 30.1%. Furthermore, HydraRAG enables smaller models (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B) to achieve reasoning performance comparable to that of GPT-4-Turbo. The source code is available on https://stevetantan.github.io/HydraRAG/.
Hybrid Temporal Differential Consistency Autoencoder for Efficient and Sustainable Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems
Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, particularly water distribution systems, have increased due to rapid digitalization and the integration of IoT devices and industrial control systems (ICS). These cyber-physical systems (CPS) introduce new vulnerabilities, requiring robust and automated intrusion detection systems (IDS) to mitigate potential threats. This study addresses key challenges in anomaly detection by leveraging time correlations in sensor data, integrating physical principles into machine learning models, and optimizing computational efficiency for edge applications. We build upon the concept of temporal differential consistency (TDC) loss to capture the dynamics of the system, ensuring meaningful relationships between dynamic states. Expanding on this foundation, we propose a hybrid autoencoder-based approach, referred to as hybrid TDC-AE, which extends TDC by incorporating both deterministic nodes and conventional statistical nodes. This hybrid structure enables the model to account for non-deterministic processes. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art classification performance while improving time to detect anomalies by 3%, outperforming the BATADAL challenge leader without requiring domain-specific knowledge, making it broadly applicable. Additionally, it maintains the computational efficiency of conventional autoencoders while reducing the number of fully connected layers, resulting in a more sustainable and efficient solution. The method demonstrates how leveraging physics-inspired consistency principles enhances anomaly detection and strengthens the resilience of cyber-physical systems.