Government
America has the power to lead the AI revolution – and the leadership to make it happen
Chevron chairman and CEO Mike Wirth joins'Sunday Morning Futures' to discuss economic concerns, the implications for if the company halts oil drilling in Venezuela and President Trump's sanction threat for Iran's oil recipients. America has triumphed in each industrial revolution – whether steel, energy or manufacturing – and has the power to lead the AI revolution, too. This week in Pittsburgh, President Donald Trump is bringing together leaders to address a defining challenge of our time: how to fuel the AI revolution with American energy. Progress on this front will be consequential for our economy, our national security, and America's global leadership. President Trump's announced 500 billion private sector AI investment is a critical enabler for our country.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,237
Russian forces launched drone attacks on Ukraine's eastern regions of Kharkiv and Sumy, killing at least one person and wounding 21 others, the Kyiv Independent reported, citing local authorities. The Ukrainian Red Cross said the attacks also damaged buildings in Sumy, including an educational and medical facility. The death toll from Russian attacks on Ukraine on Sunday has risen to six, including three people in Sumy, two others in Donetsk and one more in Kherson, the Kyiv Independent reported, citing local officials. Russia's Ministry of Defence claimed control of two more villages in eastern Ukraine: Malynivka in the Zaporizhia region and Mayak in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian drone attacks wounded two people in Russia's Kursk region, and another person in the city of Kamianka-Dniprovska in Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, which Moscow partially occupies, according to the Russian state TASS news agency.
Sesame Street puppet Elmo's X account posts anti-Jewish rant after hacking
The makers of Sesame Street have deleted a slew of offensive social media posts after hackers hijacked the puppet Elmo's X account to launch a tirade about Jews and Jeffrey Epstein. The posts on Elmo's account on Sunday called for the extermination of Jewish people, referred to United States President Donald Trump as a "puppet" of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demanded the release of law enforcement files about Epstein, the accused sex trafficker who died in 2019. The posts attracted a flurry of attention online before being deleted a short time after they were uploaded on Sunday. "Elmo's X account was compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts," a spokesperson for the Sesame Workshop told Al Jazeera in a statement on Monday. "The account has since been secured."
Clio-X: AWeb3 Solution for Privacy-Preserving AI Access to Digital Archives
Lemieux, Victoria L., Gil, Rosa, Molosiwa, Faith, Zhou, Qihong, Li, Binming, Garcia, Roberto, Cubillo, Luis De La Torre, Wang, Zehua
As archives turn to artificial intelligence to manage growing volumes of digital records, privacy risks inherent in current AI data practices raise critical concerns about data sovereignty and ethical accountability. This paper explores how privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and Web3 architectures can support archives to preserve control over sensitive content while still being able to make it available for access by researchers. We present Clio-X, a decentralized, privacy-first Web3 digital solution designed to embed PETs into archival workflows and support AI-enabled reference and access. Drawing on a user evaluation of a medium-fidelity prototype, the study reveals both interest in the potential of the solution and significant barriers to adoption related to trust, system opacity, economic concerns, and governance. Using Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory, we analyze the sociotechnical dimensions of these barriers and propose a path forward centered on participatory design and decentralized governance through a Clio-X Decentralized Autonomous Organization. By integrating technical safeguards with community-based oversight, Clio-X offers a novel model to ethically deploy AI in cultural heritage contexts.
Convex Clustering
Chi, Eric C., Molstad, Aaron J., Gao, Zheming
This survey reviews a clustering method based on solving a convex optimization problem. Despite the plethora of existing clustering methods, convex clustering has several uncommon features that distinguish it from prior art. The optimization problem is free of spurious local minima, and its unique global minimizer is stable with respect to all its inputs, including the data, a tuning parameter, and weight hyperparameters. Its single tuning parameter controls the number of clusters and can be chosen using standard techniques from penalized regression. We give intuition into the behavior and theory for convex clustering as well as practical guidance. We highlight important algorithms and give insight into how their computational costs scale with the problem size. Finally, we highlight the breadth of its uses and flexibility to be combined and integrated with other inferential methods.
Wavelet-Enhanced Neural ODE and Graph Attention for Interpretable Energy Forecasting
Accurate forecasting of energy demand and supply is critical for optimizing sustainable energy systems, yet it is challenged by the variability of renewable sources and dynamic consumption patterns. This paper introduces a neural framework that integrates continuous-time Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs), graph attention, multi-resolution wavelet transformations, and adaptive learning of frequencies to address the issues of time series prediction. The model employs a robust ODE solver, using the Runge-Kutta method, paired with graph-based attention and residual connections to better understand both structural and temporal patterns. Through wavelet-based feature extraction and adaptive frequency modulation, it adeptly captures and models diverse, multi-scale temporal dynamics. When evaluated across seven diverse datasets: ETTh1, ETTh2, ETTm1, ETTm2 (electricity transformer temperature), and Waste, Solar, and Hydro (renewable energy), this architecture consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various forecasting metrics, proving its robustness in capturing complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, the model enhances interpretability through SHAP analysis, making it suitable for sustainable energy applications.
An Algorithm for Identifying Interpretable Subgroups With Elevated Treatment Effects
We introduce an algorithm for identifying interpretable subgroups with elevated treatment effects, given an estimate of individual or conditional average treatment effects (CATE). Subgroups are characterized by "rule sets"--easy-to-understand statements of the form (Condition A AND Condition B) OR (Condition C) --which can capture high-order interactions while retaining interpretability. Our method complements existing approaches for estimating the CATE, which often produce high dimensional and uninterpretable results, by summarizing and extracting critical information from fitted models to aid decision making, policy implementation, and scientific understanding. We propose an objective function that trades-off subgroup size and effect size, and varying the hyperparameter that controls this trade-off results in a "frontier" of Pareto optimal rule sets, none of which dominates the others across all criteria. Valid inference is achievable through sample splitting. We demonstrate the utility and limitations of our method using simulated and empirical examples. In causal inference, average treatment effects (ATE) and average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) are the estimands that garner the most interest. Even if the effect of a treatment is known to be positive on average, it can vary greatly across individuals; some individuals will benefit, but some may experience no effect, and others may even be hurt.
Underrepresentation, Label Bias, and Proxies: Towards Data Bias Profiles for the EU AI Act and Beyond
Ceccon, Marina, Cornacchia, Giandomenico, Pezze, Davide Dalle, Fabris, Alessandro, Susto, Gian Antonio
Undesirable biases encoded in the data are key drivers of algorithmic discrimination. Their importance is widely recognized in the algorithmic fairness literature, as well as legislation and standards on anti-discrimination in AI. Despite this recognition, data biases remain understudied, hindering the development of computational best practices for their detection and mitigation. In this work, we present three common data biases and study their individual and joint effect on algorithmic discrimination across a variety of datasets, models, and fairness measures. We find that underrepresentation of vulnerable populations in training sets is less conducive to discrimination than conventionally affirmed, while combinations of proxies and label bias can be far more critical. Consequently, we develop dedicated mechanisms to detect specific types of bias, and combine them into a preliminary construct we refer to as the Data Bias Profile (DBP). This initial formulation serves as a proof of concept for how different bias signals can be systematically documented. Through a case study with popular fairness datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the DBP in predicting the risk of discriminatory outcomes and the utility of fairness-enhancing interventions. Overall, this article bridges algorithmic fairness research and anti-discrimination policy through a data-centric lens.
Robust Spatiotemporal Epidemic Modeling with Integrated Adaptive Outlier Detection
Shi, Haoming, Yu, Shan, Chi, Eric C.
In epidemic modeling, outliers can distort parameter estimation and ultimately lead to misguided public health decisions. Although there are existing robust methods that can mitigate this distortion, the ability to simultaneously detect outliers is equally vital for identifying potential disease hotspots. In this work, we introduce a robust spatiotemporal generalized additive model (RST-GAM) to address this need. We accomplish this with a mean-shift parameter to quantify and adjust for the effects of outliers and rely on adaptive Lasso regularization to model the sparsity of outlying observations. We use univariate polynomial splines and bivariate penalized splines over triangulations to estimate the functional forms and a data-thinning approach for data-adaptive weight construction. We derive a scalable proximal algorithm to estimate model parameters by minimizing a convex negative log-quasi-likelihood function. Our algorithm uses adaptive step-sizes to ensure global convergence of the resulting iterate sequence. We establish error bounds and selection consistency for the estimated parameters and demonstrate our model's effectiveness through numerical studies under various outlier scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of RST-GAM by analyzing county-level COVID-19 infection data in the United States, highlighting its potential to inform public health decision-making.
Optimal Differentially Private Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons
Cai, T. Tony, Chakraborty, Abhinav, Wang, Yichen
Data privacy is a central concern in many applications involving ranking from incomplete and noisy pairwise comparisons, such as recommendation systems, educational assessments, and opinion surveys on sensitive topics. In this work, we propose differentially private algorithms for ranking based on pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we develop and analyze ranking methods under two privacy notions: edge differential privacy, which protects the confidentiality of individual comparison outcomes, and individual differential privacy, which safeguards potentially many comparisons contributed by a single individual. Our algorithms--including a perturbed maximum likelihood estimator and a noisy count-based method--are shown to achieve minimax optimal rates of convergence under the respective privacy constraints. We further demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our methods through experiments on both simulated and real-world data.