Government
Hydrogen-powered rescue truck just smashed a world record, and it only spits out water
The vehicle traveled 1,806 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. Hydrogen-powered trucks are making waves in the world of clean transportation, and the H2Rescue truck just set a new Guinness World Record to prove it. This impressive vehicle, developed by Cummins Accelera in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Defense, traveled an astounding 1,806 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. The H2Rescue truck embarked on its record-setting trip in California, carrying 386 pounds of hydrogen fuel. Throughout the journey, it navigated rush hour traffic, maintained speeds between 50 and 55 mph and operated in temperatures ranging from 60 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,053
Russia's Ministry of Defence said the army gained control of the settlement of Shevchenko, near the logistical centre of Pokrovsk, a key target in its advance through Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. Ukraine has yet to acknowledge the loss of the town. Ukraine's General Staff of the Armed Forces said it repelled 46 of 56 Russian attacks around a dozen towns in the Pokrovsk sector and several clashes were ongoing. A Ukrainian drone hit one of Russia's largest oil refineries – in Taneko, Tatarstan – according to Russian Telegram channel ASTRA. Fuel oil that spilled from wrecked Russian tankers has spread into the Sea of Azov and reached the shores of Ukraine's partly Russian-occupied Zaporizhia region, a Moscow-installed official said.
Dem senator warns 'LA fires are preview of coming atrocities,' claims Trump bought off by 'Big Oil'
Catastrophe brings a search for accountability. As fires wreak havoc in California, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., claimed in a post on X the catastrophe is "what a climate emergency looks like." He took aim at President-elect Trump, asserting the incoming president has been bought off by the oil industry. "Trump has been bought for 1 billion by Big Oil. Just a payoff to kill the IRA and the Green New Deal. We know what will happen. The LA fires are preview of coming atrocities," Markey declared in a post on X. Markey, who claims there is a "climate crisis," has also warned about the potential effects of artificial intelligence (AI).
Protego: Detecting Adversarial Examples for Vision Transformers via Intrinsic Capabilities
Wu, Jialin, Pan, Kaikai, Chen, Yanjiao, Deng, Jiangyi, Pang, Shengyuan, Xu, Wenyuan
Transformer models have excelled in natural language tasks, prompting the vision community to explore their implementation in computer vision problems. However, these models are still influenced by adversarial examples. In this paper, we investigate the attack capabilities of six common adversarial attacks on three pretrained ViT models to reveal the vulnerability of ViT models. To understand and analyse the bias in neural network decisions when the input is adversarial, we use two visualisation techniques that are attention rollout and grad attention rollout. To prevent ViT models from adversarial attack, we propose Protego, a detection framework that leverages the transformer intrinsic capabilities to detection adversarial examples of ViT models. Nonetheless, this is challenging due to a diversity of attack strategies that may be adopted by adversaries. Inspired by the attention mechanism, we know that the token of prediction contains all the information from the input sample. Additionally, the attention region for adversarial examples differs from that of normal examples. Given these points, we can train a detector that achieves superior performance than existing detection methods to identify adversarial examples. Our experiments have demonstrated the high effectiveness of our detection method. For these six adversarial attack methods, our detector's AUC scores all exceed 0.95. Protego may advance investigations in metaverse security.
Data Enrichment Work and AI Labor in Latin America and the Caribbean
Williams, Gianna, Santos, Maya De Los, To, Alexandra, Savage, Saiph
The global AI surge demands crowdworkers from diverse languages and cultures. They are pivotal in labeling data for enabling global AI systems. Despite global significance, research has primarily focused on understanding the perspectives and experiences of US and India crowdworkers, leaving a notable gap. To bridge this, we conducted a survey with 100 crowdworkers across 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. We discovered that these workers exhibited pride and respect for their digital labor, with strong support and admiration from their families. Notably, crowd work was also seen as a stepping stone to financial and professional independence. Surprisingly, despite wanting more connection, these workers also felt isolated from peers and doubtful of others' labor quality. They resisted collaboration and gender-based tools, valuing gender-neutrality. Our work advances HCI understanding of Latin American and Caribbean crowdwork, offering insights for digital resistance tools for the region.
Generative Artificial Intelligence-Supported Pentesting: A Comparison between Claude Opus, GPT-4, and Copilot
Martínez, Antonio López, Cano, Alejandro, Ruiz-Martínez, Antonio
The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has brought a significant change to our society. GenAI can be applied across numerous fields, with particular relevance in cybersecurity. Among the various areas of application, its use in penetration testing (pentesting) or ethical hacking processes is of special interest. In this paper, we have analyzed the potential of leading generic-purpose GenAI tools-Claude Opus, GPT-4 from ChatGPT, and Copilot-in augmenting the penetration testing process as defined by the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES). Our analysis involved evaluating each tool across all PTES phases within a controlled virtualized environment. The findings reveal that, while these tools cannot fully automate the pentesting process, they provide substantial support by enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in specific tasks. Notably, all tools demonstrated utility; however, Claude Opus consistently outperformed the others in our experimental scenarios.
Deep Learning and Foundation Models for Weather Prediction: A Survey
Shi, Jimeng, Shirali, Azam, Jin, Bowen, Zhou, Sizhe, Hu, Wei, Rangaraj, Rahuul, Wang, Shaowen, Han, Jiawei, Wang, Zhaonan, Lall, Upmanu, Wu, Yanzhao, Bobadilla, Leonardo, Narasimhan, Giri
Physics-based numerical models have been the bedrock of atmospheric sciences for decades, offering robust solutions but often at the cost of significant computational resources. Deep learning (DL) models have emerged as powerful tools in meteorology, capable of analyzing complex weather and climate data by learning intricate dependencies and providing rapid predictions once trained. While these models demonstrate promising performance in weather prediction, often surpassing traditional physics-based methods, they still face critical challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent deep learning and foundation models for weather prediction. We propose a taxonomy to classify existing models based on their training paradigms: deterministic predictive learning, probabilistic generative learning, and pre-training and fine-tuning. For each paradigm, we delve into the underlying model architectures, address major challenges, offer key insights, and propose targeted directions for future research. Furthermore, we explore real-world applications of these methods and provide a curated summary of open-source code repositories and widely used datasets, aiming to bridge research advancements with practical implementations while fostering open and trustworthy scientific practices in adopting cutting-edge artificial intelligence for weather prediction. The related sources are available at https://github.com/JimengShi/ DL-Foundation-Models-Weather.
Causal Claims in Economics
Garg, Prashant, Fetzer, Thiemo
We analyze over 44,000 NBER and CEPR working papers from 1980 to 2023 using a custom language model to construct knowledge graphs that map economic concepts and their relationships. We distinguish between general claims and those documented via causal inference methods (e.g., DiD, IV, RDD, RCTs). We document a substantial rise in the share of causal claims-from roughly 4% in 1990 to nearly 28% in 2020-reflecting the growing influence of the "credibility revolution." We find that causal narrative complexity (e.g., the depth of causal chains) strongly predicts both publication in top-5 journals and higher citation counts, whereas non-causal complexity tends to be uncorrelated or negatively associated with these outcomes. Novelty is also pivotal for top-5 publication, but only when grounded in credible causal methods: introducing genuinely new causal edges or paths markedly increases both the likelihood of acceptance at leading outlets and long-run citations, while non-causal novelty exhibits weak or even negative effects. Papers engaging with central, widely recognized concepts tend to attract more citations, highlighting a divergence between factors driving publication success and long-term academic impact. Finally, bridging underexplored concept pairs is rewarded primarily when grounded in causal methods, yet such gap filling exhibits no consistent link with future citations. Overall, our findings suggest that methodological rigor and causal innovation are key drivers of academic recognition, but sustained impact may require balancing novel contributions with conceptual integration into established economic discourse.
Accelerating Discovery in Natural Science Laboratories with AI and Robotics: Perspectives and Challenges from the 2024 IEEE ICRA Workshop, Yokohama, Japan
Cooper, Andrew I., Courtney, Patrick, Darvish, Kourosh, Eckhoff, Moritz, Fakhruldeen, Hatem, Gabrielli, Andrea, Garg, Animesh, Haddadin, Sami, Harada, Kanako, Hein, Jason, Hübner, Maria, Knobbe, Dennis, Pizzuto, Gabriella, Shkurti, Florian, Shrestha, Ruja, Thurow, Kerstin, Vescovi, Rafael, Vogel-Heuser, Birgit, Wolf, Ádám, Yoshikawa, Naruki, Zeng, Yan, Zhou, Zhengxue, Zwirnmann, Henning
Fundamental breakthroughs across many scientific disciplines are becoming increasingly rare (1). At the same time, challenges related to the reproducibility and scalability of experiments, especially in the natural sciences (2,3), remain significant obstacles. For years, automating scientific experiments has been viewed as the key to solving this problem. However, existing solutions are often rigid and complex, designed to address specific experimental tasks with little adaptability to protocol changes. With advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, new possibilities are emerging to tackle this challenge in a more flexible and human-centric manner.