A panel joins'Fox News @ Night' to weigh in on a voter sentiment poll about the incoming Trump administration, Chinese President Xi Jinping's invitation to the presidential inauguration, and efforts by Trump Cabinet nominees to court senators. President-elect Donald Trump unleashed a slew of nominations on Sunday night, naming several new people to serve in his forthcoming administration. In several Truth Social posts on Sunday, Trump introduced various experts to work in the White House on issues ranging from defense to technology to budgeting. The Republican leader began by naming Stephen Alexander Vaden as his nominee for deputy secretary of the Department of Agriculture. "In my First Term, Stephen was the General Counsel of the Department of Agriculture, and a Member of the Board of the Commodity Credit Corporation, where he won two cases before the United States Supreme Court, relocated and reorganized the Agencies that comprise the Department to better serve Rural America, and engaged in substantial regulatory reform," Trump wrote in a post.

Earthquake early warning systems play crucial roles in reducing the risk of seismic disasters. Previously, the dominant modeling system was the single-station models. Such models digest signal data received at a given station and predict earth-quake parameters, such as the p-phase arrival time, intensity, and magnitude at that location. Various methods have demonstrated adequate performance. However, most of these methods present the challenges of the difficulty of speeding up the alarm time, providing early warning for distant areas, and considering global information to enhance performance. Recently, deep learning has significantly impacted many fields, including seismology. Thus, this paper proposes a deep learning-based framework, called SENSE, for the intensity prediction task of earthquake early warning systems. To explicitly consider global information from a regional or national perspective, the input to SENSE comprises statistics from a set of stations in a given region or country. The SENSE model is designed to learn the relationships among the set of input stations and the locality-specific characteristics of each station. Thus, SENSE is not only expected to provide more reliable forecasts by considering multistation data but also has the ability to provide early warnings to distant areas that have not yet received signals. This study conducted extensive experiments on datasets from Taiwan and Japan. The results revealed that SENSE can deliver competitive or even better performances compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to generate responses on social topics due to their world knowledge and generative capabilities. Beyond reasoning and generation performance, political bias is an essential issue that warrants attention. Political bias, as a universal phenomenon in human society, may be transferred to LLMs and distort LLMs' behaviors of information acquisition and dissemination with humans, leading to unequal access among different groups of people. To prevent LLMs from reproducing and reinforcing political biases, and to encourage fairer LLM-human interactions, comprehensively examining political bias in popular LLMs becomes urgent and crucial. In this study, we systematically measure the political biases in a wide range of LLMs, using a curated set of questions addressing political bias in various contexts. Our findings reveal distinct patterns in how LLMs respond to political topics. For highly polarized topics, most LLMs exhibit a pronounced left-leaning bias. Conversely, less polarized topics elicit greater consensus, with similar response patterns across different LLMs. Additionally, we analyze how LLM characteristics, including release date, model scale, and region of origin affect political bias. The results indicate political biases evolve with model scale and release date, and are also influenced by regional factors of LLMs.

Wireless communication has evolved significantly, with 6G offering groundbreaking capabilities, particularly for IoT. However, the integration of IoT into 6G presents new security challenges, expanding the attack surface due to vulnerabilities introduced by advanced technologies such as open RAN, terahertz (THz) communication, IRS, massive MIMO, and AI. Emerging threats like AI exploitation, virtualization risks, and evolving attacks, including data manipulation and signal interference, further complicate security efforts. As 6G standards are set to be finalized by 2030, work continues to align security measures with technological advances. However, substantial gaps remain in frameworks designed to secure integrated IoT and 6G systems. Our research addresses these challenges by utilizing tree-based machine learning algorithms to manage complex datasets and evaluate feature importance. We apply data balancing techniques to ensure fair attack representation and use SHAP and LIME to improve model transparency. By aligning feature importance with XAI methods and cross-validating for consistency, we boost model accuracy and enhance IoT security within the 6G ecosystem.

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in global applications, the importance of cultural sensitivity becomes paramount, ensuring that users from diverse backgrounds feel respected and understood. Cultural harm can arise when these models fail to align with specific cultural norms, resulting in misrepresentations or violations of cultural values. This work addresses the challenges of ensuring cultural sensitivity in LLMs, especially in small-parameter models that often lack the extensive training data needed to capture global cultural nuances. We present two key contributions: (1) A cultural harm test dataset, created to assess model outputs across different cultural contexts through scenarios that expose potential cultural insensitivities, and (2) A culturally aligned preference dataset, aimed at restoring cultural sensitivity through fine-tuning based on feedback from diverse annotators. These datasets facilitate the evaluation and enhancement of LLMs, ensuring their ethical and safe deployment across different cultural landscapes. Our results show that integrating culturally aligned feedback leads to a marked improvement in model behavior, significantly reducing the likelihood of generating culturally insensitive or harmful content. Ultimately, this work paves the way for more inclusive and respectful AI systems, fostering a future where LLMs can safely and ethically navigate the complexities of diverse cultural landscapes.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant safety concerns have emerged. Fundamentally, the safety of large language models is closely linked to the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and clarity of their understanding of safety knowledge, particularly in domains such as law, policy and ethics. This factuality ability is crucial in determining whether these models can be deployed and applied safely and compliantly within specific regions. To address these challenges and better evaluate the factuality ability of LLMs to answer short questions, we introduce the Chinese SafetyQA benchmark. Chinese SafetyQA has several properties (i.e., Chinese, Diverse, High-quality, Static, Easy-to-evaluate, Safety-related, Harmless). Based on Chinese SafetyQA, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on the factuality abilities of existing LLMs and analyze how these capabilities relate to LLM abilities, e.g., RAG ability and robustness against attacks.

Disparate impact doctrine offers an important legal apparatus for targeting unfair data-driven algorithmic decisions. A recent body of work has focused on conceptualizing and operationalizing one particular construct from this doctrine -- the less discriminatory alternative, an alternative policy that reduces disparities while meeting the same business needs of a status quo or baseline policy. This paper puts forward four fundamental results, which each represent limits to searching for and using less discriminatory algorithms (LDAs). (1) Statistically, although LDAs are almost always identifiable in retrospect on fixed populations, making conclusions about how alternative classifiers perform on an unobserved distribution is more difficult. (2) Mathematically, a classifier can only exhibit certain combinations of accuracy and selection rate disparity between groups, given the size of each group and the base rate of the property or outcome of interest in each group. (3) Computationally, a search for a lower-disparity classifier at some baseline level of utility is NP-hard. (4) From a modeling and consumer welfare perspective, defining an LDA only in terms of business needs can lead to LDAs that leave consumers strictly worse off, including members of the disadvantaged group. These findings, which may seem on their face to give firms strong defenses against discrimination claims, only tell part of the story. For each of our negative results limiting what is attainable in this setting, we offer positive results demonstrating that there exist effective and low-cost strategies that are remarkably effective at identifying viable lower-disparity policies.

We present a question-and-answer (Q\&A) application designed to support the contract management process by leveraging combined information from contract documents (PDFs) and data retrieved from contract management systems (database). This data is processed by a large language model (LLM) to provide precise and relevant answers. The accuracy of these responses is further enhanced through the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), text-to-SQL techniques, and agents that dynamically orchestrate the workflow. These techniques eliminate the need to retrain the language model. Additionally, we employed Prompt Engineering to fine-tune the focus of responses. Our findings demonstrate that this multi-agent orchestration and combination of techniques significantly improve the relevance and accuracy of the answers, offering a promising direction for future information systems.

Accurate uncertainty information associated with essential climate variables (ECVs) is crucial for reliable climate modeling and understanding the spatiotemporal evolution of the Earth system. In recent years, geoscience and climate scientists have benefited from rapid progress in deep learning to advance the estimation of ECV products with improved accuracy. However, the quantification of uncertainties associated with the output of such deep learning models has yet to be thoroughly adopted. This survey explores the types of uncertainties associated with ECVs estimated from deep learning and the techniques to quantify them. The focus is on highlighting the importance of quantifying uncertainties inherent in ECV estimates, considering the dynamic and multifaceted nature of climate data. The survey starts by clarifying the definition of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties and their roles in a typical satellite observation processing workflow, followed by bridging the gap between conventional statistical and deep learning views on uncertainties. Then, we comprehensively review the existing techniques for quantifying uncertainties associated with deep learning algorithms, focusing on their application in ECV studies. The specific need for modification to fit the requirements from both the Earth observation side and the deep learning side in such interdisciplinary tasks is discussed. Finally, we demonstrate our findings with two ECV examples, snow cover and terrestrial water storage, and provide our perspectives for future research.

Data mining and knowledge discovery are essential aspects of extracting valuable insights from vast datasets. Neural topic models (NTMs) have emerged as a valuable unsupervised tool in this field. However, the predominant objective in NTMs, which aims to discover topics maximizing data likelihood, often lacks alignment with the central goals of data mining and knowledge discovery which is to reveal interpretable insights from large data repositories. Overemphasizing likelihood maximization without incorporating topic regularization can lead to an overly expansive latent space for topic modeling. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to NTMs that addresses this misalignment by introducing contrastive learning measures to assess topic interpretability. We propose a novel NTM framework, named ContraTopic, that integrates a differentiable regularizer capable of evaluating multiple facets of topic interpretability throughout the training process. Our regularizer adopts a unique topic-wise contrastive methodology, fostering both internal coherence within topics and clear external distinctions among them. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently produces topics with superior interpretability compared to state-of-the-art NTMs.