Can a Big Tech company be sued in Kenya for alleged abuses at an outsourcing company working on its behalf? That's the question at the heart of two lawsuits that are attempting to set a new precedent in Kenya, which is the prime destination for tech companies looking to farm out digital work to the African continent. The two-year legal battle stems from allegations of human rights violations at an outsourced Meta content moderation facility in Nairobi, where employees hired by a contractor were paid as little as 1.50 per hour to view traumatic content, such as videos of rapes, murders, and war crimes. The suits claim that despite the workers being contracted by an outsourcing company, called Sama, Meta essentially supervised and set the terms for the work, and designed and managed the software required for the task. Both companies deny wrongdoing and Meta has challenged the Kenyan courts' jurisdiction to hear the cases.

The latest footage of bizarre drones in New Jersey captured several craft orbiting each other over Somerset County, while at least 12 counties have reported sightings. The video, released this week, shows three'mystery drones in the air' as two move extremely close as if they are interacting with each other and the third hovered for'about 15 minutes.' New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Monday night that the drones are'very sophisticated, explaining: 'The minute we get eyes on them [the drones], they go dark.' 'I don't blame people for being frustrated,' Gov Murphy continued, adding that he had spent most of Sunday coordinating on the issue with both the White House and the US Department of Homeland Security in the hope of getting answers. He said that the state received 49 sighting reports on Sunday night alone, with hundreds of locals sharing experiences on social media platforms. On Monday, Picatinny Arsenal, the Army facility in Morris County, confirmed it has had 11 sightings of'UFOs' over in its airspace in recent weeks.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., opens up about the aerial systems spotted in the Garden State on'The Story.' A Chinese citizen living in Los Angeles allegedly flew a drone and took aerial images of Vandenberg Space Force Base last month, federal prosecutors said Monday. Yinpiao Zhou, 39, was arrested this week at the San Francisco International Airport prior to boarding a China-bound flight, the Justice Department said. He is charged with failure to register an aircraft not providing transportation and violation of national defense airspace. On Nov. 30, drone detections systems at the military installation in Santa Barbara County detected a drone flying over the base, prosecutors said.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. In this episode we're chatting to Caitlin about gender and AI, that technology isn't neutral, using technology for good, diversity creation and exploitation, lived experience expertise, co-creating technologies and AI life cycle, importance of success metrics, international treaties on AI, and more… Alliance is a leader of the UN's Generation Equality Action Coalition Technology & Innovation for Gender Equality. Caitlin was co-chair of the Expert Group for the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) in 2023 with its first ever priority theme of Technology & Innovation. Caitlin leads the Human Rights Toolbox initiative, an educational platform that supports a global community working for a human rights-based approach to AI – with equity & inclusion at the core of the code. Women at the Table are a leader of the fr feminist AI research Network, with Hubs in Latin America & the Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, SouthEastAsia, and sister network in Africa, and serves as Civil Society lead for the World Benchmarking Alliance's Collective Impact Coalition for Ethical AI.

Simulation has become a crucial tool for Building Energy Optimization (BEO) as it enables the evaluation of different design and control strategies at a low cost. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms can leverage large-scale simulations to learn optimal control from vast amounts of data without supervision, particularly under the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Unfortunately, the lack of open and standardized tools has hindered the widespread application of ML and RL to BEO. To address this issue, this paper presents Sinergym, an open-source Python-based virtual testbed for large-scale building simulation, data collection, continuous control, and experiment monitoring. Sinergym provides a consistent interface for training and running controllers, predefined benchmarks, experiment visualization and replication support, and comprehensive documentation in a ready-to-use software library. This paper 1) highlights the main features of Sinergym in comparison to other existing frameworks, 2) describes its basic usage, and 3) demonstrates its applicability for RL-based BEO through several representative examples. By integrating simulation, data, and control, Sinergym supports the development of intelligent, data-driven applications for more efficient and responsive building operations, aligning with the objectives of digital twin technology.

Accurate predictions and uncertainty quantification (UQ) are essential for decision-making in risk-sensitive fields such as system safety modeling. Deep ensembles (DEs) are efficient and scalable methods for UQ in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs); however, their performance is limited when constructed by simply retraining the same DNN multiple times with randomly sampled initializations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method that combines Bayesian optimization (BO) with DE, referred to as BODE, to enhance both predictive accuracy and UQ. We apply BODE to a case study involving a Densely connected Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) trained on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data to predict eddy viscosity in sodium fast reactor thermal stratification modeling. Compared to a manually tuned baseline ensemble, BODE estimates total uncertainty approximately four times lower in a noise-free environment, primarily due to the baseline's overestimation of aleatoric uncertainty. Specifically, BODE estimates aleatoric uncertainty close to zero, while aleatoric uncertainty dominates the total uncertainty in the baseline ensemble. We also observe a reduction of more than 30% in epistemic uncertainty. When Gaussian noise with standard deviations of 5% and 10% is introduced into the data, BODE accurately fits the data and estimates uncertainty that aligns with the data noise. These results demonstrate that BODE effectively reduces uncertainty and enhances predictions in data-driven models, making it a flexible approach for various applications requiring accurate predictions and robust UQ.

We carry out a series of experiments to test large language models' multi-hop reasoning ability from three aspects: selecting and combining external knowledge, dealing with non-sequential reasoning tasks and generalising to data samples with larger numbers of hops. We test the GPT-3.5 model on four reasoning benchmarks with Chain-of-Thought prompting (and its variations). Our results reveal that despite the amazing performance achieved by large language models on various reasoning tasks, models still suffer from severe drawbacks which shows a large gap with humans.

Introduction: Global burden of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is rising out of proportion to specialists. Current chatbots like ChatGPT are not tailored for handling STI-related concerns out of the box. We developed Otiz, an Artificial Intelligence-based (AI-based) chatbot platform designed specifically for STI detection and counseling, and assessed its performance. Methods: Otiz employs a multi-agent system architecture based on GPT4-0613, leveraging large language model (LLM) and Deterministic Finite Automaton principles to provide contextually relevant, medically accurate, and empathetic responses. Its components include modules for general STI information, emotional recognition, Acute Stress Disorder detection, and psychotherapy. A question suggestion agent operates in parallel. Four STIs (anogenital warts, herpes, syphilis, urethritis/cervicitis) and 2 non-STIs (candidiasis, penile cancer) were evaluated using prompts mimicking patient language. Each prompt was independently graded by two venereologists conversing with Otiz as patient actors on 6 criteria using Numerical Rating Scale ranging from 0 (poor) to 5 (excellent). Results: Twenty-three venereologists did 60 evaluations of 30 prompts. Across STIs, Otiz scored highly on diagnostic accuracy (4.1-4.7), overall accuracy (4.3-4.6), correctness of information (5.0), comprehensibility (4.2-4.4), and empathy (4.5-4.8). However, relevance scores were lower (2.9-3.6), suggesting some redundancy. Diagnostic scores for non-STIs were lower (p=0.038). Inter-observer agreement was strong, with differences greater than 1 point occurring in only 12.7% of paired evaluations. Conclusions: AI conversational agents like Otiz can provide accurate, correct, discrete, non-judgmental, readily accessible and easily understandable STI-related information in an empathetic manner, and can alleviate the burden on healthcare systems.

The tool-use ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has a profound impact on a wide range of industrial applications. However, LLMs' self-control and calibration capability in appropriately using tools remains understudied. The problem is consequential as it raises potential risks of degraded performance and poses a threat to the trustworthiness of the models. In this paper, we conduct a study on a family of state-of-the-art LLMs on three datasets with two mainstream tool-use frameworks. Our study reveals the tool-abuse behavior of LLMs, a tendency for models to misuse tools with overconfidence. We also find that this is a common issue regardless of model capability. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach, \textit{SMARTCAL}, to mitigate the observed issues, and our results show an average of 8.6 percent increase in the QA performance and a 21.6 percent decrease in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) compared to baseline models.

Regulation is increasingly cited as the most important and pressing concern in machine learning. However, it is currently unknown how to implement this, and perhaps more importantly, how it would effect model performance alongside human collaboration if actually realized. In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by building a regulatable large-language model (LLM), and then quantifying how the additional constraints involved affect (1) model performance, alongside (2) human collaboration. Our empirical results reveal that it is possible to force an LLM to use human-defined features in a transparent way, but a "regulation performance trade-off" previously not considered reveals itself in the form of a 7.34% classification performance drop. Surprisingly however, we show that despite this, such systems actually improve human task performance speed and appropriate confidence in a realistic deployment setting compared to no AI assistance, thus paving a way for fair, regulatable AI, which benefits users.