In midtown Manhattan on March 4, Google's managing director for Israel, Barak Regev, was addressing a conference promoting the Israeli tech industry when a member of the audience stood up in protest. "I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance," shouted the protester, wearing an orange t-shirt emblazoned with a white Google logo. The Google worker, a 23-year-old software engineer named Eddie Hatfield, was booed by the audience and quickly bundled out of the room, a video of the event shows. After a pause, Regev addressed the act of protest. "One of the privileges of working in a company which represents democratic values is giving space for different opinions," he told the crowd.

Apple, in its latest update to its App Store developer guidelines for iPhones and iPads, flagged by 9to5Mac, says it will allow game console emulators – and even downloadable games. Apple warns developers, however, they "are responsible for all such software offered in [their] app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws." So don't expect to play Super Mario, Spyro, or a third game series that starts with an'S'. Meanwhile, we have a guide to watching (and recording) the total eclipse in North America later today. The best chance of good viewing along the path of eclipse totality is still in northeastern parts of the US (Buffalo, NY, Burlington, VT) and southeast Canada (Niagara Falls and Montreal).

There was a time before the turn of the millennium when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a full-throated accounting of himself and the things he cared about. He recalls his voice then as "unusually strong," so much so that he could fill large auditoriums with his words. The independent presidential candidate recounts those times somewhat wistfully, telling interviewers that he "can't stand" the sound of his voice today -- sometimes choked, halting and slightly tremulous. Spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological condition, in which an abnormality in the brain's neural network results in involuntary spasms of the muscles that open or close the vocal cords. My my voice doesn't really get tired. "I feel sorry for the people who have to listen to me," Kennedy said in a phone interview with The Times, his voice sounding as strained as it does in his public appearances.

Members of Ukraine's 1st Separate Assault Battalion describe themselves as firemen. Their job is to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse. Lately, their service has been in high demand: the front is burning. A large-scale counter-offensive last year failed to achieve meaningful victories, and since then Russia has been on the attack. One of its priorities appears to be Kupyansk, a city in northeastern Ukraine, some twenty miles from the Russian border.

A former interior minister, Tudorache is one of the most important players in European AI policy. He is one of the two lead negotiators of the AI Act in the European Parliament. The bill, the first sweeping AI law of its kind in the world, will enter into force this year. We first met two years ago, when Tudorache was appointed to his position as negotiator. But Tudorache's interest in AI started much earlier, in 2015.

Concern about doctored or manipulative media is always high around election cycles, but 2024 will be different for two reasons: deepfakes made by artificial intelligence (AI) and the sheer number of polls. The term deepfake refers to a hoax that uses AI to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people, with the effect often compounded by a voice component. Combined with the fact that around half the world's population is holding important elections this year – including India, the US, the EU and, most probably, the UK – and there is potential for the technology to be highly disruptive. Here is a guide to some of the most effective deepfakes in recent years, including the first attempts to create hoax images. The banana where it all began.

Ukraine's military said that fighting around the front line city of Chasiv Yar was "difficult" and "tense" but that its forces were resisting Russian air and infantry attacks. Ivan Fedorov, the head of Ukraine's southern Zaporizhia region, said three people died in the town of Huliaipole after their house was hit by a Russian shell. A woman was killed in a Russian attack that hit an apartment block in Kupiansk, in the northeastern Kharkiv region. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, five people were injured in a Russian attack. In Russia, meanwhile, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said one woman was killed after shrapnel from a shot-down Ukrainian drone hit a car.

Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI become more widespread, the content safety risks associated with their use also increase. We find a notable deficiency in high-quality content safety datasets and benchmarks that comprehensively cover a wide range of critical safety areas. To address this, we define a broad content safety risk taxonomy, comprising 13 critical risk and 9 sparse risk categories. Additionally, we curate AEGISSAFETYDATASET, a new dataset of approximately 26, 000 human-LLM interaction instances, complete with human annotations adhering to the taxonomy. We plan to release this dataset to the community to further research and to help benchmark LLM models for safety. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset, we instruction-tune multiple LLM-based safety models. We show that our models (named AEGISSAFETYEXPERTS), not only surpass or perform competitively with the state-of-the-art LLM-based safety models and general purpose LLMs, but also exhibit robustness across multiple jail-break attack categories. We also show how using AEGISSAFETYDATASET during the LLM alignment phase does not negatively impact the performance of the aligned models on MT Bench scores. Furthermore, we propose AEGIS, a novel application of a no-regret online adaptation framework with strong theoretical guarantees, to perform content moderation with an ensemble of LLM content safety experts in deployment

We show that hybrid quantum classifiers based on quantum kernel methods and support vector machines are vulnerable against adversarial attacks, namely small engineered perturbations of the input data can deceive the classifier into predicting the wrong result. Nonetheless, we also show that simple defence strategies based on data augmentation with a few crafted perturbations can make the classifier robust against new attacks. Our results find applications in security-critical learning problems and in mitigating the effect of some forms of quantum noise, since the attacker can also be understood as part of the surrounding environment.