Government
Israel pushes for new sanctions on Iran, urges countries to declare Revolutionary Guard a terror group
Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, joined'Fox & Friends First' to discuss the latest on what's expected with Israel's response as House lawmakers are expected to weigh several foreign aid bills this week. Israel's foreign minister on Tuesday said he is calling for additional sanctions on Iran in response to the missile and drone attack that targeted Israel over the weekend. Foreign Minister Israel Katz said he sent letters to 32 countries urging them to impose new sanctions on the Iranian missile project and declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. "Alongside the military response to the firing of the missiles and the UAVs, I am leading a diplomatic offensive against Iran," Katz posted on X. He said additional sanctions would "stop and weaken Iran."
Meta's Oversight Board will rule on AI-generated sexual images
Meta's Oversight Board is once again taking on the social network's rules for AI-generated content. The board has accepted two cases that deal with AI-made explicit images of public figures. While Meta's rules already prohibit nudity on Facebook and Instagram, the board said in a statement that it wants to address whether "Meta's policies and its enforcement practices are effective at addressing explicit AI-generated imagery." Sometimes referred to as "deepfake porn," AI-generated images of female celebrities, politicians and other public figures has become an increasingly prominent form of online harassment and has drawn a wave of proposed regulation. With the two cases, the Oversight Board could push Meta to adopt new rules to address such harassment on its platform.
How I Use the Internet, According to Nineties Action Movies
An illustration of a large envelope fills the screen--I've received a new e-mail, my first in weeks. I click on the middle of the envelope and a note opens in size thirty-six font. It's a top-secret assignment for me, a renegade ex-C.I.A. agent who can kick higher than anyone else in the agency. "Looks like this old dog is heading back to the pound," I growl, and close the e-mail by turning off my entire computer. I pull up a digitized photo on the screen.
GREG GUTFELD: We've never seemed weaker, and the bad guys can see it
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld gives his take on Iran's missile and drone attack against Israel on'Gutfeld!' Like I said, over the weekend, Iran launched an all-out attack on Israel, shooting as many as 300 drones and rockets at the Jewish state. By that metric, it was far more dangerous to be on the New York subway this weekend than strolling around Tel Aviv. Seriously, you have a better chance of getting hurt trying to take a burrito from Whoopi Goldberg. Give credit to Israel's air defense system, Iron Dome, which is the same nickname we gave Jesse Watters' head. Now, however, give the Iranians their due.
U.K. to Criminalize Creating Sexually Explicit Deepfake Images
The U.K. will criminalize the creation of sexually explicit deepfake images as part of plans to tackle violence against women. People convicted of creating such deepfakes without consent, even if they don't intend to share the images, will face prosecution and an unlimited fine under a new law, the Ministry of Justice said in a statement. Sharing the images could also result in jail. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence have led to the rise of the creation and dissemination of deepfake images and videos. The U.K. has classified violence against women and girls as a national threat, which means the police must prioritize tackling it, and this law is designed to help them clamp down on a practice that is increasingly being used to humiliate or distress victims.
OpenAI taps ex-Amazon executive to head enterprise push in Japan
OpenAI named the former president of Amazon Web Services's Japan arm to spearhead its push to woo enterprise clients in the world's fourth-largest economy. The artificial intelligence darling is opening an office in Tokyo as it releases a custom GPT-4 model catering to Japanese language users. OpenAI said it has 2 million weekly active users in the country, while its enterprise clients include Daikin Industries, Rakuten Group and an affiliate of Toyota Motor. "We want to build a track record through repeated dialogue with companies in Japan," said Tadao Nagasaki, the newly named Japan president for OpenAI, during a news conference Monday. The Tokyo office -- OpenAI's third overseas outpost following offices in London and Dublin -- will grow to about 10 to 20 workers this year, he said.
Graph neural network-based surrogate modelling for real-time hydraulic prediction of urban drainage networks
Zhang, Zhiyu, Lu, Chenkaixiang, Tian, Wenchong, Liao, Zhenliang, Yuan, Zhiguo
Physics-based models are computationally time-consuming and infeasible for real-time scenarios of urban drainage networks, and a surrogate model is needed to accelerate the online predictive modelling. Fully-connected neural networks (NNs) are potential surrogate models, but may suffer from low interpretability and efficiency in fitting complex targets. Owing to the state-of-the-art modelling power of graph neural networks (GNNs) and their match with urban drainage networks in the graph structure, this work proposes a GNN-based surrogate of the flow routing model for the hydraulic prediction problem of drainage networks, which regards recent hydraulic states as initial conditions, and future runoff and control policy as boundary conditions. To incorporate hydraulic constraints and physical relationships into drainage modelling, physics-guided mechanisms are designed on top of the surrogate model to restrict the prediction variables with flow balance and flooding occurrence constraints. According to case results in a stormwater network, the GNN-based model is more cost-effective with better hydraulic prediction accuracy than the NN-based model after equal training epochs, and the designed mechanisms further limit prediction errors with interpretable domain knowledge. As the model structure adheres to the flow routing mechanisms and hydraulic constraints in urban drainage networks, it provides an interpretable and effective solution for data-driven surrogate modelling. Simultaneously, the surrogate model accelerates the predictive modelling of urban drainage networks for real-time use compared with the physics-based model.
A Survey on Data-Driven Fault Diagnostic Techniques for Marine Diesel Engines
Youssef, Ayah, Noura, Hassan, Amrani, Abderrahim El, Adel, El Mostafa El, Ouladsine, Mustapha
Fault diagnosis in marine diesel engines is vital for maritime safety and operational efficiency.These engines are integral to marine vessels, and their reliable performance is crucial for safenavigation. Swift identification and resolution of faults are essential to prevent breakdowns,enhance safety, and reduce the risk of catastrophic failures at sea. Proactive fault diagnosisfacilitates timely maintenance, minimizes downtime, and ensures the overall reliability andlongevity of marine diesel engines. This paper explores the importance of fault diagnosis,emphasizing subsystems, common faults, and recent advancements in data-driven approachesfor effective marine diesel engine maintenance
MPCOM: Robotic Data Gathering with Radio Mapping and Model Predictive Communication
Ji, Zhiyou, Li, Guoliang, Han, Ruihua, Wang, Shuai, Bai, Bing, Xu, Wei, Ye, Kejiang, Xu, Chengzhong
Robotic data gathering (RDG) is an emerging paradigm that navigates a robot to harvest data from remote sensors. However, motion planning in this paradigm needs to maximize the RDG efficiency instead of the navigation efficiency, for which the existing motion planning methods become inefficient, as they plan robot trajectories merely according to motion factors. This paper proposes radio map guided model predictive communication (MPCOM), which navigates the robot with both grid and radio maps for shape-aware collision avoidance and communication-aware trajectory generation in a dynamic environment. The proposed MPCOM is able to trade off the time spent on reaching goal, avoiding collision, and improving communication. MPCOM captures high-order signal propagation characteristics using radio maps and incorporates the map-guided communication regularizer to the motion planning block. Experiments in IRSIM and CARLA simulators show that the proposed MPCOM outperforms other benchmarks in both LOS and NLOS cases. Real-world testing based on car-like robots is also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of MPCOM in indoor environments.
Which questions should I answer? Salience Prediction of Inquisitive Questions
Wu, Yating, Mangla, Ritika, Dimakis, Alexandros G., Durrett, Greg, Li, Junyi Jessy
Inquisitive questions -- open-ended, curiosity-driven questions people ask as they read -- are an integral part of discourse processing (Kehler and Rohde, 2017; Onea, 2016) and comprehension (Prince, 2004). Recent work in NLP has taken advantage of question generation capabilities of LLMs to enhance a wide range of applications. But the space of inquisitive questions is vast: many questions can be evoked from a given context. So which of those should be prioritized to find answers? Linguistic theories, unfortunately, have not yet provided an answer to this question. This paper presents QSALIENCE, a salience predictor of inquisitive questions. QSALIENCE is instruction-tuned over our dataset of linguist-annotated salience scores of 1,766 (context, question) pairs. A question scores high on salience if answering it would greatly enhance the understanding of the text (Van Rooy, 2003). We show that highly salient questions are empirically more likely to be answered in the same article, bridging potential questions (Onea, 2016) with Questions Under Discussion (Roberts, 2012). We further validate our findings by showing that answering salient questions is an indicator of summarization quality in news.