A year into Sudan's civil war, Iranian-made armed drones have helped the army turn the tide of the conflict, halting the progress of the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Force and regaining territory around the capital, a senior army source has said. Six Iranian sources, regional officials and diplomats -- who, like the army source, asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information -- also said the military had acquired Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the past few months. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) used some older UAVs in the first months of the war alongside artillery batteries and fighter jets, but had little success in rooting out RSF fighters embedded in heavily populated neighborhoods in Khartoum and other cities, more than a dozen Khartoum residents said.

Earth observation (EO) satellite missions have been providing detailed images about the state of the Earth and its land cover for over 50 years. Long term missions, such as NASA's Landsat, Terra, and Aqua satellites, and more recently, the ESA's Sentinel missions, record images of the entire world every few days. Although single images provide point-in-time data, repeated images of the same area, or satellite image time series (SITS) provide information about the changing state of vegetation and land use. These SITS are useful for modeling dynamic processes and seasonal changes such as plant phenology. They have potential benefits for many aspects of land and natural resource management, including applications in agricultural, forest, water, and disaster management, urban planning, and mining. However, the resulting satellite image time series (SITS) are complex, incorporating information from the temporal, spatial, and spectral dimensions. Therefore, deep learning methods are often deployed as they can analyze these complex relationships. This review presents a summary of the state-of-the-art methods of modelling environmental, agricultural, and other Earth observation variables from SITS data using deep learning methods. We aim to provide a resource for remote sensing experts interested in using deep learning techniques to enhance Earth observation models with temporal information.

There are a number of hypotheses underlying the existence of adversarial examples for classification problems. These include the high-dimensionality of the data, high codimension in the ambient space of the data manifolds of interest, and that the structure of machine learning models may encourage classifiers to develop decision boundaries close to data points. This article proposes a new framework for studying adversarial examples that does not depend directly on the distance to the decision boundary. Similarly to the smoothed classifier literature, we define a (natural or adversarial) data point to be $(\gamma,\sigma)$-stable if the probability of the same classification is at least $\gamma$ for points sampled in a Gaussian neighborhood of the point with a given standard deviation $\sigma$. We focus on studying the differences between persistence metrics along interpolants of natural and adversarial points. We show that adversarial examples have significantly lower persistence than natural examples for large neural networks in the context of the MNIST and ImageNet datasets. We connect this lack of persistence with decision boundary geometry by measuring angles of interpolants with respect to decision boundaries. Finally, we connect this approach with robustness by developing a manifold alignment gradient metric and demonstrating the increase in robustness that can be achieved when training with the addition of this metric.

Auditing of AI systems is a promising way to understand and manage ethical problems and societal risks associated with contemporary AI systems, as well as some anticipated future risks. Efforts to develop standards for auditing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have therefore understandably gained momentum. However, we argue that creating auditing standards is not just insufficient, but actively harmful by proliferating unheeded and inconsistent standards, especially in light of the rapid evolution and ethical and safety challenges of AI. Instead, the paper proposes the establishment of an AI Audit Standards Board, responsible for developing and updating auditing methods and standards in line with the evolving nature of AI technologies. Such a body would ensure that auditing practices remain relevant, robust, and responsive to the rapid advancements in AI. The paper argues that such a governance structure would also be helpful for maintaining public trust in AI and for promoting a culture of safety and ethical responsibility within the AI industry. Throughout the paper, we draw parallels with other industries, including safety-critical industries like aviation and nuclear energy, as well as more prosaic ones such as financial accounting and pharmaceuticals. AI auditing should emulate those fields, and extend beyond technical assessments to include ethical considerations and stakeholder engagement, but we explain that this is not enough; emulating other fields' governance mechanisms for these processes, and for audit standards creation, is a necessity. We also emphasize the importance of auditing the entire development process of AI systems, not just the final products...

This paper summarizes the most cogent advantages and risks associated with Artificial Intelligence from an in-depth review of the literature. Then the authors synthesize the salient risk-related models currently being used in AI, technology and business-related scenarios. Next, in view of an updated context of AI along with theories and models reviewed and expanded constructs, the writers propose a new framework called "The Transformation Risk-Benefit Model of Artificial Intelligence" to address the increasing fears and levels of AI risk. Using the model characteristics, the article emphasizes practical and innovative solutions where benefits outweigh risks and three use cases in healthcare, climate change/environment and cyber security to illustrate unique interplay of principles, dimensions and processes of this powerful AI transformational model.

The Mayan languages comprise a language family with an ancient history, millions of speakers, and immense cultural value, that, nevertheless, remains severely underrepresented in terms of resources and global exposure. In this paper we develop, curate, and publicly release a set of corpora in several Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala and Southern Mexico, which we call MayanV. The datasets are parallel with Spanish, the dominant language of the region, and are taken from official native sources focused on representing informal, day-to-day, and non-domain-specific language. As such, and according to our dialectometric analysis, they differ in register from most other available resources. Additionally, we present neural machine translation models, trained on as many resources and Mayan languages as possible, and evaluated exclusively on our datasets. We observe lexical divergences between the dialects of Spanish in our resources and the more widespread written standard of Spanish, and that resources other than the ones we present do not seem to improve translation performance, indicating that many such resources may not accurately capture common, real-life language usage. The MayanV dataset is available at https://github.com/transducens/mayanv.

There is a limitation in the literature of data-driven analyses for the ex-post evaluation of community risk and resilience, particularly using features related to the performance of coupled human-infrastructure systems. To address this gap, in this study we created a machine learning-based method for the ex-post assessment of community risk and resilience and their interplay based on features related to the coupled human-infrastructure systems performance. Utilizing feature groups related to population protective actions, infrastructure/building performance features, and recovery features, we examined the risk and resilience performance of communities in the context of the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County, Texas. These features related to the coupled human-infrastructure systems performance were processed using the K-means clustering method to classify census block groups into four distinct clusters then, based on feature analysis, these clusters were labeled and designated into four quadrants of risk-resilience archetypes. Finally, we analyzed the disparities in risk-resilience status of spatial areas across different clusters as well as different income groups. The findings unveil the risk-resilience status of spatial areas shaped by their coupled human-infrastructure systems performance and their interactions. The results also inform about features that contribute to high resilience in high-risk areas. For example, the results indicate that in high-risk areas, evacuation rates contributed to a greater resilience, while in low-risk areas, preparedness contributed to greater resilience.

Monitoring the threat landscape to be aware of actual or potential attacks is of utmost importance to cybersecurity professionals. Information about cyber threats is typically distributed using natural language reports. Natural language processing can help with managing this large amount of unstructured information, yet to date, the topic has received little attention. With this paper, we present AnnoCTR, a new CC-BY-SA-licensed dataset of cyber threat reports. The reports have been annotated by a domain expert with named entities, temporal expressions, and cybersecurity-specific concepts including implicitly mentioned techniques and tactics. Entities and concepts are linked to Wikipedia and the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base, the most widely-used taxonomy for classifying types of attacks. Prior datasets linking to MITRE ATT&CK either provide a single label per document or annotate sentences out-of-context; our dataset annotates entire documents in a much finer-grained way. In an experimental study, we model the annotations of our dataset using state-of-the-art neural models. In our few-shot scenario, we find that for identifying the MITRE ATT&CK concepts that are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in a text, concept descriptions from MITRE ATT&CK are an effective source for training data augmentation.

The field of eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has produced a plethora of methods (e.g., saliency-maps) to gain insight into artificial intelligence (AI) models, and has exploded with the rise of deep learning (DL). However, human-participant studies question the efficacy of these methods, particularly when the AI output is wrong. In this study, we collected and analyzed 156 human-generated text and saliency-based explanations collected in a question-answering task (N=40) and compared them empirically to state-of-the-art XAI explanations (integrated gradients, conservative LRP, and ChatGPT) in a human-participant study (N=136). Our findings show that participants found human saliency maps to be more helpful in explaining AI answers than machine saliency maps, but performance negatively correlated with trust in the AI model and explanations. This finding hints at the dilemma of AI errors in explanation, where helpful explanations can lead to lower task performance when they support wrong AI predictions.

Machine Translation (MT) remains one of the last NLP tasks where large language models (LLMs) have not yet replaced dedicated supervised systems. This work exploits the complementary strengths of LLMs and supervised MT by guiding LLMs to automatically post-edit MT with external feedback on its quality, derived from Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) annotations. Working with LLaMA-2 models, we consider prompting strategies varying the nature of feedback provided and then fine-tune the LLM to improve its ability to exploit the provided guidance. Through experiments on Chinese-English, English-German, and English-Russian MQM data, we demonstrate that prompting LLMs to post-edit MT improves TER, BLEU and COMET scores, although the benefits of fine-grained feedback are not clear. Fine-tuning helps integrate fine-grained feedback more effectively and further improves translation quality based on both automatic and human evaluation.