Every day, what's left of the once-mighty ranks of reporters across this country tap out stories meant to inform, entertain and expose. Sometimes they are the work of minutes, the first bits of knowledge on breaking news such as fires, storms or even elections. Sometimes they are investigations that have taken years. Inevitably, as soon as we publish, rich dudes with algorithms come in and sweep this work away for their own profit, like deodorant off a Target shelf. Retail theft is causing a civic meltdown and inspiring a ballot measure to incarcerate repeat toothpaste thieves.

The US says it was behind a drone strike in Iraq's capital Baghdad that killed two commanders of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia group linked to the killing of three US troops last month.

Fika Juliana Putri, a 19-year-old shopkeeper in East Jakarta, plans to vote in Indonesia's presidential election next week for a once-feared former special forces commander. She likes him, she says, because he's cuddly. A doe-eyed cartoon version of former Gen. Prabowo Subianto -- produced using generative artificial intelligence -- is emblazoned on billboards across Indonesia. It's reproduced on sweatshirts and stickers, and featured prominently on #Prabowo-tagged posts that have some 19 billion views on TikTok. Prabowo is Indonesia's defense minister.

Imran Khan, the ousted prime minister of Pakistan, discusses the situation that could see him being jailed by the country he recently led. Pakistan heads to the polls Thursday with one of the leading candidates languishing in prison as some reports claim that voter enthusiasm is lacking among the country's nearly 128 million voters. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, founder of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has been barred from contesting the national parliamentary elections. Khan was ousted as the country's 22nd prime minister after a no-confidence vote in April 2022. The former cricketer-turned-politician is currently serving more than 30 years in jail.

Computationally efficient surrogates for parametrized physical models play a crucial role in science and engineering. Operator learning provides data-driven surrogates that map between function spaces. However, instead of full-field measurements, often the available data are only finite-dimensional parametrizations of model inputs or finite observables of model outputs. Building off of Fourier Neural Operators, this paper introduces the Fourier Neural Mappings (FNMs) framework that is able to accommodate such finite-dimensional inputs and outputs. The paper develops universal approximation theorems for the method. Moreover, in many applications the underlying parameter-to-observable (PtO) map is defined implicitly through an infinite-dimensional operator, such as the solution operator of a partial differential equation. A natural question is whether it is more data-efficient to learn the PtO map end-to-end or first learn the solution operator and subsequently compute the observable from the full-field solution. A theoretical analysis of Bayesian nonparametric regression of linear functionals, which is of independent interest, suggests that the end-to-end approach can actually have worse sample complexity. Extending beyond the theory, numerical results for the FNM approximation of three nonlinear PtO maps demonstrate the benefits of the operator learning perspective that this paper adopts.

In this unprecedented era of technology-driven transformation, it becomes more critical than ever that we aggressively invest in developing robust artificial intelligence (AI) for wargaming in support of decision-making. By advancing AI-enabled systems and pairing these with human judgment, we will be able to enhance all-domain awareness, improve the speed and quality of our decision cycles, offer recommendations for novel courses of action, and more rapidly counter our adversary's actions. It therefore becomes imperative that we accelerate the development of AI to help us better address the complexity of modern challenges and dilemmas that currently requires human intelligence and, if possible, attempt to surpass human intelligence--not to replace humans, but to augment and better inform human decision-making at machine speed. Although deep reinforcement learning continues to show promising results in intelligent agent behavior development for the long-horizon, complex tasks typically found in combat modeling and simulation, further research is needed to enable the scaling of AI to deal with these intricate and expansive state-spaces characteristic of wargaming for either concept development, education, or analysis. To help address this challenge, in our research, we are developing and implementing a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that includes a multi-model approach and dimension-invariant observation abstractions.

In MRI studies, the aggregation of imaging data from multiple acquisition sites enhances sample size but may introduce site-related variabilities that hinder consistency in subsequent analyses. Deep learning methods for image translation have emerged as a solution for harmonizing MR images across sites. In this study, we introduce IGUANe (Image Generation with Unified Adversarial Networks), an original 3D model that leverages the strengths of domain translation and straightforward application of style transfer methods for multicenter brain MR image harmonization. IGUANe extends CycleGAN architecture by integrating an arbitrary number of domains for training through a many-to-one strategy. During inference, the model can be applied to any image, even from an unknown acquisition site, making it a universal generator for harmonization. Trained on a dataset comprising T1-weighted images from 11 different scanners, IGUANe was evaluated on data from unseen sites. The assessments included the transformation of MR images with traveling subjects, the preservation of pairwise distances between MR images within domains, the evolution of volumetric patterns related to age and Alzheimer$^\prime$s disease (AD), and the performance in age regression and patient classification tasks. Comparisons with other harmonization and normalization methods suggest that IGUANe better preserves individual information in MR images and is more suitable for maintaining and reinforcing variabilities related to age and AD. Future studies may further assess IGUANe in other multicenter contexts, either using the same model or retraining it for applications to different image modalities.

Social media has played an important role since its emergence. People use the internet to express opinions about anything, making social media platforms a social sensor. Initially supported by Twitter, the hashtags are now in use on several social media platforms. Hashtags are helpful to tag, track, and group posts on similar topics. In this paper, we analyze hashtag drifts over time using concepts from graph analysis and textual data streams using the Girvan-Newman method to uncover hashtag communities in annual snapshots. More specifically, we analyzed the #mybodymychoice hashtag between 2018 and 2022. In addition, we offer insights about some hashtags found in the study. Furthermore, our approach can be useful for monitoring changes over time in opinions and sentiment patterns about an entity on social media. Even though the hashtag #mybodymychoice was initially coupled with women's rights, abortion, and bodily autonomy, we observe that it suffered drifts during the studied period across topics such as drug legalization, vaccination, political protests, war, and civil rights. The year 2021 was the most significant drifting year, in which the communities detected suggest that #mybodymychoice significantly drifted to vaccination and Covid-19-related topics.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows promising applications for the perception and planning tasks in autonomous driving (AD) due to its superior performance compared to conventional methods. However, inscrutable AI systems exacerbate the existing challenge of safety assurance of AD. One way to mitigate this challenge is to utilize explainable AI (XAI) techniques. To this end, we present the first comprehensive systematic literature review of explainable methods for safe and trustworthy AD. We begin by analyzing the requirements for AI in the context of AD, focusing on three key aspects: data, model, and agency. We find that XAI is fundamental to meeting these requirements. Based on this, we explain the sources of explanations in AI and describe a taxonomy of XAI. We then identify five key contributions of XAI for safe and trustworthy AI in AD, which are interpretable design, interpretable surrogate models, interpretable monitoring, auxiliary explanations, and interpretable validation. Finally, we propose a modular framework called SafeX to integrate these contributions, enabling explanation delivery to users while simultaneously ensuring the safety of AI models.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has great potential to reshape the landscape of many social media platforms. While this can bring promising opportunities, it also raises many threats, such as biases and privacy concerns, and may contribute to the spread of propaganda by malicious actors. We developed the "LLMs Among Us" experimental framework on top of the Mastodon social media platform for bot and human participants to communicate without knowing the ratio or nature of bot and human participants. We built 10 personas with three different LLMs, GPT-4, LLama 2 Chat, and Claude. We conducted three rounds of the experiment and surveyed participants after each round to measure the ability of LLMs to pose as human participants without human detection. We found that participants correctly identified the nature of other users in the experiment only 42% of the time despite knowing the presence of both bots and humans. We also found that the choice of persona had substantially more impact on human perception than the choice of mainstream LLMs.