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Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Guardian

On Sunday, 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few aging Raiders' fans, what we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago was one advertisement that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century. The ad showed an auditorium full of zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which had been engaging in a massive labor uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state) twirls a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader's face, just as armored police rush in to try to stop her. The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.


How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India's Telangana

Al Jazeera

This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network. Hyderabad and New Delhi, India – Bismillah Bee can't conceive of owning a car. The 67-year-old widow and 12 members of her family live in a cramped three-room house in an urban slum in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Since her rickshaw puller husband's death two years ago of mouth cancer, Bee makes a living by peeling garlic for a local business. But an algorithmic system, which the Telangana government deploys to digitally profile its more than 30 million residents, tagged Bee's husband as a car owner in 2021, when he was still alive.


AI will make scam emails look genuine, UK cybersecurity agency warns

The Guardian

Artificial intelligence will make it difficult to spot whether emails are genuine or sent by scammers and malicious actors, including messages that ask computer users to reset their passwords, the UK's cybersecurity agency has warned. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said people would struggle to identify phishing messages – where users are tricked into handing over passwords or personal details – due to the sophistication of AI tools. Generative AI, the term for technology that can produce convincing text, voice and images from simple hand-typed prompts, has become widely available to the public through chatbots such as ChatGPT and free-to-use versions known as open source models. The NCSC, part of the GCHQ spy agency, said in its latest assessment of AI's impact on the cyber threats facing the UK that AI would "almost certainly" increase the volume of cyber-attacks and heighten their impact over the next two years. It said generative AI and large language models – the technology that underpins chatbots – will complicate efforts to identify different types of attack such as spoof messages and social engineering, the term for manipulating people to hand over confidential material.


Predicting SSH keys in Open SSH Memory dumps

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As the digital landscape evolves, cybersecurity has become an indispensable focus of IT systems. Its ever-escalating challenges have amplified the importance of digital forensics, particularly in the analysis of heap dumps from main memory. In this context, the Secure Shell protocol (SSH) designed for encrypted communications, serves as both a safeguard and a potential veil for malicious activities. This research project focuses on predicting SSH keys in OpenSSH memory dumps, aiming to enhance protective measures against illicit access and enable the development of advanced security frameworks or tools like honeypots. This Masterarbeit is situated within the broader SmartVMI project, and seeks to build upon existing research on key prediction in OpenSSH heap dumps. Utilizing machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, the study aims to refine features for embedding techniques and explore innovative methods for effective key detection based on recent advancements in Knowledge Graph and ML. The objective is to accurately predict the presence and location of SSH keys within memory dumps. This work builds upon, and aims to enhance, the foundations laid by SSHkex and SmartKex, enriching both the methodology and the results of the original research while exploring the untapped potential of newly proposed approaches. The current thesis dives into memory graph modelization from raw binary heap dump files. Each memory graph can support a range of embeddings that can be used directly for model training, through the use of classic ML models and graph neural network. It offers an in-depth discussion on the current state-of-the-art in key prediction for OpenSSH memory dumps, research questions, experimental setups, programs development, results as well as discussing potential future directions.


Contextual Confidence and Generative AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

They present new challenges to contextual confidence, disrupting participants' ability to identify the authentic context of communication and their ability to protect communication from reuse and recombination outside its intended context. In this paper, we describe strategies - tools, technologies and policies - that aim to stabilize communication in the face of these challenges. The strategies we discuss fall into two broad categories. Containment strategies aim to reassert context in environments where it is currently threatened - a reaction to the context-free expectations and norms established by the internet. Mobilization strategies, by contrast, view the rise of generative AI as an opportunity to proactively set new and higher expectations around privacy and authenticity in mediated communication.


Causal Relationship Network of Risk Factors Impacting Workday Loss in Underground Coal Mines

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study aims to establish the causal relationship network between various factors leading to workday loss in underground coal mines using a novel causal artificial intelligence (AI) method. The analysis utilizes data obtained from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). A total of 101,010 injury records from 3,982 unique underground coal mines spanning the years from 1990 to 2020 were extracted from the NIOSH database. Causal relationships were analyzed and visualized using a novel causal AI method called Grouped Greedy Equivalence Search (GGES). The impact of each variable on workday loss was assessed through intervention do-calculus adjustment (IDA) scores. Model training and validation were performed using the 10-fold cross-validation technique. Performance metrics, including adjacency precision (AP), adjacency recall (AR), arrowhead precision (AHP), and arrowhead recall (AHR), were utilized to evaluate the models. Findings revealed that after 2006, key direct causes of workday loss among mining employees included total mining experience, mean office employees, mean underground employees, county, and total mining experience (years). Total mining experience emerged as the most influential factor, whereas mean employees per mine exhibited the least influence. The analyses emphasized the significant role of total mining experience in determining workday loss. The models achieved optimal performance, with AP, AR, AHP, and AHR values measuring 0.694, 0.653, 0.386, and 0.345, respectively. This study demonstrates the feasibility of utilizing the new GGES method to clarify the causal factors behind the workday loss by analyzing employment demographics and injury records and establish their causal relationship network.


Fluent dreaming for language models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Feature visualization, also known as "dreaming", offers insights into vision models by optimizing the inputs to maximize a neuron's activation or other internal component. However, dreaming has not been successfully applied to language models because the input space is discrete. We extend Greedy Coordinate Gradient, a method from the language model adversarial attack literature, to design the Evolutionary Prompt Optimization (EPO) algorithm. EPO optimizes the input prompt to simultaneously maximize the Pareto frontier between a chosen internal feature and prompt fluency, enabling fluent dreaming for language models. We demonstrate dreaming with neurons, output logits and arbitrary directions in activation space. We measure the fluency of the resulting prompts and compare language model dreaming with max-activating dataset examples. Critically, fluent dreaming allows automatically exploring the behavior of model internals in reaction to mildly out-of-distribution prompts. Code for running EPO is available at https://github.com/Confirm-Solutions/dreamy. A companion page demonstrating code usage is at https://confirmlabs.org/posts/dreamy.html


A Survey of Deep Learning and Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep Learning has been successfully applied to many application domains, yet its advantages have been slow to emerge for time series forecasting. For example, in the well-known Makridakis (M) Competitions, hybrids of traditional statistical or machine learning techniques have only recently become the top performers. With the recent architectural advances in deep learning being applied to time series forecasting (e.g., encoder-decoders with attention, transformers, and graph neural networks), deep learning has begun to show significant advantages. Still, in the area of pandemic prediction, there remain challenges for deep learning models: the time series is not long enough for effective training, unawareness of accumulated scientific knowledge, and interpretability of the model. To this end, the development of foundation models (large deep learning models with extensive pre-training) allows models to understand patterns and acquire knowledge that can be applied to new related problems before extensive training data becomes available. Furthermore, there is a vast amount of knowledge available that deep learning models can tap into, including Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models fine-tuned with scientific domain knowledge. There is ongoing research examining how to utilize or inject such knowledge into deep learning models. In this survey, several state-of-the-art modeling techniques are reviewed, and suggestions for further work are provided.


Alternative Interfaces for Human-initiated Natural Language Communication and Robot-initiated Haptic Feedback: Towards Better Situational Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article presents an implementation of a natural-language speech interface and a haptic feedback interface that enables a human supervisor to provide guidance to, request information, and receive status updates from a Spot robot. We provide insights gained during preliminary user testing of the interface in a realistic robot exploration scenario.


A V2X-based Privacy Preserving Federated Measuring and Learning System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Future autonomous vehicles (AVs) will use a variety of sensors that generate a vast amount of data. Naturally, this data not only serves self-driving algorithms; but can also assist other vehicles or the infrastructure in real-time decision-making. Consequently, vehicles shall exchange their measurement data over Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies. Moreover, predicting the state of the road network might be beneficial too. With such a prediction, we might mitigate road congestion, balance parking lot usage, or optimize the traffic flow. That would decrease transportation costs as well as reduce its environmental impact. In this paper, we propose a federated measurement and learning system that provides real-time data to fellow vehicles over Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication while also operating a federated learning (FL) scheme over the Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) link to create a predictive model of the transportation network. As we are yet to have real-world AV data, we model it with a non-IID (independent and identically distributed) dataset to evaluate the capabilities of the proposed system in terms of performance and privacy. Results indicate that the proposed FL scheme improves learning performance and prevents eavesdropping at the aggregator server side.