Russian journalist Boris Maksudov has died after sustaining injuries in a drone attack in southeastern Ukraine's Zaporizhia region. Maksudov, who worked for Russian state television Rossiya 24, was wounded on Wednesday and taken to hospital. Initially, defence officials said he was in stable condition. However, he later died of shrapnel wounds. "Boris Maksudov died a hero's death, like a brave fighter," Dmitry Kiselyov, the CEO of the Russian media group Rossia Segodnia, said, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the problems with issue polling and issues with political journalism; the chaos and conflict of Sam Altman and OpenAI; and the failure of the Oslo Accords and perpetual struggle between Israel and Palestine. Send us your Conundrums: submit them at slate.com/conundrum. And join us in-person or online with our special guest – The Late Show's Steven Colbert – for Gabfest Live: The Conundrums Edition! December 7 at The 92nd Street Y, New York City. Here are some notes and references from this week's show: Nate Cohn for The New York Times: The Crisis in Issue Polling, and What We're Doing About It and We Did an Experiment to See How Much Democracy and Abortion Matter to Voters Eli Saslow for The New York Times: A Jan. 6 Defendant Pleads His Case to the Son Who Turned Him In John Dickerson and Jo Ling Kent for CBS News Prime Time: What Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI could mean for the tech world Emily Bazelon for The New York Times Magazine: Was Peace Ever Possible? Ezra Klein for The New York Times's The Ezra Klein Show podcast: The Best Primer I've Heard on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts John Dickerson for CBS Mornings: Former President Jimmy Carter: "America will learn from its mistakes" Here are this week's chatters: John: Julia Simon for NPR: 'It feels like I'm not crazy.'

A US warship cruising the Red Sea has shot down drones fired from Houthi-held territory in Yemen, according to the US Central Command. The USS Thomas Hudner, a guided-missile destroyer, shot down "multiple one-way attack drones" launched on Thursday morning from Yemen's Houthi-controlled areas, CENTCOM said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. CENTCOM said there was no damage to the US vessel or injuries to its crew. On the morning (Yemen time) of November 23, the USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116) shot down multiple one-way attack drones launched from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen. The drones were shot down while the U.S. warship was on patrol in the Red Sea.

A Japanese government panel will start discussions next month to identify issues that need to be resolved to advance the commercialization of driverless taxi and other unmanned self-driving transportation services, officials said Wednesday. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told officials who met to discuss digital administrative and fiscal reform that efforts should be accelerated to create rules for self-driving cars and put new services for transportation into commercial use. Kishida also called on officials to study ways to address challenges related to proposed ride-sharing services, including taxi industry deregulation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said troops face "difficult" defensive operations on parts of the eastern front as the bitter winter cold sets in, but forces in the south continued to conduct offensive actions. Offensive actions in the south," Zelenskyy said on Telegram messenger. In its evening report, Ukraine's General Staff said 22 Russian attacks had been beaten back in and around Avdiivka. In its account of the fighting, Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had struck Ukrainian troops and equipment near Bakhmut, another devastated town north of Avdiivka. The Ukrainian general prosecutor's office said one man died when Russian forces shelled Avdiivka, another in an attack on Chasiv Yar to the north, and a third in the southern city of Kherson. In the town of Selydove in the east, another body was pulled from the rubble lifting the death toll from Tuesday's Russian missile strike to three. The Ukrainian Air Force said it brought down 14 attack drones and an X-22 cruise missile fired from southern Russia, as authorities in the southern region of Odesa said they had destroyed a rare Iranian-built Mohajer-6 attack and reconnaissance drone. Russia bought 30 of the drones last year, they added. Russia's Defence Ministry said anti-aircraft units destroyed three Ukrainian drones over the Crimean peninsula, as well as four sea drones. Separately, the Defence Ministry said a group of Russian journalists came under a Ukrainian drone attack in the southern Zaporizhia region. A reporter from the Rossiya 24 state TV channel suffered minor injuries, the ministry added. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said troops face "difficult" defensive operations on parts of the eastern front as the bitter winter cold sets in, but forces in the south continued to conduct offensive actions. Offensive actions in the south," Zelenskyy said on Telegram messenger.

Sam Altman is returning to lead OpenAI less than five days after his surprise dismissal, which kicked off a tug of war for his talent, left the company in disarray and laid bare deep board divisions over the mission of one of the world's most valuable startups. OpenAI's new interim board, which won't include Altman at the outset, will be led by Bret Taylor, a former co-CEO of Salesforce. The other directors are Larry Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary, and existing member Adam D'Angelo, the co-founder and CEO of Quora. Altman had been fired Friday after clashing with the board over his drive to transform OpenAI from a nonprofit organization focused on the scientific exploration of artificial intelligence into a business that builds products, attracts customers and lines up the funding needed to power AI tools. Members of the former board harbored concerns about the potential harms done by powerful, unchecked AI.

Optimal Transport has received much attention in Machine Learning as it allows to compare probability distributions by exploiting the geometry of the underlying space. However, in its original formulation, solving this problem suffers from a significant computational burden. Thus, a meaningful line of work consists at proposing alternatives to reduce this burden while still enjoying its properties. In this thesis, we focus on alternatives which use projections on subspaces. The main such alternative is the Sliced-Wasserstein distance, which we first propose to extend to Riemannian manifolds in order to use it in Machine Learning applications for which using such spaces has been shown to be beneficial in the recent years. We also study sliced distances between positive measures in the so-called unbalanced OT problem. Back to the original Euclidean Sliced-Wasserstein distance between probability measures, we study the dynamic of gradient flows when endowing the space with this distance in place of the usual Wasserstein distance. Then, we investigate the use of the Busemann function, a generalization of the inner product in metric spaces, in the space of probability measures. Finally, we extend the subspace detour approach to incomparable spaces using the Gromov-Wasserstein distance.

This study focuses on the optimization of the Big-means algorithm for clustering large-scale datasets, exploring four distinct parallelization strategies. We conducted extensive experiments to assess the computational efficiency, scalability, and clustering performance of each approach, revealing their benefits and limitations. The paper also delves into the trade-offs between computational efficiency and clustering quality, examining the impacts of various factors. Our insights provide practical guidance on selecting the best parallelization strategy based on available resources and dataset characteristics, contributing to a deeper understanding of parallelization techniques for the Big-means algorithm.

Culture fundamentally shapes people's reasoning, behavior, and communication. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may cause a shift towards a dominant culture. As people increasingly use AI to expedite and even automate various professional and personal tasks, cultural values embedded in AI models may bias authentic expression. We audit large language models for cultural bias, comparing their responses to nationally representative survey data, and evaluate country-specific prompting as a mitigation strategy. We find that GPT-4, 3.5 and 3 exhibit cultural values resembling English-speaking and Protestant European countries. Our mitigation strategy reduces cultural bias in recent models but not for all countries/territories. To avoid cultural bias in generative AI, especially in high-stakes contexts, we suggest using culture matching and ongoing cultural audits.

Managing project risk is a key part of the successful implementation of any large project and is widely recognized as a best practice for public agencies to deliver infrastructures. The conventional method of identifying and evaluating project risks involves getting input from subject matter experts at risk workshops in the early phases of a project. As a project moves through its life cycle, these identified risks and their assessments evolve. Some risks are realized to become issues, some are mitigated, and some are retired as no longer important. Despite the value provided by conventional expert-based approaches, several challenges remain due to the time-consuming and expensive processes involved. Moreover, limited is known about how risks evolve from ex-ante to ex-post over time. How well does the project team identify and evaluate risks in the initial phase compared to what happens during project execution? Using historical data and artificial intelligence techniques, this study addressed these limitations by introducing a data-driven framework to identify risks automatically and to examine the quality of early risk registers and risk assessments. Risk registers from more than 70 U.S. major transportation projects form the input dataset.