Government
The impact of spatio-temporal travel distance on epidemics using an interpretable attention-based sequence-to-sequence model
Jiang, Yukang, Tian, Ting, Xie, Huajun, Guo, Hailiang, Wang, Xueqin
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions have emerged as crucial interventions for mitigating the spread of the virus. In this study, we enhance the predictive capabilities of our model, Sequence-to-Sequence Epidemic Attention Network (S2SEA-Net), by incorporating an attention module, allowing us to assess the impact of distinct classes of travel distances on epidemic dynamics. Furthermore, our model provides forecasts for new confirmed cases and deaths. To achieve this, we leverage daily data on population movement across various travel distance categories, coupled with county-level epidemic data in the United States. Our findings illuminate a compelling relationship between the volume of travelers at different distance ranges and the trajectories of COVID-19. Notably, a discernible spatial pattern emerges with respect to these travel distance categories on a national scale. We unveil the geographical variations in the influence of population movement at different travel distances on the dynamics of epidemic spread. This will contribute to the formulation of strategies for future epidemic prevention and public health policies.
Physics-Informed Data Denoising for Real-Life Sensing Systems
Zhang, Xiyuan, Fu, Xiaohan, Teng, Diyan, Dong, Chengyu, Vijayakumar, Keerthivasan, Zhang, Jiayun, Chowdhury, Ranak Roy, Han, Junsheng, Hong, Dezhi, Kulkarni, Rashmi, Shang, Jingbo, Gupta, Rajesh
Sensors measuring real-life physical processes are ubiquitous in today's interconnected world. These sensors inherently bear noise that often adversely affects performance and reliability of the systems they support. Classic filtering-based approaches introduce strong assumptions on the time or frequency characteristics of sensory measurements, while learning-based denoising approaches typically rely on using ground truth clean data to train a denoising model, which is often challenging or prohibitive to obtain for many real-world applications. We observe that in many scenarios, the relationships between different sensor measurements (e.g., location and acceleration) are analytically described by laws of physics (e.g., second-order differential equation). By incorporating such physics constraints, we can guide the denoising process to improve even in the absence of ground truth data. In light of this, we design a physics-informed denoising model that leverages the inherent algebraic relationships between different measurements governed by the underlying physics. By obviating the need for ground truth clean data, our method offers a practical denoising solution for real-world applications. We conducted experiments in various domains, including inertial navigation, CO2 monitoring, and HVAC control, and achieved state-of-the-art performance compared with existing denoising methods. Our method can denoise data in real time (4ms for a sequence of 1s) for low-cost noisy sensors and produces results that closely align with those from high-precision, high-cost alternatives, leading to an efficient, cost-effective approach for more accurate sensor-based systems.
Learning nonparametric ordinary differential equations from noisy data
Lahouel, Kamel, Wells, Michael, Rielly, Victor, Lew, Ethan, Lovitz, David, Jedynak, Bruno M.
Description of the problem and related works Fitting a system of nonparametric ordinary differential equations (ODEs) ẋ = f (t, x) to longitudinal data could lead to scientific breakthroughs in disciplines where ODEs or dynamical systems have been used for a long time, including physics, chemistry, and biology, see [1]. By nonparametric, we mean that there is no need to specify the functional form of the vector-field f using a pre-defined finite dimensional parameter. Instead, this force field belongs to a functional space and the number of parameters that characterize this vector field depends on the amount of data available. This provides a great advantage in situations where the form of the vector field is unknown but data is available for learning. The functional spaces considered are Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS) [2], allowing for efficient optimization among other desirable properties. A particular difficulty arises when the data is sparse and noisy. This is often the case for longitudinal healthcare data obtained during hospital visits.
Psychiatrist used AI to create child porn, sentenced to 40 years in prison
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out whats clicking on Foxnews.com. A child psychiatrist in Charlotte, N.C., has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for using artificial intelligence (AI) to create child pornography and secretly recording his 15-year-old cousin as she showered, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of North Carolina. David Tatum, 41, created the AI images by modifying pictures of ex-girlfriends with sexually explicit images of minors which he had obtained online. Tatum digitally altered images from a school dance and a photo commemorating the first day of school to make them sexually explicit, prosecutors said.
Analysis: How long will Hezbollah's Nasrallah hold back against Israel?
For the first four weeks of Israeli assault on Gaza, Syed Hassan Nasrallah was conspicuously silent. When he finally spoke, a week ago, the world listened anxiously: Would the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the strongest militia in the region, declare a full-scale war on Israel? It was much ado about nothing. In his well-known fiery style, Nasrallah reiterated Hezbollah's views on regional issues and warned Israel. There was no big announcement, and the speech was not followed by fighters storming into Israel or even a token salvo of missiles.
How Chinese firm linked to repression of Uyghurs aids Israeli surveillance in West Bank
In the occupied Palestinian territories, there are cameras everywhere. In Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, residents say cameras were installed by Israeli police up and down their streets, peering into their homes. One resident named Sara said she and her family "could be detected as if the cameras were just in our house … we couldn't feel at home in our own house and had to be fully dressed all the time." Surveillance cameras now cover the Damascus Gate, the main entrance into the old city of Jerusalem and one of the only public areas for Palestinians to gather socially and hold demonstrations. It's at that gate that "Palestinians are being watched and assessed at all times", according to an Amnesty International report, Automated Apartheid.
Signal Is Finally Testing Usernames
Drones, hidden cameras, thermal vision scopes--these are just a few examples of the high-tech equipment recommended by the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, according to a manual released by the organization this week. The document, which was reviewed by WIRED, is a rare glimpse into how the organization is using tech to target factory farms in often brazen operations that have rescued pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens. Extremist groups are experimenting with generative AI to flood social media with propaganda and misinformation, researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have told WIRED. A new report from the group details how, in recent months, terrorists and other extremist organizations have been using artificial intelligence to manipulate imagery and thwart content moderation. As platforms have struggled to keep up with this flood of extremist content, a new tool called Altitude, built in collaboration between Tech Against Terrorism and Google, is seeking to address the problem.
NVIDIA may soon announce new AI chips for China to get around US export restrictions
NVIDIA really, really doesn't want to lose access to China's massive AI chip market. The company is developing three new AI chips especially for China that don't run afoul of the latest export restrictions in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Last year, the US government notified the chipmaker that it would restrict the export of computer chips meant for supercomputers and artificial intelligence applications to Russia and China due to concerns that the components could be used for military purposes. That rule prevented NVIDIA from selling certain A100 and H100 chips in the country, so it designed the A800 and H800 chips specifically for the Chinese market. However, the US government recently issued an updated set of restrictions that puts a limit on how much computing power a chip can have when it's meant for export to the aforementioned countries.
Is Machine Learning Unsafe and Irresponsible in Social Sciences? Paradoxes and Reconsidering from Recidivism Prediction Tasks
Initially, those scholars employ these historical elements to forecast whether the criminal would re-offend. Subsequently, the binary outcome of recidivism serves as a proxy variable for recidivism risk. Some computer scientists also employ the probability (or score) assigned by the model for an offender's likelihood of re-offense as a gauge for their recidivism risk (Etzler et al., 2023; Ma et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022). While such configurations may seem intuitively compelling, they often embody an oversimplified and deterministic viewpoint, which stands in contradiction to contemporary social science theories. Firstly, historical factors alone are insufficient predictors of human actions.
Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Automated Summarizers
Ash, Elliott, Kesari, Aniket, Naidu, Suresh, Song, Lena, Stammbach, Dominik
Judges are important policymakers but are less accountable to the public than legislators. One way judges strengthen the legitimacy of their policy choices given low accountability is by providing written justifications based on shared principles, which are then published as judicial opinions. John Rawls argued that "[The U.S. Supreme Court's] role is not merely defensive but to give due and continuing effect to public reason by serving as its institutional exemplar." Presumably, this legitimizing function is best served when the general population can understand the written justifications. In practice, however, judicial opinions tend to be extremely long and written in complicated technical language that is inaccessible except to trained lawyers.