Government
Amazon plans drone deliveries for UK parcels next year
Frederic Laugere, head of innovation advisory services at the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said projects like this one were "vital to feed into the overall knowledge and experiences that will soon enable drones to be operating beyond the line of sight of their pilot on a day-to-day basis, while also still allowing safe and equitable use of the air by other users."
Fox News AI Newsletter: China, US race to unleash killer AI robot soldiers as military power hangs in balance
House Armed Services Committee holds hearing on the Department of Defense using AI. AI ARMS RACE: China, US duel to see who can produce the first killer military robots. ET OR AI?: Experts split over if star gazers should seek aliens or new tech. HUMANS VS AI: Demand for human freelance writers grows amid rise of AI. SMART WEAPONS: 5 ways AI is leveling the battlefield.
ChatGPT Creator Partners With Abu Dhabi's G42 in Middle East AI Push
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is teaming up with Abu Dhabi's leading artificial intelligence firm as part of an expansion within the United Arab Emirates and the broader region. The partnership with G42, which is chaired by the UAE's influential national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will focus on delivering OpenAI's generative AI models across sectors spanning financial services to energy and healthcare. "Leveraging G42's industry expertise, we aim to empower businesses and communities with effective solutions that resonate with the nuances of the region," said Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive officer of San Francisco-based OpenAI. The partnership is a "convergence of value and vision," G42 CEO Peng Xiao said. The companies didn't disclose financial details of their collaboration. It's partnering with Cerebras Systems Inc., which recently built the first of nine AI supercomputers as an alternative to systems using Nvidia Corp. technology.
US military intercepts 2 attack drones targeting Iraq air base where American troops are located
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Two U.S. defense officials have confirmed to Fox News that the U.S. intercepted two one-way attack drones targeting Iraq's al-Asad air base where American troops are located. The incident happened early Wednesday morning local time. No injuries have been reported.
China has a new plan for judging the safety of generative AI--and it's packed with details
Last week we got some clarity about what all this may look like in practice. On October 11, a Chinese government organization called the National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee released a draft document that proposed detailed rules for how to determine whether a generative AI model is problematic. Often abbreviated as TC260, the committee consults corporate representatives, academics, and regulators to set up tech industry rules on issues ranging from cybersecurity to privacy to IT infrastructure. Unlike many manifestos you may have seen about how to regulate AI, this standards document is very detailed: it sets clear criteria for when a data source should be banned from training generative AI, and it gives metrics on the exact number of keywords and sample questions that should be prepared to test out a model. Matt Sheehan, a global technology fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who flagged the document for me, said that when he first read it, he "felt like it was the most grounded and specific document related to the generative AI regulation."
Five Eyes intelligence chiefs warn on China's 'theft' of intellectual property
The Five Eyes countries' intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies. Officials from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network -- made the comments following meetings with private companies in the U.S. innovation hub Silicon Valley. U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the "unprecedented" joint call was meant to confront the "unprecedented threat" China poses to innovation across the world.
Reconstructing the Hubble parameter with future Gravitational Wave missions using Machine Learning
Mukherjee, Purba, Shah, Rahul, Bhaumik, Arko, Pal, Supratik
We study the prospects of Gaussian processes (GP), a machine learning (ML) algorithm, as a tool to reconstruct the Hubble parameter $H(z)$ with two upcoming gravitational wave missions, namely the evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) and the Einstein Telescope (ET). Assuming various background cosmological models, the Hubble parameter has been reconstructed in a non-parametric manner with the help of GP using realistically generated catalogs for each mission. The effects of early-time and late-time priors on the reconstruction of $H(z)$, and hence on the Hubble constant ($H_0$), have also been focused on separately. Our analysis reveals that GP is quite robust in reconstructing the expansion history of the Universe within the observational window of the specific missions under consideration. We further confirm that both eLISA and ET would be able to provide constraints on $H(z)$ and $H_0$ which would be competitive to those inferred from current datasets. In particular, we observe that an eLISA run of $\sim10$-year duration with $\sim80$ detected bright siren events would be able to constrain $H_0$ as good as a $\sim3$-year ET run assuming $\sim 1000$ bright siren event detections. Further improvement in precision is expected for longer eLISA mission durations such as a $\sim15$-year time-frame having $\sim120$ events. Lastly, we discuss the possible role of these future gravitational wave missions in addressing the Hubble tension, for each model, on a case-by-case basis.
CAT: Closed-loop Adversarial Training for Safe End-to-End Driving
Zhang, Linrui, Peng, Zhenghao, Li, Quanyi, Zhou, Bolei
Driving safety is a top priority for autonomous vehicles. Orthogonal to prior work handling accident-prone traffic events by algorithm designs at the policy level, we investigate a Closed-loop Adversarial Training (CAT) framework for safe end-to-end driving in this paper through the lens of environment augmentation. CAT aims to continuously improve the safety of driving agents by training the agent on safety-critical scenarios that are dynamically generated over time. A novel resampling technique is developed to turn log-replay real-world driving scenarios into safety-critical ones via probabilistic factorization, where the adversarial traffic generation is modeled as the multiplication of standard motion prediction sub-problems. Consequently, CAT can launch more efficient physical attacks compared to existing safety-critical scenario generation methods and yields a significantly less computational cost in the iterative learning pipeline. We incorporate CAT into the MetaDrive simulator and validate our approach on hundreds of driving scenarios imported from real-world driving datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that CAT can effectively generate adversarial scenarios countering the agent being trained. After training, the agent can achieve superior driving safety in both log-replay and safety-critical traffic scenarios on the held-out test set. Code and data are available at https://metadriverse.github.io/cat.
REVAMP: Automated Simulations of Adversarial Attacks on Arbitrary Objects in Realistic Scenes
Hull, Matthew, Wang, Zijie J., Chau, Duen Horng
Deep Learning models, such as those used in an autonomous vehicle are vulnerable to adversarial attacks where an attacker could place an adversarial object in the environment, leading to mis-classification. Generating these adversarial objects in the digital space has been extensively studied, however successfully transferring these attacks from the digital realm to the physical realm has proven challenging when controlling for real-world environmental factors. In response to these limitations, we introduce REVAMP, an easy-to-use Python library that is the first-of-its-kind tool for creating attack scenarios with arbitrary objects and simulating realistic environmental factors, lighting, reflection, and refraction. REVAMP enables researchers and practitioners to swiftly explore various scenarios within the digital realm by offering a wide range of configurable options for designing experiments and using differentiable rendering to reproduce physically plausible adversarial objects. We will demonstrate and invite the audience to try REVAMP to produce an adversarial texture on a chosen object while having control over various scene parameters. The audience will choose a scene, an object to attack, the desired attack class, and the number of camera positions to use. Then, in real time, we show how this altered texture causes the chosen object to be mis-classified, showcasing the potential of REVAMP in real-world scenarios. REVAMP is open-source and available at https://github.com/poloclub/revamp.
Verification of the Socio-Technical Aspects of Voting: The Case of the Polish Postal Vote 2020
Jamroga, Wojciech, Ryan, Peter Y. A., Kim, Yan
Voting procedures are designed and implemented by people, for people, and with significant human involvement. Thus, one should take into account the human factors in order to comprehensively analyze properties of an election and detect threats. In particular, it is essential to assess how actions and strategies of the involved agents (voters, municipal office employees, mail clerks) can influence the outcome of other agents' actions as well as the overall outcome of the election. In this paper, we present our first attempt to capture those aspects in a formal multi-agent model of the Polish presidential election 2020. The election marked the first time when postal vote was universally available in Poland. Unfortunately, the voting scheme was prepared under time pressure and political pressure, and without the involvement of experts. This might have opened up possibilities for various kinds of ballot fraud, in-house coercion, etc. We propose a preliminary scalable model of the procedure in the form of a Multi-Agent Graph, and formalize selected integrity and security properties by formulas of agent logics. Then, we transform the models and formulas so that they can be input to the state-of-art model checker Uppaal. The first series of experiments demonstrates that verification scales rather badly due to the state-space explosion. However, we show that a recently developed technique of user-friendly model reduction by variable abstraction allows us to verify more complex scenarios.