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North Carolina law enforcement using AI to combat increase in distracted drivers

FOX News

The North Carolina Highway Patrol has three rotating artificial intelligence devices to help track down distracted commercial vehicles. North Carolina Highway Patrol reports that it has seen an uptick in distracted truck drivers, and now the agency is using artificial intelligence devices to help crack down on the safety hazard. Distracted driving killed over 3,500 people in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. A mom who's made safe driving her passion has felt the pain from a distracted driver two separate times. "At a stop light you look around, every single person is on their phone," said Jennifer Smith, whose mother was killed by a distracted driver.


Asteroid 'dust, debris' likely found as returned NASA space capsule opened

Al Jazeera

Scientists at the United States space agency NASA found "black dust and debris" when they opened the space capsule that recently returned to Earth with the largest asteroid sample ever brought back from space. NASA said on Tuesday that researchers discovered "dust and debris on the avionics deck of the Osiris-REx science canister when the initial lid was removed today". The space agency did not specify whether the materials discovered on opening the lid of the probe definitely belonged to the asteroid, though NASA said on social media that "scientists gasped as the lid was lifted from the [Osiris-REx] asteroid sample return canister". "A scientific treasure box," NASA Astromaterials said in a social media post. "Dark powder and sand-sized particles" were found on "the inside of the lid and base", NASA said.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 581

Al Jazeera

Russia released a video reportedly showing Viktor Sokolov, commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, at a meeting with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and other military top brass a day after Ukrainian special forces claimed he was among dozens of officers killed in an attack on the fleet's Sevastopol naval base. Ukraine said it was clarifying information regarding Sokolov. The United Kingdom's defence ministry said "a dynamic, deep strike battle" was under way in the Black Sea after the Russian Black Sea Fleet suffered a series of major attacks. Kyiv said its air defences destroyed 26 of 38 Russian drones fired overnight but that some of the drones hit the Danube River port of Izmail, damaging more than 30 vehicles and injuring two drivers during a two-hour attack. The drone barrage also prompted the temporary suspension of ferry services to Romania.


No Trust without regulation!

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The explosion in the performance of Machine Learning (ML) and the potential of its applications are strongly encouraging us to consider its use in industrial systems, including for critical functions such as decision-making in autonomous systems. While the AI community is well aware of the need to ensure the trustworthiness of AI-based applications, it is still leaving too much to one side the issue of safety and its corollary, regulation and standards, without which it is not possible to certify any level of safety, whether the systems are slightly or very critical.The process of developing and qualifying safety-critical software and systems in regulated industries such as aerospace, nuclear power stations, railways or automotive industry has long been well rationalized and mastered. They use well-defined standards, regulatory frameworks and processes, as well as formal techniques to assess and demonstrate the quality and safety of the systems and software they develop. However, the low level of formalization of specifications and the uncertainties and opacity of machine learning-based components make it difficult to validate and verify them using most traditional critical systems engineering methods. This raises the question of qualification standards, and therefore of regulations adapted to AI. With the AI Act, the European Commission has laid the foundations for moving forward and building solid approaches to the integration of AI-based applications that are safe, trustworthy and respect European ethical values. The question then becomes "How can we rise to the challenge of certification and propose methods and tools for trusted artificial intelligence?"


AI Potentiality and Awareness: A Position Paper from the Perspective of Human-AI Teaming in Cybersecurity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This position paper explores the broad landscape of AI potentiality in the context of cybersecurity, with a particular emphasis on its possible risk factors with awareness, which can be managed by incorporating human experts in the loop, i.e., "Human-AI" teaming. As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies advance, they will provide unparalleled opportunities for attack identification, incident response, and recovery. However, the successful deployment of AI into cybersecurity measures necessitates an in-depth understanding of its capabilities, challenges, and ethical and legal implications to handle associated risk factors in real-world application areas. Towards this, we emphasize the importance of a balanced approach that incorporates AI's computational power with human expertise. AI systems may proactively discover vulnerabilities and detect anomalies through pattern recognition, and predictive modeling, significantly enhancing speed and accuracy. Human experts can explain AI-generated decisions to stakeholders, regulators, and end-users in critical situations, ensuring responsibility and accountability, which helps establish trust in AI-driven security solutions. Therefore, in this position paper, we argue that human-AI teaming is worthwhile in cybersecurity, in which human expertise such as intuition, critical thinking, or contextual understanding is combined with AI's computational power to improve overall cyber defenses.


Asymptotic Characterisation of Robust Empirical Risk Minimisation Performance in the Presence of Outliers

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study robust linear regression in high-dimension, when both the dimension $d$ and the number of data points $n$ diverge with a fixed ratio $\alpha=n/d$, and study a data model that includes outliers. We provide exact asymptotics for the performances of the empirical risk minimisation (ERM) using $\ell_2$-regularised $\ell_2$, $\ell_1$, and Huber losses, which are the standard approach to such problems. We focus on two metrics for the performance: the generalisation error to similar datasets with outliers, and the estimation error of the original, unpolluted function. Our results are compared with the information theoretic Bayes-optimal estimation bound. For the generalization error, we find that optimally-regularised ERM is asymptotically consistent in the large sample complexity limit if one perform a simple calibration, and compute the rates of convergence. For the estimation error however, we show that due to a norm calibration mismatch, the consistency of the estimator requires an oracle estimate of the optimal norm, or the presence of a cross-validation set not corrupted by the outliers. We examine in detail how performance depends on the loss function and on the degree of outlier corruption in the training set and identify a region of parameters where the optimal performance of the Huber loss is identical to that of the $\ell_2$ loss, offering insights into the use cases of different loss functions.


CIA is set to roll out its own version of ChatGPT to try and comb the internet for useful clues and potential security threats

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The CIA is set to launch its own ChatGPT-style AI tool to help sift through mountains of data for clues in ongoing investigations. Intended to mirror the famed OpenAI tech, the Central Intelligence Agency's latest initiative will use artificial intelligence to help analysts better access open-source intelligence, agency officials said. The CIA's Open Source Enterprise division developed the tech, which is also intended to be rolled out across the US government's 18 intelligence agencies in an effort to rival China's growing intelligence capabilities. 'We've gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,' said Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's AI division. Nixon noted that analyzing the level of data across the web is a significant challenge that the AI program would help handle, adding: 'We have to find the needles in the needle field.'


Even the CIA is developing an AI chatbot

Engadget

The CIA and other US intelligence agencies will soon have an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The program, revealed on Tuesday by Bloomberg, will train on publicly available data and provide sources alongside its answers so agents can confirm their validity. The aim is for US spies to more easily sift through ever-growing troves of information, although the exact nature of what constitutes "public data" could spark some thorny privacy issues. "We've gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going," Randy Nixon, the CIA's director of Open Source Enterprise, said in an interview with Bloomberg. "We have to find the needles in the needle field."


Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.

The New Yorker

On December 15, 1811, the London Statesman issued a warning about the state of the stocking industry in Nottingham. Twenty thousand textile workers had lost their jobs because of the incursion of automated machinery. Knitting machines known as lace frames allowed one employee to do the work of many without the skill set usually required. In protest, the beleaguered workers had begun breaking into factories to smash the machines. "Nine Hundred Lace Frames have been broken," the newspaper reported.


The Creator review โ€“ vast and exhilarating sci-fi actioner rages against the AI machine

The Guardian

This colossal sci-fi thriller from Gareth Edwards features John David Washington and Gemma Chan in vast mysterious panoramas and vertiginous vistas which deserve to be shown at Imax-plus scale; it also shows that Christopher Nolan isn't the only British director in Hollywood thinking (and acting) big. After a stint making franchise movies such as Godzilla and the enjoyable and underrated Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Edwards has now crafted this ambitious original picture, co-written with Chris Weitz, which is closer in spirit to his ingenious 2010 debut Monsters. The Creator is an old-fashioned science-fiction actioner with some ideas to match to state-of-the-art digital effects, in the tradition of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or Neill Blomkamp's District 9, with a creeping colonialist's fear of the unknown to match that in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. And given that Edwards has served some time aboard the Star Wars mother ship, it shouldn't be too surprising to find some holograms in the mix and a certain dustbin-sized droid which whimpers something poignant about what an honour it's been to serve his comrades before lumbering out to face the enemy on a kamikaze mission. Washington shows us some more of that distinctive self-possession and even slight hauteur as a performer, in playing Josh, a US army special forces undercover officer, fighting a strange, dirty war in a postnuclear world upended by the dominance of artificial intelligence.