News outlets including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) have blocked a tool from OpenAI, limiting the company's ability to continue accessing their content. OpenAI is behind one of the best known artificial intelligence chatbots, ChatGPT. Its web crawler – known as GPTBot – may scan webpages to help improve its AI models. The Verge was first to report the New York Times had blocked GPTBot on its website. The Guardian subsequently found that other major news websites, including CNN, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the ABC and Australian Community Media (ACM) brands such as the Canberra Times and the Newcastle Herald, appear to have also disallowed the web crawler.

Geographic regression models of various descriptions are often applied to identify patterns and anomalies in the determinants of spatially distributed observations. These types of analyses focus on answering why questions about underlying spatial phenomena, e.g., why is crime higher in this locale, why do children in one school district outperform those in another, etc.? Answers to these questions require explanations of the model structure, the choice of parameters, and contextualization of the findings with respect to their geographic context. This is particularly true for local forms of regression models which are focused on the role of locational context in determining human behavior. In this paper, we present GeoExplainer, a visual analytics framework designed to support analysts in creating explanative documentation that summarizes and contextualizes their spatial analyses. As analysts create their spatial models, our framework flags potential issues with model parameter selections, utilizes template-based text generation to summarize model outputs, and links with external knowledge repositories to provide annotations that help to explain the model results. As analysts explore the model results, all visualizations and annotations can be captured in an interactive report generation widget. We demonstrate our framework using a case study modeling the determinants of voting in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have opened new possibilities for designing solutions for autonomous cyber defence. Teams of intelligent agents in computer network defence roles may reveal promising avenues to safeguard cyber and kinetic assets. In a simulated game environment, agents are evaluated on their ability to jointly mitigate attacker activity in host-based defence scenarios. Defender systems are evaluated against heuristic attackers with the goals of compromising network confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Value-based Independent Learning and Centralized Training Decentralized Execution (CTDE) cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods are compared revealing that both approaches outperform a simple multi-agent heuristic defender. This work demonstrates the ability of cooperative MARL to learn effective cyber defence tactics against varied threats.

Data summarization is the process of generating interpretable and representative subsets from a dataset. Existing time series summarization approaches often search for recurring subsequences using a set of manually devised similarity functions to summarize the data. However, such approaches are fraught with limitations stemming from an exhaustive search coupled with a heuristic definition of series similarity. Such approaches affect the diversity and comprehensiveness of the generated data summaries. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce an approach to time series summarization, called Time-to-Pattern (T2P), which aims to find a set of diverse patterns that together encode the most salient information, following the notion of minimum description length. T2P is implemented as a deep generative model that learns informative embeddings of the discrete time series on a latent space specifically designed to be interpretable. Our synthetic and real-world experiments reveal that T2P discovers informative patterns, even in noisy and complex settings. Furthermore, our results also showcase the improved performance of T2P over previous work in pattern diversity and processing scalability, which conclusively demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness for time series summarization.

The Dynamic PicoProbe at Argonne National Laboratory is undergoing upgrades that will enable it to produce up to 100s of GB of data per day. While this data is highly important for both fundamental science and industrial applications, there is currently limited on-site infrastructure to handle these high-volume data streams. We address this problem by providing a software architecture capable of supporting large-scale data transfers to the neighboring supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. To prepare for future scientific workflows, we implement two instructive use cases for hyperspectral and spatiotemporal datasets, which include: (i) off-site data transfer, (ii) machine learning/artificial intelligence and traditional data analysis approaches, and (iii) automatic metadata extraction and cataloging of experimental results. This infrastructure supports expected workloads and also provides domain scientists the ability to reinterrogate data from past experiments to yield additional scientific value and derive new insights.

A large number of studies on social media compare the behaviour of users from different political parties. As a basic step, they employ a predictive model for inferring their political affiliation. The accuracy of this model can change the conclusions of a downstream analysis significantly, yet the choice between different models seems to be made arbitrarily. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey and an empirical comparison of the current party prediction practices and propose several new approaches which are competitive with or outperform state-of-the-art methods, yet require less computational resources. Party prediction models rely on the content generated by the users (e.g., tweet texts), the relations they have (e.g., who they follow), or their activities and interactions (e.g., which tweets they like). We examine all of these and compare their signal strength for the party prediction task. This paper lets the practitioner select from a wide range of data types that all give strong performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on different aspects of these methods, such as data collection speed and transfer capabilities, which can provide further insights for both applied and methodological research.

This work explores various ways of exploring multi-task learning (MTL) techniques aimed at classifying videos as original or manipulated in cross-manipulation scenario to attend generalizability in deep fake scenario. The dataset used in our evaluation is FaceForensics++, which features 1000 original videos manipulated by four different techniques, with a total of 5000 videos. We conduct extensive experiments on multi-task learning and contrastive techniques, which are well studied in literature for their generalization benefits. It can be concluded that the proposed detection model is quite generalized, i.e., accurately detects manipulation methods not encountered during training as compared to the state-of-the-art.

Risky drivers account for 70% of fatal accidents in the United States. With recent advances in sensors and intelligent vehicular systems, there has been significant research on assessing driver behavior to improve driving experiences and road safety. This paper examines the various techniques used to analyze driver behavior using visual and vehicular data, providing an overview of the latest research in this field. The paper also discusses the challenges and open problems in the field and offers potential recommendations for future research. The survey concludes that integrating vision and vehicular information can significantly enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of driver behavior analysis, leading to improved safety measures and reduced traffic accidents.

This work presents a large-scale simulation study investigating the deployment and operation of distributed swarms of CubeSats for interplanetary missions to small celestial bodies. Utilizing Taylor numerical integration and advanced collision detection techniques, we explore the potential of large CubeSat swarms in capturing gravity signals and reconstructing the internal mass distribution of a small celestial body while minimizing risks and Delta V budget. Our results offer insight into the applicability of this approach for future deep space exploration missions. Introduction In the last decade CubeSats have emerged as an innovative and cost-effective platform for testing new satellite technologies, with applications ranging from Earth observation to deep space missions. For instance, the HERA interplanetary mission that will explore the Didymos binary system in 2025 will embark two CubeSats to perform a detailed exploration of the system.

Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models remain challenged by the task of long-sequence processing, because the computational cost of self-attention operations in transformers swells quadratically with the input sequence length. To alleviate the complexity of long-sequence processing, we propose a simple framework to enable the offthe-shelf pre-trained transformers to process much longer sequences, while the computation and memory costs remain growing linearly with the input sequence lengths. More specifically, our method divides each long-sequence input into a batch of chunks, then aligns the interchunk information during the encoding steps, and finally selects the most representative hidden states from the encoder for the decoding process. To extract inter-chunk semantic information, we align the start and end token embeddings among chunks in each encoding transformer block. To learn an effective hidden selection policy, we design a dual updating scheme inspired by reinforcement learning, which regards the decoders of transformers as environments, and the downstream performance metrics as the rewards to evaluate the hidden selection actions. Our empirical results on real-world long-text summarization and reading comprehension tasks demonstrate effective improvements compared to prior longsequence processing baselines.