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Uncovering the secrets of one of WWII's bloodiest battles: Archaeologists use drones to peer through the dense forest cover of the battlefield of the Battle of the Bulge - revealing previously unknown dugouts, bomb craters and artillery emplacements

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Famously, the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944/45 was one of the largest and bloodiest armed conflict of the Second World War. Taking place in densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg, it was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. Researchers have used drone-mounted LiDAR โ€“ which emits pulses of light to create 3D models and maps โ€“ to'see through' the thick forest canopy. They found nearly 1,000 features within the landscape, including dugouts, bomb craters and even artillery emplacements where troops positioned their guns. Pictured are LiDAR images from the study.


An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books

Engadget

It certainly didn't take long for AI's other shoe to drop, what with the emergent technology already being perverted to commit confidence scams and generate spam content. We can now add censorship to that list as the Globe Gazette reports the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year. In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum. Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be "age appropriate" and without "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," per Iowa Code 702.17. But ensuring that every book in the district's archives adhere to these new rules is quickly turning into a mammoth undertaking.


Nigerian men to face US justice in sextortion scheme that led to teen's suicide

FOX News

Brian Montgomery, who lost his son to suicide after he was extorted, discussed the loss of his son and how teen boys have been blackmailed over explicit pictures on'America's Newsroom.' If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Two Nigerian men accused of running an international sextortion ring that led to the suicide of a Michigan teenager were extradited to the U.S., and a third suspect is expected to follow. Samuel Ogoshi, 22, and Samson Ogoshi, 20, of Lagos, Nigeria, as well as Ezekial Ejehem Robert, 19, allegedly bought hacked social media accounts, posed as young women to lure teenagers and young adult men into sexual chats that included explicit images and videos, and threatened to release them unless they paid a ransom. Jordan DeMay, 17, was one of at least 100 American victims.


TikTok Has Started to Let People Think For Themselves

WIRED

TikTok recently announced that its users in the European Union will soon be able to switch off its infamously engaging content-selection algorithm. The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is driving this change as part of the region's broader effort to regulate AI and digital services in accordance with human rights and values. TikTok's algorithm learns from users' interactions--how long they watch, what they like, when they share a video--to create a highly tailored and immersive experience that can shape their mental states, preferences, and behaviors without their full awareness or consent. An opt-out feature is a great step toward protecting cognitive liberty, the fundamental right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. Rather than being confined to algorithmically curated For You pages and live feeds, users will be able to see trending videos in their region and language, or a "Following and Friends" feed that lists the creators they follow in chronological order.


AI isn't great at decoding human emotions. So why are regulators targeting the tech?

MIT Technology Review

In addition to proposing the theory of evolution, Darwin studied the expressions and emotions of people and animals. He debated in his writing just how scientific, universal, and predictable emotions actually are, and he sketched characters with exaggerated expressions, which the library had on display. The subject rang a bell for me. Lately, as everyone has been up in arms about ChatGPT, AI general intelligence, and the prospect of robots taking people's jobs, I've noticed that regulators have been ramping up warnings against AI and emotion recognition. Emotion recognition, in this far-from-Darwin context, is the attempt to identify a person's feelings or state of mind using AI analysis of video, facial images, or audio recordings. The idea isn't super complicated: the AI model may see an open mouth, squinted eyes, and contracted cheeks with a thrown-back head, for instance, and register it as a laugh, concluding that the subject is happy.


Wearable device with AI could allow for at-home breast cancer screenings: 'Accessible and personalized'

FOX News

To provide women at a high risk of breast cancer with more frequent screenings between mammograms, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a wearable ultrasound scanner designed to be attached to a bra. The goal is to help women detect breast cancer tumors in the early stages and maximize the survival rate, according to a press release on MIT's website. The researchers' aim was to design a wearable "miniaturized ultrasound device" that allows for "consistent placement and orientation" to take images of breast tissue, according to lead study author Canan Dagdeviren, PhD, associate professor at MIT. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? The device attaches to the bra like a patch, with a "honeycomb" pattern that has open spaces for the tracker to move through for an optimal field of view, Dagdeviren told Fox News Digital. "The ultrasound generates a wave that penetrates the targeted breast tissue," he said.


G-MATT: Single-step Retrosynthesis Prediction using Molecular Grammar Tree Transformer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Various template-based and template-free approaches have been proposed for single-step retrosynthesis prediction in recent years. While these approaches demonstrate strong performance from a data-driven metrics standpoint, many model architectures do not incorporate underlying chemistry principles. Here, we propose a novel chemistry-aware retrosynthesis prediction framework that combines powerful data-driven models with prior domain knowledge. We present a tree-to-sequence transformer architecture that utilizes hierarchical SMILES grammar-based trees, incorporating crucial chemistry information that is often overlooked by SMILES text-based representations, such as local structures and functional groups. The proposed framework, grammar-based molecular attention tree transformer (G-MATT), achieves significant performance improvements compared to baseline retrosynthesis models. G-MATT achieves a promising top-1 accuracy of 51% (top-10 accuracy of 79.1%), invalid rate of 1.5%, and bioactive similarity rate of 74.8% on the USPTO-50K dataset. Additional analyses of G-MATT attention maps demonstrate the ability to retain chemistry knowledge without relying on excessively complex model architectures. Introduction Reaction prediction plays a pivotal role in computational chemistry, enabling efficient and precise synthetic route planning for complex organic molecules. Accurately modeling chemical processes has widespread implications, accelerating the discovery of novel compounds used in drug development, materials design, catalysis, polymer design, and more. Corresponding author Email address: venkat@columbia.edu Traditional reaction planning relied heavily on the expertise of chemists, which is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. In contrast, data-driven methods offer automated strategies for predicting accurate pathways. It has been argued that the development of hybrid approaches that combine data-driven techniques with chemistry knowledge is required for more robust and practical reaction prediction models [1, 2].


Physics-Informed Deep Learning to Reduce the Bias in Joint Prediction of Nitrogen Oxides

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Atmospheric nitrogen oxides (NOx) primarily from fuel combustion have recognized acute and chronic health and environmental effects. Machine learning (ML) methods have significantly enhanced our capacity to predict NOx concentrations at ground-level with high spatiotemporal resolution but may suffer from high estimation bias since they lack physical and chemical knowledge about air pollution dynamics. Chemical transport models (CTMs) leverage this knowledge; however, accurate predictions of ground-level concentrations typically necessitate extensive post-calibration. Here, we present a physics-informed deep learning framework that encodes advection-diffusion mechanisms and fluid dynamics constraints to jointly predict NO2 and NOx and reduce ML model bias by 21-42%. Our approach captures fine-scale transport of NO2 and NOx, generates robust spatial extrapolation, and provides explicit uncertainty estimation. The framework fuses knowledge-driven physicochemical principles of CTMs with the predictive power of ML for air quality exposure, health, and policy applications. Our approach offers significant improvements over purely data-driven ML methods and has unprecedented bias reduction in joint NO2 and NOx prediction.


Machine Unlearning: Solutions and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning models may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, posing risks of privacy violations, security breaches, and performance deterioration. To address these issues, machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique to selectively remove specific training data points' influence on trained models. This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy and analysis of machine unlearning research. We categorize existing research into exact unlearning that algorithmically removes data influence entirely and approximate unlearning that efficiently minimizes influence through limited parameter updates. By reviewing the state-of-the-art solutions, we critically discuss their advantages and limitations. Furthermore, we propose future directions to advance machine unlearning and establish it as an essential capability for trustworthy and adaptive machine learning. This paper provides researchers with a roadmap of open problems, encouraging impactful contributions to address real-world needs for selective data removal.