Government
From 'super-soldiers' to killer AI drones: How tech will reshape warfare by the end of the century
The wars of the tomorrow will not be fought with mushroom clouds but with devastating cyber attacks unleashed by'quantum computers,' experts have predicted. Former soldiers and intelligence agents revealed this ominous future to DailyMail.com, These range from quantum computers millions of times more powerful than the machines used today to robotic exoskeletons, which will give soldiers superhuman strength, and AI-controlled drones that will kill without human input. Augmented reality will offer soldiers and pilots'superhuman' senses Virtual reality and augmented reality will allow soldiers to'see through' drones or pilot robotic vehicles, with augmented reality'heads-up displays' (HUDs) overlaying the view of pilots and soldiers. Adam Seamons, Information Security Manager, GRC International Group, said, Technologies like VR have already been used for many years to train both military and commercial pilots, along with other expensive hardware such as armor vehicles and tanks.
Here's How Small Farmers Across Africa Are Bringing Back Trees
A farmer in Niger tends to a tree sprout growing among his millet crop.Tony Rinaudo/World Vision Australia This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation in Africa. And they are true--the continent's forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields.
Meet Pause AI, the Protest Group Campaigning Against Human Extinction
The first time we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. He tears up as he describes a conversation in which he warned his niece about the risk of artificial intelligence causing societal collapse. Afterward, she had a panic attack. "I cry every other day," he says, speaking over Zoom from his home in the Dutch city of Utrecht. "Every time I say goodbye to my parents or friends, it feels like it could be the last time."
Smart Transformation of EFL Teaching and Learning Approaches
The calibration of the EFL teaching and learning approaches with Artificial Intelligence can potentially facilitate a smart transformation, fostering a personalized and engaging experience in teaching and learning among the stakeholders. The paper focuses on developing an EFL Big Data Ecosystem that is based on Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning and cluster domain of EFL teaching and learning contents. The framework has been developed on the basis of the theory that machine learning algorithms, when exposed to structured or semistructure data stored in the cluster domains of EFL Big Data ecosystem, can cull out the patterns, similarities, and differences existing in the contents of the domains. Later these machine learning algorithms can apply these already identified patterns to perform new tasks on open Big Data platform and identify similar contents to be stored in the respective cluster domain of EFL Bigdata Ecosystem without being supervised. Accordingly, the paper uses two membranes to construe its framework, namely (i) Open Big Data Membrane that stores random data collected from various source domains and (ii) Machine Learning Membrane that stores specially prepared structured and semi-structured data. Theoretically, the structured and semi structured data are to be prepared skill-wise, attribute-wise, method-wise, and preference-wise to accommodate the personalized preferences and diverse teaching and learning needs of different individuals. Within the machine learning membrane, the paper includes a number of stages such as knowledge building, development of cluster domain of the EFL contents, integration of skill-wise cluster domain with the CEFR attribute-wise teaching and learning approaches, machine learning of the personalized preferences, resonating, machine learning of the cluster domain for proximity development and sustainable operation. The ultimate goal is to optimize the learning experience by leveraging machine learning to create tailored content that aligns with the diverse teaching and learning needs of the EFL communities. Developing a prototype following the framework exerts the potentials to provide an'alternative to methods', transforming the process of learning into a process of acquisition.
Hyp-OW: Exploiting Hierarchical Structure Learning with Hyperbolic Distance Enhances Open World Object Detection
Doan, Thang, Li, Xin, Behpour, Sima, He, Wenbin, Gou, Liang, Ren, Liu
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging and realistic task that extends beyond the scope of standard Object Detection task. It involves detecting both known and unknown objects while integrating learned knowledge for future tasks. However, the level of 'unknownness' varies significantly depending on the context. For example, a tree is typically considered part of the background in a self-driving scene, but it may be significant in a household context. We argue that this external or contextual information should already be embedded within the known classes. In other words, there should be a semantic or latent structure relationship between the known and unknown items to be discovered. Motivated by this observation, we propose Hyp-OW, a method that learns and models hierarchical representation of known items through a SuperClass Regularizer. Leveraging this learned representation allows us to effectively detect unknown objects using a Similarity Distance-based Relabeling module. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hyp-OW achieving improvement in both known and unknown detection (up to 6 points). These findings are particularly pronounced in our newly designed benchmark, where a strong hierarchical structure exists between known and unknown objects.
Revolutionizing Cyber Threat Detection with Large Language Models
Ferrag, Mohamed Amine, Ndhlovu, Mthandazo, Tihanyi, Norbert, Cordeiro, Lucas C., Debbah, Merouane, Lestable, Thierry
Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain is experiencing a revolution due to the capabilities of Pre-trained Large Language Models ( LLMs), fueled by ground-breaking Transformers architecture, resulting into unprecedented advancements. Their exceptional aptitude for assessing probability distributions of text sequences is the primary catalyst for outstanding improvement of both the precision and efficiency of NLP models. This paper introduces for the first time SecurityLLM, a pre-trained language model designed for cybersecurity threats detection. The SecurityLLM model is articulated around two key generative elements: SecurityBERT and FalconLLM. SecurityBERT operates as a cyber threat detection mechanism, while FalconLLM is an incident response and recovery system. To the best of our knowledge, SecurityBERT represents the inaugural application of BERT in cyber threat detection. Despite the unique nature of the input data and features, such as the reduced significance of syntactic structures in content classification, the suitability of BERT for this duty demonstrates unexpected potential, thanks to our pioneering study. We reveal that a simple classification model, created from scratch, and consolidated with LLMs, exceeds the performance of established traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) methods in cyber threat detection, like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The experimental analysis, conducted using a collected cybersecurity dataset, proves that our SecurityLLM model can identify fourteen (14) different types of attacks with an overall accuracy of 98%
Robust Spatiotemporal Traffic Forecasting with Reinforced Dynamic Adversarial Training
Liu, Fan, Zhang, Weijia, Liu, Hao
Machine learning-based forecasting models are commonly used in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to predict traffic patterns and provide city-wide services. However, most of the existing models are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which can lead to inaccurate predictions and negative consequences such as congestion and delays. Therefore, improving the adversarial robustness of these models is crucial for ITS. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for incorporating adversarial training into spatiotemporal traffic forecasting tasks. We demonstrate that traditional adversarial training methods designated for static domains cannot be directly applied to traffic forecasting tasks, as they fail to effectively defend against dynamic adversarial attacks. Then, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method to learn the optimal node selection strategy for adversarial examples, which simultaneously strengthens the dynamic attack defense capability and reduces the model overfitting. Additionally, we introduce a self-knowledge distillation regularization module to overcome the "forgetting issue" caused by continuously changing adversarial nodes during training. We evaluate our approach on two real-world traffic datasets and demonstrate its superiority over other baselines. Our method effectively enhances the adversarial robustness of spatiotemporal traffic forecasting models. The source code for our framework is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/RDAT.
Privacy and Fairness in Federated Learning: on the Perspective of Trade-off
Chen, Huiqiang, Zhu, Tianqing, Zhang, Tao, Zhou, Wanlei, Yu, Philip S.
Federated learning (FL) has been a hot topic in recent years. Ever since it was introduced, researchers have endeavored to devise FL systems that protect privacy or ensure fair results, with most research focusing on one or the other. As two crucial ethical notions, the interactions between privacy and fairness are comparatively less studied. However, since privacy and fairness compete, considering each in isolation will inevitably come at the cost of the other. To provide a broad view of these two critical topics, we presented a detailed literature review of privacy and fairness issues, highlighting unique challenges posed by FL and solutions in federated settings. We further systematically surveyed different interactions between privacy and fairness, trying to reveal how privacy and fairness could affect each other and point out new research directions in fair and private FL.
Canonical and Noncanonical Hamiltonian Operator Inference
Gruber, Anthony, Tezaur, Irina
A method for the nonintrusive and structure-preserving model reduction of canonical and noncanonical Hamiltonian systems is presented. Based on the idea of operator inference, this technique is provably convergent and reduces to a straightforward linear solve given snapshot data and gray-box knowledge of the system Hamiltonian. Examples involving several hyperbolic partial differential equations show that the proposed method yields reduced models which, in addition to being accurate and stable with respect to the addition of basis modes, preserve conserved quantities well outside the range of their training data.
Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance
Vilar, David, Freitag, Markus, Cherry, Colin, Luo, Jiaming, Ratnakar, Viresh, Foster, George
Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.