Government
Elon Musk reveals US intel agencies had 'full access' to private Twitter DMs, discloses new encryption feature
Twitter CEO Elon Musk opens up how about his takeover of the company and his mission to ensure free speech on'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk revealed in an exclusive interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson that the United States, along with foreign government agencies, was granted "full access" to direct messages of private citizens on Twitter prior to his takeover. Musk made the bombshell allegation in the Carlson sit-down, the first part of which aired Monday on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." In a rare and unfiltered discussion, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO spoke candidly about his concerns about artificial intelligence (AI), his Twitter acquisition and his future plans for the social media platform that he bought last fall. In what has been described as one of the most "jaw-dropping" moments of the two-part conversation, Musk accused his predecessors at Twitter of allowing U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies to read users' direct messages on the platform, calling it among the most "absurd" discoveries he made since purchasing the company for $44 billion. MUSK BLASTS BBC REPORTER WHO CLAIMS TWITTER HAS RISE IN HATE SPEECH: 'YOU CAN'T NAME A SINGLE EXAMPLE' "The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind," Musk told Carlson.
Musk on AI regulation: 'It's not fun to be regulated' but artificial intelligence may need it
Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk joins'Tucker Carlson Tonight' for exclusive, wide-ranging interview. Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk warned Monday of the potential pitfalls of groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) technology, telling "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that while he has butted heads with regulators in the past, this new frontier can be potentially dangerous if there aren't boundaries or guidelines. Musk recounted working with Google co-founder Larry Page years back on artificial intelligence, saying he would warn Page about the importance of AI "safety." He also stated how humans' edge on their primate cousins are that while chimpanzees are more agile and stronger, homosapiens are smarter. In that regard, AI would top humanity in its most prolific category, he warned.
EU lawmakers call for summit to control 'very powerful' AI
April 17 (Reuters) - EU lawmakers urged world leaders on Monday to hold a summit to find ways to control the development of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT, saying they were developing faster than expected. The 12 MEPs, all working on EU legislation on the technology, called on U.S. President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to convene the meeting, and said AI firms should be more responsible. The statement came weeks after Twitter owner Elon Musk and more than 1,000 technology figures demanded a six-month pause in the development of systems more powerful than Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI's latest iteration of ChatGPT, which can mimic humans and create text and images based on prompts. That open letter, published in March by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), had warned that AI could spread misinformation at an unprecedented rate, and that machines could "outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace" humans, if left unchecked. The MEPS said they disagreed with some of the FLI message's "more alarmist statements".
Neural networks for geospatial data
Geostatistics, the analysis of geocoded data, is traditionally based on stochastic process models which offer a coherent way to model data at any finite collection of locations while ensuring the generalizability of inference to the entire region.Gaussian processes (GP) with a mean function capturing effects of covariates and the covariance function encoding the spatial dependence, is a staple for geostatistical analysis, offering theoretical guarantees and practical benefits. GP are flexible enough to model any smooth spatial surface, and can be specified parsimoniously with covariance functions using a very small set of parameters. The spatial covariance parameters offer insights into the smoothness and spatial properties of the response process (Stein, 1999). The finite dimensional realizations of a GP are multivariate Gaussian, thereby offering estimates of the mean and covariance parameters via convenient maximization of the Gaussian likelihood, and predictions at new locations by using conditional Gaussian distributions (see, e.g., Banerjee et al., 2014; Cressie and Wikle, 2015, for detailed exposition on GP models for spatial and spatio-temporal data). Also, computational roadblocks to using GP for large spatial data have been greatly mitigated by recent advances (see, Heaton et al., 2019, for a recent review of scalable GP approaches). The mean function of a Gaussian process is often modeled as a linear regression on the covariates. The growing popularity and accessibility of machine learning algorithms such as neural networks, random forests, gradient boosted trees, capable of modeling complex non-linear relationships has heralded a paradigm shift. Practitioners are increasingly shunning models with parametric assumptions like linearity in favor of these machine learning approaches that can capture non-linearity and high-order interactions in a data-driven manner. The field of spatial statistics has not been insulated from this machine learning revolution.
Machine Learning Research Trends in Africa: A 30 Years Overview with Bibliometric Analysis Review
Ezugwu, Absalom E., Oyelade, Olaide N., Ikotun, Abiodun M., Agushaka, Jeffery O., Ho, Yuh-Shan
The machine learning (ML) paradigm has gained much popularity today. Its algorithmic models are employed in every field, such as natural language processing, pattern recognition, object detection, image recognition, earth observation and many other research areas. In fact, machine learning technologies and their inevitable impact suffice in many technological transformation agendas currently being propagated by many nations, for which the already yielded benefits are outstanding. From a regional perspective, several studies have shown that machine learning technology can help address some of Africa's most pervasive problems, such as poverty alleviation, improving education, delivering quality healthcare services, and addressing sustainability challenges like food security and climate change. In this state-of-the-art paper, a critical bibliometric analysis study is conducted, coupled with an extensive literature survey on recent developments and associated applications in machine learning research with a perspective on Africa. The presented bibliometric analysis study consists of 2761 machine learning-related documents, of which 89% were articles with at least 482 citations published in 903 journals during the past three decades. Furthermore, the collated documents were retrieved from the Science Citation Index EXPANDED, comprising research publications from 54 African countries between 1993 and 2021. The bibliometric study shows the visualization of the current landscape and future trends in machine learning research and its application to facilitate future collaborative research and knowledge exchange among authors from different research institutions scattered across the African continent.
American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media
Louf, Thomas, Gonçalves, Bruno, Ramasco, Jose J., Sanchez, David, Grieve, Jack
Seven of the most prominent theories Cultural identity is an elusive notion because it depends [3-9] are mapped in Figure 1, showing considerable on a wide range of different cultural factors-- disagreement. For example, in [5] the geographer Wilbur including politics, religion, ethnicity, economics, and art, Zelinsky identified 5 major cultural regions--New England, among countless other examples--which will generally the Midland, the South, the Middle West, and the differ across individuals, with the cultural background West--based on a synthesis of regional patterns in a wide of every individual ultimately being unique. Nevertheless, range of cultural factors, including ethnicity, religion, individuals from the same region can generally be economics, and settlement history. Alternatively, in [6] expected to share some cultural traits, reflecting the drawing on a similar but more extensive range of cultural shared cultural values and practices associated with the factors, the social scientist Raymond Gastil identified 13 region [1]. Identifying the cultural regions of a nation-- major cultural regions, offering a more complex theory regions whose populations are characterized by relative than Zelinsky, including by dividing Zelinsky's Midland, cultural homogeneity compared to the populations of Middle West, and West regions. The two studies illustrate other regions within the nation--is very valuable information two basic limitations with these types of approaches across a wide range of domains. For example, it that subjectively synthesize a range of data to infer cultural is important for governments to understand geographical regions. First, it is unclear exactly how relevant variation in the values of their population so as to cultural factors should be identified. Zelinsky considers better meet their educational, social, and welfare needs.
The Unintended Consequences of Censoring Digital Technology -- Evidence from Italy's ChatGPT Ban
Kreitmeir, David H., Raschky, Paul A.
We first compile data on the hourly coding output of over 8,000 professional GitHub users in Italy and other European countries to analyse the impact of the ban on individual productivity. Combining the high-frequency data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the output of Italian developers decreased by around 50% in the first two business days after the ban and recovered after that. Applying a synthetic control approach to daily Google search and Tor usage data shows that the ban led to a significant increase in the use of censorship bypassing tools. Our findings show that users swiftly implement strategies to bypass Internet restrictions but this adaptation activity creates short-term disruptions and hampers productivity.
CodeAttack: Code-Based Adversarial Attacks for Pre-trained Programming Language Models
Jha, Akshita, Reddy, Chandan K.
Pre-trained programming language (PL) models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, etc.,) have the potential to automate software engineering tasks involving code understanding and code generation. However, these models operate in the natural channel of code, i.e., they are primarily concerned with the human understanding of the code. They are not robust to changes in the input and thus, are potentially susceptible to adversarial attacks in the natural channel. We propose, CodeAttack, a simple yet effective black-box attack model that uses code structure to generate effective, efficient, and imperceptible adversarial code samples and demonstrates the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art PL models to code-specific adversarial attacks. We evaluate the transferability of CodeAttack on several code-code (translation and repair) and code-NL (summarization) tasks across different programming languages. CodeAttack outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial NLP attack models to achieve the best overall drop in performance while being more efficient, imperceptible, consistent, and fluent. The code can be found at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/CodeAttack.
Machine Learning Applications in Studying Mental Health Among Immigrants and Racial and Ethnic Minorities: A Systematic Review
Park, Khushbu Khatri, Ahmed, Abdulaziz, Al-Garadi, Mohammed Ali
Background: The use of machine learning (ML) in mental health (MH) research is increasing, especially as new, more complex data types become available to analyze. By systematically examining the published literature, this review aims to uncover potential gaps in the current use of ML to study MH in vulnerable populations of immigrants, refugees, migrants, and racial and ethnic minorities. Methods: In this systematic review, we queried Google Scholar for ML-related terms, MH-related terms, and a population of a focus search term strung together with Boolean operators. Backward reference searching was also conducted. Included peer-reviewed studies reported using a method or application of ML in an MH context and focused on the populations of interest. We did not have date cutoffs. Publications were excluded if they were narrative or did not exclusively focus on a minority population from the respective country. Data including study context, the focus of mental healthcare, sample, data type, type of ML algorithm used, and algorithm performance was extracted from each. Results: Our search strategies resulted in 67,410 listed articles from Google Scholar. Ultimately, 12 were included. All the articles were published within the last 6 years, and half of them studied populations within the US. Most reviewed studies used supervised learning to explain or predict MH outcomes. Some publications used up to 16 models to determine the best predictive power. Almost half of the included publications did not discuss their cross-validation method. Conclusions: The included studies provide proof-of-concept for the potential use of ML algorithms to address MH concerns in these special populations, few as they may be. Our systematic review finds that the clinical application of these models for classifying and predicting MH disorders is still under development.
Knowledge is Power: Understanding Causality Makes Legal judgment Prediction Models More Generalizable and Robust
Chen, Haotian, Zhang, Lingwei, Liu, Yiran, Chen, Fanchao, Yu, Yang
Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP), aiming to predict a judgment based on fact descriptions according to rule of law, serves as legal assistance to mitigate the great work burden of limited legal practitioners. Most existing methods apply various large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) finetuned in LJP tasks to obtain consistent improvements. However, we discover the fact that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model makes judgment predictions according to irrelevant (or non-casual) information. The violation of rule of law not only weakens the robustness and generalization ability of models but also results in severe social problems like discrimination. In this paper, we use causal structural models (SCMs) to theoretically analyze how LJP models learn to make decisions and why they can succeed in passing the traditional testing paradigm without learning causality. According to our analysis, we provide two solutions intervening on data and model by causality, respectively. In detail, we first distinguish non-causal information by applying the open information extraction (OIE) technique. Then, we propose a method named the Causal Information Enhanced SAmpling Method (CIESAM) to eliminate the non-causal information from data. To validate our theoretical analysis, we further propose another method using our proposed Causality-Aware Self-Attention Mechanism (CASAM) to guide the model to learn the underlying causality knowledge in legal texts. The confidence of CASAM in learning causal information is higher than that of CIESAM. The extensive experimental results show that both our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on three commonly used legal-specific datasets. The stronger performance of CASAM further demonstrates that causality is the key to the robustness and generalization ability of models.