Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


Special delivery: Drones are smuggling contraband into California prisons, feds say

Los Angeles Times

Walls and rules have never stopped prisoners from getting what they need. Drugs, phones and other contraband have been smuggled in by guards and visitors, flung over fences and even stashed inside hollowed-out pastries in care packages. Now, two men are accused of using an increasingly common technology to bypass prison walls: drones. Federal prosecutors in Fresno have charged Jose Enrique Oropeza and David Ramirez Jr. with using drones to drop loads of methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, tobacco and cellphones into the yards of seven prisons across California. Oropeza was arrested March 29; Ramirez on April 4. Along with drug trafficking offenses, the men face airspace violations of operating unregistered aircraft and flying without a certificate, a redacted indictment shows.


The man who unleashed AI on an unsuspecting Silicon Valley

Washington Post - Technology News

As part of that job, he's planned a round-the-world goodwill tour to talk with politicians and people using OpenAI's technology. The month-long campaign -- which will take him to Canada, Brazil, Nigeria, Europe, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Australia, among other stops -- comes as debate over AI's impact on the world is heating up. The Italian government temporarily banned OpenAI in March, citing concerns about privacy and data collection.


Artificial Intelligence software used to spread misinformation in Venezuela

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence software is being used to spread misinformation in Venezuela. Stefano Pozzebon takes a look at how it's being distributed, and how to spot fake video. Former Maryland Gov. Hogan's ex-chief of staff dies after confrontation with FBI agent'Lucky fire-breathing dragon': UConn's head coach admits to wearing this during games GOP lawmaker hands out'indict this!' ham sandwiches on Capitol Hill Listen to Trump's defiant message after being indicted Disney quietly takes power from Florida governor's board'Shark Tank' star reacts to Senate hearing on bank failures


OpenAI Threatened With Lawsuit Over ChatGPT Defamation

#artificialintelligence

For the first time, OpenAI may face a lawsuit over ChatGPT-generated defamation. An Australian mayor named Brian Hood, who according to Reuters is peeved about the fact that ChatGPT wrongfully identified him as a guilty party in a "foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s," apparently claiming that Hood had even served prison time for his so-called crime. Hood was involved in the scandal -- but as the whistleblower, not the crime-doer. Yeah, we'd be pissed, too. Per Reuters, Hood's lawyers sent a "letter of concern" to OpenAI back on March 21 demanding that the company fix its chatbot's error within 28 days.


The FDA's Action Plan Regarding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - Channelchek

#artificialintelligence

Should artificial intelligence or machine learning (AI/ML) be allowed to alter FDA approved software in medical devices? If so, where should the guardrails be set? The discussions and debates surrounding AI/ML are heated; some believe the technology may destroy humanity, while others look forward to the speed of advancement it will allow. The FDA is getting out ahead on this debate. This week the agency drafted a list of โ€œguiding principlesโ€ intended to begin developing best practices for machine learning within medical devices. A new framework envisioned by the FDA includes a โ€œpredetermined change control planโ€ in premarket submissions. This plan would include the types of anticipated modifications, referred to as โ€œSoftware as a Medical Device Pre-Specificationsโ€. The associated methodology used to implement those changes in a measured and controlled approach that manages risk the FDA calls the โ€œAlgorithm Change Protocol.โ€


Adversarially Robust Neural Architecture Search for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) obtain tremendous success in modeling relational data. Still, they are prone to adversarial attacks, which are massive threats to applying GNNs to risk-sensitive domains. Existing defensive methods neither guarantee performance facing new data/tasks or adversarial attacks nor provide insights to understand GNN robustness from an architectural perspective. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has the potential to solve this problem by automating GNN architecture designs. Nevertheless, current graph NAS approaches lack robust design and are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Robust Neural Architecture search framework for GNNs (G-RNA). Specifically, we design a robust search space for the message-passing mechanism by adding graph structure mask operations into the search space, which comprises various defensive operation candidates and allows us to search for defensive GNNs. Furthermore, we define a robustness metric to guide the search procedure, which helps to filter robust architectures. In this way, G-RNA helps understand GNN robustness from an architectural perspective and effectively searches for optimal adversarial robust GNNs. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets show that G-RNA significantly outperforms manually designed robust GNNs and vanilla graph NAS baselines by 12.1% to 23.4% under adversarial attacks.


WebBrain: Learning to Generate Factually Correct Articles for Queries by Grounding on Large Web Corpus

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we introduce a new NLP task -- generating short factual articles with references for queries by mining supporting evidence from the Web. In this task, called WebBrain, the ultimate goal is to generate a fluent, informative, and factually-correct short article (e.g., a Wikipedia article) for a factual query unseen in Wikipedia. To enable experiments on WebBrain, we construct a large-scale dataset WebBrain-Raw by extracting English Wikipedia articles and their crawlable Wikipedia references. WebBrain-Raw is ten times larger than the previous biggest peer dataset, which can greatly benefit the research community. From WebBrain-Raw, we construct two task-specific datasets: WebBrain-R and WebBrain-G, which are used to train in-domain retriever and generator, respectively. Besides, we empirically analyze the performances of the current state-of-the-art NLP techniques on WebBrain and introduce a new framework ReGen, which enhances the generation factualness by improved evidence retrieval and task-specific pre-training for generation. Experiment results show that ReGen outperforms all baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.


Eagle: End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning based Autonomous Control of PTZ Cameras

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing approaches for autonomous control of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras use multiple stages where object detection and localization are performed separately from the control of the PTZ mechanisms. These approaches require manual labels and suffer from performance bottlenecks due to error propagation across the multi-stage flow of information. The large size of object detection neural networks also makes prior solutions infeasible for real-time deployment in resource-constrained devices. We present an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) solution called Eagle to train a neural network policy that directly takes images as input to control the PTZ camera. Training reinforcement learning is cumbersome in the real world due to labeling effort, runtime environment stochasticity, and fragile experimental setups. We introduce a photo-realistic simulation framework for training and evaluation of PTZ camera control policies. Eagle achieves superior camera control performance by maintaining the object of interest close to the center of captured images at high resolution and has up to 17% more tracking duration than the state-of-the-art. Eagle policies are lightweight (90x fewer parameters than Yolo5s) and can run on embedded camera platforms such as Raspberry PI (33 FPS) and Jetson Nano (38 FPS), facilitating real-time PTZ tracking for resource-constrained environments. With domain randomization, Eagle policies trained in our simulator can be transferred directly to real-world scenarios.


Ensemble Modeling for Time Series Forecasting: an Adaptive Robust Optimization Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate time series forecasting is critical for a wide range of problems with temporal data. Ensemble modeling is a well-established technique for leveraging multiple predictive models to increase accuracy and robustness, as the performance of a single predictor can be highly variable due to shifts in the underlying data distribution. This paper proposes a new methodology for building robust ensembles of time series forecasting models. Our approach utilizes Adaptive Robust Optimization (ARO) to construct a linear regression ensemble in which the models' weights can adapt over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a series of synthetic experiments and real-world applications, including air pollution management, energy consumption forecasting, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. Our results show that our adaptive ensembles outperform the best ensemble member in hindsight by 16-26% in root mean square error and 14-28% in conditional value at risk and improve over competitive ensemble techniques.


RISC: Generating Realistic Synthetic Bilingual Insurance Contract

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Insurance contracts are 90 to 100 pages long and use complex legal and insurance-specific vocabulary for a layperson. Hence, they are a much more complex class of documents than those in traditional NLP corpora. Therefore, we introduce RISCBAC, a Realistic Insurance Synthetic Bilingual Automobile Contract dataset based on the mandatory Quebec car insurance contract. The dataset comprises 10,000 French and English unannotated insurance contracts. RISCBAC enables NLP research for unsupervised automatic summarisation, question answering, text simplification, machine translation and more. Moreover, it can be further automatically annotated as a dataset for supervised tasks such as NER.