Government
The role of assistive AI in a real-time crime center - Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial
Real-time crime center (RTCC) is a term that is seen more and more in the public safety industry. RTCCs are essentially centralized technology hubs used by law enforcement agencies to track data in real time, identify patterns and to prevent and reduce crime. According to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), the mission of an RTCC is "to provide a law enforcement agency with the ability to capitalize on a wide and expanding range of technologies for efficient and effective policing." Many major cities have established RTCCs in order to better protect their residents, officers and communities. RTCCs can house members of one or multiple agencies and receive large amounts of data from many sources across their jurisdictions, including video cameras, sensors, license plate readers (LPR), gunshot detection, drones, facial recognition, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems, records management systems (RMS), electronic monitoring, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and more.
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All-out Drone War In Ukraine Points To Future
Deployed on a scale never seen before to carry out both surveillance and strikes, drones ranging from small commercially-available models to larger aircraft have become a defining feature of the Ukraine conflict. Drones have been a part of warfare for years, employed extensively by the United States during the "War on Terror," and they have played important roles in conflicts including in Iraq and in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. But the degree to which they are being used by both sides in Ukraine -- and the benefits they bring, as well as the threats they pose -- highlights the importance for militaries to be ready to employ and to counter drones in future conflicts. "The size and the scale of drone use in Ukraine supersedes all the previous conflicts," said Samuel Bendett, a researcher in uncrewed military systems who is an analyst with the CNA Russia Studies Program. Bendett stressed the "absolutely unprecedented use of commercial-type drones" for both surveillance and combat in Ukraine, and said the war has shown that "small... tactical drones are absolutely essential -- at every unit, every platoon level, every company level."
Thaler v. Vidal: The Federal Circuit Nixes Artificial Intelligence As Inventor - Patent - United States
Patent prosecutors should consider drafting claims to avoid the situation where the AI is the only entity providing an inventive contribution. Artificial intelligence (AI) is making an impact in our everyday life. AI helps us cut grass and vacuum living rooms. It helps us identify images for applications from waste sorting to medical diagnosis. AI also is making an impact in research and development.
Fairness and Sequential Decision Making: Limits, Lessons, and Opportunities
Nashed, Samer B., Svegliato, Justin, Blodgett, Su Lin
As automated decision making and decision assistance systems become common in everyday life, research on the prevention or mitigation of potential harms that arise from decisions made by these systems has proliferated. However, various research communities have independently conceptualized these harms, envisioned potential applications, and proposed interventions. The result is a somewhat fractured landscape of literature focused generally on ensuring decision-making algorithms "do the right thing". In this paper, we compare and discuss work across two major subsets of this literature: algorithmic fairness, which focuses primarily on predictive systems, and ethical decision making, which focuses primarily on sequential decision making and planning. We explore how each of these settings has articulated its normative concerns, the viability of different techniques for these different settings, and how ideas from each setting may have utility for the other.
Fixed and adaptive landmark sets for finite pseudometric spaces
Brunson, Jason Cory, Skaf, Yara
Topological data analysis (TDA) is an expanding field that leverages principles and tools from algebraic topology to quantify structural features of data sets or transform them into more manageable forms. As its theoretical foundations have been developed, TDA has shown promise in extracting useful information from high-dimensional, noisy, and complex data such as those used in biomedicine. To improve efficiency, these techniques may employ landmark samplers. The heuristic maxmin procedure obtains a roughly even distribution of sample points by implicitly constructing a cover comprising sets of uniform radius. However, issues arise with data that vary in density or include points with multiplicities, as are common in biomedicine. We propose an analogous procedure, "lastfirst" based on ranked distances, which implies a cover comprising sets of uniform cardinality. We first rigorously define the procedure and prove that it obtains landmarks with desired properties. We then perform benchmark tests and compare its performance to that of maxmin, on feature detection and class prediction tasks involving simulated and real-world biomedical data. Lastfirst is more general than maxmin in that it can be applied to any data on which arbitrary (and not necessarily symmetric) pairwise distances can be computed. Lastfirst is more computationally costly, but our implementation scales at the same rate as maxmin. We find that lastfirst achieves comparable performance on prediction tasks and outperforms maxmin on homology detection tasks. Where the numerical values of similarity measures are not meaningful, as in many biomedical contexts, lastfirst sampling may also improve interpretability.
Natural Language Processing of Aviation Occurrence Reports for Safety Management
Jonk, Patrick, de Vries, Vincent, Wever, Rombout, Sidiropoulos, Georgios, Kanoulas, Evangelos
Occurrence reporting is a commonly used method in safety management systems to obtain insight in the prevalence of hazards and accident scenarios. In support of safety data analysis, reports are often categorized according to a taxonomy. However, the processing of the reports can require significant effort from safety analysts and a common problem is interrater variability in labeling processes. Also, in some cases, reports are not processed according to a taxonomy, or the taxonomy does not fully cover the contents of the documents. This paper explores various Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to support the analysis of aviation safety occurrence reports. In particular, the problems studied are the automatic labeling of reports using a classification model, extracting the latent topics in a collection of texts using a topic model and the automatic generation of probable cause texts. Experimental results showed that (i) under the right conditions the labeling of occurrence reports can be effectively automated with a transformer-based classifier, (ii) topic modeling can be useful for finding the topics present in a collection of reports, and (iii) using a summarization model can be a promising direction for generating probable cause texts.
First Three Years of the International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP)
Brix, Christopher, Müller, Mark Niklas, Bak, Stanley, Johnson, Taylor T., Liu, Changliu
This paper presents a summary and meta-analysis of the first three iterations of the annual International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP) held in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In the VNN-COMP, participants submit software tools that analyze whether given neural networks satisfy specifications describing their input-output behavior. These neural networks and specifications cover a variety of problem classes and tasks, corresponding to safety and robustness properties in image classification, neural control, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems. We summarize the key processes, rules, and results, present trends observed over the last three years, and provide an outlook into possible future developments.
Investigating the Combination of Planning-Based and Data-Driven Methods for Goal Recognition
Wilken, Nils, Cohausz, Lea, Schaum, Johannes, Lüdtke, Stefan, Stuckenschmidt, Heiner
An important feature of pervasive, intelligent assistance systems is the ability to dynamically adapt to the current needs of their users. Hence, it is critical for such systems to be able to recognize those goals and needs based on observations of the user's actions and state of the environment. In this work, we investigate the application of two state-of-the-art, planning-based plan recognition approaches in a real-world setting. So far, these approaches were only evaluated in artificial settings in combination with agents that act perfectly rational. We show that such approaches have difficulties when used to recognize the goals of human subjects, because human behaviour is typically not perfectly rational. To overcome this issue, we propose an extension to the existing approaches through a classification-based method trained on observed behaviour data. We empirically show that the proposed extension not only outperforms the purely planning-based- and purely data-driven goal recognition methods but is also able to recognize the correct goal more reliably, especially when only a small number of observations were seen. This substantially improves the usefulness of hybrid goal recognition approaches for intelligent assistance systems, as recognizing a goal early opens much more possibilities for supportive reactions of the system.
On the feasibility of attacking Thai LPR systems with adversarial examples
Jiamsuchon, Chissanupong, Suaboot, Jakapan, Rattanavipanon, Norrathep
Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, enabling its adoption to a wide range of real-world applications. Despite this success, DNN-based OCR is shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which the adversary can influence the DNN model's prediction by carefully manipulating input to the model. Prior work has demonstrated the security impacts of adversarial attacks on various OCR languages. However, to date, no studies have been conducted and evaluated on an OCR system tailored specifically for the Thai language. To bridge this gap, this work presents a feasibility study of performing adversarial attacks on a specific Thai OCR application -- Thai License Plate Recognition (LPR). Moreover, we propose a new type of adversarial attack based on the \emph{semi-targeted} scenario and show that this scenario is highly realistic in LPR applications. Our experimental results show the feasibility of our attacks as they can be performed on a commodity computer desktop with over 90% attack success rate.