Government
Iran slams call for UN probe into alleged use of its drones
Iran has strongly condemned a call by France, Germany and the United Kingdom for the United Nations to investigate the accusations that Russia has used Iranian-origin drones to attack Ukraine, according to its foreign ministry. Nasser Kanaani, spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, said on Saturday that the call by the so-called E-3 group of countries was "false and baseless" and that it was "strongly rejected and condemned". Ukraine says Russia has used Iranian-made Shahed-136 attack drones that cruise towards their target and explode on impact. "The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in its pursuit to protect its national interest and to secure the rights of the noble Iranian people, reserves the right to respond to any irresponsible action," the Iranian foreign ministry website quoted Kanaani as saying. "It will not hesitate to defend the interests of the Iranian people," he said, without elaborating.
Supervisory Authorities publish discussion paper on artificial intelligence
The UK financial services regulators, the Bank of England (BoE), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – together Supervisory Authorities – jointly published a discussion paper (DP5/22) on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning on 11 October 2022. The purpose of the discussion paper was to facilitate a public debate on the safe and responsible adoption of AI in UK financial services. The Supervisory Authorities have also raised discussion questions for stakeholder input, with the aim of understanding whether the current regulatory framework is sufficient to address the potential risks and harms associated with AI and how any additional intervention may support the safe and responsible adoption of AI in UK financial services. The discussion paper provides a platform for the Supervisory Authorities, experts and stakeholders to collaborate and jointly assess whether the current legal framework can adequately regulate AI technology by safeguarding each of the Supervisory Authorities' objectives while at the same time promoting innovation in UK financial services. This consultation occurs in parallel to the UK government's ongoing work in developing its own cross-sector approach to the regulation of AI technology and will therefore provide a valuable contribution to this broader policy debate.
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It allows developers to transmit raw data via the Scale API and gives businesses access to datasets for building AI systems. Computer vision teams and autonomous vehicle manufacturers utilize the platform to speed up the data labeling process. Alexandr Wang is the youngest and most powerful billionaire in the world. The CEO of Scale Al, the firm he co-founded in 2016, Alexandr Wang, who shares his name with a well-known fashion designer of the same name, has a net worth of over $1 billion. Scale helps machine learning teams generate high-quality ground truth data, which speeds up the development of AI applications.
While speaking to British lawmakers, a robot falls asleep - Digital Time News
Although not alive, Ai-Da can still create art. This was evident when he told the House of Lords committee that "I am not a machine. I am a living being." Though he then shut off and refused to answer any more questions. Ai-Da, named after Ada Lovelace who was an English mathematician and the world's first computer programmer, was the first robot to ever speak at the House of Commons.
Estimating oil and gas recovery factors via machine learning: Database-dependent accuracy and reliability
Roustazadeh, Alireza, Ghanbarian, Behzad, Shadmand, Mohammad B., Taslimitehrani, Vahid, Lake, Larry W.
With recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML) approaches have become an attractive tool in petroleum engineering, particularly for reservoir characterizations. A key reservoir property is hydrocarbon recovery factor (RF) whose accurate estimation would provide decisive insights to drilling and production strategies. Therefore, this study aims to estimate the hydrocarbon RF for exploration from various reservoir characteristics, such as porosity, permeability, pressure, and water saturation via the ML. We applied three regression-based models including the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector machine (SVM), and stepwise multiple linear regression (MLR) and various combinations of three databases to construct ML models and estimate the oil and/or gas RF. Using two databases and the cross-validation method, we evaluated the performance of the ML models. In each iteration 90 and 10% of the data were respectively used to train and test the models. The third independent database was then used to further assess the constructed models. For both oil and gas RFs, we found that the XGBoost model estimated the RF for the train and test datasets more accurately than the SVM and MLR models. However, the performance of all the models were unsatisfactory for the independent databases. Results demonstrated that the ML algorithms were highly dependent and sensitive to the databases based on which they were trained. Statistical tests revealed that such unsatisfactory performances were because the distributions of input features and target variables in the train datasets were significantly different from those in the independent databases (p-value < 0.05).
ASDOT: Any-Shot Data-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models
Xiang, Jiannan, Liu, Zhengzhong, Zhou, Yucheng, Xing, Eric P., Hu, Zhiting
Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse settings by making efficient use of any given (or no) examples. ASDOT consists of two steps, data disambiguation and sentence fusion, both of which are amenable to be solved with off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs) with optional finetuning. In the data disambiguation stage, we employ the prompted GPT-3 model to understand possibly ambiguous triples from the input data and convert each into a short sentence with reduced ambiguity. The sentence fusion stage then uses an LM like T5 to fuse all the resulting sentences into a coherent paragraph as the final description. We evaluate extensively on various datasets in different scenarios, including the zero-/few-/full-shot settings, and generalization to unseen predicates and out-of-domain data. Experimental results show that ASDOT consistently achieves significant improvement over baselines, e.g., a 30.81 BLEU gain on the DART dataset under the zero-shot setting.
Sound and Complete Verification of Polynomial Networks
Rocamora, Elias Abad, Sahin, Mehmet Fatih, Liu, Fanghui, Chrysos, Grigorios G, Cevher, Volkan
Polynomial Networks (PNs) have demonstrated promising performance on face and image recognition recently. However, robustness of PNs is unclear and thus obtaining certificates becomes imperative for enabling their adoption in real-world applications. Existing verification algorithms on ReLU neural networks (NNs) based on classical branch and bound (BaB) techniques cannot be trivially applied to PN verification. In this work, we devise a new bounding method, equipped with BaB for global convergence guarantees, called Verification of Polynomial Networks or VPN for short. One key insight is that we obtain much tighter bounds than the interval bound propagation (IBP) and DeepT-Fast [Bonaert et al., 2021] baselines. This enables sound and complete PN verification with empirical validation on MNIST, CIFAR10 and STL10 datasets. We believe our method has its own interest to NN verification.
Strategic Decisions Survey, Taxonomy, and Future Directions from Artificial Intelligence Perspective
Wu, Caesar, Ramamohanarao, Kotagiri, Zhang, Rui, Bouvry, Pascal
Strategic Decision-Making is always challenging because it is inherently uncertain, ambiguous, risky, and complex. It is the art of possibility. We develop a systematic taxonomy of decision-making frames that consists of 6 bases, 18 categorical, and 54 frames. We aim to lay out the computational foundation that is possible to capture a comprehensive landscape view of a strategic problem. Compared with traditional models, it covers irrational, non-rational and rational frames c dealing with certainty, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, chaos, and ignorance.
GANI: Global Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Imperceptible Node Injections
Fang, Junyuan, Wen, Haixian, Wu, Jiajing, Xuan, Qi, Zheng, Zibin, Tse, Chi K.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have found successful applications in various graph-related tasks. However, recent studies have shown that many GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In a vast majority of existing studies, adversarial attacks on GNNs are launched via direct modification of the original graph such as adding/removing links, which may not be applicable in practice. In this paper, we focus on a realistic attack operation via injecting fake nodes. The proposed Global Attack strategy via Node Injection (GANI) is designed under the comprehensive consideration of an unnoticeable perturbation setting from both structure and feature domains. Specifically, to make the node injections as imperceptible and effective as possible, we propose a sampling operation to determine the degree of the newly injected nodes, and then generate features and select neighbors for these injected nodes based on the statistical information of features and evolutionary perturbations obtained from a genetic algorithm, respectively. In particular, the proposed feature generation mechanism is suitable for both binary and continuous node features. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets against both general and defended GNNs show strong attack performance of GANI. Moreover, the imperceptibility analyses also demonstrate that GANI achieves a relatively unnoticeable injection on benchmark datasets.
Artificial Intelligence and Arms Control
Scharre, Paul, Lamberth, Megan
Potential advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could have profound implications for how countries research and develop weapons systems, and how militaries deploy those systems on the battlefield. The idea of AI-enabled military systems has motivated some activists to call for restrictions or bans on some weapon systems, while others have argued that AI may be too diffuse to control. This paper argues that while a ban on all military applications of AI is likely infeasible, there may be specific cases where arms control is possible. Throughout history, the international community has attempted to ban or regulate weapons or military systems for a variety of reasons. This paper analyzes both successes and failures and offers several criteria that seem to influence why arms control works in some cases and not others. We argue that success or failure depends on the desirability (i.e., a weapon's military value versus its perceived horribleness) and feasibility (i.e., sociopolitical factors that influence its success) of arms control. Based on these criteria, and the historical record of past attempts at arms control, we analyze the potential for AI arms control in the future and offer recommendations for what policymakers can do today.