Charts are very popular to analyze data and convey important insights. People often analyze visualizations to answer open-ended questions that require explanatory answers. Answering such questions are often difficult and time-consuming as it requires a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. To address this challenge, we introduce a new task called OpenCQA, where the goal is to answer an open-ended question about a chart with descriptive texts. We present the annotation process and an in-depth analysis of our dataset. We implement and evaluate a set of baselines under three practical settings. In the first setting, a chart and the accompanying article is provided as input to the model. The second setting provides only the relevant paragraph(s) to the chart instead of the entire article, whereas the third setting requires the model to generate an answer solely based on the chart. Our analysis of the results show that the top performing models generally produce fluent and coherent text while they struggle to perform complex logical and arithmetic reasoning.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) twin systems will be a fundamental enabler of zero-touch network and service management (ZSM) for sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. A reliable XAI twin system for ZSM requires two composites: an extreme analytical ability for discretizing the physical behavior of the Internet of Everything (IoE) and rigorous methods for characterizing the reasoning of such behavior. In this paper, a novel neuro-symbolic explainable artificial intelligence twin framework is proposed to enable trustworthy ZSM for a wireless IoE. The physical space of the XAI twin executes a neural-network-driven multivariate regression to capture the time-dependent wireless IoE environment while determining unconscious decisions of IoE service aggregation. Subsequently, the virtual space of the XAI twin constructs a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based Bayesian network that can infer a symbolic reasoning score over unconscious decisions through a first-order probabilistic language model. Furthermore, a Bayesian multi-arm bandits-based learning problem is proposed for reducing the gap between the expected explained score and the current obtained score of the proposed neuro-symbolic XAI twin. To address the challenges of extensible, modular, and stateless management functions in ZSM, the proposed neuro-symbolic XAI twin framework consists of two learning systems: 1) an implicit learner that acts as an unconscious learner in physical space, and 2) an explicit leaner that can exploit symbolic reasoning based on implicit learner decisions and prior evidence. Experimental results show that the proposed neuro-symbolic XAI twin can achieve around 96.26% accuracy while guaranteeing from 18% to 44% more trust score in terms of reasoning and closed-loop automation.

Mike Chapple is Teaching Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in cybersecurity and business analytics. Prior to joining Notre Dame's faculty, Mike served as Senior Director for IT Service Delivery at the University. In this role, he oversaw the information security, IT compliance, cloud computing, data governance, IT architecture, learning platforms, project management, strategic planning and product management functions for the Office of Information Technologies. Mike led Notre Dame's Cloud First strategy which moved 80% of the institution's IT services into the cloud over three years. Mike previously served as Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President at Notre Dame for two years.

Imagine an AI that recognizes people and targets them; imagine putting that piece of software into a weapon.. et voilà. This is how you get AI weapons, aka "autonomous weapons systems" (AWS) for the experts, aka "killer robots" for the mass media. In even simpler words, they are dumb machines using the brain of a clever AI algorithm, created with the only purpose to kill without human intervention. They do not need some crazy person clicking a giant red button to kill the target. When the AI recognizes the target, it fires -- automatically. After all, the only encounter we might have had with AWS may have been watching Terminator or other sci-fi movies.

Self-driving cars have the potential to change the paradigm of transportation. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey, 93% of all vehicle accidents are influenced by human error. Eliminating those accidents would be a giant leap forward, a safer means of transportation. However, developing autonomous driving systems requires a tremendous amount of training images, usually collected and labelled by human labor, which is costly and error-prone. To make things worse, gathering such a vast amount of real driving images is challenging because we cannot artificially make unusual corner cases or peculiar weather and lighting conditions.

A British humanoid called Ai-Da has made history by becoming the first robot to speak at the House of Lords. Addressing members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee on Tuesday afternoon, the bot spoke about whether creativity is under attack from AI and technology. When asked: 'How do you produce art and how is this different to what human artists produce?', Ai-Da replied: 'I could use my paintings by cameras in my eyes, my AI algorithms and my robotic arm to paint on canvas, which result in visually appealing images. 'For my poetry using neutral networks, this involves analysing a large corpus of text to identify common content and poetic structures, and then using these structures/content to generate new poems. 'How this differs to humans is consciousness.

Is creativity under attack from the rise of artificial intelligence? Who better to answer that question than Ai-Da, the world's first artist robot that has made headlines for her incredible paintings and sculptures - not least a portrait of the Queen to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee earlier in 2022. Later today, Ai-Da Robot will make history as she (she is far too realistic to call her an "it") gives evidence at the House of Lords as part of its A Creative Future inquiry, examining potential challenges for the creative industries and looking at how they can adapt as tech advances. It might sound like a scene from a science-fiction film, but in 2022 it's very much a reality. "The fact that Ai-Da is giving evidence at one of these sessions is pretty mind-blowing," creator Aidan Meller tells Sky News.

That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the White House's science and technology advisory agency had unveiled an AI Bill of Rights. The document is Biden's vision of how the US government, technology companies, and citizens should work together to hold the AI sector accountable. The US has so far been one of the only Western nations without clear guidance on how to protect its citizens against AI harms--covering everything from wrongful arrests, suicides, and entire cohorts of schoolchildren being marked unjustly by an algorithm, and that's just for starters. The AI Bill of Rights is missing some pretty important areas of harm, such as law enforcement and worker surveillance. And unlike the actual US Bill of Rights, the AI Bill of Rights is more an enthusiastic recommendation than a binding law, which experts worry won't be fully adequate to hold errant tech companies to account.

Russia's deadly air strikes on Ukraine's cities this week have triggered calls for more military aid, but analysts warn than no air-defence systems can completely defend Ukrainian territory. Kyiv says a barrage of Russian strikes across the country on Monday killed at least 19 people, wounded more than 100, and damaged infrastructure. Missiles including cruise missiles rained down on the country's cities, including in rare strikes on the capital Kyiv, far from the frontlines in the east and south. Ukraine also accused Russia of using Iranian-made drones launched from neighbouring Belarus and Russia-annexed Crimea. While Kyiv says its army managed to shoot down more than half of these, Prime Minister Denys Shmygal has called for "more modern weapons to protect the sky and civilians".

At first glance at these images, you'd be forgiven for mistaking them as stills from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But the flying saucer-like object depicted in the images is very much real - and is set to be launched into space by NASA next month. The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) is scheduled for November 1 and will see a huge heat shield launched into low Earth orbit. Once there, it will inflate, before descending back to Earth. NASA hopes the test will demonstrate how the inflatable heat shield can slow down a spacecraft enough to survive atmospheric entry.