Nations around the world are investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their military, intelligence, and other national security capabilities. Yet AI technology, at present, has significant safety and security issues and AI systems can currently fail in unexpected ways due to a variety of causes. Now, a US defence & foreign policy think tank, the Center for a New American Security (CANS) has announced the creation of a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and National Security to look into AI's impact both in the US and around the world. This comes at a time when the interactive nature of military competition means that one nation's actions affect others, including in ways that may be detrimental to mutual stability. Currently, there is an urgent need to explore actions that can mitigate these risks, such as improved processes for AI assurance, norms and best practices for responsible AI adoption, and confidence-building measures that improve stability among all nations.

There is increasing evidence of the business benefits of responsible AI (RAI), when companies mitigate risks through training and testing data, measuring model bias and accuracy, and model documentation. Companies that adopt responsible AI experience higher returns on their AI investment. Raj Shekhar writes that business leaders globally must coalesce around the imperative to develop rigorous, consistent standards for responsible AI adoption. Much has been spoken and written about the risks to public trust and safety arising from the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications across multiple sectors. In finance, the use of AI has led to discriminatory credit decisions.

WE ARE AT the start of some of the most significant changes in human history that will result from the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in virtually every area of life. The speed of some of these changes will be exciting or frightening, depending on your perspective. In medicine, AI is being used already to diagnose and remotely treat patients, as well as to identify potential new drugs and make prescriptions. Job applicants are shortlisted using AI and credit ratings are determined by the same technology. Data is increasingly being used to determine large swathes of public policy, from policing to transport planning. In science fiction, the cyborg is this part human, part machine where the technology can carry out many of the traditional functions at speed of the human.

'Urban Mobility' is emerging as the backbone of the entire city ecosystem ensuring its growth and overall success. Today's call for a greener planet and active'Climate Change' combatting agenda inevitably encourages the need for smarter, greener, and safer urban mobility channels. The emerging smart cities today are increasingly integrating mobility solutions that are based on cleaner energy usage and shared resources with an elevated level of infrastructure integration among its inhabitants. None of this can be achieved without a substantial focus on the design, planning, and delivery of urban infrastructure that enables greater efficiency in urban mobility. According to World Bank –'Traditionally, urban mobility is about moving people from one location to another location within or between urban areas.

Among the major trends in technology is the rapid development of artificial intelligence and its wide range of applications. In addition to enhancing technological applications, artificial intelligence allows us to simulate and expand human intelligence. As a technology, artificial intelligence has emerged as a critical component of complementing the efforts of human information security teams. Humans cannot adequately protect the dynamic attack surface of an organisation alone. This is why artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly critical to cybersecurity professionals in order to reduce breach risk and improve security posture.

Last month, Facebook parent Meta unveiled an artificial intelligence chatbot said to be its most advanced yet. BlenderBot 3, as the AI is known, is able to search the internet to talk to people about almost anything, and it has abilities related to personality, empathy, knowledge and long-term memory. BlenderBot 3 is also good at peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming that former US President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and calling Meta Chairman and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg "creepy". It's not the first time an AI has gone rogue. In 2016, Microsoft's Tay AI took less than 24 hours to morph into a rightwing bigot on Twitter, posting racist and misogynistic tweets and praising Adolf Hitler.

Data used to train machine learning (ML) models can be sensitive. Membership inference attacks (MIAs), attempting to determine whether a particular data record was used to train an ML model, risk violating membership privacy. ML model builders need a principled definition of a metric to quantify the membership privacy risk of (a) individual training data records, (b) computed independently of specific MIAs, (c) which assesses susceptibility to different MIAs, (d) can be used for different applications, and (e) efficiently. None of the prior membership privacy risk metrics simultaneously meet all these requirements. We present SHAPr, a membership privacy metric based on Shapley values which is a leave-one-out (LOO) technique, originally intended to measure the contribution of a training data record on model utility. We conjecture that contribution to model utility can act as a proxy for memorization, and hence represent membership privacy risk. Using ten benchmark datasets, we show that SHAPr is indeed effective in estimating susceptibility of training data records to MIAs. We also show that, unlike prior work, SHAPr is significantly better in estimating susceptibility to newer, and more effective MIA. We apply SHAPr to evaluate the efficacy of several defenses against MIAs: using regularization and removing high risk training data records. Moreover, SHAPr is versatile: it can be used for estimating vulnerability of different subgroups to MIAs, and inherits applications of Shapley values (e.g., data valuation). We show that SHAPr has an acceptable computational cost (compared to naive LOO), varying from a few minutes for the smallest dataset to ~92 minutes for the largest dataset.

Today, participating in discussions on online forums is extremely commonplace and these discussions have started rendering a strong influence on the overall opinion of online users. Naturally, twisting the flow of the argument can have a strong impact on the minds of naive users, which in the long run might have socio-political ramifications, for example, winning an election or spreading targeted misinformation. Thus, these platforms are potentially highly vulnerable to malicious players who might act individually or as a cohort to breed fallacious arguments with a motive to sway public opinion. Ad hominem arguments are one of the most effective forms of such fallacies. Although a simple fallacy, it is effective enough to sway public debates in offline world and can be used as a precursor to shutting down the voice of opposition by slander. In this work, we take a first step in shedding light on the usage of ad hominem fallacies in the wild. First, we build a powerful ad hominem detector with high accuracy (F1 more than 83%, showing a significant improvement over prior work), even for datasets for which annotated instances constitute a very small fraction. We then used our detector on 265k arguments collected from the online debate forum - CreateDebate. Our crowdsourced surveys validate our in-the-wild predictions on CreateDebate data (94% match with manual annotation). Our analysis revealed that a surprising 31.23% of CreateDebate content contains ad hominem fallacy, and a cohort of highly active users post significantly more ad hominem to suppress opposing views. Then, our temporal analysis revealed that ad hominem argument usage increased significantly since the 2016 US Presidential election, not only for topics like Politics, but also for Science and Law. We conclude by discussing important implications of our work to detect and defend against ad hominem fallacies.

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cross-lingual transfer technique for fact-checking. Additionally, trustworthy information in different languages can be complementary and helpful in verifying facts. To this end, we present the first fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-lingual retriever. Given the absence of cross-lingual information retrieval datasets with claim-like queries, we train the retriever with our proposed Cross-lingual Inverse Cloze Task (X-ICT), a self-supervised algorithm that creates training instances by translating the title of a passage. The goal for X-ICT is to learn cross-lingual retrieval in which the model learns to identify the passage corresponding to a given translated title. On the X-Fact dataset, our approach achieves 2.23% absolute F1 improvement in the zero-shot cross-lingual setup over prior systems. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/khuangaf/CONCRETE.

A growing number of oversight boards and regulatory bodies seek to monitor and govern algorithms that make decisions about people's lives. Prior work has explored how people believe algorithmic decisions should be made, but there is little understanding of how individual factors like sociodemographics or direct experience with a decision-making scenario may affect their ethical views. We take a step toward filling this gap by exploring how people's perceptions of one aspect of procedural algorithmic fairness (the fairness of using particular features in an algorithmic decision) relate to their (i) demographics (age, education, gender, race, political views) and (ii) personal experiences with the algorithmic decision-making scenario. We find that political views and personal experience with the algorithmic decision context significantly influence perceptions about the fairness of using different features for bail decision-making. Drawing on our results, we discuss the implications for stakeholder engagement and algorithmic oversight including the need to consider multiple dimensions of diversity in composing oversight and regulatory bodies.