We present an enrichment of the Hateval corpus of hate speech tweets (Basile et. al 2019) aimed to facilitate automated counter-narrative generation. Comparably to previous work (Chung et. al. 2019), manually written counter-narratives are associated to tweets. However, this information alone seems insufficient to obtain satisfactory language models for counter-narrative generation. That is why we have also annotated tweets with argumentative information based on Wagemanns (2016), that we believe can help in building convincing and effective counter-narratives for hate speech against particular groups. We discuss adequacies and difficulties of this annotation process and present several baselines for automatic detection of the annotated elements. Preliminary results show that automatic annotators perform close to human annotators to detect some aspects of argumentation, while others only reach low or moderate level of inter-annotator agreement.

Political science research often requires constructing a race/ethnicity proxy variable for datasets that do not contain it, like voter registration files, lists of electoral candidates, or political donation records. Constructing such a proxy is an important step for conducting ecological inference in voting rights litigation (Barreto et al. [2019], Imai and Khanna [2016]), redistricting (DeLuca and Curiel [2022], Kenny et al. [2021]), and substantive research on the role of race/ethnicity in politics (Enos [2016], Enos et al. [2019], Grumbach and Sahn [2020]). The most common method for proxying race/ethnicity is Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), which uses Bayes' rule to compute a probability distribution over race/ethnicity categories conditional on a voter's surname and where they live (Elliott et al. [2008, 2009]). BISG has attained widespread popularity due to its parsimony, computational efficiency, and superior performance when compared to existing alternatives, namely spatial interpolation of Census racial-ethnic composition from Census geographies (Imai and Khanna [2016], Clark et al. [2021], Shah and Davis [2017]). While BISG performs well compared to the small suite of existing alternatives, it has not yet been benchmarked against machine learning (ML) models, which can produce race/ethnicity predictions from more flexible and potentially more accurate models. In this paper I present the results of such a benchmark. I train a range of machine learning models using voter registration data from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and a portion of California where voters self-report their race/ethnicity upon registration. The registries in these states contain over 26 million labelled observations, which equates to greater than a five percent non-representative sample of the United States electorate. I then compare BISG against predictions from these models made out-of-state.

Information on cyber-related crimes, incidents, and conflicts is abundantly available in numerous open online sources. However, processing the large volumes and streams of data is a challenging task for the analysts and experts, and entails the need for newer methods and techniques. In this article we present and implement a novel knowledge graph and knowledge mining framework for extracting the relevant information from free-form text about incidents in the cyberdomain. The framework includes a machine learning based pipeline for generating graphs of organizations, countries, industries, products and attackers with a non-technical cyber-ontology. The extracted knowledge graph is utilized to estimate the incidence of cyberattacks on a given graph configuration. We use publicly available collections of real cyber-incident reports to test the efficacy of our methods. The knowledge extraction is found to be sufficiently accurate, and the graph-based threat estimation demonstrates a level of correlation with the actual records of attacks. In practical use, an analyst utilizing the presented framework can infer additional information from the current cyber-landscape in terms of risk to various entities and propagation of the risk heuristic between industries and countries.

Recent research on the robustness of deep learning has shown that Vision Transformers (ViTs) surpass the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) under some perturbations, e.g., natural corruption, adversarial attacks, etc. Some papers argue that the superior robustness of ViT comes from the segmentation of its input images; others say that the Multi-head Self-Attention (MSA) is the key to preserving the robustness. In this paper, we aim to introduce a principled and unified theoretical framework to investigate such an argument on ViT's robustness. We first theoretically prove that, unlike Transformers in Natural Language Processing, ViTs are Lipschitz continuous. Then we theoretically analyze the adversarial robustness of ViTs from the perspective of the Cauchy Problem, via which we can quantify how the robustness propagates through layers. We demonstrate that the first and last layers are the critical factors to affect the robustness of ViTs. Furthermore, based on our theory, we empirically show that unlike the claims from existing research, MSA only contributes to the adversarial robustness of ViTs under weak adversarial attacks, e.g., FGSM, and surprisingly, MSA actually comprises the model's adversarial robustness under stronger attacks, e.g., PGD attacks.

The NHS is to use artificial intelligence to detect, screen and treat people at risk of hepatitis C under plans to eradicate the disease by 2030. Hepatitis C often does not have any noticeable symptoms until the liver has been severely damaged, which means thousands of people are living with the infection – known as the silent killer – without realising it. Left untreated, it can cause life-threatening damage to the liver over years. But with modern treatments now available, it is possible to cure the infection. Now health chiefs are launching a hi-tech screening programme in England in a fresh drive to identify thousands of people unaware they have the virus.

Viz.ai announced it has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 501(k) clearance for Viz SDH, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect subdural hemorrhage (SDH). By detecting SDH automatically, Viz SDH allows physicians to triage patients effectively and deliver care, according to the company. Viz.ai notes that subdural hemorrhage is projected to become the most common neurosurgical diagnosis by 2031, and global clinical trials are investigating new treatments to address this disease. Viz SDH has the capability to identify acute and chronic subdural bleeds and notify the care team in the event of a necessary immediate intervention, according to Viz.ai.

Nir Kaldero is chief AI officer at NEORIS and Adjunct Executive for AI at CEMEX. The world is in constant high-speed transition. We have entered a period in which the battles of good and evil, light and dark, democracy and authoritarianism are at high stake and being defined. Although it might sound like a John le Carré novel, this is the world we are living in. Technology and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the ideology that will dominate these fields, are also being shaped in real time, even if many of us are unaware of the battles being fought behind our computer screens and closed doors.

The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis L.) is a serious pest that primarily feeds on cotton plants. In places like Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, due to sub-tropical climatic conditions, cotton plants can grow year-round and therefore the left-over seeds from the previous season during harvest can continue to grow in the middle of rotation crops like corn (Zea mays L.) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.). These feral or volunteer cotton (VC) plants when reach the pinhead squaring phase (5-6 leaf stage) can act as hosts for the boll weevil pest. The Texas Boll Weevil Eradication Program (TBWEP) employs people to locate and eliminate VC plants growing by the side of roads or fields with rotation crops but the ones growing in the middle of fields remain undetected. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of computer vision (CV) algorithm based on You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) for detecting VC plants growing in the middle of corn fields at three different growth stages (V3, V6, and VT) using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) remote sensing imagery. All the four variants of YOLOv5 (s, m, l, and x) were used and their performances were compared based on classification accuracy, mean average precision (mAP), and F1-score. It was found that YOLOv5s could detect VC plants with a maximum classification accuracy of 98% and mAP of 96.3 % at the V6 stage of corn while YOLOv5s and YOLOv5m resulted in the lowest classification accuracy of 85% and YOLOv5m and YOLOv5l had the least mAP of 86.5% at the VT stage on images of size 416 x 416 pixels. The developed CV algorithm has the potential to effectively detect and locate VC plants growing in the middle of corn fields as well as expedite the management aspects of TBWEP.

Timber and forest products made from wood, like furniture, are valuable commodities, and like the global trade of many highly-valued natural resources, face challenges of corruption, fraud, and illegal harvesting. These grey and black market activities in the wood and forest products sector are not limited to the countries where the wood was harvested, but extend throughout the global supply chain and have been tied to illicit financial flows, like trade-based money laundering, document fraud, species mislabeling, and other illegal activities. The task of finding such fraudulent activities using trade data, in the absence of ground truth, can be modelled as an unsupervised anomaly detection problem. However existing approaches suffer from certain shortcomings in their applicability towards large scale trade data. Trade data is heterogeneous, with both categorical and numerical attributes in a tabular format. The overall challenge lies in the complexity, volume and velocity of data, with large number of entities and lack of ground truth labels. To mitigate these, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection -- Contrastive Learning based Heterogeneous Anomaly Detection (CHAD) that is generally applicable for large-scale heterogeneous tabular data. We demonstrate our model CHAD performs favorably against multiple comparable baselines for public benchmark datasets, and outperforms them in the case of trade data. More importantly we demonstrate our approach reduces assumptions and efforts required hyperparameter tuning, which is a key challenging aspect in an unsupervised training paradigm. Specifically, our overarching objective pertains to detecting suspicious timber shipments and patterns using Bill of Lading trade record data. Detecting anomalous transactions in shipment records can enable further investigation by government agencies and supply chain constituents.

In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and reviews, are very useful for big businesses, markets, politics, journalism, and many other fields. Politics is one of the most talked-about and popular topics on social media networks right now. Many politicians use micro-blogging services like Twitter because they have a large number of followers and supporters on those networks. Politicians, political parties, political organizations, and foundations use social media networks to communicate with citizens ahead of time. Today, social media is used by hundreds of thousands of political groups and politicians. On these social media networks, every politician and political party has millions of followers, and politicians find new and innovative ways to urge individuals to participate in politics. Furthermore, social media assists politicians in various decision-making processes by providing recommendations, such as developing policies and strategies based on previous experiences, recommending and selecting suitable candidates for a particular constituency, recommending a suitable person for a particular position in the party, and launching a political campaign based on citizen sentiments on various issues and controversies, among other things. This research is a review on the use of social network analysis (SNA) and semantic analysis (SA) on the Twitter platform to study the supporters networks of political leaders because it can help in decision-making when predicting their political futures.