It's no secret that the latest wave of new technologies has changed how we go about our daily lives. From automated vehicles to smart cities and augmented reality to smart homes, it seems as though artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more predominant in nearly every industry. The cybersecurity sector is no exception. In today's digital world, the proliferation of cyberattacks continues to pose complex challenges for businesses. Even the best networks in the world are not immune to cyber incidents.

Mike Ananny walked his dog this morning. He did so with no expectation of privacy. "I know that I was subject to a wide variety of cameras, whether it's Ring doorbells, cars driving along, or even city traffic cameras," he said. "I didn't choose to participate in this whole variety of video surveillance systems. I just took my dog for a walk." Ananny understands that, wherever he goes, data about him is being collected, analyzed and monetized by artificial intelligence (AI). Kate Crawford drove a van deep into the arid Nevada landscape to get a good look at the evaporating brine ponds of the Silver Peak Lithium Mine.

Language Models (LMs) often cannot be deployed because of their potential to harm users in hard-to-predict ways. Prior work identifies harmful behaviors before deployment by using human annotators to hand-write test cases. However, human annotation is expensive, limiting the number and diversity of test cases. In this work, we automatically find cases where a target LM behaves in a harmful way, by generating test cases ("red teaming") using another LM. We evaluate the target LM's replies to generated test questions using a classifier trained to detect offensive content, uncovering tens of thousands of offensive replies in a 280B parameter LM chatbot. We explore several methods, from zero-shot generation to reinforcement learning, for generating test cases with varying levels of diversity and difficulty. Furthermore, we use prompt engineering to control LM-generated test cases to uncover a variety of other harms, automatically finding groups of people that the chatbot discusses in offensive ways, personal and hospital phone numbers generated as the chatbot's own contact info, leakage of private training data in generated text, and harms that occur over the course of a conversation. Overall, LM-based red teaming is one promising tool (among many needed) for finding and fixing diverse, undesirable LM behaviors before impacting users.

In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several specific goals, often (but not always) within a specific domain. We also consider the concept of embodied conversational agents, briefly reviewing aspects such as character animation and speech processing. The many different approaches for representing dialogue in CAs are discussed in some detail, along with methods for evaluating such agents, emphasizing the important topics of accountability and interpretability. A brief historical overview is given, followed by an extensive overview of various applications, especially in the fields of health and education. We end the chapter by discussing benefits and potential risks regarding the societal impact of current and future CA technology.

We analyze a general class of bilevel problems, in which the upper-level problem consists in the minimization of a smooth objective function and the lower-level problem is to find the fixed point of a smooth contraction map. This type of problems include instances of meta-learning, hyperparameter optimization and data poisoning adversarial attacks. Several recent works have proposed algorithms which warm-start the lower-level problem, i.e. they use the previous lower-level approximate solution as a staring point for the lower-level solver. This warm-start procedure allows one to improve the sample complexity in both the stochastic and deterministic settings, achieving in some cases the order-wise optimal sample complexity. We show that without warm-start, it is still possible to achieve order-wise optimal and near-optimal sample complexity for the stochastic and deterministic settings, respectively. In particular, we propose a simple method which uses stochastic fixed point iterations at the lower-level and projected inexact gradient descent at the upper-level, that reaches an $\epsilon$-stationary point using $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ and $\tilde{O}(\epsilon^{-1})$ samples for the stochastic and the deterministic setting, respectively. Compared to methods using warm-start, ours is better suited for meta-learning and yields a simpler analysis that does not need to study the coupled interactions between the upper-level and lower-level iterates.

We introduce physics-informed multimodal autoencoders (PIMA) - a variational inference framework for discovering shared information in multimodal scientific datasets representative of high-throughput testing. Individual modalities are embedded into a shared latent space and fused through a product of experts formulation, enabling a Gaussian mixture prior to identify shared features. Sampling from clusters allows cross-modal generative modeling, with a mixture of expert decoder imposing inductive biases encoding prior scientific knowledge and imparting structured disentanglement of the latent space. This approach enables discovery of fingerprints which may be detected in high-dimensional heterogeneous datasets, avoiding traditional bottlenecks related to high-fidelity measurement and characterization. Motivated by accelerated co-design and optimization of materials manufacturing processes, a dataset of lattice metamaterials from metal additive manufacturing demonstrates accurate cross modal inference between images of mesoscale topology and mechanical stress-strain response.

Statistical production systems cover multiple steps from the collection, aggregation, and integration of data to tasks like data quality assurance and dissemination. While the context of data quality assurance is one of the most promising fields for applying machine learning, the lack of curated and labeled training data is often a limiting factor. The statistical production system for the Centralised Securities Database features an interactive feedback loop between data collected by the European Central Bank and data quality assurance performed by data quality managers at National Central Banks. The quality assurance feedback loop is based on a set of rule-based checks for raising exceptions, upon which the user either confirms the data or corrects an actual error. In this paper we use the information received from this feedback loop to optimize the exceptions presented to the National Central Banks thereby improving the quality of exceptions generated and the time consumed on the system by the users authenticating those exceptions. For this approach we make use of explainable supervised machine learning to (a) identify the types of exceptions and (b) to prioritize which exceptions are more likely to require an intervention or correction by the NCBs. Furthermore, we provide an explainable AI taxonomy aiming to identify the different explainable AI needs that arose during the project.

In 2021 the application of AI enabled advances in many areas of healthcare. We made significant progress in AI for drug discovery, medical imaging, diagnostics, pathology, and clinical trials. Important peer reviewed papers were published and dozens of partnerships were formed. Big Pharma companies and major tech companies became very active in the space. Record amounts of funding were raised, and a few companies even started human clinical trials. Microsoft and NVIDIA launched two of the world's most powerful supercomputers and Microsoft announced Azure OpenAI Service. In 2022 we expect these technologies to converge across the healthcare spectrum. This article summarizes milestones achieved in 2021. This is the first in a series of progress reports I'm writing on the sector that will be supplemented by industry performance data and metrics compiled in partnership with Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAIH) and other top tier resources.

With geopolitical instability during an omicron surge, the AI of military factions are under the microscope. With Russia/Ukraine, China/India and China/Taiwan borders under pressure, there's a greater danger of A.I being misused in geographical tensions. Terminators were once just a movie. Engineers in Korea have developed a highly dexterous robotic hand that's capable of crushing beer cans or gently clutching an egg. It looks nearly exactly like those old movies.

WHEN the human brain learns something new, it adapts. But when artificial intelligence learns something new, it tends to forget information it already learned. As companies use more and more data to improve how AI recognizes images, learns languages and carries out other complex tasks, a paper published in Science this week shows a way that computer chips could dynamically rewire themselves to take in new data like the brain does, helping AI to keep learning over time. "The brains of living beings could continuously learn throughout their lifespan. We have now created an artificial platform for machines to learn throughout their lifespan," said Shriram Ramanathan, a professor in Purdue University's School of Materials Engineering who specializes in discovering how materials could mimic the brain to improve computing.