'Fox & Friends Weekend' co-host Pete Hegseth reacts to the U.S. drone that killed civilians instead of ISIS-K members in Afghanistan. After previously avoiding the botched U.S. drone strike that killed Afghan civilians instead of terrorists, both CNN and NBC's Sunday morning news shows dedicated just seconds of coverage to the Biden foreign policy blunder. On Friday, the Pentagon confirmed that the Aug. 28 drone strike was a "tragic mistake" that resulted in ten dead civilians, including seven children, which was meant to be in response to the Aug. 26 terrorist attack outside the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. servicemen. This came one week after the New York Times published a stunning visual investigation that came to the same conclusion. The Biden administration had announced that "two high profile" ISIS-K fighters who were dubbed as "planners and facilitators" of the suicide bombing were killed in the strike.

The AI Policy Sourcebook is the first compendium of AI policy, providing essential information for policy makers, researchers, journalists, and the public. Edited by Marc Rotenberg, the AI Policy Sourcebook includes global AI frameworks, such as the OECD AI Principles and the Universal Guidelines for AI. The Sourcebook also includes materials from the European Union and the Council of Europe, national AI initiatives, as well as recommendations from professional societies, including the ACM and the IEEE.

The Exa.TrkX project has applied geometric learning concepts such as metric learning and graph neural networks to HEP particle tracking. Exa.TrkX's tracking pipeline groups detector measurements to form track candidates and filters them. The pipeline, originally developed using the TrackML dataset (a simulation of an LHC-inspired tracking detector), has been demonstrated on other detectors, including DUNE Liquid Argon TPC and CMS High-Granularity Calorimeter. This paper documents new developments needed to study the physics and computing performance of the Exa.TrkX pipeline on the full TrackML dataset, a first step towards validating the pipeline using ATLAS and CMS data. The pipeline achieves tracking efficiency and purity similar to production tracking algorithms. Crucially for future HEP applications, the pipeline benefits significantly from GPU acceleration, and its computational requirements scale close to linearly with the number of particles in the event.

Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these and other data-driven policies are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and interpretability. This is especially true when such policies are used for public policy decision-making. For example, algorithmic pre-trial risk assessments, which serve as our motivating application, provide relatively simple, deterministic classification scores and recommendations to help judges make release decisions. Unfortunately, existing methods for policy learning are not applicable because they require existing policies to be stochastic rather than deterministic. We develop a robust optimization approach that partially identifies the expected utility of a policy, and then finds an optimal policy by minimizing the worst-case regret. The resulting policy is conservative but has a statistical safety guarantee, allowing the policy-maker to limit the probability of producing a worse outcome than the existing policy. We extend this approach to common and important settings where humans make decisions with the aid of algorithmic recommendations. Lastly, we apply the proposed methodology to a unique field experiment on pre-trial risk assessments. We derive new classification and recommendation rules that retain the transparency and interpretability of the existing risk assessment instrument while potentially leading to better overall outcomes at a lower cost.

Storytelling, whether via fables, news reports, documentaries, or memoirs, can be thought of as the communication of interesting and related events that, taken together, form a concrete process. It is desirable to extract the event chains that represent such processes. However, this extraction remains a challenging problem. We posit that this is due to the nature of the texts from which chains are discovered. Natural language text interleaves a narrative of concrete, salient events with background information, contextualization, opinion, and other elements that are important for a variety of necessary discourse and pragmatics acts but are not part of the principal chain of events being communicated. We introduce methods for extracting this principal chain from natural language text, by filtering away non-salient events and supportive sentences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods at isolating critical event chains by comparing their effect on downstream tasks. We show that by pre-training large language models on our extracted chains, we obtain improvements in two tasks that benefit from a clear understanding of event chains: narrative prediction and event-based temporal question answering. The demonstrated improvements and ablative studies confirm that our extraction method isolates critical event chains.

In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-stage optimization method for planning complex missions for heterogeneous multi-robot teams. This class of problems involves tasks that can be executed in different ways and are associated with cross-schedule dependencies that constrain the schedules of the different robots in the system. The proposed approach involves a multi-objective heuristic search of the mission, represented as a hierarchical tree that defines the mission goal. This procedure outputs several favorable ways to fulfill the mission, which directly feed into the next stage of the method. We propose a distributed metaheuristic based on evolutionary computation to allocate tasks and generate schedules for the set of chosen decompositions. The method is evaluated in a simulation setup of an automated greenhouse use case, where we demonstrate the method's ability to adapt the planning strategy depending on the available robots and the given optimization criteria.

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) combined with the extensive amount of data generated by today's clinical systems, has led to the development of imaging AI solutions across the whole value chain of medical imaging, including image reconstruction, medical image segmentation, image-based diagnosis and treatment planning. Notwithstanding the successes and future potential of AI in medical imaging, many stakeholders are concerned of the potential risks and ethical implications of imaging AI solutions, which are perceived as complex, opaque, and difficult to comprehend, utilise, and trust in critical clinical applications. Despite these concerns and risks, there are currently no concrete guidelines and best practices for guiding future AI developments in medical imaging towards increased trust, safety and adoption. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a careful selection of guiding principles drawn from the accumulated experiences, consensus, and best practices from five large European projects on AI in Health Imaging. These guiding principles are named FUTURE-AI and its building blocks consist of (i) Fairness, (ii) Universality, (iii) Traceability, (iv) Usability, (v) Robustness and (vi) Explainability. In a step-by-step approach, these guidelines are further translated into a framework of concrete recommendations for specifying, developing, evaluating, and deploying technically, clinically and ethically trustworthy AI solutions into clinical practice.

We develop a subseasonal forecasting toolkit of simple learned benchmark models that outperform both operational practice and state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning methods. Our new models include (a) Climatology++, an adaptive alternative to climatology that, for precipitation, is 9% more accurate and 250% more skillful than the United States operational Climate Forecasting System (CFSv2); (b) CFSv2++, a learned CFSv2 correction that improves temperature and precipitation accuracy by 7-8% and skill by 50-275%; and (c) Persistence++, an augmented persistence model that combines CFSv2 forecasts with lagged measurements to improve temperature and precipitation accuracy by 6-9% and skill by 40-130%. Across the contiguous U.S., our Climatology++, CFSv2++, and Persistence++ toolkit consistently outperforms standard meteorological baselines, state-of-the-art machine and deep learning methods, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ensemble. Overall, we find that augmenting traditional forecasting approaches with learned enhancements yields an effective and computationally inexpensive strategy for building the next generation of subseasonal forecasting benchmarks.

As artificial intelligence enters the legal space, it is essential to recognize biases in legal data and ensure that they are not replicated and reinforced with legal technology [7, 13, 18]. Furthermore, understanding biases in legal data and developing discrimination-free technology could help the legal space to become fairer and more widely accessible. We typically find two types of biases in legal data: First, representation biases, i.e., certain social groups are over-or underrepresented in a data set. Second, sentencing disparities, i.e., the outcome of legal proceedings for similar cases varies across social groups. Representation biases may reflect disparities in policing (arrest rates) or in offense rates.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2020 Fall Symposium Series was held virtually from November 11-14, 2020, and was collocated with three symposia postponed from March 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. There were five symposia in the fall program: AI for Social Good, Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector, Conceptual Abstraction and Analogy in Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Physics-Guided AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery, and Trust and Explainability in Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction. Additionally, there were three symposia delayed from spring: AI Welcomes Systems Engineering: Towards the Science of Interdependence for Autonomous Human-Machine Teams, Deep Models and Artificial Intelligence for Defense Applications: Potentials, Theories, Practices, Tools, and Risks, and Towards Responsible AI in Surveillance, Media, and Security through Licensing. Recent developments in big data and computational power are revolutionizing several domains, opening up new opportunities and challenges. In this symposium, we highlighted two specific themes, namely humanitarian relief, and healthcare, where AI could be used for social good to achieve the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) in those areas, which touch every aspect of human, social, and economic development. The talks at the symposium were focused on identifying the critical needs and pathways for responsible AI solutions to achieve SDGs, which demand holistic thinking on optimizing the trade-off between automation benefits and their potential side-effects, especially in a year that has upended societies globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Riding on the success of the AI for Social Good symposium that was held in Washington, DC, in November 2019, we organized the 2020 version of the symposium.