There has been great interest in using tools from dynamical systems and numerical analysis of differential equations to understand and construct new optimization methods. In particular, recently a new paradigm has emerged that applies ideas from mechanics and geometric integration to obtain accelerated optimization methods on Euclidean spaces. This has important consequences given that accelerated methods are the workhorses behind many machine learning applications. In this paper we build upon these advances and propose a framework for dissipative and constrained Hamiltonian systems that is suitable for solving optimization problems on arbitrary smooth manifolds. Importantly, this allows us to leverage the well-established theory of symplectic integration to derive "rate-matching" dissipative integrators. This brings a new perspective to optimization on manifolds whereby convergence guarantees follow by construction from classical arguments in symplectic geometry and backward error analysis. Moreover, we construct two dissipative generalizations of leapfrog that are straightforward to implement: one for Lie groups and homogeneous spaces, that relies on the tractable geodesic flow or a retraction thereof, and the other for constrained submanifolds that is based on a dissipative generalization of the famous RATTLE integrator.

We present a novel global compression framework for deep neural networks that automatically analyzes each layer to identify the optimal per-layer compression ratio, while simultaneously achieving the desired overall compression. Our algorithm hinges on the idea of compressing each convolutional (or fully-connected) layer by slicing its channels into multiple groups and decomposing each group via low-rank decomposition. At the core of our algorithm is the derivation of layer-wise error bounds from the Eckart Young Mirsky theorem. We then leverage these bounds to frame the compression problem as an optimization problem where we wish to minimize the maximum compression error across layers and propose an efficient algorithm towards a solution. Our experiments indicate that our method outperforms existing low-rank compression approaches across a wide range of networks and data sets. We believe that our results open up new avenues for future research into the global performance-size trade-offs of modern neural networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucaslie/torchprune.

Malware detection and analysis are active research subjects in cybersecurity over the last years. Indeed, the development of obfuscation techniques, as packing, for example, requires special attention to detect recent variants of malware. The usual detection methods do not necessarily provide tools to interpret the results. Therefore, we propose a model based on the transformation of binary files into grayscale image, which achieves an accuracy rate of 88%. Furthermore, the proposed model can determine if a sample is packed or encrypted with a precision of 85%. It allows us to analyze results and act appropriately. Also, by applying attention mechanisms on detection models, we have the possibility to identify which part of the files looks suspicious. This kind of tool should be very useful for data analysts, it compensates for the lack of interpretability of the common detection models, and it can help to understand why some malicious files are undetected.

Over the last several years, end-to-end neural conversational agents have vastly improved in their ability to carry a chit-chat conversation with humans. However, these models are often trained on large datasets from the internet, and as a result, may learn undesirable behaviors from this data, such as toxic or otherwise harmful language. Researchers must thus wrestle with the issue of how and when to release these models. In this paper, we survey the problem landscape for safety for end-to-end conversational AI and discuss recent and related work. We highlight tensions between values, potential positive impact and potential harms, and provide a framework for making decisions about whether and how to release these models, following the tenets of value-sensitive design. We additionally provide a suite of tools to enable researchers to make better-informed decisions about training and releasing end-to-end conversational AI models.

Wikidata has been increasingly adopted by many communities for a wide variety of applications, which demand high-quality knowledge to deliver successful results. In this paper, we develop a framework to detect and analyze low-quality statements in Wikidata by shedding light on the current practices exercised by the community. We explore three indicators of data quality in Wikidata, based on: 1) community consensus on the currently recorded knowledge, assuming that statements that have been removed and not added back are implicitly agreed to be of low quality; 2) statements that have been deprecated; and 3) constraint violations in the data. We combine these indicators to detect low-quality statements, revealing challenges with duplicate entities, missing triples, violated type rules, and taxonomic distinctions. Our findings complement ongoing efforts by the Wikidata community to improve data quality, aiming to make it easier for users and editors to find and correct mistakes.

Google has always been the master of AI and today, the CEO of Google himself stated in an interview with BBC that Artificial Intelligence is man's greatest discovery. For the leader of the technology giant," in the next 25 years artificial intelligence and quantum computing will completely revolutionize our lives" he stated. Pichai compared AI to other discoveries like fire and electricity, explaining the change it will bring will be just as profound. Artificial intelligence is indeed a technology that leverages human cognitive processes in machines. Google and Amazon already are making use of it to carry out certain processes because it is faster than humans and makes fewer mistakes.

From the first time it was mysteriously referenced in public, DICE developers have repeatedly described Battlefield Portal, the newly-revealed creative mode for the upcoming "Battlefield 2042" as a "love letter" to their community. During the hour-long EA Play livestream Thursday, that letter was unsealed. Its contents showcased a new mode in which players can use a free tool to customize multiplayer matches in a plethora of detailed ways to craft and share unique, playable experiences using assets from "Battlefield 2042" and several past installments of the franchise. Now, DICE's developers are hoping the community will embrace its overtures and go on to make lots and lots of beautiful Battlefield babies, so to speak.

Scientists have finally been able to understand the crust underneath the surface of Mars. The research represents the first time that humanity has been able to start mapping the interior of another planet beyond our own Earth. The new research relied on data taken from Nasa's InSight mission, which has been looking for Marsquakes that reverberate across its surface. Using information about those quakes, researchers are able to understand what might be lurking beneath the Martian surface. Beneath the InSight landing site, the crust is either approximately 20 kilometres or 39 kilometres thick, according to an international research team led by geophysicist Dr Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun at the University of Cologne's Institute of Geology and Mineralogy and Dr Mark Panning at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

SCI COMMUN### Astronomy The Hubble Space Telescope ended a monthlong hiatus on 16 July when operators successfully switched a failed control system to backup devices. The trouble started on 13 June when Hubble's payload computer, which controls its instruments, halted, and the main spacecraft computer put all the astronomical instruments in safe mode. Operators were unable to restart the payload computer, and switching memory modules—which they initially thought were at fault—didn't wake the telescope. They tested and ruled out problems in other devices before zeroing in on a power control unit. NASA called in retired staff to help devise a fix for the 31-year-old telescope, which involved remotely switching to a spare power control unit and other backup hardware for managing the instruments and their data. The agency practiced and checked the repair on the ground for 2 weeks before executing it. After powering up all the hardware, Hubble returned to work on 17 July, and has already beamed back new images. NASA says it expects Hubble to continue for many years. ### Conservation A new automated alert system can help veterinarians get a jump on investigating disease outbreaks and disasters afflicting wildlife. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues used a machine learning algorithm to scan case reports of sick and dead wildlife submitted to a database by wildlife clinics and rehabilitation centers in the United States and other countries. The researchers used data from 3081 reports filed from California to train the algorithm to detect patterns of species suffering common symptoms. The software is designed to identify unusual events in one of 12 clinical categories, such as mass starvation or an oil spill. The algorithm assigned the correct category to 83% of cases examined, including ones from an outbreak of neurological disease in California brown pelicans (above) and red-throated loons, the research team reported last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B . The system could help wildlife officials more quickly detect developing problems and confirm specific causes. ### Public health Reflecting another toll of the coronavirus pandemic, 23 million children missed routine vaccinations in 2020, the most since 2009 and 19% more than in 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF said last week. As many as 17 million didn't receive any childhood vaccine at all. The pandemic led to closures or cutbacks at vaccination clinics and lockdowns that prevented parents and their children from reaching them, the groups reported. In addition, 57 mass vaccination campaigns for non–COVID-19 diseases in 66 countries were postponed. Childhood vaccination rates decreased across all WHO regions, with the Southeast Asian and eastern Mediterranean regions particularly affected. In India, more than 3 million children missed a first dose of the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine, more than double the number in 2019. “We [are] leaving children at risk from devastating but preventable diseases like measles, polio, or meningitis,” says WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ### Climate policy As part of the run-up to the U.N. climate summit in November, the European Union and China announced last week plans to follow through on commitments to curb their carbon emissions. The European proposal, which must be approved by the bloc's member states, would steeply increase the price of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions; eliminate new gas-powered cars by 2035; require 38% of all energy to come from renewables by 2030, up from a previous goal of 32%; and impose tariffs on goods from countries that have not acted on climate change. (Democratic lawmakers in the United States proposed a similar tariff this week.) Meanwhile, China on 16 July launched a carbon trading scheme for power plants that instantly created the world's largest carbon market, triple the European Union's in size. China's plan incentivizes plants to lower CO2 emissions by allowing more efficient facilities to sell some of their reductions to less efficient ones. Although some observers call the plan weak because it covers a relatively small portion of China's emissions, it could be expanded to eventually incorporate three-fourths of the country's emissions from all sources. ### Public health When temperatures soar, workers and their employers need to take heed: Hot weather led to 20,000 more injuries annually in California between 2001 and 2018, according to a novel analysis of 11 million workers compensation claims. Economist Jisung Park at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues classified work-related injuries by ZIP code and looked up local temperatures on the day each was recorded. They found increases of between 5% and 15% in claims, depending on the temperature and occupation, compared with those filed on a typical cooler day, defined as a temperature of 16°C. Few were attributed directly to heat, but the injuries connected to higher temperatures—such as falls and mishandling equipment—may have resulted because the heat made workers woozy, the researchers reported to Congress last week and in a preprint on the SSRN server. But mitigation may be possible: Heat-related injury claims declined after 2005, when California began to require shade, water, and breaks for outdoor workers—in industries such as construction, utilities, and farming—whenever temperature exceeded 35°C. ### Research integrity Both the United Kingdom and the United States last week announced new high-level bodies to provide guidance on research integrity—but both lack the powers that many whistleblowers say are critical, such as independently investigating complaints of wrongdoing and pulling grant funding from institutions that fail to conduct misconduct probes properly. The umbrella funding body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) launched the Committee on Research Integrity, which plans to operate for 3 years and accelerate existing projects in this area. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) unveiled the Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust, which will have members from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. Unlike UKRI, NASEM does not fund researchers, so it cannot set policies on how to handle misconduct allegations. But it could promote integrity in other ways—for instance by pushing for a central repository for researchers to report their financial conflicts of interest, says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences and an ex officio member of the new panel. ### Microbiology Sifting through DNA in the mud of her backyard, a geomicrobiologist discovered what may be the longest known extrachromosomal sequence, which includes genes from a variety of microbes—prompting her son to propose naming it after Star Trek 's Borg, cybernetic aliens that assimilate humans. Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, was searching for viruses that infect archaea, a type of microbe often found in places devoid of oxygen. The 1-million-base-pair strand of DNA contains genes known to help archaea metabolize methane, suggesting the fragment might exist inside the microbes but outside their normal chromosome, the research team wrote in a preprint posted on 10 July on the bioRxiv server. Scanning a public microbial DNA database, the authors identified 23 possible Borgs, with many of the same characteristics, in other U.S. locations. The Borgs' role remains murky, but they may provide another example of DNA that can hop between an organism's chromosomes or between organisms, helping species adapt to changes in their environment.

A lawsuit filed by the state of California on Wednesday alleges sexual harassment, gender discrimination and violations of the state's equal pay law at the video game giant Activision Blizzard. A lawsuit filed by the state of California on Wednesday alleges sexual harassment, gender discrimination and violations of the state's equal pay law at the video game giant Activision Blizzard. The video game studio behind the hit franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush is facing a civil lawsuit in California over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and potential violations of the state's equal pay law. A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. "fostered a sexist culture" where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges.