Government
Hierarchical Multi-head Attentive Network for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection
To detect fake news, researchers proposed to use The proliferation of biased news, misleading linguistics and textual content (Castillo et al., 2011; claims, disinformation and fake news has caused Zhao et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2015). Since textual heightened negative effects on modern society in claims are usually deliberately written to deceive various domains ranging from politics, economics readers, it is hard to detect fake news by solely to public health. A recent study showed that maliciously relying on the content claims. Therefore, multiple fabricated and partisan stories possibly works utilized other signals such as temporal caused citizens' misperception about political candidates spreading patterns (Liu and Wu, 2018), network (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017) during the structures (Wu and Liu, 2018; Vo and Lee, 2018; 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In economics, the Shu et al., 2020) and users' feedbacks (Vo and spread of fake news has manipulated stock price Lee, 2019; Shu et al., 2019; Vo and Lee, 2020a).
Who Is Andy Jassy, the Amazon Exec Taking Over Jeff Bezos' Job?
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Tuesday that he will step down as CEO later this year and become executive chairman of the company's board. He described the move in a letter to employees as an opportunity for him to focus on "new products and early initiatives" and his various pet projects like his space-flight company Blue Origin and the Washington Post. In Bezo's stead, longtime Amazon executive Andy Jassy will become the new CEO. So, who exactly is that guy? Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, three years after its founding.
Evinced, a Web Accessibility Startup, Raises $17 Million
The round closes as customers and disability activists increasingly pressure companies to make the web accessible to all users, including people who are blind and use screen readers, and those with motor difficulties who rely on a simplified keyboard setup. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 didn't explicitly address the digital space. But plaintiffs have in recent years interpreted the legislation to successfully sue corporations for failing to make their websites, apps and other software accessible to all. Get weekly insights into the ways companies optimize data, technology and design to drive success with their customers and employees. Guillermo Robles, who is blind, in 2016 sued Domino's Pizza LLC after he was unable to order from the chain online using his screen-reading software.
Problematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits
While algorithm audits are growing rapidly in commonality and public importance, relatively little scholarly work has gone toward synthesizing prior work and strategizing future research in the area. This systematic literature review aims to do just that, following PRISMA guidelines in a review of over 500 English articles that yielded 62 algorithm audit studies. The studies are synthesized and organized primarily by behavior (discrimination, distortion, exploitation, and misjudgement), with codes also provided for domain (e.g. search, vision, advertising, etc.), organization (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), and audit method (e.g. sock puppet, direct scrape, crowdsourcing, etc.). The review shows how previous audit studies have exposed public-facing algorithms exhibiting problematic behavior, such as search algorithms culpable of distortion and advertising algorithms culpable of discrimination. Based on the studies reviewed, it also suggests some behaviors (e.g. discrimination on the basis of intersectional identities), domains (e.g. advertising algorithms), methods (e.g. code auditing), and organizations (e.g. Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn) that call for future audit attention. The paper concludes by offering the common ingredients of successful audits, and discussing algorithm auditing in the context of broader research working toward algorithmic justice.
Self-Supervised Claim Identification for Automated Fact Checking
Pathak, Archita, Shaikh, Mohammad Abuzar, Srihari, Rohini
We propose a novel, attention-based self-supervised approach to identify "claim-worthy" sentences in a fake news article, an important first step in automated fact-checking. We leverage "aboutness" of headline and content using attention mechanism for this task. The identified claims can be used for downstream task of claim verification for which we are releasing a benchmark dataset of manually selected compelling articles with veracity labels and associated evidence. This work goes beyond stylistic analysis to identifying content that influences reader belief. Experiments with three datasets show the strength of our model. Data and code available at https://github.com/architapathak/Self-Supervised-ClaimIdentification
Variational Bayes survival analysis for unemployment modelling
Boลกkoski, Pavle, Perne, Matija, Rameลกa, Martina, Boshkoska, Biljana Mileva
Mathematical modelling of unemployment dynamics attempts to predict the probability of a job seeker finding a job as a function of time. This is typically achieved by using information in unemployment records. These records are right censored, making survival analysis a suitable approach for parameter estimation. The proposed model uses a deep artificial neural network (ANN) as a non-linear hazard function. Through embedding, high-cardinality categorical features are analysed efficiently. The posterior distribution of the ANN parameters are estimated using a variational Bayes method. The model is evaluated on a time-to-employment data set spanning from 2011 to 2020 provided by the Slovenian public employment service. It is used to determine the employment probability over time for each individual on the record. Similar models could be applied to other questions with multi-dimensional, high-cardinality categorical data including censored records. Such data is often encountered in personal records, for example in medical records.
A Bayesian Neural Network based on Dropout Regulation
Theobald, Claire, Pennerath, Frรฉdรฉric, Conan-Guez, Brieuc, Couceiro, Miguel, Napoli, Amedeo
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN) have recently emerged in the Deep Learning world for dealing with uncertainty estimation in classification tasks, and are used in many application domains such as astrophysics, autonomous driving...BNN assume a prior over the weights of a neural network instead of point estimates, enabling in this way the estimation of both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty of the model prediction.Moreover, a particular type of BNN, namely MC Dropout, assumes a Bernoulli distribution on the weights by using Dropout.Several attempts to optimize the dropout rate exist, e.g. using a variational approach.In this paper, we present a new method called "Dropout Regulation" (DR), which consists of automatically adjusting the dropout rate during training using a controller as used in automation.DR allows for a precise estimation of the uncertainty which is comparable to the state-of-the-art while remaining simple to implement.
Pitfalls of Static Language Modelling
Lazaridou, Angeliki, Kuncoro, Adhiguna, Gribovskaya, Elena, Agrawal, Devang, Liska, Adam, Terzi, Tayfun, Gimenez, Mai, d'Autume, Cyprien de Masson, Ruder, Sebastian, Yogatama, Dani, Cao, Kris, Kocisky, Tomas, Young, Susannah, Blunsom, Phil
Our world is open-ended, non-stationary and constantly evolving; thus what we talk about and how we talk about it changes over time. This inherent dynamic nature of language comes in stark contrast to the current static language modelling paradigm, which constructs training and evaluation sets from overlapping time periods. Despite recent progress, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art Transformer models perform worse in the realistic setup of predicting future utterances from beyond their training period -- a consistent pattern across three datasets from two domains. We find that, while increasing model size alone -- a key driver behind recent progress -- does not provide a solution for the temporal generalization problem, having models that continually update their knowledge with new information can indeed slow down the degradation over time. Hence, given the compilation of ever-larger language modelling training datasets, combined with the growing list of language-model-based NLP applications that require up-to-date knowledge about the world, we argue that now is the right time to rethink our static language modelling evaluation protocol, and develop adaptive language models that can remain up-to-date with respect to our ever-changing and non-stationary world.
NASA astronauts complete multi-year project to upgrade batteries on the ISS
When NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover went on a spacewalk on February 1st, they wrapped up a multi-year effort to replace the aging nickel hydrogen batteries on the ISS with new lithium-ion models. The International Space Station Program approved the development of lithium-ion batteries to replace the station's aging power storage system back in 2011. Battery production started in 2014, and the first lithium--ion replacements flew to the station aboard JAXA's Kounotori 6 resupply flight in December 2016. Now, four years after that flight and 14 spacewalks with 13 different astronauts later, the upgrade is finally complete. Ground controllers used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to position some of the batteries for installation.