In a recent New Yorker article about the Capitol siege, Ronan Farrow described how investigators used a bevy of online data and facial recognition technology to confirm the identity of Larry Rendall Brock Jr., an Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran from Texas. Brock was photographed inside the Capitol carrying zip ties, presumably to be used to restrain someone. Brock was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts.) Even as they stormed the Capitol, many rioters stopped to pose for photos and give excited interviews on livestream. Each photo uploaded, message posted, and stream shared created a torrent of data for police, researchers, activists, and journalists to archive and analyze.

Late last year, San Francisco face-recognition startup Everalbum won a $2 million contract with the Air Force to provide "AI-driven access control." Monday, another arm of the US government dealt the company a setback. The Federal Trade Commission said Everalbum had agreed to settle charges that it had applied face-recognition technology to images uploaded to a photo app without users' permission and retained them after telling users they would be deleted. The startup used millions of the photos to develop technology offered to government agencies and other customers under the brand Paravision. Paravision, as the company is now known, agreed to delete the data collected inappropriately.

From smartphones to TVs, Sony is known for its impressive range of electronic products. Now, the tech giant is turning its attention to drones, launching a new spin-off brand called Airpeak. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone that can be equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system. Sony hopes its new drones will support the creativity of video creators, and is even seeking collaborators to participate in the Airpeak project. Airpeak is said to be the industry's smallest class of drone equipped with Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera system The Airpeak model shown off at CES features a quadcopter design, with two landing gear extensions that retract upwards during flight.

The Defense Ministry will begin research on ways to ward off drone attacks by using vehicle-mounted laser, according to informed sources. By mounting laser equipment on vehicles, the ministry aims to raise the mobility of the system. The ministry included ¥2.8 billion in research spending in its budget for fiscal 2021. It aims to establish related technology as early as fiscal 2024 and put it into practical use at an early date. In fiscal 2018, the ministry started research on using high-energy laser to destroy drones.

We investigate how to solve the cross-corpus news recommendation for unseen users in the future. This is a problem where traditional content-based recommendation techniques often fail. Luckily, in real-world recommendation services, some publisher (e.g., Daily news) may have accumulated a large corpus with lots of consumers which can be used for a newly deployed publisher (e.g., Political news). To take advantage of the existing corpus, we propose a transfer learning model (dubbed as TrNews) for news recommendation to transfer the knowledge from a source corpus to a target corpus. To tackle the heterogeneity of different user interests and of different word distributions across corpora, we design a translator-based transfer-learning strategy to learn a representation mapping between source and target corpora. The learned translator can be used to generate representations for unseen users in the future. We show through experiments on real-world datasets that TrNews is better than various baselines in terms of four metrics. We also show that our translator is effective among existing transfer strategies.

We present a scalable tree search planning algorithm for large multi-agent sequential decision problems that require dynamic collaboration. Teams of agents need to coordinate decisions in many domains, but naive approaches fail due to the exponential growth of the joint action space with the number of agents. We circumvent this complexity through an anytime approach that allows us to trade computation for approximation quality and also dynamically coordinate actions. Our algorithm comprises three elements: online planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), factored representations of local agent interactions with coordination graphs, and the iterative Max-Plus method for joint action selection. We evaluate our approach on the benchmark SysAdmin domain with static coordination graphs and achieve comparable performance with much lower computation cost than our MCTS baselines. We also introduce a multi-drone delivery domain with dynamic, i.e., state-dependent coordination graphs, and demonstrate how our approach scales to large problems on this domain that are intractable for other MCTS methods. We provide an open-source implementation of our algorithm at https://github.com/JuliaPOMDP/FactoredValueMCTS.jl.

As AI-powered systems increasingly mediate consequential decision-making, their explainability is critical for end-users to take informed and accountable actions. Explanations in human-human interactions are socially-situated. AI systems are often socio-organizationally embedded. However, Explainable AI (XAI) approaches have been predominantly algorithm-centered. We take a developmental step towards socially-situated XAI by introducing and exploring Social Transparency (ST), a sociotechnically informed perspective that incorporates the socio-organizational context into explaining AI-mediated decision-making. To explore ST conceptually, we conducted interviews with 29 AI users and practitioners grounded in a speculative design scenario. We suggested constitutive design elements of ST and developed a conceptual framework to unpack ST's effect and implications at the technical, decision-making, and organizational level. The framework showcases how ST can potentially calibrate trust in AI, improve decision-making, facilitate organizational collective actions, and cultivate holistic explainability. Our work contributes to the discourse of Human-Centered XAI by expanding the design space of XAI.

This paper presents a computational evolutionary game model to study and understand fraud dynamics in the consumption tax system. Players are cooperators if they correctly declare their value added tax (VAT), and are defectors otherwise. Each player's payoff is influenced by the amount evaded and the subjective probability of being inspected by tax authorities. Since transactions between companies must be declared by both the buyer and seller, a strategy adopted by one influences the other's payoff. We study the model with a well-mixed population and different scale-free networks. Model parameters were calibrated using real-world data of VAT declarations by businesses registered in the Canary Islands region of Spain. We analyzed several scenarios of audit probabilities for high and low transactions and their prevalence in the population, as well as social rewards and penalties to find the most efficient policy to increase the proportion of cooperators. Two major insights were found. First, increasing the subjective audit probability for low transactions is more efficient than increasing this probability for high transactions. Second, favoring social rewards for cooperators or alternative penalties for defectors can be effective policies, but their success depends on the distribution of the audit probability for low and high transactions.

In the current era, people and society have grown increasingly reliant on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. AI has the potential to drive us towards a future in which all of humanity flourishes. It also comes with substantial risks for oppression and calamity. Discussions about whether we should (re)trust AI have repeatedly emerged in recent years and in many quarters, including industry, academia, health care, services, and so on. Technologists and AI researchers have a responsibility to develop trustworthy AI systems. They have responded with great efforts of designing more responsible AI algorithms. However, existing technical solutions are narrow in scope and have been primarily directed towards algorithms for scoring or classification tasks, with an emphasis on fairness and unwanted bias. To build long-lasting trust between AI and human beings, we argue that the key is to think beyond algorithmic fairness and connect major aspects of AI that potentially cause AI's indifferent behavior. In this survey, we provide a systematic framework of Socially Responsible AI Algorithms that aims to examine the subjects of AI indifference and the need for socially responsible AI algorithms, define the objectives, and introduce the means by which we may achieve these objectives. We further discuss how to leverage this framework to improve societal well-being through protection, information, and prevention/mitigation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been increasingly used in the implementation of advanced Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). Research demonstrated the potential usefulness of AI-powered CDSS (AI-CDSS) in clinical decision making scenarios. However, post-adoption user perception and experience remain understudied, especially in developing countries. Through observations and interviews with 22 clinicians from 6 rural clinics in China, this paper reports the various tensions between the design of an AI-CDSS system ("Brilliant Doctor") and the rural clinical context, such as the misalignment with local context and workflow, the technical limitations and usability barriers, as well as issues related to transparency and trustworthiness of AI-CDSS. Despite these tensions, all participants expressed positive attitudes toward the future of AI-CDSS, especially acting as "a doctor's AI assistant" to realize a Human-AI Collaboration future in clinical settings. Finally we draw on our findings to discuss implications for designing AI-CDSS interventions for rural clinical contexts in developing countries.