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The Army working on a battlefield AI 'teammate' for soldiers – Tech Check News

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Members of Carnegie Mellon's research team set up equipment for data collection event at Fort Hunter Liggett, Jan 13, for the ATC-MCAS system. The Army is working to deploy artificial intelligence on the battlefield to detect and classify real-time threats for soldiers in the years to come.


AI startup digs up business opportunity in aging water pipes in Japan and elsewhere

The Japan Times

When a fifth of the people living in the city of Wakayama faced a three-day water stoppage last month to fix a 60-year-old pipe network, they rushed to get ready, only to learn that the repairs could be made without a shutdown. Some 3,000 complaints were filed with city officials, who said they had no way of knowing until they dug up the pipes. Cities across the world are facing similar challenges in dealing with deteriorating infrastructure because of a lack of precision in where and when to fix aging water pipelines. Now, some cash-strapped cities are embracing new technology to make water repairs more efficient, with the goal of cutting construction costs and lowering utility bills. The need is pressing, as global climate change, with an increasing frequency of floods, droughts and warmer weather, is overloading water systems.


Dana Perino on impeachment: Trump is like 'Pac-Man,' getting 'bigger and stronger'

FOX News

Democrats say they'll keep investigating Trump; reaction and analysis on'The Five.' The hosts of "The Five" dismissed Sunday's claim by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., that Democrats "proved" their case against the president in the Senate impeachment trial and he would not have done anything differently. "Look, there's nothing that I can see that we could have done differently, because as the senators have already admitted, we've proved our case," Schiff said on CBS News' "Face The Nation." "[Schiff] has to say that, but I'm sure he regrets it," co-host Jesse Watters said. "I mean, if they had done it properly and not started it out in a secret basement with no lawyers present, maybe they would have gone differently. Maybe they would have build a stronger case. Maybe they would have gone to a judge to compel witness testimony and maybe delivered. "They could have argued in a more convincing fashion, but they wanted to do a rush job to fit a political calendar," Watters added. "They didn't really care about making a really strong constitutional case so they can continue to investigate the president." Co-host Dana Perino called Trump's eventual acquittal a "loss" for Democrats and said it only emboldens the president. "Acquittal is a loss," Perino said. "And then whoever wins in a fight like this gets to write the history." "President Trump is like... 'Pac-Man,'" Perino said, comparing him to the popular video game character from the 1980s. "You go along, ding, ding, ding, and then you eat the fruit and you get bigger and stronger and you get another man, like, that's President Trump." Co-host Greg Gutfeld predicted that Democrats will keep the proceedings "running," with congressional investigations becoming "as mundane as living next to an airport "You know, we used to think planes were interesting," he said.


Accelerating Psychometric Screening Tests With Bayesian Active Differential Selection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Classical methods for psychometric function estimation either require excessive measurements or produce only a low-resolution approximation of the target psychometric function. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for rapid screening for a change in the psychometric function estimation of a given patient. We use Bayesian active model selection to perform an automated pure-tone audiogram test with the goal of quickly finding if the current audiogram will be different from a previous audiogram. We validate our approach using audiometric data from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health NIOSH. Initial results show that with a few tones we can detect if the patient's audiometric function has changed between the two test sessions with high confidence.


Whose Side are Ethics Codes On? Power, Responsibility and the Social Good

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The moral authority of ethics codes stems from an assumption that they serve a unified society, yet this ignores the political aspects of any shared resource. The sociologist Howard S. Becker challenged researchers to clarify their power and responsibility in the classic essay: Whose Side Are We On. Building on Becker's hierarchy of credibility, we report on a critical discourse analysis of data ethics codes and emerging conceptualizations of beneficence, or the "social good", of data technology. The analysis revealed that ethics codes from corporations and professional associations conflated consumers with society and were largely silent on agency. Interviews with community organizers about social change in the digital era supplement the analysis, surfacing the limits of technical solutions to concerns of marginalized communities. Given evidence that highlights the gulf between the documents and lived experiences, we argue that ethics codes that elevate consumers may simultaneously subordinate the needs of vulnerable populations. Understanding contested digital resources is central to the emerging field of public interest technology. We introduce the concept of digital differential vulnerability to explain disproportionate exposures to harm within data technology and suggest recommendations for future ethics codes.


Minimax Defense against Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

State-of-the-art adversarial attacks are aimed at neural network classifiers. By default, neural networks use gradient descent to minimize their loss function. The gradient of a classifier's loss function is used by gradient-based adversarial attacks to generate adversarially perturbed images. We pose the question whether another type of optimization could give neural network classifiers an edge. Here, we introduce a novel approach that uses minimax optimization to foil gradient-based adversarial attacks. Our minimax classifier is the discriminator of a generative adversarial network (GAN) that plays a minimax game with the GAN generator. In addition, our GAN generator projects all points onto a manifold that is different from the original manifold since the original manifold might be the cause of adversarial attacks. To measure the performance of our minimax defense, we use adversarial attacks - Carlini Wagner (CW), DeepFool, Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) - on three datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10 and German Traffic Sign (TRAFFIC). Against CW attacks, our minimax defense achieves 98.07% (MNIST-default 98.93%), 73.90% (CIFAR-10-default 83.14%) and 94.54% (TRAFFIC-default 96.97%). Against DeepFool attacks, our minimax defense achieves 98.87% (MNIST), 76.61% (CIFAR-10) and 94.57% (TRAFFIC). Against FGSM attacks, we achieve 97.01% (MNIST), 76.79% (CIFAR-10) and 81.41% (TRAFFIC). Our Minimax adversarial approach presents a significant shift in defense strategy for neural network classifiers.


ALPINE: Active Link Prediction using Network Embedding

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Many real-world problems can be formalized as predicting links in a partially observed network. Examples include Facebook friendship suggestions, consumer-product recommendations, and the identification of hidden interactions between actors in a crime network. Several link prediction algorithms, notably those recently introduced using network embedding, are capable of doing this by just relying on the observed part of the network. Often, the link status of a node pair can be queried, which can be used as additional information by the link prediction algorithm. Unfortunately, such queries can be expensive or time-consuming, mandating the careful consideration of which node pairs to query. In this paper we estimate the improvement in link prediction accuracy after querying any particular node pair, to use in an active learning setup. Specifically, we propose ALPINE (Active Link Prediction usIng Network Embedding), the first method to achieve this for link prediction based on network embedding. To this end, we generalized the notion of V -optimality from experimental design to this setting, as well as more basic active learning heuristics originally developed in standard classification settings. Empirical results on real data show that ALPINE is scalable, and boosts link prediction accuracy with far fewer queries.


UB receives $800,000 NSF/Amazon grant to improve AI fairness in foster care - University at Buffalo

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The National Science Foundation and Amazon, the grant's joint funders, have partnered on a program called Fairness in Artificial Intelligence (FAI) that aims to address bias and build trustworthy computational systems that can contribute to solving the biggest challenges facing modern societies. Over the course of three years, the UB researchers will collaborate with the Hillside Family of Agencies (Rochester, N.Y.), one of the oldest family and youth nonprofit human services organizations in the country, and a youth advisory council made up of individuals who have recently aged out of foster care, to develop the tool. They will also consult with national experts across specializations to inform this complex work. Researchers will use data from the Administration on Children and Families' (ACF) federally mandated National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) and input from collaborators to inform their predictive model. Each state participates in NYTD to report the experiences and services used by youth in foster care.


Could Star Trek's DATA Be a Patent Inventor?

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Most of us know that DATA, the beloved android from Star Trek, The Next Generation, is an artificial intelligence (AI) life form from the distant future with a high capacity to problem solve and innovate. But, if DATA were present today and invented a new technology, could he be an inventor on a patent for his invention? The question of whether AI can legally be an inventor on a patent was recently addressed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). The same question is still being evaluated by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) along with solicitation for comments to the patent community. A group from the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom (UK), recently challenged the definition of "inventor" in Europe and the United States by filing two separate patent applications designating an AI entity as an inventor.


New face of the £50 note is revealed

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Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England's £50 note. He is celebrated for his code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War Two. The £50 note will be the last of the Bank of England collection to switch from paper to polymer when it enters circulation by the end of 2021. The note was once described as the "currency of corrupt elites" and is the least used in daily transactions. However, there are still 344 million £50 notes in circulation, with a combined value of £17.2bn, according to the Bank of England's banknote circulation figures.