Law
'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO?
'Palantir is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of him' Alex Karp. 'Palantir is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of him' Alex Karp. 'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO? His company is potentially creating the ultimate state surveillance tool, and Karp has recently been on a striking political and philosophical journey. I n a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was "the most important software company in America and therefore in the world". He may well be right.
Chance of more showers in L.A., with a new storm set to hit Thursday
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Chance of more showers in L.A., with a new storm set to hit Thursday A driver navigates a flooded street during a storm Monday in Santa Barbara. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Showers could linger in Los Angeles on Tuesday following four straight days of rain -- and even more rain is likely on Thursday and Friday.
Ex-Harvard president Larry Summers steps back from public role after Epstein email release
Former Harvard president Larry Summers has said he will step back from public commitments after his emails with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were made public. I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognise the pain they have caused, he said in a statement to CBS News, the BBC's US partner. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. Emails released by Congress last week show Summers, a former US treasury secretary, communicated with Epstein until the day before the paedophile's 2019 arrest for sex trafficking minors. On Tuesday, House members are expected to vote on releasing all files related to the late sex offender.
AI Fairness Beyond Complete Demographics: Current Achievements and Future Directions
Wang, Zichong, Yin, Zhipeng, Yap, Roland H. C., Zhang, Wenbin
Fairness in artificial intelligence (AI) has become a growing concern due to discriminatory outcomes in AI-based decision-making systems. While various methods have been proposed to mitigate bias, most rely on complete demographic information, an assumption often impractical due to legal constraints and the risk of reinforcing discrimination. This survey examines fairness in AI when demographics are incomplete, addressing the gap between traditional approaches and real-world challenges. We introduce a novel taxonomy of fairness notions in this setting, clarifying their relationships and distinctions. Additionally, we summarize existing techniques that promote fairness beyond complete demographics and highlight open research questions to encourage further progress in the field.
Asymptotic analysis of cooperative censoring policies in sensor networks
Fernandez-Bes, Jesus, Arroyo-Valles, Rocรญo, Cid-Sueiro, Jesรบs
The problem of cooperative data censoring in battery-powered multihop sensor networks is analyzed in this paper. We are interested in scenarios where nodes generate messages (which are related to the sensor measurements) that can be graded with some importance value. Less important messages can be censored in order to save energy for later communications. The problem is modeled using a joint Markov Decision Process of the whole network dynamics, and a theoretically optimal censoring policy, which maximizes a long-term reward, is found. Though the optimal censoring rules are computationally prohibitive, our analysis suggests that, under some conditions, they can be approximated by a finite collection of constant-threshold rules. A centralized algorithm for the computation of these thresholds is proposed. The experimental simulations show that cooperative censoring policies are energy-efficient, and outperform other non-cooperative schemes.
Aspect-Level Obfuscated Sentiment in Thai Financial Disclosures and Its Impact on Abnormal Returns
Rutherford, Attapol T., Chueykamhang, Sirisak, Bunditlurdruk, Thachaparn, Angsuwichitkul, Nanthicha
Understanding sentiment in financial documents is crucial for gaining insights into market behavior. These reports often contain obfuscated language designed to present a positive or neutral outlook, even when underlying conditions may be less favorable. This paper presents a novel approach using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to decode obfuscated sentiment in Thai financial annual reports. We develop specific guidelines for annotating obfuscated sentiment in these texts and annotate more than one hundred financial reports. We then benchmark various text classification models on this annotated dataset, demonstrating strong performance in sentiment classification. Additionally, we conduct an event study to evaluate the real-world implications of our sentiment analysis on stock prices. Our results suggest that market reactions are selectively influenced by specific aspects within the reports. Our findings underscore the complexity of sentiment analysis in financial texts and highlight the importance of addressing obfuscated language to accurately assess market sentiment.
Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agent for Trustworthy Legal Question Answering in Judicial Forensics
Xi, Yueqing, Bai, Yifan, Luo, Huasen, Wen, Weiliang, Liu, Hui, Li, Haoliang
As artificial intelligence permeates judicial forensics, ensuring the veracity and traceability of legal question answering (QA) has become critical. Conventional large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, risking misleading guidance in legal consultation, while static knowledge bases struggle to keep pace with frequently updated statutes and case law. We present a hybrid legal QA agent tailored for judicial settings that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-model ensembling to deliver reliable, auditable, and continuously updatable counsel. The system prioritizes retrieval over generation: when a trusted legal repository yields relevant evidence, answers are produced via RAG; otherwise, multiple LLMs generate candidates that are scored by a specialized selector, with the top-ranked answer returned. High-quality outputs then undergo human review before being written back to the repository, enabling dynamic knowledge evolution and provenance tracking. Experiments on the Law\_QA dataset show that our hybrid approach significantly outperforms both a single-model baseline and a vanilla RAG pipeline on F1, ROUGE-L, and an LLM-as-a-Judge metric. Ablations confirm the complementary contributions of retrieval prioritization, model ensembling, and the human-in-the-loop update mechanism. The proposed system demonstrably reduces hallucination while improving answer quality and legal compliance, advancing the practical landing of media forensics technologies in judicial scenarios.
Read Between the Lines: A Benchmark for Uncovering Political Bias in Bangla News Articles
Lia, Nusrat Jahan, Dipta, Shubhashis Roy, Zehady, Abdullah Khan, Islam, Naymul, Chakraborty, Madhusodan, Wasif, Abdullah Al
Detecting media bias is crucial, specifically in the South Asian region. Despite this, annotated datasets and computational studies for Bangla political bias research remain scarce. Crucially because, political stance detection in Bangla news requires understanding of linguistic cues, cultural context, subtle biases, rhetorical strategies, code-switching, implicit sentiment, and socio-political background. To address this, we introduce the first benchmark dataset of 200 politically significant and highly debated Bangla news articles, labeled for government-leaning, government-critique, and neutral stances, alongside diagnostic analyses for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Our comprehensive evaluation of 28 proprietary and open-source LLMs shows strong performance in detecting government-critique content (F1 up to 0.83) but substantial difficulty with neutral articles (F1 as low as 0.00). Models also tend to over-predict government-leaning stances, often misinterpreting ambiguous narratives. This dataset and its associated diagnostics provide a foundation for advancing stance detection in Bangla media research and offer insights for improving LLM performance in low-resource languages.