Public product launches in Artificial Intelligence can serve as focusing events for collective attention, surfacing how societies react to technological change. Social media provide a window into the sensemaking around these events, surfacing hopes and fears and showing who chooses to engage in the discourse and when. We demonstrate that public sensemaking about AI is shaped by economic interests and cultural values of those involved. We analyze 3.8 million tweets posted by 1.6 million users across 117 countries in response to the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Our analysis shows how economic self-interest, proxied by occupational skill types in writing, programming, and mathematics, and national cultural orientations, as measured by Hofstede's individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance dimensions, shape who speaks, when they speak, and their stance towards ChatGPT. Roles requiring more technical skills, such as programming and mathematics, tend to engage earlier and express more positive stances, whereas writing-centric occupations join later with greater skepticism. At the cultural level, individualism predicts both earlier engagement and a more negative stance, and uncertainty avoidance reduces the prevalence of positive stances but does not delay when users first engage with ChatGPT. Aggregate sentiment trends mask the dynamics observed in our study. The shift toward a more critical stance towards ChatGPT over time stems primarily from the entry of more skeptical voices rather than a change of heart among early adopters. Our findings underscore the importance of both the occupational background and cultural context in understanding public reactions to AI.

This project introduces a new measure of elite polarization via actor and subject detection using artificial intelligence. I identify when politicians mention one another in parliamentary speeches, note who is speaking and who is being addressed, and assess the emotional temperature behind these evaluations. This maps how elites evaluate their various out-parties, allowing us to create an index of mutual out-party hostility, that is, elite polarization. While I analyzed polarization data over the past four decades for the UK, and two decades for Hungary and Italy, my approach lays the groundwork for a twenty-year, EU-wide time-series dataset on elite polarization. I obtain the results that can be aggregated by party and quarter. The resulting index demonstrates a good face validity: it reacts to events such as electoral campaigns, country- and party-level crises, and to parties losing and assuming power.

Understanding how policy language evolves over time is critical for assessing global responses to complex challenges such as climate change. Temporal analysis helps stakeholders, including policymakers and researchers, to evaluate past priorities, identify emerging themes, design governance strategies, and develop mitigation measures. Traditional approaches, such as manual thematic coding, are time-consuming and limited in capturing the complex, interconnected nature of global policy discourse. With the increasing relevance of unsupervised machine learning, these limitations can be addressed, particularly under high-volume, complex, and high-dimensional data conditions. In this work, we explore a novel approach that applies the dynamic embedded topic model (DETM) to analyze the evolution of global climate policy discourse. A probabilistic model designed to capture the temporal dynamics of topics over time. We collected a corpus of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy decisions from 1995 to 2023, excluding 2020 due to the postponement of COP26 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model reveals shifts from early emphases on greenhouse gases and international conventions to recent focuses on implementation, technical collaboration, capacity building, finance, and global agreements. Section 3 presents the modeling pipeline, including preprocessing, model training, and visualization of temporal word distributions. Our results show that DETM is a scalable and effective tool for analyzing the evolution of global policy discourse. Section 4 discusses the implications of these findings and we concluded with future directions and refinements to extend this approach to other policy domains.

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human preferences and the limited coverage of available datasets, reward models often fail under distributional shifts or adversarial perturbations. Existing approaches for identifying such failure modes typically rely on prior knowledge about preference distributions or failure attributes, limiting their practicality in real-world settings where such information is unavailable. In this work, we propose a tractable, preference-distribution agnostic method for discovering reward model failure modes via reward guided controlled decoding. Building on this, we introduce REFORM, a self-improving reward modeling framework that enhances robustness by using the reward model itself to guide the generation of falsely scored responses. These adversarial examples are then used to augment the training data and patch the reward model's misaligned behavior. We evaluate REFORM on two widely used preference datasets Anthropic Helpful Harmless (HH) and PKU Beavertails and demonstrate that it significantly improves robustness without sacrificing reward quality. Notably, REFORM preserves performance both in direct evaluation and in downstream policy training, and further improves alignment quality by removing spurious correlations.

The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in high-stakes AI-based applications has increased significantly in recent years, especially since the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, despite their strong performance, LLMs introduce important legal/ethical concerns, particularly regarding privacy, data protection, and transparency. Due to these concerns, this work explores the use of Named-Entity Recognition (NER) to facilitate the privacy-preserving training (or adaptation) of LLMs. We propose a framework that uses NER technologies to anonymize sensitive information in text data, such as personal identities or geographic locations. An evaluation of the proposed privacy-preserving learning framework was conducted to measure its impact on user privacy and system performance in a particular high-stakes and sensitive setup: AI-based resume scoring for recruitment processes. The study involved two language models (BERT and RoBERTa) and six anonymization algorithms (based on Presidio, FLAIR, BERT, and different versions of GPT) applied to a database of 24,000 candidate profiles. The findings indicate that the proposed privacy preservation techniques effectively maintain system performance while playing a critical role in safeguarding candidate confidentiality, thus promoting trust in the experimented scenario. On top of the proposed privacy-preserving approach, we also experiment applying an existing approach that reduces the gender bias in LLMs, thus finally obtaining our proposed Privacy-and Bias-aware LLMs (PBa-LLMs). Note that the proposed PBa-LLMs have been evaluated in a particular setup (resume scoring), but are generally applicable to any other LLM-based AI application.

Lasker, the Times explained, was the "intermediary" who tipped off the publication about Mamdani's application, which was included in a larger hack of Columbia's computer systems. After the Times published its story, Lasker celebrated on X. "I break-uh dah news," he wrote to his more than 260,000 followers. On both X and Substack, where he also has a large following, Lasker is best-known for compiling charts on the "Black-White IQ gap" and otherwise linking race to real-world outcomes. He seems convinced that any differences are the result of biology, and has shot down other possible explanations. He has suggested that crime is genetic.

The moratorium could also have killed laws that have already been adopted around the country, including a Colorado law that targets algorithmic discrimination, laws in Utah and California aimed at making AI-generated content more identifiable, and other legislation focused on preserving data privacy and keeping children safe online. Proponents of the moratorium, such OpenAI and Senator Ted Cruz, have said that a "patchwork" of state-level regulations would place an undue burden on technology companies and stymie innovation. Federal regulation, they argue, is a better approach--but there is currently no federal AI regulation in place. Wiener and other state lawmakers can now get back to work writing and passing AI policy, at least for the time being--with the tailwind of a major moral victory at their backs. The movement to defeat the moratorium was impressively bipartisan: 40 state attorneys general signed a letter to Congress opposing the measure, as did a group of over 250 Republican and Democratic state lawmakers.

Many automated decision systems (ADS) are designed to solve prediction problems -- where the goal is to learn patterns from a sample of the population and apply them to individuals from the same population. In reality, these prediction systems operationalize holistic policy interventions in deployment. Once deployed, ADS can shape impacted population outcomes through an effective policy change in how decision-makers operate, while also being defined by past and present interactions between stakeholders and the limitations of existing organizational, as well as societal, infrastructure and context. In this work, we consider the ways in which we must shift from a prediction-focused paradigm to an interventionist paradigm when considering the impact of ADS within social systems. We argue this requires a new default problem setup for ADS beyond prediction, to instead consider predictions as decision support, final decisions, and outcomes. We highlight how this perspective unifies modern statistical frameworks and other tools to study the design, implementation, and evaluation of ADS systems, and point to the research directions necessary to operationalize this paradigm shift. Using these tools, we characterize the limitations of focusing on isolated prediction tasks, and lay the foundation for a more intervention-oriented approach to developing and deploying ADS.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable utility across diverse applications, and their growing complexity has made Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) a viable platform for scalable deployment. However, this accessibility also exposes GNN to serious security threats, most notably model extraction attacks (MEAs), in which adversaries strategically query a deployed model to construct a high-fidelity replica. In this work, we evaluate the vulnerability of GNNs to MEAs and explore their potential for cost-effective model acquisition in non-adversarial research settings. Importantly, adaptive node querying strategies can also serve a critical role in research, particularly when labeling data is expensive or time-consuming. By selectively sampling informative nodes, researchers can train high-performing GNNs with minimal supervision, which is particularly valuable in domains such as biomedicine, where annotations often require expert input. To address this, we propose a node querying strategy tailored to a highly practical yet underexplored scenario, where bulk queries are prohibited, and only a limited set of initial nodes is available. Our approach iteratively refines the node selection mechanism over multiple learning cycles, leveraging historical feedback to improve extraction efficiency. Extensive experiments on benchmark graph datasets demonstrate our superiority over comparable baselines on accuracy, fidelity, and F1 score under strict query-size constraints. These results highlight both the susceptibility of deployed GNNs to extraction attacks and the promise of ethical, efficient GNN acquisition methods to support low-resource research environments.

The increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other autonomous algorithmic systems presents the world with new systemic risks. While focus often lies on the function of individual algorithms, a critical and underestimated danger arises from their interactions, particularly when algorithmic systems operate without awareness of each other, or when those deploying them are unaware of the full algorithmic ecosystem deployment is occurring in. These interactions can lead to unforeseen, rapidly escalating negative outcomes - from market crashes and energy supply disruptions to potential physical accidents and erosion of public trust - often exceeding the human capacity for effective monitoring and the legal capacities for proper intervention. Current governance frameworks are inadequate as they lack visibility into this complex ecosystem of interactions. This paper outlines the nature of this challenge and proposes some initial policy suggestions centered on increasing transparency and accountability through phased system registration, a licensing framework for deployment, and enhanced monitoring capabilities.