Frequent occurrences of extreme weather events substantially impact the lives of the less privileged in our societies, particularly in agriculture-inclined economies. The unpredictability of extreme fires, floods, drought, cyclones, and others endangers sustainable production and life on land (SDG goal 15), which translates into food insecurity and poorer populations. Fortunately, modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligent (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, 3D printing, and virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) are promising to reduce the risk and impact of extreme weather in our societies. However, research directions on how these technologies could help reduce the impact of extreme weather are unclear. This makes it challenging to emploring digital technologies within the spheres of extreme weather. In this paper, we employed the Delphi Best Worst method and Machine learning approaches to identify and assess the push factors of technology. The BWM evaluation revealed that predictive nature was AI's most important criterion and role, while the mass-market potential was the less important criterion. Based on this outcome, we tested the predictive ability of machine elarning on a publilcly available dataset to affrm the predictive rols of AI. We presented the managerial and methodological implications of the study, which are crucial for research and practice. The methodology utilized in this study could aid decision-makers in devising strategies and interventions to safeguard sustainable production. This will also facilitate allocating scarce resources and investment in improving AI techniques to reduce the adverse impacts of extreme events. Correspondingly, we put forward the limitations of this, which necessitate future research.

Sarcasm can be defined as saying or writing the opposite of what one truly wants to express, usually to insult, irritate, or amuse someone. Because of the obscure nature of sarcasm in textual data, detecting it is difficult and of great interest to the sentiment analysis research community. Though the research in sarcasm detection spans more than a decade, some significant advancements have been made recently, including employing unsupervised pre-trained transformers in multimodal environments and integrating context to identify sarcasm. In this study, we aim to provide a brief overview of recent advancements and trends in computational sarcasm research for the English language. We describe relevant datasets, methodologies, trends, issues, challenges, and tasks relating to sarcasm that are beyond detection. Our study provides well-summarized tables of sarcasm datasets, sarcastic features and their extraction methods, and performance analysis of various approaches which can help researchers in related domains understand current state-of-the-art practices in sarcasm detection.

The Resistance: Avalon is a partially observable social deduction game. This area of AI game playing is fairly undeveloped. Implementing an AI for this game involves multiple components specific to each phase as well as role in the game. In this paper, we plan to iteratively develop the required components for each role/phase by first addressing the Assassination phase which can be modeled as a machine learning problem. Using a publicly available dataset from an online version of the game, we train classifiers that emulate an Assassin. After trying various classification techniques, we are able to achieve above average human performance using a simple linear support vector classifier. The eventual goal of this project is to pursue developing an intelligent and complete Avalon player that can play through each phase of the game as any role.

In this paper, we propose a new covering technique localized for the trajectories of SGD. This localization provides an algorithm-specific complexity measured by the covering number, which can have dimension-independent cardinality in contrast to standard uniform covering arguments that result in exponential dimension dependency. Based on this localized construction, we show that if the objective function is a finite perturbation of a piecewise strongly convex and smooth function with $P$ pieces, i.e. non-convex and non-smooth in general, the generalization error can be upper bounded by $O(\sqrt{(\log n\log(nP))/n})$, where $n$ is the number of data samples. In particular, this rate is independent of dimension and does not require early stopping and decaying step size. Finally, we employ these results in various contexts and derive generalization bounds for multi-index linear models, multi-class support vector machines, and $K$-means clustering for both hard and soft label setups, improving the known state-of-the-art rates.

A support vector machine (SVM) is an algorithm that finds a hyperplane which optimally separates labeled data points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ into positive and negative classes. The data points on the margin of this separating hyperplane are called support vectors. We connect the possible configurations of support vectors to Radon's theorem, which provides guarantees for when a set of points can be divided into two classes (positive and negative) whose convex hulls intersect. If the convex hulls of the positive and negative support vectors are projected onto a separating hyperplane, then the projections intersect if and only if the hyperplane is optimal. Further, with a particular type of general position, we show that (a) the projected convex hulls of the support vectors intersect in exactly one point, (b) the support vectors are stable under perturbation, (c) there are at most $n+1$ support vectors, and (d) every number of support vectors from 2 up to $n+1$ is possible. Finally, we perform computer simulations studying the expected number of support vectors, and their configurations, for randomly generated data. We observe that as the distance between classes of points increases for this type of randomly generated data, configurations with fewer support vectors become more likely.

Text classifiers are applied at scale in the form of one-size-fits-all solutions. Nevertheless, many studies show that classifiers are biased regarding different languages and dialects. When measuring and discovering these biases, some gaps present themselves and should be addressed. First, ``Does language, dialect, and topical content vary across geographical regions?'' and secondly ``If there are differences across the regions, do they impact model performance?''. We introduce a novel dataset called GeoOLID with more than 14 thousand examples across 15 geographically and demographically diverse cities to address these questions. We perform a comprehensive analysis of geographical-related content and their impact on performance disparities of offensive language detection models. Overall, we find that current models do not generalize across locations. Likewise, we show that while offensive language models produce false positives on African American English, model performance is not correlated with each city's minority population proportions. Warning: This paper contains offensive language.

More than 50 million people worldwide are living with different types of neurodegenerative dementias including Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Vascular Dementia, Lewy Body Dementia, and Frontotemporal Lobar Dementia [1]. These are among the leading global neurodegenerative diseases and have notable economic impacts on individuals and societies [2]. To mitigate the impact of neurodegenerative dementias on older adults and help them plan for the future [3], early detection of dementia is necessary. It would help older adults at the early stages of the disease seek out different intervention programs [4], including psycho-social interventions (e.g., walking programs and art therapy) [5], non-pharmaceutical intervention programs (e.g., music interventions [6]) as well as clinical interventions so that they can maintain their quality of life [7] at the normal level and slow down disease progression.

The rise of social media platforms provides an unbounded, infinitely rich source of aggregate knowledge of the world around us, both historic and real-time, from a human perspective. The greatest challenge we face is how to process and understand this raw and unstructured data, go beyond individual observations and see the "big picture"--the domain of Situation Awareness. We provide an extensive survey of Artificial Intelligence research, focusing on microblog social media data with applications to Situation Awareness, that gives the seminal work and state-of-the-art approaches across six thematic areas: Crime, Disasters, Finance, Physical Environment, Politics, and Health and Population. We provide a novel, unified methodological perspective, identify key results and challenges, and present ongoing research directions.

In detecting malicious websites, a common approach is the use of blacklists which are not exhaustive in themselves and are unable to generalize to new malicious sites. Detecting newly encountered malicious websites automatically will help reduce the vulnerability to this form of attack. In this study, we explored the use of ten machine learning models to classify malicious websites based on lexical features and understand how they generalize across datasets. Specifically, we trained, validated, and tested these models on different sets of datasets and then carried out a cross-datasets analysis. From our analysis, we found that K-Nearest Neighbor is the only model that performs consistently high across datasets. Other models such as Random Forest, Decision Trees, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machines also consistently outperform a baseline model of predicting every link as malicious across all metrics and datasets. Also, we found no evidence that any subset of lexical features generalizes across models or datasets. This research should be relevant to cybersecurity professionals and academic researchers as it could form the basis for real-life detection systems or further research work.

With the growing rates of cyber-attacks and cyber espionage, the need for better and more powerful intrusion detection systems (IDS) is even more warranted nowadays. The basic task of an IDS is to act as the first line of defense, in detecting attacks on the internet. As intrusion tactics from intruders become more sophisticated and difficult to detect, researchers have started to apply novel Machine Learning (ML) techniques to effectively detect intruders and hence preserve internet users' information and overall trust in the entire internet network security. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of research on intrusion detection techniques based on ML and Deep Learning (DL) architectures on various cyber security-based datasets such as the DARPA, KDDCUP'99, NSL-KDD, CAIDA, CTU-13, UNSW-NB15. In this research, we review contemporary literature and provide a comprehensive survey of different types of intrusion detection technique that applies Support Vector Machines (SVMs) algorithms as a classifier. We focus only on studies that have been evaluated on the two most widely used datasets in cybersecurity namely: the KDDCUP'99 and the NSL-KDD datasets. We provide a summary of each method, identifying the role of the SVMs classifier, and all other algorithms involved in the studies. Furthermore, we present a critical review of each method, in tabular form, highlighting the performances measures, strengths, and limitations, of each of the methods surveyed.