This paper presents a novel approach to extract scientifically valuable information about Earth's physical phenomena from unconventional sources, such as multi-modal social media posts. Employing a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), Gemini 1.5 Pro (Reid et al. 2024), we estimate earthquake ground shaking intensity from these unstructured posts. The model's output, in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) values, aligns well with independent observational data. Furthermore, our results suggest that LLMs, trained on vast internet data, may have developed a unique understanding of physical phenomena. Specifically, Google's Gemini models demonstrate a simplified understanding of the general relationship between earthquake magnitude, distance, and MMI intensity, accurately describing observational data even though it's not identical to established models. These findings raise intriguing questions about the extent to which Gemini's training has led to a broader understanding of the physical world and its phenomena. The ability of Generative AI models like Gemini to generate results consistent with established scientific knowledge highlights their potential to augment our understanding of complex physical phenomena like earthquakes. The flexible and effective approach proposed in this study holds immense potential for enriching our understanding of the impact of physical phenomena and improving resilience during natural disasters. This research is a significant step toward harnessing the power of social media and AI for natural disaster mitigation, opening new avenues for understanding the emerging capabilities of Generative AI and LLMs for scientific applications.

We introduce a new family of positive-definite kernel functions that mimic the computation in large, multilayer neural nets. These kernel functions can be used in shallow architectures, such as support vector machines (SVMs), or in deep kernel-based architectures that we call multilayer kernel machines (MKMs). We evaluate SVMs and MKMs with these kernel functions on problems designed to illustrate the advantages of deep architectures. On several problems, we obtain better results than previous, leading benchmarks from both SVMs with Gaussian kernels as well as deep belief nets. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

When software developers modify one or more files in a large code base, they must also identify and update other related files. Many file dependencies can be detected by mining the development history of the code base: in essence, groups of related files are revealed by the logs of previous workflows. From data of this form, we show how to detect dependent files by solving a problem in binary matrix completion. We explore different latent variable models (LVMs) for this problem, including Bernoulli mixture models, exponential family PCA, restricted Boltzmann machines, and fully Bayesian approaches. We evaluate these models on the development histories of three large, open-source software systems: Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse Subversive, and Gimp.

When software developers modify one or more files in a large code base, they must also identify and update other related files. Many file dependencies can be detected by mining the development history of the code base: in essence, groups of related files are revealed by the logs of previous workflows. From data of this form, we show how to detect dependent files by solving a problem in binary matrix completion. We explore different latent variable models (LVMs) for this problem, including Bernoulli mixture models, exponential family PCA, restricted Boltzmann machines, and fully Bayesian approaches. We evaluate these models on the development histories of three large, open-source software systems: Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse Subversive, and Gimp. In all of these applications, we find that LVMs improve the performance of related file prediction over current leading methods.

We introduce a new family of positive-definite kernel functions that mimic the computation in large, multilayer neural nets. These kernel functions can be used in shallow architectures, such as support vector machines (SVMs), or in deep kernel-based architectures that we call multilayer kernel machines (MKMs). We evaluate SVMs and MKMs with these kernel functions on problems designed to illustrate the advantages of deep architectures. On several problems, we obtain better results than previous, leading benchmarks from both SVMs with Gaussian kernels as well as deep belief nets.