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Tom Hanks' New Movie Totally Bombed. I Loved It.

Slate

A great thing about catching a cold in December, as a critic, is that it's a perfect time to play NyQuil-induced catch-up with all the screeners I'd yet to watch. Cynthia Erivo is as good as everyone says in Wicked. Hundreds of Beavers is funny and incredibly well calculated, astute in its ability to shape-shift just enough to never get tedious. The Wild Robot is emotionally satisfying--but it made me lament a world in which even a robot has to have her programming overridden by the American social imperative to be a "mother." The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a worthy reminder of what the old internet, the internet of my own upbringing, used to feel like: communal, social, mysterious.

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"Rejection," by Tony Tulathimutte, Reviewed: A Story Collection About People Who Just Can't Hang

The New Yorker

Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte's "Rejection" did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it's a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project--both his own and that of his characters--with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he's ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, "Grrr, friend-zoned again!" while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line "Unshakably serious about consent. These are two of the mildest ...


The Morning After: Starliner's crewed flight gets scrubbed

Engadget

The first crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner was scrubbed less than four minutes before liftoff after a computer failed to launch the correct countdown. It's the squillionth setback for the craft, (our math may be out a little) which should support the next generation of spaceflight. NASA says it'll target June 5 for its next launch attempt. At this point, we'll believe it when we see it. This tool unlocks Windows' AI-powered Recall feature for unsupported PCs Marvel's "What If...?" for Apple Vision Pro looks incredible, but plays terribly You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox.


Open-sourcing generative AI

MIT Technology Review

Alison Smith is a Director of Generative AI at Booz Allen Hamilton where she helps clients address their missions with innovative solutions. Leading Booz Allen's investments in Generative AI and grounding them in real business needs, Alison employs a pragmatic approach to designing, implementing, and deploying Generative AI that blends existing tools with additional customization. She is also responsible for disseminating best practices and key solutions throughout the firm to ensure that all teams are up-to-date on the latest available tools, solutions, and approaches to common client problems. In addition to her role at Booz Allen which balances technical solutions and business growth, Alison also enjoys staying connected to and serving her local community. From 2017-2021, Alison served on the board of a non-profit, DC Open Government Coalition (DCOGC), a group that seeks to enhance public access to government information and ensure transparent government operations; in November 2021, Alison was recognized as a Power Woman in Code by DCFemTech.


Facebook is using AI to supercharge the algorithm that recommends you videos

Engadget

Meta is revamping how Facebook recommends videos across Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed, by using AI to power its video recommendation algorithm, Facebook head Tom Alison revealed on Wednesday. The world's largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine, and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video -- the main Facebook feed and Groups -- as part of a "technology roadmap" through 2026, Alison said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco. Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed. "So what that told us was this new model architecture is learning from the data much more efficiently than the previous generation," Alison said. "So that was like a good sign that says, OK, we're on the right track."


ALISON: Fast and Effective Stylometric Authorship Obfuscation

Xing, Eric, Venkatraman, Saranya, Le, Thai, Lee, Dongwon

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Authorship Attribution (AA) and Authorship Obfuscation (AO) are two competing tasks of increasing importance in privacy research. Modern AA leverages an author's consistent writing style to match a text to its author using an AA classifier. AO is the corresponding adversarial task, aiming to modify a text in such a way that its semantics are preserved, yet an AA model cannot correctly infer its authorship. To address privacy concerns raised by state-of-the-art (SOTA) AA methods, new AO methods have been proposed but remain largely impractical to use due to their prohibitively slow training and obfuscation speed, often taking hours. To this challenge, we propose a practical AO method, ALISON, that (1) dramatically reduces training/obfuscation time, demonstrating more than 10x faster obfuscation than SOTA AO methods, (2) achieves better obfuscation success through attacking three transformer-based AA methods on two benchmark datasets, typically performing 15% better than competing methods, (3) does not require direct signals from a target AA classifier during obfuscation, and (4) utilizes unique stylometric features, allowing sound model interpretation for explainable obfuscation. We also demonstrate that ALISON can effectively prevent four SOTA AA methods from accurately determining the authorship of ChatGPT-generated texts, all while minimally changing the original text semantics. To ensure the reproducibility of our findings, our code and data are available at: https://github.com/EricX003/ALISON.


Hierarchical3D Adapters for Long Video-to-text Summarization

Papalampidi, Pinelopi, Lapata, Mirella

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we focus on video-to-text summarization and investigate how to best utilize multimodal information for summarizing long inputs (e.g., an hour-long TV show) into long outputs (e.g., a multi-sentence summary). We extend SummScreen (Chen et al., 2021), a dialogue summarization dataset consisting of transcripts of TV episodes with reference summaries, and create a multimodal variant by collecting corresponding full-length videos. We incorporate multimodal information into a pre-trained textual summarizer efficiently using adapter modules augmented with a hierarchical structure while tuning only 3.8\% of model parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that multimodal information offers superior performance over more memory-heavy and fully fine-tuned textual summarization methods.


Machine learning helps cancer center with targeted COVID-19 outreach

#artificialintelligence

Regional Cancer Care Associates, based in New Jersey, has more than 20 locations throughout New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Washington area. Staff realized they needed a risk-stratified list of patients for COVID-19 vulnerability that nurses could manage through phone calls and by coordinating services with other providers. Because of staffing challenges, the list had to identify only the high-risk patients who staff needed to manage first, not the entire population or those patients who could wait a bit longer for nurse outreach. "Even though we already had an indigenous and independent scoring logic/mechanism for patient risk, this was mainly based on a combination of comorbidities that differentiated it from the usual scoring techniques," explained Lani M. Alison, vice president of quality and value transformation at RCCA. "Thus," she said, "there was a need to further stratify the risk patients for COVID-19 vulnerability and to establish a patient-centered assessment and outreach." On another note, staff observed challenges in assigning these patients and a defined patient roster to care coordination executives or support staff, which was hindering a patient-centric outreach approach, Alison added.


New data analysis tools are amping up game UA creative testing (VB Live)

#artificialintelligence

Creative is the key to user acquisition for game developers, and data is the key to optimizing for your target audience, drilling down to what converts, and more. For more on gaining a competitive edge with new creative processes and technologies, join GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi and more at this VB Live event. When it comes to user acquisition, the most pressing challenge game developers face is simply consumer attention. There's a tremendous amount of competition for the precious free time people have between responsibilities, says Noa Miller, marketing creative strategist at yellowHEAD. "You're competing to make playing games a priority," Miller says.


Daily AI Roundup: The 5 Coolest Things On Earth Today

#artificialintelligence

AI Daily Roundup starts today! We are covering the top updates from around the world. The updates will feature state-of-the-art capabilities in artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Fintech and human-system interactions. We will cover the role of AI Daily Roundup and their application in various industries and daily lives. SEMrush, leading online visibility management, and content marketing SaaS platform, has further expanded its ecosystem with the acquisition of a 100% stake in fast-growing public relations SaaS startup Prowly.com.