book review
Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.?
Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.? How anger over artificial intelligence might drive the next wave of populist politics. The Washington Roundtable discusses the growing political backlash to artificial intelligence, especially among young Americans, and asks whether Washington is capable of regulating A.I. companies. They're joined by Nate Soares, the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the book " If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies ." The group explores what was behind the White House's sudden reversal on an A.I.-safety executive order this week, the outsized influence of venture capitalists in the A.I. industry, and how A.I. may turbocharge the next populist movement in American politics. "My impression is that a lot of the people protesting data centers can sort of tell that this A.I. stuff is taking the world somewhere they don't want," Soares says.
Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege'
Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. Michael Pollan: "Psychedelics have a way of smudging the windshield of experience" Author Michael Pollan has tackled plants, food and psychedelics in bestselling books including The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind . Now, he has taken on the thorny problem of consciousness. In his latest book, Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started.
How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?
How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? From ancient Rome to the era of A.I., people have prized originality, but the line where influence ends and cribbing begins is notoriously blurry. One pleasing facet of plagiarism is that, in the eyes of the law, it doesn't exist. I could come over later, bring a few beers, and we could, you know, get down to some serious humanizing. Hard to resist, these days, given what's at stake. For students with assignments to complete, who have already vanquished their desolation by asking ChatGPT to compose an essay on their behalf, a humanizer is an A.I. tool that takes what has been produced, puts it through a further digital mill, and makes it sound as if it had emerged from a verifiable person. Among the companies that offer such tools are StealthWriter, HIX AI, and QuillBot. Anyone who has buttered and blitzed a mountain of mashed potatoes into a purรฉe will understand.
Can Michael Pollan crack the problem of consciousness in his new book?
Can Michael Pollan crack the problem of consciousness in his new book? It is one of the most perplexing questions in science. You would expect our intimacy with it to give us a leg up in understanding how it works, but this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. So how can you study something objectively when it is also the very tool you are using to do the studying? This conundrum forms the backbone of Michael Pollan's latest book, Pollan's previous works include and The former helped bring the environmental and animal welfare impacts of the US food system to light, while the latter introduced the public to the psychedelic research renaissance.
How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty
Recent memoirs by the Justices reveal how a new vision of restraint has led to radical outcomes. To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett's new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born. On Barrett's desk at home, she recounts in " Listening to the Law," she keeps a photograph of her great-grandmother's one-story house, where, as a widow during the Great Depression, she raised some of her thirteen children and took in other needy relatives. "Looking at the photo reminds me of a woman who stretched herself beyond all reasonable capacity," Barrett explains. "I'm not sure that I'll be able to manage my life with the same grace that she had. But she motivates me to keep trying." For Barrett, the mother of seven children, that effort entails setting her alarm for 5 "Our kids get up at six thirty during the school year, so I start early if I want to accomplish anything on my own to-do list," she writes. This is what passes for disclosure from Barrett; she measures out the details of her life with coffee spoons, careful not to spill.
Reviewer # 1: We appreciate many insightful comments from this reviewer
Reviewer #1: We appreciate many insightful comments from this reviewer. We have included more scenarios in the paper. Here are three of them. In this paper, SM stands for the standard two-layer GCN model. In the last few days, we have tried very hard to carry out more experiments on other datasets including'Citeseer', and Table 1: Mean Prediction Accuracy for'Citeseer' Figure 1: Boxplot of RMSEs in real data analysis Reviewer #2: We appreciate many insightful comments from this reviewer.
A Text-Based Recommender System that Leverages Explicit Affective State Preferences
Hasan, Tonmoy, Bunescu, Razvan
The affective attitude of liking a recommended item reflects just one category in a wide spectrum of affective phenomena that also includes emotions such as entranced or intrigued, moods such as cheerful or buoyant, as well as more fine-grained affective states, such as "pleasantly surprised by the conclusion". In this paper, we introduce a novel recommendation task that can leverage a virtually unbounded range of affective states sought explicitly by the user in order to identify items that, upon consumption, are likely to induce those affective states. Correspondingly, we create a large dataset of user preferences containing expressions of fine-grained affective states that are mined from book reviews, and propose a Transformer-based architecture that leverages such affective expressions as input. We then use the resulting dataset of affective states preferences, together with the linked users and their histories of book readings, ratings, and reviews, to train and evaluate multiple recommendation models on the task of matching recommended items with affective preferences. Experiments show that the best results are obtained by models that can utilize textual descriptions of items and user affective preferences.
Inverse Reinforcement Learning using Revealed Preferences and Passive Stochastic Optimization
This monograph, spanning three chapters, explores Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). The first two chapters view inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) through the lens of revealed preferences from microeconomics while the third chapter studies adaptive IRL via Langevin dynamics stochastic gradient algorithms. Chapter uses classical revealed preference theory (Afriat's theorem and extensions) to identify constrained utility maximizers based on observed agent actions. This allows for the reconstruction of set-valued estimates of an agent's utility. We illustrate this procedure by identifying the presence of a cognitive radar and reconstructing its utility function. The chapter also addresses the construction of a statistical detector for utility maximization behavior when agent actions are corrupted by noise. Chapter 2 studies Bayesian IRL. It investigates how an analyst can determine if an observed agent is a rationally inattentive Bayesian utility maximizer (i.e., simultaneously optimizing its utility and observation likelihood). The chapter discusses inverse stopping-time problems, focusing on reconstructing the continuation and stopping costs of a Bayesian agent operating over a random horizon. We then apply this IRL methodology to identify the presence of a Bayes-optimal sequential detector. Additionally, Chapter 2 provides a concise overview of discrete choice models, inverse Bayesian filtering, and inverse stochastic gradient algorithms for adaptive IRL. Finally, Chapter 3 introduces an adaptive IRL approach utilizing passive Langevin dynamics. This method aims to track time-varying utility functions given noisy and misspecified gradients. In essence, the adaptive IRL algorithms presented in Chapter 3 can be conceptualized as inverse stochastic gradient algorithms, as they learn the utility function in real-time while a stochastic gradient algorithm is in operation.