Financial arguments play a critical role in shaping investment decisions and public trust in financial institutions. Nevertheless, assessing their quality remains poorly studied in the literature. In this paper, we examine the capabilities of three state-of-the-art LLMs GPT-4o, Llama 3.1, and Gemma 2 in annotating argument quality within financial communications, using the FinArgQuality dataset. Our contributions are twofold. First, we evaluate the consistency of LLM-generated annotations across multiple runs and benchmark them against human annotations. Second, we introduce an adversarial attack designed to inject gender bias to analyse models responds and ensure model's fairness and robustness. Both experiments are conducted across three temperature settings to assess their influence on annotation stability and alignment with human labels. Our findings reveal that LLM-based annotations achieve higher inter-annotator agreement than human counterparts, though the models still exhibit varying degrees of gender bias. We provide a multifaceted analysis of these outcomes and offer practical recommendations to guide future research toward more reliable, cost-effective, and bias-aware annotation methodologies.

The increased use of information retrieval in recruitment, primarily through job recommender systems (JRSs), can have a large impact on job seekers, recruiters, and companies. As a result, such systems have been determined to be high-risk in recent legislature. This requires JRSs to be trustworthy and transparent, allowing stakeholders to understand why specific recommendations were made. To fulfill this requirement, the stakeholders' exact preferences and needs need to be determined. To do so, we evaluated an explainable job recommender system using a realistic, task-based, mixed-design user study (n=30) in which stakeholders had to make decisions based on the model's explanations. This mixed-methods evaluation consisted of two objective metrics - correctness and efficiency, along with three subjective metrics - trust, transparency, and usefulness. These metrics were evaluated twice per participant, once using real explanations and once using random explanations. The study included a qualitative analysis following a think-aloud protocol while performing tasks adapted to each stakeholder group. We find that providing stakeholders with real explanations does not significantly improve decision-making speed and accuracy. Our results showed a non-significant trend for the real explanations to outperform the random ones on perceived trust, usefulness, and transparency of the system for all stakeholder types. We determine that stakeholders benefit more from interacting with explanations as decision support capable of providing healthy friction, rather than as previously-assumed persuasive tools.

From sex toys to creepy AI talking heads, the CES tech show never fails to disappoint in terms of novel gadgets. This year, electronics giants like LG and Samsung focused a lot on their transparent TV screens and their futuristic tech for cars, but out on the show floor, there was a heavy focus on home cooking, health, and pets. Here are the 13 most interesting and surprisingly useful'world's firsts' that we saw: Dogsplay is a TV made specifically for dogs. 'Dogs are lonely when they're home alone,' a representative for the company Dogsplay told DailyMail.com. Many dog owners switch on the TV for their animal to watch while they're gone. Dogsplay has made a TV just for dogs that plays content with adjusted color to compensate for dogs' red-green colorblindness, and adjusted sound to account for the higher-frequencies they can hear.

Users of the free Brave browser this week received two very different looks at how the 2020 election played out using Leo, the free AI tool that now comes as part of the Brave browser. When PCWorld asked the free version of Leo who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the AI tool waffled and declined to answer. However, users who wished to pay $15 per month for the more sophisticated version of Leo received the answer that Joe Biden was the winner. Brave designs a well-regarded Web browser, which has filled a niche for those who seek privacy while browsing online. The company has embraced private search, while also endorsing cryptocurrency and NFTs.

Recent legislation proposals have significantly increased the demand for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in many businesses, especially in so-called `high-risk' domains, such as recruitment. Within recruitment, AI has become commonplace, mainly in the form of job recommender systems (JRSs), which try to match candidates to vacancies, and vice versa. However, common XAI techniques often fall short in this domain due to the different levels and types of expertise of the individuals involved, making explanations difficult to generalize. To determine the explanation preferences of the different stakeholder types - candidates, recruiters, and companies - we created and validated a semi-structured interview guide. Using grounded theory, we structurally analyzed the results of these interviews and found that different stakeholder types indeed have strongly differing explanation preferences. Candidates indicated a preference for brief, textual explanations that allow them to quickly judge potential matches. On the other hand, hiring managers preferred visual graph-based explanations that provide a more technical and comprehensive overview at a glance. Recruiters found more exhaustive textual explanations preferable, as those provided them with more talking points to convince both parties of the match. Based on these findings, we describe guidelines on how to design an explanation interface that fulfills the requirements of all three stakeholder types. Furthermore, we provide the validated interview guide, which can assist future research in determining the explanation preferences of different stakeholder types.

LOGOSHUFFLE, a platform with years of experience in online logo creation is adding more features in its artificial intelligence powered logo creation tool. With these updates, the platform is enabling the users to create logos easily, fast and cost effectively. "We want to make the logo creation process more effective and avoid recurring feedback cycles. What a better way of doing it than using artificial intelligence (AI)?" quipped the LOGOSHUFFLE founder and CEO adding that the new features allow creation of a logo within three minutes. LOGOSHUFFLE, started in 2017 with algorithmic design and since then the platform is using more and more artificial intelligence.

The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit . China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up "Big Brother" technology. Seagate Technology PLC, Qualcomm Inc. and United Technologies Corp. were among the foreign companies to show their wares at the 16th China Public Security Expo, where prospective customers included Chinese police, government officials and businesses.

"It's not just a normal update," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said during a press briefing Tuesday at the company's swanky San Francisco headquarters. "This is a radical redesign and rebuild of the app from scratch." Uber's premise is simple: It pairs drivers with passengers via smartphone app. In the past seven years, it has gone from a small startup to one of the largest ride-hailing services on the planet, operating in more than 70 countries. With a valuation of $68 billion, Uber is also the world's highest-valued venture-backed company.

The motorcycle of the future is so safe riders can cruise without a helmet and never fall off, giving all of the thrills with none of the danger, according to BMW. The German automaker unveiled its Motorrad Vision Next 100, a sleek, self-balancing prototype the company released as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations. The zero-emissions bike has self-balancing wheels designed to stand upright even at a complete stop, stability that the company says will allow riders to forgo riding a helmet. The self-balancing BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept motorcycle is unveiled on the last of four international stops of the'Iconic Impulses' event, celebrating 100 years of BMW. A'flexframe' extends from the front to the rear wheel, which means means the bike can be steered without the various joints found on today's motorcycles.