Along with the dataset, two tasks are proposed to evaluate machines'

World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have been gathering in Munich for Europe's biggest security and defence conference. The burning question on everyone's minds: is America still an ally of Europe? The keynote speech that everyone was waiting for was from Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State. Would he repeat the attacks made on Europe last year by the US Vice President JD Vance? Or would he be conciliatory?

The ability to discern and comprehend pragmatic meanings is a cornerstone of social and emotional intelligence, referred to as pragmatic reasoning. Despite the strides made in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, these models grapple with capturing the nuanced and ambiguous facets of language, falling short of the aspiration to build human-like conversational agents.

Along with the dataset, two tasks are proposed to evaluate machines'

Cambridge, United Kingdom – The fate of Ukraine and the future of European security hangs in the balance as United States and Russian diplomats prepared to discuss an accelerated peace plan this week. The uncertainty and dreadful possibilities of this historical moment, with Russia occupying a fifth of Ukrainian soil, dominated the atmosphere of Firewalling the Future, a conference on the future of Ukraine held at Cambridge University on Monday. Organised by programme leader Victoria Vdovychenko and professor of Ukrainian studies Rory Finnin under the auspices of the Centre for Geopolitics, it brought together Ukrainian, European and British diplomats, soldiers and academics. Dominant among the Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans present was the sentiment that with Trump's re-election, the international order is irrecoverably lost and needs to be rebuilt. Some spoke openly of a post-NATO reality in which Europe must form new structures and alliances to fend for itself.

The ability to discern and comprehend pragmatic meanings is a cornerstone of social and emotional intelligence, referred to as pragmatic reasoning. Despite the strides made in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, these models grapple with capturing the nuanced and ambiguous facets of language, falling short of the aspiration to build human-like conversational agents. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark, the DiPlomat, which delves into the fundamental components of conversational pragmatic reasoning, encompassing situational context reasoning, open-world knowledge acquisition, and unified figurative language understanding. We start by collecting a new human-annotated dialogue dataset, composed of 4,177 multi-turn dialogues and a vocabulary of 48,900 words. Along with the dataset, two tasks are proposed to evaluate machines' pragmatic reasoning capabilities, namely, Pragmatic Reasoning and Identification(PIR) and Conversational Question Answering (CQA).

This paper explores how automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming U.S. cyber diplomacy. Leveraging these technologies helps the U.S. manage the complexity and urgency of cyber diplomacy, improving decision-making, efficiency, and security. As global inter connectivity grows, cyber diplomacy, managing national interests in the digital space has become vital. The ability of AI and automation to quickly process vast data volumes enables timely responses to cyber threats and opportunities. This paper underscores the strategic integration of these tools to maintain U.S. competitive advantage and secure national interests. Automation enhances diplomatic communication and data processing, freeing diplomats to focus on strategic decisions. AI supports predictive analytics and real time decision making, offering critical insights and proactive measures during high stakes engagements. Case studies show AIs effectiveness in monitoring cyber activities and managing international cyber policy. Challenges such as ethical concerns, security vulnerabilities, and reliance on technology are also addressed, emphasizing human oversight and strong governance frameworks. Ensuring proper ethical guidelines and cybersecurity measures allows the U.S. to harness the benefits of automation and AI while mitigating risks. By adopting these technologies, U.S. cyber diplomacy can become more proactive and effective, navigating the evolving digital landscape with greater agility.

Hush-hush meetings, often never made public. For centuries, the art of conflict mediation has relied on nuanced human skills: from elements as simple as how to make eye contact and listen carefully to detecting shifts in emotions and subtle signals from opponents. Now, a growing set of entrepreneurs and experts are pitching a dramatic new set of tools into the world of dispute resolution – relying increasingly on artificial intelligence (AI). "Groundbreaking technological advancements are revolutionising the frontier of peace and mediation," said Sama al-Hamdani, programme director of Hala System, a private company using AI and data analysis to gather unencrypted intelligence in conflict zones, among other war-related tasks. "We are witnessing an era where AI transforms mediators into powerhouses of efficiency and insight," al-Hamdani said.

India's foreign minister has confirmed that he discussed his country's row with Canada over the killing of a Canadian Sikh leader with top United States government officials during a visit to Washington, DC, this week. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Friday that he laid out India's concerns about Sikh separatist movement supporters in Canada during talks a day earlier with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on September 18 that his government was investigating "credible allegations of a potential link" between Indian government agents and the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh leader in western Canada. "They [Blinken and Sullivan] obviously shared US views and assessments on this whole situation and I explained to them … the concerns which I had," Jaishankar said during an event on Friday morning at the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank. "Hopefully we both came out of those meetings better informed."

Stephen Cave has considerable experience of well-intentioned actions that have unhappy consequences. A former senior diplomat in the foreign office during the New Labour era, he was involved in treaty negotiations which later – and unexpectedly – unravelled to trigger several international events that included Brexit. "I know the impact of well-meant global events that have gone wrong," he admits. His experience could prove valuable, however. The former diplomat, now a senior academic, is about to head a new Cambridge University institute which will investigate all aspects of artificial intelligence in a bid to pinpoint the intellectual perils we face from the growing prowess of computers and to highlight its positive uses.