Accurately assessing post quality requires complex relational reasoning to capture nuanced topic-post relationships. However, existing studies face three major limitations: (1) treating the task as unimodal categorization, which fails to leverage multimodal cues and fine-grained quality distinctions; (2) introducing noise during deep multimodal fusion, leading to misleading signals; and (3) lacking the ability to capture complex semantic relationships like relevance and comprehensiveness. To address these issues, we propose the Multimodal Fine-grained Topic-post Relational Reasoning (MFTRR) framework, which mimics human cognitive processes. MFTRR reframes post-quality assessment as a ranking task and incorporates multimodal data to better capture quality variations. It consists of two key modules: (1) the Local-Global Semantic Correlation Reasoning Module, which models fine-grained semantic interactions between posts and topics at both local and global levels, enhanced by a maximum information fusion mechanism to suppress noise; and (2) the Multi-Level Evidential Relational Reasoning Module, which explores macro- and micro-level relational cues to strengthen evidence-based reasoning. We evaluate MFTRR on three newly constructed multimodal topic-post datasets and the public Lazada-Home dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that MFTRR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 9.52% NDCG@3 improvement over the best unimodal method on the Art History dataset.

Heritage Foundation researcher Emma Waters joins'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss a recent report that a global birth decline is good for the planet. More than 60 heads of state and government and hundreds of business leaders are coming to Switzerland to discuss the biggest global challenges during the World Economic Forum's annual gathering next week, ranging from Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The likes of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and many others will descend on the Alpine ski resort town of Davos on Jan. 15-19, organizers said Tuesday. Attendees have their work cut out for them with two major wars -- the Israel-Hamas conflict and Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- plus problems like climate change, major disruptions to trade in the Red Sea, a weak global economy and misinformation powered by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence in a major election year. Trust has eroded on peace and security, with global cooperation down since 2016 and plummeting since 2020, forum President Borge Brende said at a briefing.

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) is increasing the scale and complexity of ransomware attacks. Understanding the internal operations behind RaaS has been a challenge due to the illegality of such activities. The recent chat leak of the Conti RaaS operator, one of the most infamous ransomware operators on the international scene, offers a key opportunity to better understand the inner workings of such organizations. This paper analyzes the main topic discussions in the Conti chat leak using machine learning techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), as well as visualization strategies. Five discussion topics are found: 1) Business, 2) Technical, 3) Internal tasking/Management, 4) Malware, and 5) Customer Service/Problem Solving. Moreover, the distribution of topics among Conti members shows that only 4% of individuals have specialized discussions while almost all individuals (96%) are all-rounders, meaning that their discussions revolve around the five topics. The results also indicate that a significant proportion of Conti discussions are non-tech related. This study thus highlights that running such large RaaS operations requires a workforce skilled beyond technical abilities, with individuals involved in various tasks, from management to customer service or problem solving. The discussion topics also show that the organization behind the Conti RaaS oper5086933ator shares similarities with a large firm. We conclude that, although RaaS represents an example of specialization in the cybercrime industry, only a few members are specialized in one topic, while the rest runs and coordinates the RaaS operation.

AltDeep is a newsletter focused on microtrend-spotting in data and decision science, machine learning, and AI. Know an engineer, research scientist, AI product manager, or entrepreneur in the AI space? Buy them a gift subscription. The Economist is the latest top tier publication to hype the GPT-2 transformer network language model created by OpenAI. They did so by "interviewing" the network, meaning that it generated "unedited" answers to the questions.

In this paper, we present a set of crowdsourcing and data processing techniques for annotating, segmenting and analyzing spoken dialog data to track topics of discussion between multiple users. Specifically, our system records the dialog between the parent and child as they interact with a reading game on a tablet, crowdsources the audio data to obtain transcribed text, and models topics of discussion from speech transcription using ConceptNet, a freely available commonsense knowledge base. We present preliminary results evaluating our technique using dialog collected using an interactive reading game for children 3-5 years of age. We successfully demonstrate the ability to form discussion topics by grouping words with similar meaning. The presented approach is entirely domain independent and in future work can be applied to a broad range of interactive entertainment applications, such as mobile devices, tablets and games.

We investigate the impact of a discussion snippet's overall sentiment on a user's willingness to read more of a discussion. Using sentiment analysis, we constructed positive, neutral, and negative discussion snippets using the discussion topic and a sample comment from discussions taking place around content on an enterprise social networking site. We computed personalized snippet recommendations for a subset of users and conducted a survey to test how these recommendations were perceived. Our experimental results show that snippets with high sentiments are better discussion "teasers."