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Living through Operation Metro Surge, and what came after. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney described the ground plan in Minnesota: "They were, like, 'Occupy Minneapolis like it was Falluja.' " Photographs by Philip Cheung for The New Yorker Michael Cavlan had settled into a routine of patrolling his neighborhood by car most mornings when, early on January 7th, he received an alert on his phone informing him about Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity near his house in Powderhorn, in South Minneapolis. The previous day, the Department of Homeland Security had announced that it was sending two thousand immigration agents to Minnesota to take part in Operation Metro Surge, a campaign of mass detention and deportation that the Trump Administration advertised as the largest D.H.S. undertaking ever. Cavlan, a salty, gray-haired nurse and union steward, is a first-generation Irish American; in 1969, his Irish Catholic parents, inspired by the U.S. civil-rights movement, had moved the ...

He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Rutgers historian Mark Bray is trying to flee to Spain after an online campaign from far-right influencers was followed by death threats. He was turned back at the airport on his first attempt. A professor at Rutgers University who wrote a book about " antifa " almost a decade ago is trying--and struggling--to flee the US for Europe after a weeks-long online campaign against him by far-right influencers was followed by death threats. Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers who specializes in Spanish history and radicalism, has been a far-right target ever since he published in 2017.

The United States Army is employing a prototype generative artificial intelligence tool to identify references to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) for removal from training materials in line with a recent executive order from President Donald Trump. Officials at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)--the major command responsible for training soldiers, developing leaders, and shaping the service's guidelines, strategies, and concepts--are currently using the AI tool, dubbed CamoGPT, to "review policies, programs, publications, and initiatives for DEIA and report findings," according to an internal memo reviewed by WIRED. The memo followed Trump's signing of a January 27 executive order entitled, "Restoring America's Fighting Force," which directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to eliminate all Pentagon policies seen as promoting what that the commander-in-chief declared "un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories" regarding race and gender, a linguistic dragnet that extends as far as past social media posts from official US military accounts. Chris Robinson confirmed the use of CamoGPT to review DEIA materials. "[TRADOC] will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President. We ensure that these directives are carried out with the utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives," Robinson says.

JOHANNESBURG/LONDON – Mental health counselor Nicole Doyle was stunned when the head of the U.S. National Eating Disorders Association showed up at a staff meeting to announce the group would be replacing its helpline with a chatbot. A few days after the helpline was taken down, the bot -- named Tessa -- would also be discontinued for providing harmful advice to people in the throes of mental illness. "People … found it was giving out weight loss advice to people who told it they were struggling with an eating disorder," said Doyle, 33, one of five workers who were let go in March, about a year after the chatbot was launched. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Europeans wanting to try Google Bard will have to wait. The Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC), the main overseer of data in the European Union, has forced Google to delay the rollout of its Bard chatbot in the region. The generative AI was supposed to launch in the EU this week, but IDPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle says his agency hasn't received a "detailed" privacy briefing, a data impact assessment or supporting info. The Commission is still in the midst of an "ongoing examination" of Bard, according to Doyle. It isn't estimating when it might wrap up that investigation, but it plans to share info with other EU data regulators as quickly as possible.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, the nation's most prominent accreditor of programs in science, technology, and engineering, according to an announcement, said that Northern Kentucky University's bachelor's degree in data science will be the first of only two data science programs in the U.S. to earn the organization's accreditation. As data science has emerged as an important field over the last decade, ABET announced that it would be creating accreditation standards for it, according to the organization. NKU was selected in 2020 to be one of only two universities to undergo the inaugural accreditation process. NKU's data science program was only the third such bachelor's program in the U.S. when it launched in 2013. The program focuses on big-data analytics and machine learning, combining a background in computer science and statistics with real-world capstone projects.

OppFi Inc., a 10-year-old fintech platform based in Chicago, targets U.S. households with an average of $50,000 in annual income that need extra cash for car repairs, medical bills, student loans and other expenses. Todd Schwartz, the company's chief executive, said its customers are employed and have bank accounts but are otherwise "locked out of mainstream financial services." The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. OppFi, which made its public-market debut last summer, uses an AI model, real-time data analytics and a proprietary scoring algorithm to automate the underwriting process. It generates a credit score by analyzing a loan applicant's online shopping habits, income and employment information, among other data sources.

It's two weeks until the competition, and 17-year-old Ella Maier is ecstatic her robot can finally do a pull-up. "Oh, that's so exciting," the Girls of Steel member said, as her robot latched on to a bar at the team's practice facility and hoisted itself to the second rung. "I'm in charge of that subsystem, and I'm really pleased it works. There's always a fear that it might not perform. There are no guarantees on this stuff, ever."

Abstracts of the invited talks presented at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Discovery Informatics: AI Takes a Science-Centered View on Big Data. Talks include A Data Lifecycle Approach to Discovery Informatics, Generating Biomedical Hypotheses Using Semantic Web Technologies, Socially Intelligent Science, Representing and Reasoning with Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs, Bioinformatics Computation of Metabolic Models from Sequenced Genomes, Climate Informatics: Recent Advances and Challenge Problems for Machine Learning in Climate Science, Predictive Modeling of Patient State and Therapy Optimization, Case Studies in Data-Driven Systems: Building Carbon Maps to Finding Neutrinos, Computational Analysis of Complex Human Disorders, and Look at This Gem: Automated Data Prioritization for Scientific Discovery of Exoplanets, Mineral Deposits, and More.