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EU Digital Regulation and Guatemala: AI, 5G, and Cybersecurity

Juarez, Victor Lopez

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The paper examines how EU rules in AI, 5G, and cybersecurity operate as transnational governance and shape policy in Guatemala. It outlines the AI Act's risk approach, the 5G Action Plan and Security Toolbox, and the cybersecurity regime built on ENISA, NIS2, the Cybersecurity Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act. It traces extraterritorial channels such as the Brussels effect, private standards, supply chain clauses, and data transfer controls. Guatemala specific impacts include SME compliance costs, procurement limits, environmental trade-offs in rollout, rights risks, and capacity gaps. The paper maps current national measures and proposes five guardrails: digital constitutionalism, green IT duties, third country impact assessment, standards co-design, and recognition of regulatory diversity.


Unexpected drone operated by unidentified party sighted near USMNT training grounds: reports

FOX News

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. men's national team is vying for the coveted CONCACAF Gold Cup winners trophy. But, as the USMNT prepared for Wednesday's semifinal match against Guatemala, a flying object caused a disruption at the team's training grounds. An unidentified party was believed to have been operating what appeared to be a drone in the vicinity of the team's training facility in St. Louis, CBS Sports reported.


Edge AI for Real-time Fetal Assessment in Rural Guatemala

Katebi, Nasim, Ahmad, Mohammad, Motie-Shirazi, Mohsen, Phan, Daniel, Kolesnikova, Ellen, Nikookar, Sepideh, Rafiei, Alireza, Korikana, Murali K., Hall-Clifford, Rachel, Castro, Esteban, Sut, Rosibely, Coyote, Enma, Strader, Anahi Venzor, Ramos, Edlyn, Rohloff, Peter, Sameni, Reza, Clifford, Gari D.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Perinatal complications, defined as conditions that arise during pregnancy, childbirth, and the immediate postpartum period, represent a significant burden on maternal and neonatal health worldwide. Factors contributing to these disparities include limited access to quality healthcare, socioeconomic inequalities, and variations in healthcare infrastructure. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving health outcomes for mothers and newborns, particularly in underserved communities. To mitigate these challenges, we have developed an AI-enabled smartphone application designed to provide decision support at the point-of-care. This tool aims to enhance health monitoring during pregnancy by leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques. The intended use of this application is to assist midwives during routine home visits by offering real-time analysis and providing feedback based on collected data. The application integrates TensorFlow Lite (TFLite) and other Python-based algorithms within a Kotlin framework to process data in real-time. It is designed for use in low-resource settings, where traditional healthcare infrastructure may be lacking. The intended patient population includes pregnant women and new mothers in underserved areas and the developed system was piloted in rural Guatemala. This ML-based solution addresses the critical need for accessible and quality perinatal care by empowering healthcare providers with decision support tools to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes.


Curated Datasets and Neural Models for Machine Translation of Informal Registers between Mayan and Spanish Vernaculars

Lou, Andrés, Pérez-Ortiz, Juan Antonio, Sánchez-Martínez, Felipe, Sánchez-Cartagena, Víctor M.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Mayan languages comprise a language family with an ancient history, millions of speakers, and immense cultural value, that, nevertheless, remains severely underrepresented in terms of resources and global exposure. In this paper we develop, curate, and publicly release a set of corpora in several Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala and Southern Mexico, which we call MayanV. The datasets are parallel with Spanish, the dominant language of the region, and are taken from official native sources focused on representing informal, day-to-day, and non-domain-specific language. As such, and according to our dialectometric analysis, they differ in register from most other available resources. Additionally, we present neural machine translation models, trained on as many resources and Mayan languages as possible, and evaluated exclusively on our datasets. We observe lexical divergences between the dialects of Spanish in our resources and the more widespread written standard of Spanish, and that resources other than the ones we present do not seem to improve translation performance, indicating that many such resources may not accurately capture common, real-life language usage. The MayanV dataset is available at https://github.com/transducens/mayanv.


Guatemala: As COVID misinformation spreads, vaccine doses expire

Al Jazeera

Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala – On a recent afternoon, the COVID-19 vaccination centre in the heart of the Indigenous Mayan town of Santiago Atitlan was quiet. The health centre had a vaccine supply, but demand was low. The lack of coordination of a Guatemalan government-led campaign to overcome vaccine hesitancy has resulted in the expiration of millions of doses across the country this year, critics have said, as more than half of the population remains unvaccinated. According to Juan Manuel Ramirez, an evangelical preacher in Santiago Atitlan, some community members have taken the vaccine, knowing it helps to protect against severe disease. But others have subscribed to conspiracy theories about its potential dangers.


A Panorama of Computing in Central America and the Caribbean

Communications of the ACM

Despite being a poor and unequal country, Costa Rica has managed to close the gap in access to technology for its citizens, and it is now leading the way in the region. The country started the process of admission for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) several years ago with reforms on laws, the creation of policies and the use of Computer Technologies to improve education, information access, financial markets, competitiveness, and a more open government. In May 2020, Costa Rica became the first Central American or Caribbean country invited to become an OECD member. The OECD has almost 60 years of existence, and its members are many of the world's more developed countries that work together to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity, and well-being for their citizens. Costa Rica will become the 38th member, the fourth of Latin America.


27 Maya ritual sites discovered on online map by eagle-eyed archaeologist

FOX News

Researchers have uncovered a 1,500-year-old stucco mask of Maya ruler K'inich Janaab'Pakal. What differentiates this mask from others is it's seemingly made in the king's likeness. An eagle-eyed archaeologist has used a freely available online map to locate 27 Maya ceremonial sites in Mexico. Takeshi Inomata, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, made the discovery using a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) map he found online last year, according to the New York Times. LiDAR technology harnesses a laser to measure distances to the Earth's surface and can prove extremely valuable to study what is hidden in areas with thick vegetation.


Stunning 3D laser maps reveal the sprawling Mayan 'megalopolis' hidden in Guatemala

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Stunning new maps covering over 2,000 square kilometers of northern Guatemala have revealed the site of an ancient Maya mega-city hidden in the dense tropical forest. Researchers uncovered more than 61,000 ancient structures at the site using LiDAR technology, which relies on laser pulses to map out the topography. Evidence from the exhaustive survey supports earlier suspicions that upwards of 11 million people lived in the Maya Lowlands from the year 650 to 800 CE. Stunning new maps covering over 2,000 square kilometers of northern Guatemala have revealed the site of an ancient Maya megacity hidden in the dense tropical forest. The researchers have now published the results of what they say is the largest LiDAR survey to date, months after first revealing their remarkable discovery.


Laser-Carrying Airplanes Uncover Massive, Sprawling Maya Cities

WIRED

In July 2016, a group of archaeologists commissioned a small plane--along with special pilots--to fly over the thick jungle canopy in northern Guatemala, near the border with Mexico. Cruising well above the trees, the pilots combed the area, pointing three lasers at the ground that fired 300,000 pulses of light per second. Over 12 days, the team used the lasers to create one of the largest-scale maps of Maya cities built between 1000 BC to 1500 AD. Although archaeologists have surveyed slivers of these metropolitan ruins in the past, the new maps showcase entire cities for the first time, putting the Maya's formidable pyramids, city roads, and farming terraces in context. This view offers a wider perspective to archaeologists, who have historically been stuck analyzing individual structures at a time.


Emerging scientific technologies help defend human rights

Science

AAAS analyst assists a human rights organization in gathering data during an exhumation. Against a backdrop of summer heat and a constant roar of distant howler monkeys, a scientific analyst piloted a drone to collect data from a hillside in northern Guatemala. At his side, anthropologists affiliated with a regional human rights group painstakingly cleared soil and roots from human remains in a mass grave. "Remains contorted, overlapping, interlaced, a cruel, tragic mashup of Hieronymus Bosch and H.R. Giger," noted Jonathan Drake, senior program associate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Geospatial Technologies Project, summoning images from 15th- and 20th-century artists to describe the nightmarish remnants of an atrocity estimated to have occurred sometime after 1980, during Guatemala's lengthy civil war. Clothing with burnt edges stuck to the bones of some.