TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US. When TikTok users in the US opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the US, TikTok was compelled by the US government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity.

A new feature on X revealed that many influential MAGA accounts are not actually based in the US. President Donald Trump has continued sharing their posts anyway. A new feature on X has revealed that a number of major MAGA accounts on the platform are operated by people based overseas. And in the days since these accounts were exposed, President Donald Trump has continued boosting several of them. Many of the accounts, which have large followings and claim to be conservative people based in Texas or "America First" accounts "promoting good resisting evil," are actually operated everywhere from Chile and Nigeria to Russia and across eastern Europe .

Maxar Intelligence demonstrates its Raptor software that can guide drones through remote regions where there is no GPS signal, like this Polar Circle demonstration. A key geospatial intelligence firm on Tuesday announced a new product that can operate drones even in areas where the GPS signal has been jammed - cutting through modern defenses in the age of unmanned vehicular warfare. The war between Russia and Ukraine presented a unique problem: each military had learned how to jam the other's GPS signals, meaning their drones would be flying blind. This prompted the latest innovation from Maxar Intelligence, a drone-guiding technology that does not rely on satellite signals from space. Now, Maxar, a global satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence provider, has the capability to counter GPS-jamming technology through its Raptor system.

A timely and effective response is crucial to minimize damage and save lives during natural disasters like earthquakes. Microblogging platforms, particularly Twitter, have emerged as valuable real-time information sources for such events. This work explores the potential of leveraging Twitter data for earthquake response analysis. We develop a machine learning (ML) framework by incorporating natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract and analyze relevant information from tweets posted during earthquake events. The approach primarily focuses on extracting location data from tweets to identify affected areas, generating severity maps, and utilizing WebGIS to display valuable information. The insights gained from this analysis can aid emergency responders, government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and NGOs in enhancing their disaster response strategies and facilitating more efficient resource allocation during earthquake events.

The transparency principle of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires data processing information to be clear, precise, and accessible. While language models show promise in this context, their probabilistic nature complicates truthfulness and comprehensibility. This paper examines state-of-the-art Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhanced with alignment techniques to fulfill GDPR obligations. We evaluate RAG systems incorporating an alignment module like Rewindable Auto-regressive Inference (RAIN) and our proposed multidimensional extension, MultiRAIN, using a Privacy Q&A dataset. Responses are optimized for preciseness and comprehensibility and are assessed through 21 metrics, including deterministic and large language model-based evaluations. Our results show that RAG systems with an alignment module outperform baseline RAG systems on most metrics, though none fully match human answers. Principal component analysis of the results reveals complex interactions between metrics, highlighting the need to refine metrics. This study provides a foundation for integrating advanced natural language processing systems into legal compliance frameworks.

Forecasting the change in the distribution of viral variants is crucial for therapeutic design and disease surveillance. This task poses significant modeling challenges due to the sharp differences in virus distributions across sub-populations (e.g., countries) and their dynamic interactions. Existing machine learning approaches that model the variant distribution as a whole are incapable of making location-specific predictions and ignore transmissions that shape the viral landscape. In this paper, we propose a sub-population specific protein evolution model, which predicts the time-resolved distributions of viral proteins in different locations. The algorithm explicitly models the transmission rates between sub-populations and learns their interdependence from data. The change in protein distributions across all sub-populations is defined through a linear ordinary differential equation (ODE) parametrized by transmission rates. Solving this ODE yields the likelihood of a given protein occurring in particular sub-populations. Multi-year evaluation on both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A/H3N2 demonstrates that our model outperforms baselines in accurately predicting distributions of viral proteins across continents and countries. We also find that the transmission rates learned from data are consistent with the transmission pathways discovered by retrospective phylogenetic analysis.

Lifestyle support through robotics is an increasingly promising field, with expectations for robots to take over or assist with chores like floor cleaning, table setting and clearing, and fetching items. The growth of AI, particularly foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs), is significantly shaping this sector. LLMs, by facilitating natural interactions and providing vast general knowledge, are proving invaluable for robotic tasks. This paper zeroes in on the benefits of LLMs for "bring-me" tasks, where robots fetch specific items for users, often based on vague instructions. Our previous efforts utilized an ontology extended to handle environmental data to decipher such vagueness, but faced limitations when unresolvable ambiguities required user intervention for clarity. Here, we enhance our approach by integrating LLMs for providing additional commonsense knowledge, pairing it with ontological data to mitigate the issue of hallucinations and reduce the need for user queries, thus improving system usability. We present a system that merges these knowledge bases and assess its efficacy on "bring-me" tasks, aiming to provide a more seamless and efficient robotic assistance experience.

Ophthalmic image segmentation serves as a critical foundation for ocular disease diagnosis. Although fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonly employed for segmentation, they are constrained by inductive biases and face challenges in establishing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based models address these limitations but introduce substantial computational overhead. Recently, a simple yet efficient Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) architecture was proposed for image classification, achieving competitive performance relative to advanced transformers. However, its effectiveness for ophthalmic image segmentation remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce MM-UNet, an efficient Mixed MLP model tailored for ophthalmic image segmentation. Within MM-UNet, we propose a multi-scale MLP (MMLP) module that facilitates the interaction of features at various depths through a grouping strategy, enabling simultaneous capture of global and local information. We conducted extensive experiments on both a private anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) image dataset and a public fundus image dataset. The results demonstrated the superiority of our MM-UNet model in comparison to state-of-the-art deep segmentation networks.

We propose a method that can generate customer trajectories and purchasing behaviors in retail stores simultaneously using Transformer-based deep learning structure. Utilizing customer trajectory data, layout diagrams, and retail scanner data obtained from a retail store, we trained a GPT-2 architecture from scratch to generate indoor trajectories and purchase actions. Additionally, we explored the effectiveness of fine-tuning the pre-trained model with data from another store. Results demonstrate that our method reproduces in-store trajectories and purchase behaviors more accurately than LSTM and SVM models, with fine-tuning significantly reducing the required training data.

Over the last decade, similar to other application domains, social media content has been proven very effective in disaster informatics. However, due to the unstructured nature of the data, several challenges are associated with disaster analysis in social media content. To fully explore the potential of social media content in disaster informatics, access to relevant content and the correct geo-location information is very critical. In this paper, we propose a three-step solution to tackling these challenges. Firstly, the proposed solution aims to classify social media posts into relevant and irrelevant posts followed by the automatic extraction of location information from the posts' text through Named Entity Recognition (NER) analysis. Finally, to quickly analyze the topics covered in large volumes of social media posts, we perform topic modeling resulting in a list of top keywords, that highlight the issues discussed in the tweet. For the Relevant Classification of Twitter Posts (RCTP), we proposed a merit-based fusion framework combining the capabilities of four different models namely BERT, RoBERTa, Distil BERT, and ALBERT obtaining the highest F1-score of 0.933 on a benchmark dataset. For the Location Extraction from Twitter Text (LETT), we evaluated four models namely BERT, RoBERTa, Distil BERTA, and Electra in an NER framework obtaining the highest F1-score of 0.960. For topic modeling, we used the BERTopic library to discover the hidden topic patterns in the relevant tweets. The experimental results of all the components of the proposed end-to-end solution are very encouraging and hint at the potential of social media content and NLP in disaster management.