The goal of this article is to provide an introduction to the desirability function approach to multi-objective optimization (direct and surrogate model-based), and multi-objective hyperparameter tuning. This work is based on the paper by Kuhn (2016). It presents a `Python` implementation of Kuhn's `R` package `desirability`. The `Python` package `spotdesirability` is available as part of the `sequential parameter optimization` framework. After a brief introduction to the desirability function approach is presented, three examples are given that demonstrate how to use the desirability functions for classical optimization, surrogate-model based optimization, and hyperparameter tuning.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg joined the'Brian Kilmeade Show' to discuss the dangers of the Russian-North Korean alliance and why he believes the U.S. will stay in NATO regardless of who wins in November. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the next great domain in the theater of war, and NATO allies have made it a top priority as they look to bolster the alliance's collective defense. A summit in Washington, D.C., next week will not only commemorate the 75th anniversary of the alliance but will focus on safeguarding NATO in an increasingly hostile geopolitical sphere. The global consequences of the war in Ukraine have been far-reaching, and the deepening divides between the West and top authoritarian adversaries has had an effect on everything from defense to trade. At the core of how NATO is looking to safeguard itself in challenging times is change in AI technology.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used artificial intelligence (AI) to improve targeting of Hamas operators and facilities as its military faces criticism for what's been deemed as collateral damage and civilian casualties. "I can't predict how long the Gaza operation will take, but the IDF's use of AI and Machine Learning (ML) tools can certainly assist in the administratively burdensome targeting identification, evaluation and assessment process," Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, told Fox News Digital. "Similar to U.S. forces, the IDF takes great effort to reduce collateral damage and civilian casualties, and tools like AI and ML can make the targeting process more agile and executable," Montgomery added. "AI tools should help in target identification efforts, expediting target review and approval," he said. "There will inevitably still be humans in the targeting process but in a much accelerated timeline."

Since the tech industry began its love affair with machine learning about a decade ago, US lawmakers have chattered about the potential need for regulation to rein in the technology. No proposal to regulate corporate AI projects has got close to becoming law--but OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November has convinced some senators there is now an urgent need to do something to protect people's rights against the potential harms of AI technology. At a hearing held by a Senate Judiciary subcommittee yesterday attendees heard a terrifying laundry list of ways artificial intelligence can harm people and democracy. Senators from both parties spoke in support of the idea of creating a new arm of the US government dedicated to regulating AI. The idea even got the backing of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT's OpenAI, testified before members of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday about the need to regulate the increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technology being created inside his company and others like Google and Microsoft. The three-hour-long hearing touched on several aspects of the risks that generative AI could pose to society, how it would affect the jobs market and why regulation by governments would be needed. Tuesday's hearing will be the first in a series of hearings to come as lawmakers grapple with drafting regulations around AI to address its ethical, legal and national security concerns. Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut opened the proceedings with an AI-generated audio recording that sounded just like him. "Too often we have seen what happens when technology outpaces regulation. We have seen how algorithmic biases can perpetuate discrimination and prejudice and how the lack of transparency can undermine public trust. This is not the future we want," the voice said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an appeal to members of Congress under oath: Regulate artificial intelligence. Altman, whose company is on the extreme forefront of generative A.I. technology with its ChatGPT tool, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first time in a Tuesday hearing. And while he said he is ultimately optimistic that innovation will benefit people on a grand scale, Altman echoed his previous assertion that lawmakers should create parameters for AI creators to avoid causing "significant harm to the world." "We think it can be a printing press moment," Altman said. "We have to work together to make it so."

Microsoft's new Bing Chat tool is making massive waves, but the tech giant now lacks a dedicated team to focus on implementing AI technology in a way that meets the company's guidelines. According to a new report from Platformer (via The Verge (opens in new tab)), Microsoft recently laid off one of the teams responsible for handling ethics in AI usage. This comes at a time when Bing Chat is exploding in popularity, with the tool pushing Bing to over 100 million daily active users. Platformer notes that while there is still a set of guiding principles in the form of Microsoft's Office of Responsible AI, there is no longer a dedicated team to interpret these principles in a rapidly evolving field of technology. "People would look at the principles coming out of the office of responsible AI and say, 'I don't know how this applies,'" said one former employee.

We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse retrieval strategy. The second stage consists of a reader which outputs the answer from the top passages returned by the first stage. We show the efficacy of using a multilingual language model with entity representations in pretraining, sparse retrieval signals to help dense retrieval, and Fusion-in-Decoder. On the development set, we obtain 43.46 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 21.99 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 32.73. On the test set, we obtain 40.93 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 22.29 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 31.61. We improve over the official baseline by over 4 F1 points on both the development and test sets.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Today is a big day for AI announcements from Microsoft, both from this week's Build conference and beyond. But one common theme bubbles over consistently: For AI to become more useful for business applications, it needs to be easier, simpler, more explainable, more accessible and, most of all, responsible. Responsible AI is actually at the heart of a lot of today's Build news, John Montgomery, corporate vice president of Azure AI, told VentureBeat. Most notable is Azure Machine Learning's preview of a responsible AI dashboard, which brings together capabilities in use over the past 18 months, such as data explorer, model interpretability, error analysis, counterfactual and causal inference analysis, into a single view.

A security guard has become one of the first patients in Scotland to have a tumour cut out of his throat by a robot. Peter Simpson was awake, talking and eating ice-cream just five hours after his tonsil and part of his tongue were removed. The 63-year-old was home within 24 hours of the pioneering surgery at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in his home city of Glasgow. "I'm feeling good and I'm really quite surprised," he told STV News after the procedure, which our cameras were allowed to film. "When you're told you're getting this kind of operation on your throat, you think'am I going to be able to talk or eat?', but I can do everything. "There is some discomfort when I swallow but it's much better than I expected." Peter was shaving while on holiday in Skye last August when he noticed a lump on his neck, which turned out to be cancerous. Tumours in such hard-to-reach areas would previously have involved a gruelling and invasive operation. But medics were instead able to guide robotic arms – already used in urology and lung surgery – into Peter's mouth. Ahead of the treatment, staff in the operating theatre told STV News it was a "big week" for them after six months of extensive Transoral Robotic surgery (TORS) training. A doctor from London's Royal Marsden hospital was there to advise as the first of five such ENT (ear, nose and throat) procedures planned in Scotland took place. Jenny Montgomery, consultant for head and neck surgery, guided the robotic arm and communicated by microphone with a surgical team working on Peter. The'arms' of the robot allowed the team to make tiny movements, while the hands can rotate 360 degrees. Enhanced precision helps reduce side effects and the length of time patients have to stay in hospital. "This patient will have probably a more effective identification of where their cancer originated from than they would have had with previous operations," said Ms Montgomery. "If it's a small cancer, there is a possibility they might not need radiotherapy.