I raised my score from 4 to 6 after reading the author's feedback, mainly due to the novelty of the framework. However, I would expect the author can provide a thorough discussion of the limitation of the result in the camera-ready version. Weakness: Due to the intractbility of the MMD DRO problem, the submission did not find an exact reformulation as much other literature in DRO did for other probability metrics. Instead, the author provides several layers of approximation. The reason why I emphasize the importance of a tight bound, if not an exact reformulation, is that one of the major criticism about (distributionally) robust optimization is that it is sometimes too conservative, and thus a loose upper bound might not be sufficient to mitigate the over-conservativeness and demonstrate the power of distributionally robust optimization. When a new distance is introduced into the DRO framework, a natural question is why it should be used compared with other existing approaches.

Loneliness, or the lack of fulfilling relationships, significantly impacts a person's mental and physical well-being and is prevalent worldwide. Previous research suggests that large language models (LLMs) may help mitigate loneliness. However, we argue that the use of widespread LLMs like ChatGPT is more prevalent--and riskier, as they are not designed for this purpose. To explore this, we analysed user interactions with ChatGPT, particularly those outside of its marketed use as task-oriented assistant. In dialogues classified as lonely, users frequently (37%) sought advice or validation, and received good engagement. However, ChatGPT failed in sensitive scenarios, like responding appropriately to suicidal ideation or trauma. We also observed a 35% higher incidence of toxic content, with women being 22 times more likely to be targeted than men. Our findings underscore ethical and legal questions about this technology, and note risks like radicalisation or further isolation. We conclude with recommendations for research and industry to address loneliness.

India has 1369 languages of which 22 are official. About 13 different scripts are used to represent these languages. A Common Label Set (CLS) was developed based on phonetics to address the issue of large vocabulary of units required in the End to End (E2E) framework for multilingual synthesis. This reduced the footprint of the synthesizer and also enabled fast adaptation to new languages which had similar phonotactics, provided language scripts belonged to the same family. In this paper, we provide new insights into speech synthesis, where the script belongs to one family, while the phonotactics comes from another. Indian language text is first converted to CLS, and then a synthesizer that matches the phonotactics of the language is used. Quality akin to that of a native speaker is obtained for Sanskrit and Konkani with zero adaptation data, using Kannada and Marathi synthesizers respectively. Further, this approach also lends itself seamless code switching across 13 Indian languages and English in a given native speaker's voice.

We present MunTTS, an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system specifically for Mundari, a low-resource Indian language of the Austo-Asiatic family. Our work addresses the gap in linguistic technology for underrepresented languages by collecting and processing data to build a speech synthesis system. We begin our study by gathering a substantial dataset of Mundari text and speech and train end-to-end speech models. We also delve into the methods used for training our models, ensuring they are efficient and effective despite the data constraints. We evaluate our system with native speakers and objective metrics, demonstrating its potential as a tool for preserving and promoting the Mundari language in the digital age.

Eugenia Kuyda defended AI companion bots during the interview with Fox News Digital and argued that dating app Replika is just one of many possible solutions to loneliness. Credit it to the rise of technology, political polarization or even the pandemic, but loneliness is on the rise. It's an epidemic with consequences so severe that Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warns they could be deadly. "We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It's a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing," Murthy said, per The Associated Press.

Oregon State University announced a new $200 million research and education center on Friday, focused on supporting the semiconductor and general technology industries in the region. The center will be launched by $100 million in donations. The university announced the new center at a fundraising campaign launch event Friday night. The center will be named the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex. Jen-Hsun Huang is the founder and CEO of the software company NVIDIA.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and former under Secretary of Defense for policy Michèle Flournoy discuss possible actions to take if Russia invades Ukraine. This is a rush transcript of "Fox News Sunday" on December 5, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. President Biden and Russia's Vladimir Putin will hold a superpower phone JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't accept anybody's red We'll discuss the standoff with Senate Armed Services Committee member Joni Just how much of a threat is China? We'll talk about how to keep law and order in space with the vice chief of So, we need to be ready. U.S. faces around the world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the swelling populations of newly arrived immigrants in New York City's Lower East Side reached a boiling point, forcing the City to pass the 1901 Tenement House Act. Recalling this legislation, New York City's Mayor's Office recently responded to its own modern housing crisis by enabling developers for the first time to build affordable micro-studio apartments of 400 square feet. One of the primary drivers of allocating tens of thousands of new micro-units is the adoption of innovative design and construction technologies that enable modular and flexible housing options. As Mayor de Blasio affirmed, "Housing New York 2.0 commits us to creating 25,000 affordable homes a year and 300,000 homes by 2026. Making New York a fairer city for today and for future generations depends on it."

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) estimators are obtained as solutions of min-max problems in which the statistician selects a parameter minimizing the worst-case loss among all probability models within a certain distance (in a Wasserstein sense) from the underlying empirical measure. While motivated by the need to identify model parameters (or) decision choices that are robust to model uncertainties and misspecification, the Wasserstein DRO estimators recover a wide range of regularized estimators, including square-root LASSO and support vector machines, among others, as particular cases. This paper studies the asymptotic normality of underlying DRO estimators as well as the properties of an optimal (in a suitable sense) confidence region induced by the Wasserstein DRO formulation.

Now, a collaboration between the labs of Princeton professors Mala Murthy and Joshua Shaevitz has gone a step further, using the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically track animals' individual body parts in existing video. Their new tool, LEAP Estimates Animal Pose (LEAP), can be trained in a matter of minutes to automatically track an animal's individual body parts over millions of frames of video with high accuracy, without having to add any physical markers or labels. "The method can be used broadly, across animal model systems, and it will be useful to measuring the behavior of animals with genetic mutations or following drug treatments," said Murthy, an associate professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). The paper detailing the new technology will be published in the January 2019 issue of the journal Nature Methods, but its open-access version, released in May, has already led to the software being adopted by a number of other labs. When the researchers combine LEAP with other quantitative tools developed in their labs, they can study what they call "the language of behavior" by observing patterns in animal body movements, said Shaevitz, a professor of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.