The National Archives needs help from people with a special set of skills–reading cursive. The archival bureau is seeking volunteer citizen archivists to help them classify and/or transcribe more than 200 years worth of hand-written historical documents. Most of these are from the Revolutionary War-era, known for looped and flowing penmanship. "Reading cursive is a superpower," Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog told USA Today. "It's not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it's how much you use cursive today."

The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit "bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior," according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is "committed to pursuing innovation within our agency" but are still "working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way." Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use "state-of-the-art generative AI models" at work--but only inside the agency's internal testing environment. "Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI's capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs," Fucito wrote in an email. Outside of the testing environment, USPTO staff are barred from relying on AI programs like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude for work tasks.

Large language models have gained tremendous popularity in domains such as e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and education. Fine-tuning is a common approach to customize an LLM on a domain-specific dataset for a desired downstream task. In this paper, we present a valuable resource for fine-tuning LLMs developed for the Spanish language to perform a variety of tasks such as classification, masked language modeling, clustering, and others. Our resource is a collection of handwritten notary records from the seventeenth century obtained from the National Archives of Argentina. This collection contains a combination of original images and transcribed text (and metadata) of 160+ pages that were handwritten by two notaries, namely, Estenban Agreda de Vergara and Nicolas de Valdivia y Brisuela nearly 400 years ago. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our collection can be used to fine-tune Spanish LLMs for tasks such as classification and masked language modeling, and can outperform pre-trained Spanish models and ChatGPT-3.5/ChatGPT-4o. Our resource will be an invaluable resource for historical text analysis and is publicly available on GitHub.

Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Wash., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., are encouraged by the Biden administration's response to the huge and growing backlog of government documents that need to be processed so that more of them can be revealed to the public. "The failures of the current classification system make our country both more vulnerable and less transparent--it's a lose-lose proposition," Wyden said in a press release Wednesday. "I'm pleased that the Biden administration is committed to reforming the classification system and investing in new declassification technology. I'll continue watching closely to ensure the White House gets it done and ultimately heeds my call to update the executive order governing classification." The executive order, issued back in 2009, looked to address how the internet has changed the items that need to be processed for classification.

Novel methods of searching the nation's gallery, library and museum collections could soon be revolutionized by a visual search platform designed in collaboration with Northumbria University. As the sector worldwide moves towards presenting collections online, the Deep Discoveries project was launched to explore ways of creating a computer vision search platform that can identify and match images across digitized collections on a national scale. The expertise of Dr. Jo Briggs and Associate Professor Jamie Steane, from Northumbria School of Design, were enlisted to help deliver the collaboration between The National Archives, the University of Surrey and the V&A Museum. Rather than typing a keyword into an empty search box, visual search uses a query image and computer vision artificial intelligence (AI), to match similar images from across digitized collections based on properties such as color, pattern and shape. The Northumbria design team--made up of Jo, Jamie and talented graduate Andy Cain--joined the project at a later stage to help with information sharing and developing the user experience.

What is happening in Europe regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)? "A lot" is the short answer. There is a Cambrian explosion of projects, studies and initiatives in this field. In this post we provide an overview of what is happening in Europe regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). We look some of the latest examples from across Europe where public sector buyers are looking for suppliers of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data systems, products and services.

Last week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, the Democratic National Committee tried to raise awareness of the dangers of AI-doctored videos by displaying a deepfaked video of DNC Chair Tom Perez. Deepfakes are videos that have been manipulated, using deep learning tools, to superimpose a person's face onto a video of someone else. As the 2020 presidential election draws near, there's increasing concern over the potential threats deepfakes pose to the democratic process. In June, the U.S. Congress House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing to discuss the threats of deefakes and other AI-manipulated media. But there's doubt over whether tech companies are ready to deal with deepfakes.

The U.K.'s University of Surrey has announced that it's securing digital government records of national video archives around the world against tampering using blockchain tech and artificial intelligence (AI). In a press release provided to CoinDesk, the university said its Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) has teamed up with the Open Data Institute and the National Archives in the U.K. to develop what it calls a "highly secure, decentralised computer vision and blockchain based system" called ARCHANGEL, which is designed to preserve the integrity of digital archives for the long term. Computer vision is a field in which computers are programmed to analyze and understand digital images or videos. The system "essentially provides a digital fingerprint for archives, making it possible to verify their authenticity," according to project lead at the University of Surrey, Professor John Collomosse. ARCHANGEL uses blockchain tech as a database maintained by a number of archives.

The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is in the books. I tweeted, took notes and picked some winners and losers. At times she came across as overly rehearsed and robotic. This week, the advertising world converges on New York City to discuss the industry and its ongoing changes. The team at Advertising Week has created a program full of interesting speakers and topics, including brand storytelling, mobile advertising and diversity.