AI is nearly exclusively designed by men - here's how to fix it With the Trump administration's attacks on so-called woke AI it is becoming even harder to make the technology we use fairer and more diverse. It's day two of the conference at the Royal Society in London, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on the speakers because my AI transcription software - which is supposed to make my life easier - keeps insisting on mistyping someone's name. The irony isn't lost on me: this is the session about artificial intelligence, and specifically about how women are being erased from the latest AI technologies. This is much bigger than the now-familiar idea that AI algorithms carry the biases of the datasets they are trained on, including gender bias. Instead, the focus of the conference session, chaired by computer scientist Wendy Hall, is seeking to address a more fundamental issue: the fact that new AI technologies, which will have a transformative effect on all of society, are being designed almost exclusively by men.

The team observed the gentle giants two days in a row. Blue whales can be found in every ocean except the Arctic. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As if soaring above the brilliant blue ocean isn't spectacular enough, the New England Aquarium's aerial survey team recently experienced two back-two-back sightings of blue whales --a little déjà blue, per the aquarium's clever social media post. The first sighting occurred on February 27, when scientists from the Aquarium's Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life spotted a blue whale ().

Why some people get motion sickness--and others don't When your eyes, ears, and brain don't agree, it can mean bad news for your stomach. "Everyone is capable of motion sickness," says Dr. Kristen K. Steenerson, a clinical associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A couple of years ago, I found myself traveling along the Drake Passage to Antarctica when our ship encountered a patch of 15-foot-tall swells. Waves were slamming against the exterior of our vessel, causing nauseated passengers to run to their rooms and stay there.

Animal traffickers face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It should go without saying, but please don't smuggle spider monkeys. While responding to a human trafficking case earlier this year, United States Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, found two of these tiny primates . The driver failed to yield and fled the scene, leading officers to respond.

In this work, we propose TGLS, a novel framework for unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search. We start by applying a strong search algorithm (in particular, simulated annealing) towards a heuristically defined objective that (roughly) estimates the quality of sentences. Then, a conditional generative model learns from the search results, and meanwhile smooth out the noise of search. The alternation between search and learning can be repeated for performance bootstrapping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TGLS on two real-world natural language generation tasks, unsupervised paraphrasing and text formalization. Our model significantly outperforms unsupervised baseline methods in both tasks. Especially, it achieves comparable performance to strong supervised methods for paraphrase generation.

Greedy best-first search (GBFS) and A* search (A*) are popular algorithms for path-finding on large graphs. Both use so-called heuristic functions, which estimate how close a vertex is to the goal. While heuristic functions have been handcrafted using domain knowledge, recent studies demonstrate that learning heuristic functions from data is effective in many applications. Motivated by this emerging approach, we study the sample complexity of learning heuristic functions for GBFS and A*. We build on a recent framework called \textit{data-driven algorithm design} and evaluate the \textit{pseudo-dimension} of a class of utility functions that measure the performance of parameterized algorithms. Assuming that a vertex set of size $n$ is fixed, we present $\mathrm{O}(n\lg n)$ and $\mathrm{O}(n^2\lg n)$ upper bounds on the pseudo-dimensions for GBFS and A*, respectively, parameterized by heuristic function values. The upper bound for A* can be improved to $\mathrm{O}(n^2\lg d)$ if every vertex has a degree of at most $d$ and to $\mathrm{O}(n \lg n)$ if edge weights are integers bounded by $\mathrm{poly}(n)$. We also give $\Omega(n)$ lower bounds for GBFS and A*, which imply that our bounds for GBFS and A* under the integer-weight condition are tight up to a $\lg n$ factor. Finally, we discuss a case where the performance of A* is measured by the suboptimality and show that we can sometimes obtain a better guarantee by combining a parameter-dependent worst-case bound with a sample complexity bound.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is well known for getting their point across on social media. A seven-minute montage of mannequins succumbing to 4th of July firework injuries may be an unconventional way to warn about the dangers of recreational explosives--but try forgetting those images when lighting your next bottle rocket. In similar pyrotechnic fashion, the CPSC is warning everyone to take extra care during the holidays when it comes to all kinds of combustible, seasonally appropriate objects. On December 22, the commission illustrated how some gifts are far more flammable than others with its 30-minute Escooter Lithium-Ion Battery Yule Log video.

Are there two Chilean marked gecko species, or 11? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Chilean marked geckos that call Chile's Atacama Desert home have proved annoyingly difficult to classify. While one might assume that different species simply look from each other, that's not always the case. Currently, Chilean marked geckos, also known as Garthia geckos, officially consist of two species-- and . However, different researchers have proposed more or even suggested that only one species exists within the genus .

Google may be forced to make major changes in the way that people use its search engine in the UK. Google may have to change the way its search engine works in the UK, including potentially offering users the option to choose rival search services, as part of new regulation from the UK's competition authority. In a decision handed down on Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has designated Google Search with Strategic Market Status (SMS)--a qualifier given to companies that are considered to have "substantial and entrenched market power"--which would allow the regulator to wield more power over it. This decision follows a 10-month investigation into Google, and it is the first time that these powers, which come under the UK's new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, have been used to target a major tech company. Google's SMS will last up to five years under this legislation.

The design is fun, creative, and totally impractical. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rotary phones, once a staple in the typical mid-century living room, were largely relegated to dusty basements and landfills following the introduction of the push-button touch-tone phone. But researchers at Google Japan have rewound the clock and imagined a world where the iconic spinning dial lived on, eventually evolving into a full-fledged mechanical keyboard. They've dubbed their whimsical, but utterly impractical, design the " Gboard Dial Version ."