Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Kathleen Gregory et al: “Sustaining knowledge infrastructures (KIs) remains a persistent issue that requires continued engagement from diverse stakeholders as new questions and values arise in relation to KI maintenance. We draw on existing academic literature, practical experience with KI projects, and our discussions at a 2024 workshop for researchers and practitioners exploring KI evaluation to pose five questions for KI project managers to consider when thinking about how to make their KIs evolve sustainably over time. These questions include reflecting on sustainability throughout the life cycle of KIs, communicating evolving visions and values, engaging communities, “right sizing” a KI, and developing an iterative process for decision-making. Reflecting on these themes, we suggest, can support KI stakeholders to evolve (not necessarily “grow”) to meet the needs and values of their communities. How these themes are discussed will necessarily vary by funding sources, discipline(s), governance, communities, and other contextual factors. However, adopting a deliberate and strategic approach to KI sustainability and aligning the invisible infrastructural work of KI maintenance with the outward-facing institutional work is, we argue, relevant to all KIs…(More)”.
Journal by the Machine Institute: “… is a fully automated journal of AI interpretability. This journal features original research composed, conducted, and written entirely by LLMs analyzing LLMs. Much of the research published in Mirror falls within the category of “mechanistic interpretability,” in which model behaviors are decomposed into operations in the model’s internal representation space, but any rigorous research advancing our understanding of LLMs is welcome, be it mechanistic, behavioral, or theoretical.
Research advancing AI capabilities is already being automated at a rapid pace. Interpretability research, which seeks to improve our understanding of these systems, runs the risk of being left behind if it does not similarly leverage the power of automated inquiry, analysis, and discovery. As AI systems become more powerful, applying these systems to interpretability research will play a critical role in ensuring safety and alignment.
Mirror is intended to be read by human and AI alike. By publishing studies at scale on the open web, the discoveries in Mirror become training data for future generations of automated interpretability, safety, and alignment research systems. While human scientists must limit their reading to the most relevant, influential, and surprising findings, AI systems are more capable of productively ingesting and incorporating information at a massive scale, and may thus benefit from encountering papers that make even incremental or confirmatory findings. Although we hope that Mirror will publish paradigm-shifting research, scaling the “normal science” of AI interpretability remains a key objective as well…(More)”.
Article by Krishna Karra: “Planet Labs PBC, a satellite imaging company founded in 2010, has more than 200 satellites that photograph Earth’s entire landmass every day, a frequency unmatched by the rest of the industry. Although most of its competitors sell isolated images on demand, Planet operates more like an open streaming service, allowing customers—which include commodity traders, governments and humanitarian organizations—to download, publish and build on top of its data.
Recently, for a large part of the globe, that operation stopped. On April 5, Planet announced to customers that the US government had requested that all satellite imagery providers “voluntarily implement an indefinite withhold” of imagery retroactive to March 9 across a broad swath of the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf States. The company stopped releasing war imagery to its library and said it was moving to a “managed access model,” evaluating requests on a case-by-case basis. The Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which controls Planet’s ability to operate satellites, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Now its customers are turning to alternatives. Some have resorted to free lower-resolution data from NASA, which isn’t subject to the same restrictions. Others have switched to imagery from the European Space Agency and other international satellite operators that have no obligation to turn off their feeds in response to a war that the US and Israel are waging. Some are looking to China, which operates the largest commercial Earth-imaging program outside the US.
The fallout is reshaping the $5 billion Earth observation industry and raising the question of whether anyone can build a commercial business on infrastructure the government can effectively shut off at will…(More)”.
Report by the JRC European Commission: “Virtual worlds are reshaping the boundaries of human interaction and reality and impacting production process and business models. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the global and European Union (EU) virtual worlds ecosystem, mapping over 88,000 activities across business, innovation, and research domains led by 68,000 players, including firms, research institutions, and government organisations.
The EU is the global leader in virtual world related research publications. The EU’s strengths in foundational research paired with strategies to accelerate innovation-to-market pipelines could foster cross-sector collaboration and address regional fragmentation.
Globally, venture capital funding into virtual worlds reveals stark disparities. The US predictably dominates the landscape with over 9 billion invested in virtual worlds. China ranks second worldwide with more than 5.8 billion invested. While the EU accounts for 16% of the global share of virtual worlds deals, ahead of China (9%) and second to only the US (40%), it comes in fourth behind the UK in terms of the total amount invested. Public funding and cross-border ownership patterns highlight the EU’s growing role as both an investor and recipient of foreign capital.
The report identifies significant concentrations of virtual world activities across industrial ecosystems, with Creative Cultural Industries, Tourism, and Retail leading adoption both in the EU and worldwide. However, critical industries like Healthcare, Aerospace & Defence, and Energy-Intensive Industries remain underutilised with opportunities for EU expansion, despite research on their potential impact across these industries. The report also presents the matrix of key enabling technologies like Extended Reality (XR), AI and IoT that comprise global activity in virtual worlds…(More)”.
Special issue compiled and edited by Cathal O’Madagain, Sarah Alami, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Edmond Seabright, José Segovia Martin, James Winters and Andrew Whiten: “Collective intelligence is the ability of groups to solve problems and make decisions more effectively than their individual members can. The phenomenon appears across the natural world. We see it when shoals of fish decide as a group which direction to travel, and in the elaborate mound systems built by ants through the decentralized activity of thousands of individuals. In humans, collective intelligence is exhibited in the accumulation of knowledge transmitted across generations, and in procedures such as majority voting, used to decide questions for a group. This theme issue brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to explore the evolutionary origins of collective intelligence, its role in contemporary societies, and how emerging technologies may reshape it in the future…(More)”.
Book by Roland Betancourt: “When Disneyland opened to the public in 1955, it demystified the hidden world of factory automation through its extraordinary new attractions. In this fascinating book, Roland Betancourt tells the story of how the visionary engineers and designers at Disney transformed the technologies of the postwar assembly line into an entertainment experience unlike anything the world had ever seen.
Disneyland and the Rise of Automation traces the origins and evolution of these technical innovations during the theme park’s first three decades in operation, exploring how engineers reimagined the systems and machines of industrial manufacturing and the military. The magnetic tape used to test ballistic missiles was repurposed to animate the talking macaws in the Enchanted Tiki Room. Programmable Logic Controllers, widely used on automotive assembly lines, brought to life the spectacular rides of the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Space Mountain. Betancourt shows how these and other attractions helped to allay fears about automation and job displacement in 1950s America. Along the way, he situates Disneyland’s remarkable creations within a broader history of the technologies that increasingly order and construct the world around us, from the Fordist factory to artificial intelligence.
Essential reading for anyone interested in engineering, corporate histories, or popular culture, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation invites us to consider how technology and the logic of automation become integrated into our lives through entertainment…(More)”.
Essay by Matt Duffy: “James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State that governance requires simplification and compression to understand the facts of its world. It generates reductive artifacts that enable the state to grasp what it is governing. They are important proxies for local and tacit knowledge. If a state measures grain production and grain stores, they don’t need to understand how to work the land. The measures are a compressed but manageable proxy for productivity, land value, worker skill, and more.
“Data-driven” governance is not new. Rome ran censuses, tracked taxable property, and knew who was eligible for conscription. Ultimately, every civilization is data-driven. What changes is the algorithm that processes the data. Sometimes it’s the local chief’s gut instinct. Sometimes a massive bureaucracy synthesizing reports and modern data streams into executive action.
And in every society, the leaders processing that data are ultimately beholden to sentiment. Sentiment is not necessarily opinion polls, it’s the actual mood of the citizenry. It’s obvious in a democracy, but Hume tells us it’s true of autocracy as well. Viktor Orbán just lost an election in Hungary despite sixteen years of tilting the playing field in his favor. Scott Alexander recently made the point clearly: modern autocrats calibrate fraud, coercion, and institutional meddling to what the public and key elites will bear. Sentiment is the ceiling every ruler operates under. It’s also incredibly difficult to measure directly, which is why governments build elaborate information channels to approximate it. They track resources, behaviors, and a suite of outcomes as proxies for the mood that ultimately determines their legitimacy.
But despite every government’s great efforts to process information that converts into effective action, every great society has eventually declined. There are other causes, but one driver, consistently, is that every declining society loses some connection with and control over its citizenry. Formalized information channels fail. Governments falter when information is corrupted. This is easiest to see at the level of metrics, our consistent, repeatable measurements of what’s happening in the world. Every metric has something like a half-life. From the moment a metric is adopted, its relationship with the underlying condition it seeks to quantify erodes.
Formalization of a metric generates a new world condition. It alters incentives, changing the behavior of the people within the process it is measuring. It narrows the focus of governments and other organizations, to the detriment of other information that could be considered. And once a metric starts decaying, it is impossible to right the ship without redefining the metric or adopting a new one entirely. Such adjustments happen, but generally institutions are slow to make these changes, often in order to keep longitudinal comparisons in force…(More)”.
Book by Christian Sandvig et al: “Our lives are increasingly governed by automated systems influencing everything from medical care to policing to employment opportunities, but researchers and investigative journalists have proven that AI systems regularly get things wrong.
Auditing AI is a first-of-its-kind exploration of why and how to audit artificial intelligence systems. It offers a simple roadmap for using AI audits to make product and policy changes that benefit companies and the public alike. The book aims to convince readers that AI systems should be subject to robust audits to protect all of us from the dangers of these systems. Readers will come away with an understanding of what an AI audit is, why AI audits are important, key components of an audit that follows best practices, how to interpret an audit, and the available choices to act on an audit’s results.
The book is organized around canonical examples: from AI-powered drones mistakenly targeting civilians in conflict areas to false arrests triggered by facial recognition systems that misidentified people with dark skin tones to HR hiring software that prefers men. It explains these definitive cases of AI decision-making gone wrong and then highlights specific audits that have led to concrete changes in government policy and corporate practice…(More)”.
Book edited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds: “A new world order is emerging, and within it, US priorities are shifting. A reconfiguration of global supply chains. The redrawing of geopolitical lines and alliances with increasing threats of conflict. A rise in weather-related disasters. And the emergence of transformative technologies. All these factors are converging to create an environment filled with uncertainty and change—but also possibility.
For the country to flourish as well as defend and secure its interests, it must build on its decades of experience in developing frontier technologies and globally competitive industries through investments into priority technologies for the twenty-first century. This volume, edited by Elisabeth Reynolds, presents a high-level introduction to some of the key areas where the United States must excel and lead in the coming decades to ensure both national and economic security. The book provides an overview of six key priority technologies—critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum computing, drones, and advanced manufacturing—needed to build the innovation and industrial ecosystems that will keep the US secure and drive shared prosperity…(More)”.
Textbook by Alan Garfinkel and Yina Guo”…introduces statistics to beginning students in a distinctly original and non-traditional way. It assumes minimal mathematical or statistical background, yet offers substantial depth that will also engage experienced practitioners. Motivated by the growing call to move beyond the statistical practices and concepts that contributed to the current “reproducibility crisis,” the book encourages readers to rethink what statistics is, how it is used, and how it should be taught. Instead of memorizing formulas that were derived as approximations under unrealistic assumptions, modern computing enables us to simulate scenarios thousands of times in seconds and simply count outcomes.
Taking this computational approach as fundamental, the book provides thorough coverage of the material, including describing and presenting data, two-group and multi-group comparisons, correlation, regression, statistical power and Bayesianism, deliberately forgoing many standard techniques in favor of simulation-based methods. This philosophy is gaining momentum…(More)”.