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Psychology in cybersecurity

The psychology of cybersecurity (often intersecting with usable security and cyberpsychology) is an interdisciplinary field studying how human behavior, cognitive biases, and social dynamics influence information security. While traditional cybersecurity focuses on hardware and software vulnerabilities, this discipline addresses the "human factor," which is exploited in cyberattacks. Psychology in cybersecurity draws from cognitive psychology and human–computer interaction. == History and evolution == The challenge of human behavior in computing was noted as early as the 1960s with multi-user mainframes like the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). In 1966, a software error on CTSS caused the system's master password file to be displayed to every user upon login—one of the earliest documented security incidents attributable to a combination of system design and human factors. These behaviors gained broader significance in the 1990s as the Internet became widely accessible. High-profile incidents involving figures like Kevin Mitnick demonstrated how human trust could be exploited through social engineering such as pretexting over the phone. == Cognitive and behavioral factors == Much of the psychology of cybersecurity focuses on decision-making under stress or uncertainty. Researchers apply frameworks like dual process theory to explain why humans fall for phishing or business email compromise. Threat actors design malicious communications to trigger fast, emotional "System 1" thinking—using urgency, authority, or panic, which prompts users to click a link or wire funds before their analytical "System 2" can assess the situation's legitimacy. Industry research has consistently documented the effectiveness of these techniques at scale, pointing to several recurring psychological phenomena that influence daily security practices: Cognitive biases: The optimism bias leads users to believe they are unlikely to be targeted by cybercriminals, resulting in lax password practices or delayed software updates. The availability heuristic causes individuals to focus on highly publicized, sophisticated threats while ignoring common, statistically probable risks like credential reuse. Social influence: Attackers leverage established principles of persuasion, such as those categorized by Robert Cialdini. Impersonating a CEO leverages the psychological trigger of authority, while fake tech support scams use reciprocity (offering to fix a problem before asking for network credentials). == Neurological and pre-cognitive factors == Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show that neural activation in visual and attentional regions decreases with repeated exposure to the same stimulus, a phenomenon termed repetition suppression. Experiments have confirmed this effect in the context of security warnings: static warning designs produce declines in user attention and adherence. Information processing research on phishing indicates that affective cues, such as artificial urgency or fear, increase cognitive load and elicit automatic heuristic processing, reducing the likelihood of analytical evaluation and facilitating compliance with malicious requests. == Security fatigue and organizational dynamics == Aggressive cybersecurity postures can sometimes lead to mental and emotional exhaustion, a phenomenon known as security fatigue. === Alert fatigue === One example is alert fatigue, which most frequently affects both end-users and security operations center analysts. Continuous exposure to browser warnings or antivirus pop-ups, particularly those that are false positives, conditions users to dismiss alerts automatically due to the volume of notifications rather than their repetitive appearance (see § Neurological and pre-cognitive factors). The scale of this problem is significant in enterprise: SOC teams in large organizations receive thousands of alerts daily, and a survey published in ACM Computer Surveys found that analysts spend over 25% of their time handling false positives, meaning that malicious indicators can be buried in the noise. === Password fatigue === Similarly, password fatigue is the feeling experienced by many people who are required to remember an excessive number of passwords as part of their daily routine, such as to log in to a computer at work. Users cope with the memory burden by making predictable, iterative changes to their passwords (such as updating "Password01!" to "Password02!"), which decreases password security.
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Coupled pattern learner

Coupled Pattern Learner (CPL) is a machine learning algorithm which couples the semi-supervised learning of categories and relations to forestall the problem of semantic drift associated with boot-strap learning methods. == Coupled Pattern Learner == Semi-supervised learning approaches using a small number of labeled examples with many unlabeled examples are usually unreliable as they produce an internally consistent, but incorrect set of extractions. CPL solves this problem by simultaneously learning classifiers for many different categories and relations in the presence of an ontology defining constraints that couple the training of these classifiers. It was introduced by Andrew Carlson, Justin Betteridge, Estevam R. Hruschka Jr. and Tom M. Mitchell in 2009. == CPL overview == CPL is an approach to semi-supervised learning that yields more accurate results by coupling the training of many information extractors. Basic idea behind CPL is that semi-supervised training of a single type of extractor such as ‘coach’ is much more difficult than simultaneously training many extractors that cover a variety of inter-related entity and relation types. Using prior knowledge about the relationships between these different entities and relations CPL makes unlabeled data as a useful constraint during training. For e.g., ‘coach(x)’ implies ‘person(x)’ and ‘not sport(x)’. == CPL description == === Coupling of predicates === CPL primarily relies on the notion of coupling the learning of multiple functions so as to constrain the semi-supervised learning problem. CPL constrains the learned function in two ways. Sharing among same-arity predicates according to logical relations Relation argument type-checking === Sharing among same-arity predicates === Each predicate P in the ontology has a list of other same-arity predicates with which P is mutually exclusive. If A is mutually exclusive with predicate B, A’s positive instances and patterns become negative instances and negative patterns for B. For example, if ‘city’, having an instance ‘Boston’ and a pattern ‘mayor of arg1’, is mutually exclusive with ‘scientist’, then ‘Boston’ and ‘mayor of arg1’ will become a negative instance and a negative pattern respectively for ‘scientist.’ Further, Some categories are declared to be a subset of another category. For e.g., ‘athlete’ is a subset of ‘person’. === Relation argument type-checking === This is a type checking information used to couple the learning of relations and categories. For example, the arguments of the ‘ceoOf’ relation are declared to be of the categories ‘person’ and ‘company’. CPL does not promote a pair of noun phrases as an instance of a relation unless the two noun phrases are classified as belonging to the correct argument types. === Algorithm description === Following is a quick summary of the CPL algorithm. Input: An ontology O, and a text corpus C Output: Trusted instances/patterns for each predicate for i=1,2,...,∞ do foreach predicate p in O do EXTRACT candidate instances/contextual patterns using recently promoted patterns/instances; FILTER candidates that violate coupling; RANK candidate instances/patterns; PROMOTE top candidates; end end ==== Inputs ==== A large corpus of Part-Of-Speech tagged sentences and an initial ontology with predefined categories, relations, mutually exclusive relationships between same-arity predicates, subset relationships between some categories, seed instances for all predicates, and seed patterns for the categories. ==== Candidate extraction ==== CPL finds new candidate instances by using newly promoted patterns to extract the noun phrases that co-occur with those patterns in the text corpus. CPL extracts, Category Instances Category Patterns Relation Instances Relation Patterns ==== Candidate filtering ==== Candidate instances and patterns are filtered to maintain high precision, and to avoid extremely specific patterns. An instance is only considered for assessment if it co-occurs with at least two promoted patterns in the text corpus, and if its co-occurrence count with all promoted patterns is at least three times greater than its co-occurrence count with negative patterns. ==== Candidate ranking ==== CPL ranks candidate instances using the number of promoted patterns that they co-occur with so that candidates that occur with more patterns are ranked higher. Patterns are ranked using an estimate of the precision of each pattern. ==== Candidate promotion ==== CPL ranks the candidates according to their assessment scores and promotes at most 100 instances and 5 patterns for each predicate. Instances and patterns are only promoted if they co-occur with at least two promoted patterns or instances, respectively. == Meta-Bootstrap Learner == Meta-Bootstrap Learner (MBL) was also proposed by the authors of CPL. Meta-Bootstrap learner couples the training of multiple extraction techniques with a multi-view constraint, which requires the extractors to agree. It makes addition of coupling constraints on top of existing extraction algorithms, while treating them as black boxes, feasible. MBL assumes that the errors made by different extraction techniques are independent. Following is a quick summary of MBL. Input: An ontology O, a set of extractors ε Output: Trusted instances for each predicate for i=1,2,...,∞ do foreach predicate p in O do foreach extractor e in ε do Extract new candidates for p using e with recently promoted instances; end FILTER candidates that violate mutual-exclusion or type-checking constraints; PROMOTE candidates that were extracted by all extractors; end end Subordinate algorithms used with MBL do not promote any instance on their own, they report the evidence about each candidate to MBL and MBL is responsible for promoting instances. == Applications == In their paper authors have presented results showing the potential of CPL to contribute new facts to existing repository of semantic knowledge, Freebase
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JAX (software)

JAX is a Python library for accelerator-oriented array computation and program transformation, designed for high-performance numerical computing and large-scale machine learning. It is developed by Google with contributions from Nvidia and other community contributors. It is described as bringing together a modified version of the automatic differentiation system autograd and OpenXLA's XLA (Accelerated Linear Algebra). It is designed to follow the structure and workflow of NumPy as closely as possible and works with various existing frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. The primary features of JAX are: Providing a unified NumPy-like interface to computations that run on CPU, GPU, or TPU, in local or distributed settings. Built-in Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation via OpenXLA, an open-source machine learning compiler ecosystem. Efficient evaluation of gradients via its automatic differentiation transformations. Automatic vectorization to efficiently map functions over arrays representing batches of inputs. == Libraries using Jax == Flax Equinox Optax
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AZFinText

Arizona Financial Text System (AZFinText) is a textual-based quantitative financial prediction system written by Robert P. Schumaker of University of Texas at Tyler and Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona. == System == This system differs from other systems in that it uses financial text as one of its key means of predicting stock price movement. This reduces the information lag-time problem evident in many similar systems where new information must be transcribed (e.g., such as losing a costly court battle or having a product recall), before the quant can react appropriately. AZFinText overcomes these limitations by utilizing the terms used in financial news articles to predict future stock prices twenty minutes after the news article has been released. It is believed that certain article terms can move stocks more than others. Terms such as factory exploded or workers strike will have a depressing effect on stock prices whereas terms such as earnings rose will tend to increase stock prices. The AZFinText system analyzes financial news to identify the patterns in how investors react to such specific information. It uses methods like sentiment analysis and term weighting to examine the text of news articles. This system is designed to find price differences that occur when the market responds to news stories. This approach provides an alternative and easier method for predicting stock market movements. == Overview of research == The foundation of AZFinText can be found in the ACM TOIS article. Within this paper, the authors tested several different prediction models and linguistic textual representations. From this work, it was found that using the article terms and the price of the stock at the time the article was released was the most effective model and using proper nouns was the most effective textual representation technique. Combining the two, AZFinText netted a 2.84% trading return over the five-week study period. AZFinText was then extended to study what combination of peer organizations help to best train the system. Using the premise that IBM has more in common with Microsoft than GM, AZFinText studied the effect of varying peer-based training sets. To do this, AZFinText trained on the various levels of GICS and evaluated the results. It was found that sector-based training was most effective, netting an 8.50% trading return, outperforming Jim Cramer, Jim Jubak and DayTraders.com during the study period. AZFinText was also compared against the top 10 quantitative systems and outperformed 6 of them. A third study investigated the role of portfolio building in a textual financial prediction system. From this study, Momentum and Contrarian stock portfolios were created and tested. Using the premise that past winning stocks will continue to win and past losing stocks will continue to lose, AZFinText netted a 20.79% return during the study period. It was also noted that traders were generally overreacting to news events, creating the opportunity of abnormal returns. A fourth study looked into using author sentiment as an added predictive variable. Using the premise that an author can unwittingly influence market trades simply by the terms they use, AZFinText was tested using tone and polarity features. It was found that Contrarian activity was occurring within the market, where articles of a positive tone would decrease in price and articles of a negative tone would increase in price. A further study investigated what article verbs have the most influence on stock price movement. From this work, it was found that planted, announcing, front, smaller and crude had the highest positive impact on stock price. == Notable publicity == AZFinText has been the topic of discussion by numerous media outlets. Some of the more notable ones include The Wall Street Journal, MIT's Technology Review, Dow Jones Newswire, WBIR in Knoxville, TN, Slashdot and other media outlets.
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Linux Trace Toolkit

The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) is a set of tools that is designed to log program execution details from a patched Linux kernel and then perform various analyses on them, using console-based and graphical tools. LTT has been mostly superseded by its successor LTTng (Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation). LTT allows the user to see in-depth information about the processes that were running during the trace period, including when context switches occurred, how long the processes were blocked for, and how much time the processes spent executing vs. how much time the processes were blocked. The data is logged to a text file and various console-based and graphical (GTK+) tools are provided for interpreting that data. In order to do data collection, LTT requires a patched Linux kernel. The authors of LTT claim that the performance hit for a patched kernel compared to a regular kernel is minimal; Their testing has reportedly shown that this is less than 2.5% on a "normal use" system (measured using batches of kernel makes) and less than 5% on a file I/O intensive system (measured using batches of tar). == Usage == === Collecting trace data === Data collection is Started by: trace 15 foo This command will cause the LTT tracedaemon to do a trace that lasts for 15 seconds, writing trace data to foo.trace and process information from the /proc filesystem to foo.proc. The trace command is actually a script which runs the program tracedaemon with some common options. It is possible to run tracedaemon directly and in that case, the user can use a number of command-line options to control the data which is collected. For the complete list of options supported by tracedaemon, see the online manual page for tracedaemon. === Viewing the results === Viewing the results of a trace can be accomplished with: traceview foo This command will launch a graphical (GTK+) traceview tool that will read from foo.trace and foo.proc. This tool can show information in various interesting ways, including Event Graph, Process Analysis, and Raw Trace. The Event Graph is perhaps the most interesting view, showing the exact timing of events like page faults, interrupts, and context switches, in a simple graphical way. The traceview command is a wrapper for a program called tracevisualizer. For the complete list of options supported by tracevisualizer, see the online manual page for tracevisualizer.
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A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity

"A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" is a 1943 paper written by Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts, published in the journal The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. The paper proposed a mathematical model of the nervous system as a network of simple logical elements, later known as artificial neurons, or McCulloch–Pitts neurons. These neurons receive inputs, perform a weighted sum, and fire an output signal based on a threshold function. By connecting these units in various configurations, McCulloch and Pitts demonstrated that their model could perform all logical functions. It is a seminal work in cognitive science, computational neuroscience, computer science, and artificial intelligence. It was a foundational result in automata theory. John von Neumann cited it as a significant result. == Mathematics == The artificial neuron used in the original paper is slightly different from the modern version. They considered neural networks that operate in discrete steps of time t = 0 , 1 , … {\displaystyle t=0,1,\dots } . The neural network contains a number of neurons. Let the state of a neuron i {\displaystyle i} at time t {\displaystyle t} be N i ( t ) {\displaystyle N_{i}(t)} . The state of a neuron can either be 0 or 1, standing for "not firing" and "firing". Each neuron also has a firing threshold θ {\displaystyle \theta } , such that it fires if the total input exceeds the threshold. Each neuron can connect to any other neuron (including itself) with positive synapses (excitatory) or negative synapses (inhibitory). That is, each neuron can connect to another neuron with a weight w {\displaystyle w} taking an integer value. A peripheral afferent is a neuron with no incoming synapses. We can regard each neural network as a directed graph, with the nodes being the neurons, and the directed edges being the synapses. A neural network has a circle or a circuit if there exists a directed circle in the graph. Let w i j ( t ) {\displaystyle w_{ij}(t)} be the connection weight from neuron j {\displaystyle j} to neuron i {\displaystyle i} at time t {\displaystyle t} , then its next state is N i ( t + 1 ) = H ( ∑ j = 1 n w i j ( t ) N j ( t ) − θ i ( t ) ) , {\displaystyle N_{i}(t+1)=H\left(\sum _{j=1}^{n}w_{ij}(t)N_{j}(t)-\theta _{i}(t)\right),} where H {\displaystyle H} is the Heaviside step function (outputting 1 if the input is greater than or equal to 0, and 0 otherwise). === Symbolic logic === The paper used, as a logical language for describing neural networks, "Language II" from The Logical Syntax of Language by Rudolf Carnap with some notations taken from Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Language II covers substantial parts of classical mathematics, including real analysis and portions of set theory. To describe a neural network with peripheral afferents N 1 , N 2 , … , N p {\displaystyle N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{p}} and non-peripheral afferents N p + 1 , N p + 2 , … , N n {\displaystyle N_{p+1},N_{p+2},\dots ,N_{n}} they considered logical predicate of form P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N p , t ) {\displaystyle Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{p},t)} where P r {\displaystyle Pr} is a first-order logic predicate function (a function that outputs a boolean), N 1 , … , N p {\displaystyle N_{1},\dots ,N_{p}} are predicates that take t {\displaystyle t} as an argument, and t {\displaystyle t} is the only free variable in the predicate. Intuitively speaking, N 1 , … , N p {\displaystyle N_{1},\dots ,N_{p}} specifies the binary input patterns going into the neural network over all time, and P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N n , t ) {\displaystyle Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{n},t)} is a function that takes some binary input patterns, and constructs an output binary pattern P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N n , 0 ) , P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N n , 1 ) , … {\displaystyle Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{n},0),Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{n},1),\dots } . A logical sentence P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N n , t ) {\displaystyle Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{n},t)} is realized by a neural network iff there exists a time-delay T ≥ 0 {\displaystyle T\geq 0} , a neuron i {\displaystyle i} in the network, and an initial state for the non-peripheral neurons N p + 1 ( 0 ) , … , N n ( 0 ) {\displaystyle N_{p+1}(0),\dots ,N_{n}(0)} , such that for any time t {\displaystyle t} , the truth-value of the logical sentence is equal to the state of the neuron i {\displaystyle i} at time t + T {\displaystyle t+T} . That is, ∀ t = 0 , 1 , 2 , … , P r ( N 1 , N 2 , … , N p , t ) = N i ( t + T ) {\displaystyle \forall t=0,1,2,\dots ,\quad Pr(N_{1},N_{2},\dots ,N_{p},t)=N_{i}(t+T)} === Equivalence === In the paper, they considered some alternative definitions of artificial neural networks, and have shown them to be equivalent, that is, neural networks under one definition realizes precisely the same logical sentences as neural networks under another definition. They considered three forms of inhibition: relative inhibition, absolute inhibition, and extinction. The definition above is relative inhibition. By "absolute inhibition" they meant that if any negative synapse fires, then the neuron will not fire. By "extinction" they meant that if at time t {\displaystyle t} , any inhibitory synapse fires on a neuron i {\displaystyle i} , then θ i ( t + j ) = θ i ( 0 ) + b j {\displaystyle \theta _{i}(t+j)=\theta _{i}(0)+b_{j}} for j = 1 , 2 , 3 , … {\displaystyle j=1,2,3,\dots } , until the next time an inhibitory synapse fires on i {\displaystyle i} . It is required that b j = 0 {\displaystyle b_{j}=0} for all large j {\displaystyle j} . Theorem 4 and 5 state that these are equivalent. They considered three forms of excitation: spatial summation, temporal summation, and facilitation. The definition above is spatial summation (which they pictured as having multiple synapses placed close together, so that the effect of their firing sums up). By "temporal summation" they meant that the total incoming signal is ∑ τ = 0 T ∑ j = 1 n w i j ( t ) N j ( t − τ ) {\displaystyle \sum _{\tau =0}^{T}\sum _{j=1}^{n}w_{ij}(t)N_{j}(t-\tau )} for some T ≥ 1 {\displaystyle T\geq 1} . By "facilitation" they meant the same as extinction, except that b j ≤ 0 {\displaystyle b_{j}\leq 0} . Theorem 6 states that these are equivalent. They considered neural networks that do not change, and those that change by Hebbian learning. That is, they assume that at t = 0 {\displaystyle t=0} , some excitatory synaptic connections are not active. If at any t {\displaystyle t} , both N i ( t ) = 1 , N j ( t ) = 1 {\displaystyle N_{i}(t)=1,N_{j}(t)=1} , then any latent excitatory synapse between i , j {\displaystyle i,j} becomes active. Theorem 7 states that these are equivalent. === Logical expressivity === They considered "temporal propositional expressions" (TPE), which are propositional formulas with one free variable t {\displaystyle t} . For example, N 1 ( t ) ∨ N 2 ( t ) ∧ ¬ N 3 ( t ) {\displaystyle N_{1}(t)\vee N_{2}(t)\wedge \neg N_{3}(t)} is such an expression. Theorem 1 and 2 together showed that neural nets without circles are equivalent to TPE. For neural nets with loops, they noted that "realizable P r {\displaystyle Pr} may involve reference to past events of an indefinite degree of remoteness". These then encodes for sentences like "There was some x such that x was a ψ" or ( ∃ x ) ( ψ x ) {\displaystyle (\exists x)(\psi x)} . Theorems 8 to 10 showed that neural nets with loops can encode all first-order logic with equality and conversely, any looped neural networks is equivalent to a sentence in first-order logic with equality, thus showing that they are equivalent in logical expressiveness. As a remark, they noted that a neural network, if furnished with a tape, scanners, and write-heads, is equivalent to a Turing machine, and conversely, every Turing machine is equivalent to some such neural network. Thus, these neural networks are equivalent to Turing computability and Church's lambda-definability. == Context == === Previous work === The paper built upon several previous strands of work. In the symbolic logic side, it built on the previous work by Carnap, Whitehead, and Russell. This was contributed by Walter Pitts, who had a strong proficiency with symbolic logic. Pitts provided mathematical and logical rigor to McCulloch’s vague ideas on psychons (atoms of psychological events) and circular causality. In the neuroscience side, it built on previous work by the mathematical biology research group centered around Nicolas Rashevsky, of which McCulloch was a member. The paper was published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, which was founded by Rashevsky in 1939. During the late 1930s, Rashevsky's research group was producing papers that had difficulty publishing in other journals at the time, so Rashevsky decided to found a new journal exclusively devoted to mathematical biophysics. Also in the Rashevsky's group was Alston Scott Householder, who in 1941 published an abstract model
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Artificial intelligence in hiring

Artificial intelligence can be used to automate aspects of the job recruitment process. Advances in artificial intelligence, such as the advent of machine learning and the growth of big data, enable AI to be utilized to recruit, screen, and predict the success of applicants. Proponents of artificial intelligence in hiring claim it reduces bias, assists with finding qualified candidates, and frees up human resource workers' time for other tasks, while opponents worry that AI perpetuates inequalities in the workplace and will eliminate jobs. Despite the potential benefits, the ethical implications of AI in hiring remain a subject of debate, with concerns about algorithmic transparency, accountability, and the need for ongoing oversight to ensure fair and unbiased decision-making throughout the recruitment process. == Background == It is common for companies to use AI to automate aspects of their hiring process, especially the hospitality, finance, and tech industries. == Uses == === Screeners === Screeners are tests that allow companies to sift through a large applicant pool and extract applicants that have desirable features. What factors are used to screen applicants is a concern to ethicists and civil rights activists. A screener that favors people who have similar characteristics to those already employed at a company may perpetuate inequalities. For example, if a company that is predominantly white and male uses its employees' data to train its screener it may accidentally create a screening process that favors white, male applicants. The automation of screeners also has the potential to reduce biases. Biases against applicants with African American sounding names have been shown in multiple studies. An AI screener has the potential to limit human bias and error in the hiring process, allowing more minority applicants to be successful. === Recruitment === Recruitment involves the identification of potential applicants and the marketing of positions. AI is commonly utilized in the recruitment process because it can help boost the number of qualified applicants for positions. Companies are able to use AI to target their marketing to applicants who are likely to be good fits for a position. This often involves the use of social media sites advertising tools, which rely on AI. Facebook allows advertisers to target ads based on demographics, location, interests, behavior, and connections. Facebook also allows companies to target a "look-a-like" audience, that is the company supplies Facebook with a data set, typically the company's current employees, and Facebook will target the ad to profiles that are similar to the profiles in the data set. Additionally, job sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter target job listings to applicants that have certain characteristics employers are looking for. Targeted advertising has many advantages for companies trying to recruit such being a more efficient use of resources, reaching a desired audience, and boosting qualified applicants. This has helped make it a mainstay in modern hiring. Who receives a targeted ad can be controversial. In hiring, the implications of targeted ads have to do with who is able to find out about and then apply to a position. Most targeted ad algorithms are proprietary information. Some platforms, like Facebook and Google, allow users to see why they were shown a specific ad, but users who do not receive the ad likely never know of its existence and also have no way of knowing why they were not shown the ad. === Interviews === Chatbots were one of the first applications of AI and are commonly used in the hiring process. Interviewees interact with chatbots to answer interview questions, and an analysis of their responses can be generated by AI. HireVue has created technology that analyzes interviewees' responses and gestures during recorded video interviews. Over 12 million interviewees have been screened by the more than 700 companies that utilize the service. == Controversies == Artificial intelligence in hiring confers many benefits, but it also has some challenges that have concerned experts. AI is only as good as the data it is using. Biases can inadvertently be baked into the data used in AI. Often companies will use data from their employees to decide what people to recruit or hire. This can perpetuate bias and lead to more homogenous workforces. Facebook Ads was an example of a platform that created such controversy for allowing business owners to specify what type of employee they are looking for. For example, job advertisements for nursing and teach could be set such that only women of a specific age group would see the advertisements. Facebook Ads has since then removed this function from its platform, citing the potential problems with the function in perpetuating biases and stereotypes against minorities. The growing use of Artificial Intelligence-enabled hiring systems has become an important component of modern talent hiring, particularly through social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. However, data overflow embedded in the hiring systems, based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, may result in unconscious gender bias. Utilizing data driven methods may mitigate some bias generated from these systems It can also be hard to quantify what makes a good employee. This poses a challenge for training AI to predict which employees will be best. Commonly used metrics like performance reviews can be subjective and have been shown to favor white employees over black employees and men over women. Another challenge is the limited amount of available data. Employers only collect certain details about candidates during the initial stages of the hiring process. This requires AI to make determinations about candidates with very limited information to go off of. Additionally, many employers do not hire employees frequently and so have limited firm specific data to go off. To combat this, many firms will use algorithms and data from other firms in their industry. AI's reliance on applicant and current employees personal data raises privacy issues. These issues effect both the applicants and current employees, but also may have implications for third parties who are linked through social media to applicants or current employees. For example, a sweep of someone's social media will also show their friends and people they have tagged in photos or posts. == AI and the future of hiring == Artificial intelligence along with other technological advances such as improvements in robotics have placed 47% of jobs at risk of being eliminated in the near future. In 2016 the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, called AI and related technology the "Fourth Industrial Revolution". According to some scholars, however, the transformative impact of AI on labor has been overstated. The "no-real-change" theory holds that an IT revolution has already occurred, but that the benefits of implementing new technologies does not outweigh the costs associated with adopting them. This theory claims that the result of the IT revolution is thus much less impactful than had originally been forecasted. Other scholars refute this theory claiming that AI has already led to significant job loss for unskilled labor and that it will eliminate middle skill and high skill jobs in the future. This position is based around the idea that AI is not yet a technology of general use and that any potential 4th industrial revolution has not fully occurred. A third theory holds that the effect of AI and other technological advances is too complicated to yet be understood. This theory is centered around the idea that while AI will likely eliminate jobs in the short term it will also likely increase the demand for other jobs. The question then becomes will the new jobs be accessible to people and will they emerge near when jobs are eliminated. == AI use in hiring for candidates == Job seekers now commonly encounter AI-driven tools at multiple stages, including automated resume parsing, video interview analysis, chatbots for frequently asked questions, and real‑time application updates. Some candidates also employ AI career agents, designed to optimize job searches, tailor applications, and interface with hiring teams. A 2025 Australian study found that AI-driven video interviews exhibited transcription error rates of up to 22% for non‑native speakers and those with speech-related disabilities, raising concerns of discrimination. A 2017 study in the Journal of Sociology found persistent gender and racial disparities in AI screening tools, even when fairness interventions are applied. Industry observers describe a growing “AI arms race” in recruitment, where both employers and candidates increasingly rely on automated agents. Employers use recruiting systems to source and filter applicants, while candidates deploy AI agents to prepare and submit applications. == Regulations == The Artifici
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Cross-entropy method

The cross-entropy (CE) method is a Monte Carlo method for importance sampling and optimization. It is applicable to both combinatorial and continuous problems, with either a static or noisy objective. The method approximates the optimal importance sampling estimator by repeating two phases: Draw a sample from a probability distribution. Minimize the cross-entropy between this distribution and a target distribution to produce a better sample in the next iteration. Reuven Rubinstein developed the method in the context of rare-event simulation, where tiny probabilities must be estimated, for example in network reliability analysis, queueing models, or performance analysis of telecommunication systems. The method has also been applied to the traveling salesman, quadratic assignment, DNA sequence alignment, max-cut and buffer allocation problems. == Estimation via importance sampling == Consider the general problem of estimating the quantity ℓ = E u [ H ( X ) ] = ∫ H ( x ) f ( x ; u ) d x {\displaystyle \ell =\mathbb {E} _{\mathbf {u} }[H(\mathbf {X} )]=\int H(\mathbf {x} )\,f(\mathbf {x} ;\mathbf {u} )\,{\textrm {d}}\mathbf {x} } , where H {\displaystyle H} is some performance function and f ( x ; u ) {\displaystyle f(\mathbf {x} ;\mathbf {u} )} is a member of some parametric family of distributions. Using importance sampling this quantity can be estimated as ℓ ^ = 1 N ∑ i = 1 N H ( X i ) f ( X i ; u ) g ( X i ) {\displaystyle {\hat {\ell }}={\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i=1}^{N}H(\mathbf {X} _{i}){\frac {f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {u} )}{g(\mathbf {X} _{i})}}} , where X 1 , … , X N {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} _{1},\dots ,\mathbf {X} _{N}} is a random sample from g {\displaystyle g\,} . For positive H {\displaystyle H} , the theoretically optimal importance sampling density (PDF) is given by g ∗ ( x ) = H ( x ) f ( x ; u ) / ℓ {\displaystyle g^{}(\mathbf {x} )=H(\mathbf {x} )f(\mathbf {x} ;\mathbf {u} )/\ell } . This, however, depends on the unknown ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } . The CE method aims to approximate the optimal PDF by adaptively selecting members of the parametric family that are closest (in the Kullback–Leibler sense) to the optimal PDF g ∗ {\displaystyle g^{}} . == Generic CE algorithm == Choose initial parameter vector v ( 0 ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {v} ^{(0)}} ; set t = 1. Generate a random sample X 1 , … , X N {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} _{1},\dots ,\mathbf {X} _{N}} from f ( ⋅ ; v ( t − 1 ) ) {\displaystyle f(\cdot ;\mathbf {v} ^{(t-1)})} Solve for v ( t ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {v} ^{(t)}} , where v ( t ) = argmax v ⁡ 1 N ∑ i = 1 N H ( X i ) f ( X i ; u ) f ( X i ; v ( t − 1 ) ) log ⁡ f ( X i ; v ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {v} ^{(t)}=\mathop {\textrm {argmax}} _{\mathbf {v} }{\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i=1}^{N}H(\mathbf {X} _{i}){\frac {f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {u} )}{f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {v} ^{(t-1)})}}\log f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {v} )} If convergence is reached then stop; otherwise, increase t by 1 and reiterate from step 2. In several cases, the solution to step 3 can be found analytically. Situations in which this occurs are When f {\displaystyle f\,} belongs to the natural exponential family When f {\displaystyle f\,} is discrete with finite support When H ( X ) = I { x ∈ A } {\displaystyle H(\mathbf {X} )=\mathrm {I} _{\{\mathbf {x} \in A\}}} and f ( X i ; u ) = f ( X i ; v ( t − 1 ) ) {\displaystyle f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {u} )=f(\mathbf {X} _{i};\mathbf {v} ^{(t-1)})} , then v ( t ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {v} ^{(t)}} corresponds to the maximum likelihood estimator based on those X k ∈ A {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} _{k}\in A} . == Continuous optimization—example == The same CE algorithm can be used for optimization, rather than estimation. Suppose the problem is to maximize some function S {\displaystyle S} , for example, S ( x ) = e − ( x − 2 ) 2 + 0.8 e − ( x + 2 ) 2 {\displaystyle S(x)={\textrm {e}}^{-(x-2)^{2}}+0.8\,{\textrm {e}}^{-(x+2)^{2}}} . To apply CE, one considers first the associated stochastic problem of estimating P θ ( S ( X ) ≥ γ ) {\displaystyle \mathbb {P} _{\boldsymbol {\theta }}(S(X)\geq \gamma )} for a given level γ {\displaystyle \gamma \,} , and parametric family { f ( ⋅ ; θ ) } {\displaystyle \left\{f(\cdot ;{\boldsymbol {\theta }})\right\}} , for example the 1-dimensional Gaussian distribution, parameterized by its mean μ t {\displaystyle \mu _{t}\,} and variance σ t 2 {\displaystyle \sigma _{t}^{2}} (so θ = ( μ , σ 2 ) {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\theta }}=(\mu ,\sigma ^{2})} here). Hence, for a given γ {\displaystyle \gamma \,} , the goal is to find θ {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\theta }}} so that D K L ( I { S ( x ) ≥ γ } ‖ f θ ) {\displaystyle D_{\mathrm {KL} }({\textrm {I}}_{\{S(x)\geq \gamma \}}\|f_{\boldsymbol {\theta }})} is minimized. This is done by solving the sample version (stochastic counterpart) of the KL divergence minimization problem, as in step 3 above. It turns out that parameters that minimize the stochastic counterpart for this choice of target distribution and parametric family are the sample mean and sample variance corresponding to the elite samples, which are those samples that have objective function value ≥ γ {\displaystyle \geq \gamma } . The worst of the elite samples is then used as the level parameter for the next iteration. This yields the following randomized algorithm that happens to coincide with the so-called Estimation of Multivariate Normal Algorithm (EMNA), an estimation of distribution algorithm. === Pseudocode === // Initialize parameters μ := −6 σ2 := 100 t := 0 maxits := 100 N := 100 Ne := 10 // While maxits not exceeded and not converged while t < maxits and σ2 > ε do // Obtain N samples from current sampling distribution X := SampleGaussian(μ, σ2, N) // Evaluate objective function at sampled points S := exp(−(X − 2) ^ 2) + 0.8 exp(−(X + 2) ^ 2) // Sort X by objective function values in descending order X := sort(X, S) // Update parameters of sampling distribution via elite samples μ := mean(X(1:Ne)) σ2 := var(X(1:Ne)) t := t + 1 // Return mean of final sampling distribution as solution return μ == Related methods == Simulated annealing Genetic algorithms Harmony search Estimation of distribution algorithm Tabu search Natural Evolution Strategy Ant colony optimization algorithms
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Keka HR

Keka HR is a software company that provides cloud-based human resource management and payroll automation software. Keka HR specializes in providing business services in the field of HR technology, payroll automation, recruiting, leave, attendance and performance management. The company was founded by Vijay Yalamanchili on July 21, 2014. The company is headquartered in Hyderabad, with operations in Singapore and the United States. == History == Keka HR was established in 2014 in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. In 2015, the company entered the Indian HR market and received the HYSEA Startup Award. By 2019, Keka HR had surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the company reported a sevenfold increase in sales. By 2021, the company had raised $1.6 million through Recur Club. In 2022, Keka HR secured $57 million in Series A funding from West Bridge Capital. The company's headquarters are located in Gachibowli, Hyderabad, with offices in Singapore and Seattle, Washington.
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Neural scaling law

In machine learning, a neural scaling law is an empirical scaling law that describes how neural network performance changes as key factors are scaled up or down. These factors typically include the number of parameters, training dataset size, and training cost. Some models also exhibit performance gains by scaling inference through increased test-time compute (TTC), extending neural scaling laws beyond training to the deployment phase. == Introduction == In general, a deep learning model can be characterized by four parameters: model size, training dataset size, training cost, and the post-training error rate (e.g., the test set error rate). Each of these variables can be defined as a real number, usually written as N , D , C , L {\displaystyle N,D,C,L} (respectively: parameter count, dataset size, computing cost, and loss). A neural scaling law is a theoretical or empirical statistical law between these parameters. There are also other parameters with other scaling laws. === Size of the model === In most cases, the model's size is simply the number of parameters. However, one complication arises with the use of sparse models, such as mixture-of-expert models. With sparse models, during inference, only a fraction of their parameters are used. In comparison, most other kinds of neural networks, such as transformer models, always use all their parameters during inference. === Size of the training dataset === The size of the training dataset is usually quantified by the number of data points within it. Larger training datasets are typically preferred, as they provide a richer and more diverse source of information from which the model can learn. This can lead to improved generalization performance when the model is applied to new, unseen data. However, increasing the size of the training dataset also increases the computational resources and time required for model training. With the "pretrain, then finetune" method used for most large language models, there are two kinds of training dataset: the pretraining dataset and the finetuning dataset. Their sizes have different effects on model performance. Generally, the finetuning dataset is less than 1% the size of pretraining dataset. In some cases, a small amount of high quality data suffices for finetuning, and more data does not necessarily improve performance. Many scaling laws, due to their inherent diminishing returns nature, value data based on a submodular set function which was shown in a paper on this topic. === Cost of training === Training cost is typically measured in terms of time (how long it takes to train the model) and computational resources (how much processing power and memory are required). It is important to note that the cost of training can be significantly reduced with efficient training algorithms, optimized software libraries, and parallel computing on specialized hardware such as GPUs or TPUs. The cost of training a neural network model is a function of several factors, including model size, training dataset size, the training algorithm complexity, and the computational resources available. In particular, doubling the training dataset size does not necessarily double the cost of training, because one may train the model for several times over the same dataset (each being an "epoch"). === Performance === The performance of a neural network model is evaluated based on its ability to accurately predict the output given some input data. Common metrics for evaluating model performance include: Negative log-likelihood per token (logarithm of perplexity) for language modeling; Accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score for classification tasks; Mean squared error (MSE) or mean absolute error (MAE) for regression tasks; Elo rating in a competition against other models, such as gameplay or preference by a human judge. Performance can be improved by using more data, larger models, different training algorithms, regularizing the model to prevent overfitting, and early stopping using a validation set. When the performance is a number bounded within the range of [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle [0,1]} , such as accuracy, precision, etc., it often scales as a sigmoid function of cost, as seen in the figures. == Examples == === (Hestness, Narang, et al, 2017) === The 2017 paper is a common reference point for neural scaling laws fitted by statistical analysis on experimental data. Previous works before the 2000s, as cited in the paper, were either theoretical or orders of magnitude smaller in scale. Whereas previous works generally found the scaling exponent to scale like L ∝ D − α {\displaystyle L\propto D^{-\alpha }} , with α ∈ { 0.5 , 1 , 2 } {\displaystyle \alpha \in \{0.5,1,2\}} , the paper found that α ∈ [ 0.07 , 0.35 ] {\displaystyle \alpha \in [0.07,0.35]} . Of the factors they varied, only task can change the exponent α {\displaystyle \alpha } . Changing the architecture optimizers, regularizers, and loss functions, would only change the proportionality factor, not the exponent. For example, for the same task, one architecture might have L = 1000 D − 0.3 {\displaystyle L=1000D^{-0.3}} while another might have L = 500 D − 0.3 {\displaystyle L=500D^{-0.3}} . They also found that for a given architecture, the number of parameters necessary to reach lowest levels of loss, given a fixed dataset size, grows like N ∝ D β {\displaystyle N\propto D^{\beta }} for another exponent β {\displaystyle \beta } . They studied machine translation with LSTM ( α ∼ 0.13 {\displaystyle \alpha \sim 0.13} ), generative language modelling with LSTM ( α ∈ [ 0.06 , 0.09 ] , β ≈ 0.7 {\displaystyle \alpha \in [0.06,0.09],\beta \approx 0.7} ), ImageNet classification with ResNet ( α ∈ [ 0.3 , 0.5 ] , β ≈ 0.6 {\displaystyle \alpha \in [0.3,0.5],\beta \approx 0.6} ), and speech recognition with two hybrid (LSTMs complemented by either CNNs or an attention decoder) architectures ( α ≈ 0.3 {\displaystyle \alpha \approx 0.3} ). === (Henighan, Kaplan, et al, 2020) === A 2020 analysis studied statistical relations between C , N , D , L {\displaystyle C,N,D,L} over a wide range of values and found similar scaling laws, over the range of N ∈ [ 10 3 , 10 9 ] {\displaystyle N\in [10^{3},10^{9}]} , C ∈ [ 10 12 , 10 21 ] {\displaystyle C\in [10^{12},10^{21}]} , and over multiple modalities (text, video, image, text to image, etc.). In particular, the scaling laws it found are (Table 1 of ): For each modality, they fixed one of the two C , N {\displaystyle C,N} , and varying the other one ( D {\displaystyle D} is varied along using D = C / 6 N {\displaystyle D=C/6N} ), the achievable test loss satisfies L = L 0 + ( x 0 x ) α {\displaystyle L=L_{0}+\left({\frac {x_{0}}{x}}\right)^{\alpha }} where x {\displaystyle x} is the varied variable, and L 0 , x 0 , α {\displaystyle L_{0},x_{0},\alpha } are parameters to be found by statistical fitting. The parameter α {\displaystyle \alpha } is the most important one. When N {\displaystyle N} is the varied variable, α {\displaystyle \alpha } ranges from 0.037 {\displaystyle 0.037} to 0.24 {\displaystyle 0.24} depending on the model modality. This corresponds to the α = 0.34 {\displaystyle \alpha =0.34} from the Chinchilla scaling paper. When C {\displaystyle C} is the varied variable, α {\displaystyle \alpha } ranges from 0.048 {\displaystyle 0.048} to 0.19 {\displaystyle 0.19} depending on the model modality. This corresponds to the β = 0.28 {\displaystyle \beta =0.28} from the Chinchilla scaling paper. Given fixed computing budget, optimal model parameter count is consistently around N o p t ( C ) = ( C 5 × 10 − 12 petaFLOP-day ) 0.7 = 9.0 × 10 − 7 C 0.7 {\displaystyle N_{opt}(C)=\left({\frac {C}{5\times 10^{-12}{\text{petaFLOP-day}}}}\right)^{0.7}=9.0\times 10^{-7}C^{0.7}} The parameter 9.0 × 10 − 7 {\displaystyle 9.0\times 10^{-7}} varies by a factor of up to 10 for different modalities. The exponent parameter 0.7 {\displaystyle 0.7} varies from 0.64 {\displaystyle 0.64} to 0.75 {\displaystyle 0.75} for different modalities. This exponent corresponds to the ≈ 0.5 {\displaystyle \approx 0.5} from the Chinchilla scaling paper. It's "strongly suggested" (but not statistically checked) that D o p t ( C ) ∝ N o p t ( C ) 0.4 ∝ C 0.28 {\displaystyle D_{opt}(C)\propto N_{opt}(C)^{0.4}\propto C^{0.28}} . This exponent corresponds to the ≈ 0.5 {\displaystyle \approx 0.5} from the Chinchilla scaling paper. The scaling law of L = L 0 + ( C 0 / C ) 0.048 {\displaystyle L=L_{0}+(C_{0}/C)^{0.048}} was confirmed during the training of GPT-3 (Figure 3.1 ). === Chinchilla scaling (Hoffmann, et al, 2022) === One particular scaling law ("Chinchilla scaling") states that, for a large language model (LLM) autoregressively trained for one epoch, with a cosine learning rate schedule, we have: { C = C 0 N D L = A N α + B D β + L 0 {\displaystyle {\begin{cases}C=C_{0}ND\\L={\frac {A}{N^{\alpha }}}+{\frac {B}{D^{\beta }}}+L_{0}\end{cases}}} where the variables are C {\displaystyle C} is the cost o
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Operation Serenata de Amor

Operation Serenata de Amor is an artificial intelligence project designed to analyze public spending in Brazil. The project has been funded by a recurrent financing campaign since September 7, 2016, and came in the wake of major scandals of misappropriation of public funds in Brazil, such as the Mensalão scandal and what was revealed in the Operation Car Wash investigations. The analysis began with data from the National Congress then expanded to other types of budget and instances of government, such as the Federal Senate. The project is built through collaboration on GitHub and using a public group with more than 600 participants on Telegram. The name "Serenata de Amor," which means "serenade of love," was taken from a popular cashew cream bonbon produced by Chocolates Garoto in Brazil. == Modules == Throughout development of the project, new modules have been newly introduced in addition to the main repository: The main repository, serenata-de-amor, serves as the starting point for investigative work. Rosie is the robot programmed to identify public funds expenses with discrepancies, starting with CEAP (Quota for Exercise of Parliamentary Activity); it analyzes each of the reimbursements requested by the deputies and senators, indicating the reasons that lead it to believe they are suspicious. From Rosie was born whistleblower, which tweets under the name of @RosieDaSerenata, distributing the results found on social media. Jarbas (Github repository) is a data visualization tool which shows a complete list of reimbursements made available by the Chamber of Deputies and mined by Rosie. Toolbox is a Python installable package that supports the development of Serenata de Amor and Rosie. == History == Operation Serenata de Amor is an Artificial intelligence project for analysis of public expenditures. It was conceived in March 2016 by data scientist Irio Musskopf, sociologist Eduardo Cuducos and entrepreneur Felipe Cabral. The project was financed collectively in the Catarse platform, where it reached 131% of the collection goal paying 3 months of project development. Ana Schwendler, also a data scientist, Pedro Vilanova "Tonny", data journalist, Bruno Pazzim, software engineer, Filipe Linhares, a frontend engineer, Leandro Devegili, an entrepreneur and André Pinho took the first steps towards constructing the platform, such as collecting and structuring the first datasets. Jessica Temporal, data scientist and Yasodara Córdova "Yaso", researcher, Tatiana Balachova "Russa", UX designer, joined the project after the financing took place. The members created a recurring financing campaign, expanding the analysis of public spending to the Federal Senate. Donors make monthly payments ranging from 5 BRL to 200 BRL to maintain group activities. The monthly amount collected is around 10,000 BRL. == Results == In January 2017, concluding the period financed by the initial campaign, the group carried out an investigation into the suspicious activities found by the data analysis system. 629 complaints were made to the Ombudsman's Office of the Chamber of Deputies, questioning expenses of 216 federal deputies. In addition, the Facebook project page has more than 25,000 followers, and users frequently cite the operation as a benchmark in transparency in the Brazilian government. One of the examples of results obtained by the operation is the case of the Deputy who had to return about 700 BRL to the House after his expenses were analyzed by the platform. The platform was able to analyze more than 3 million notes, raising about 8,000 suspected cases in public spending. The community that supports the work of the team benefits from open source repositories, with licenses open for the collaboration. So much so that the two main data scientists of the project presented it at the CivicTechFest in Taipei, obtaining several mentions even in the international press. The technical leader presented the project in Poland during DevConf2017 in Kraków. It was also presented in the Google News Lab in 2017. It was presented by Yaso, when she was the Director of the initiative, at the MIT Media Lab/Berkman Klein Center Initiative for Artificial Intelligence ethics, and at the Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion Symposium, an initiative of the Global Network of Internet & Society Centers (NoC). It was also presented both by Irio and Yaso at the Digital Harvard Kennedy School, over a lunch seminar, where the transparency of the platform and the main solutions found were discussed, so that the code and data are always available to verify its suitability. This infographic provides information about the first results of Operation Serenata de Amor, a project that analyzes open data on public spending to find discrepancies. The project was presented by Yaso to the House Audit and Control Committee of the Chamber of Deputies in August 2017, and raised the interest of House officials who work with open data. The operation has been a source of inspiration for other civic projects that aim to work with similar goals, demonstrating the broader impact of artificial intelligence also in industry in Brazil. Participation of several team members in events throughout Brazil and abroad can be found on the Internet, such as presentation at OpenDataDay, held at Calango Hackerspace in the Federal District, Campus Party Bahia, Campus Party Brasilia, Friends of Tomorrow, XIII National Meeting of Internal Control, in the event USP Talks Hackfest against corruption in João Pessoa, the latter being also highlighted in the National Press.
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Google Clips

Google Clips is a discontinued miniature clip-on camera device developed by Google. == History == It was announced on October 4, 2017 and went on sale on January 27, 2018. Google Clips automatically captured video clips (without audio) at moments its machine learning algorithms determined to be interesting or relevant. An indicator flashed when the camera was looking for scenes to capture. Google Clips' artificial intelligence (AI) could learn the faces of people to take photographs with certain people, and could automatically set lighting and framing. It had 16 GB of storage built-in storage and could record clips for up to 3 hours. This camera was originally priced at US$249 in the United States. It was withdrawn from sale on October 15, 2019, but supported until the end of December 2021. == Reception == The Independent wrote that Google Clips is "an impressive little device, but one that also has the potential to feel very creepy." According to The Verge's generally negative review, "it didn't capture anything special" over two weeks of testing.
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Similarity learning

Similarity learning is an area of supervised machine learning in artificial intelligence. It is closely related to regression and classification, but the goal is to learn a similarity function that measures how similar or related two objects are. It has applications in ranking, in recommendation systems, visual identity tracking, face verification, and speaker verification. == Learning setup == There are four common setups for similarity and metric distance learning. Regression similarity learning In this setup, pairs of objects are given ( x i 1 , x i 2 ) {\displaystyle (x_{i}^{1},x_{i}^{2})} together with a measure of their similarity y i ∈ R {\displaystyle y_{i}\in R} . The goal is to learn a function that approximates f ( x i 1 , x i 2 ) ∼ y i {\displaystyle f(x_{i}^{1},x_{i}^{2})\sim y_{i}} for every new labeled triplet example ( x i 1 , x i 2 , y i ) {\displaystyle (x_{i}^{1},x_{i}^{2},y_{i})} . This is typically achieved by minimizing a regularized loss min W ∑ i l o s s ( w ; x i 1 , x i 2 , y i ) + r e g ( w ) {\displaystyle \min _{W}\sum _{i}loss(w;x_{i}^{1},x_{i}^{2},y_{i})+reg(w)} . Classification similarity learning Given are pairs of similar objects ( x i , x i + ) {\displaystyle (x_{i},x_{i}^{+})} and non similar objects ( x i , x i − ) {\displaystyle (x_{i},x_{i}^{-})} . An equivalent formulation is that every pair ( x i 1 , x i 2 ) {\displaystyle (x_{i}^{1},x_{i}^{2})} is given together with a binary label y i ∈ { 0 , 1 } {\displaystyle y_{i}\in \{0,1\}} that determines if the two objects are similar or not. The goal is again to learn a classifier that can decide if a new pair of objects is similar or not. Ranking similarity learning Given are triplets of objects ( x i , x i + , x i − ) {\displaystyle (x_{i},x_{i}^{+},x_{i}^{-})} whose relative similarity obey a predefined order: x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is known to be more similar to x i + {\displaystyle x_{i}^{+}} than to x i − {\displaystyle x_{i}^{-}} . The goal is to learn a function f {\displaystyle f} such that for any new triplet of objects ( x , x + , x − ) {\displaystyle (x,x^{+},x^{-})} , it obeys f ( x , x + ) > f ( x , x − ) {\displaystyle f(x,x^{+})>f(x,x^{-})} (contrastive learning). This setup assumes a weaker form of supervision than in regression, because instead of providing an exact measure of similarity, one only has to provide the relative order of similarity. For this reason, ranking-based similarity learning is easier to apply in real large-scale applications. Locality sensitive hashing (LSH) Hashes input items so that similar items map to the same "buckets" in memory with high probability (the number of buckets being much smaller than the universe of possible input items). It is often applied in nearest neighbor search on large-scale high-dimensional data, e.g., image databases, document collections, time-series databases, and genome databases. A common approach for learning similarity is to model the similarity function as a bilinear form. For example, in the case of ranking similarity learning, one aims to learn a matrix W that parametrizes the similarity function f W ( x , z ) = x T W z {\displaystyle f_{W}(x,z)=x^{T}Wz} . When data is abundant, a common approach is to learn a siamese network – a deep network model with parameter sharing. == Metric learning == Similarity learning is closely related to distance metric learning. Metric learning is the task of learning a distance function over objects. A metric or distance function has to obey four axioms: non-negativity, identity of indiscernibles, symmetry and subadditivity (or the triangle inequality). In practice, metric learning algorithms ignore the condition of identity of indiscernibles and learn a pseudo-metric. When the objects x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} are vectors in R d {\displaystyle R^{d}} , then any matrix W {\displaystyle W} in the symmetric positive semi-definite cone S + d {\displaystyle S_{+}^{d}} defines a distance pseudo-metric of the space of x through the form D W ( x 1 , x 2 ) 2 = ( x 1 − x 2 ) ⊤ W ( x 1 − x 2 ) {\displaystyle D_{W}(x_{1},x_{2})^{2}=(x_{1}-x_{2})^{\top }W(x_{1}-x_{2})} . When W {\displaystyle W} is a symmetric positive definite matrix, D W {\displaystyle D_{W}} is a metric. Moreover, as any symmetric positive semi-definite matrix W ∈ S + d {\displaystyle W\in S_{+}^{d}} can be decomposed as W = L ⊤ L {\displaystyle W=L^{\top }L} where L ∈ R e × d {\displaystyle L\in R^{e\times d}} and e ≥ r a n k ( W ) {\displaystyle e\geq rank(W)} , the distance function D W {\displaystyle D_{W}} can be rewritten equivalently D W ( x 1 , x 2 ) 2 = ( x 1 − x 2 ) ⊤ L ⊤ L ( x 1 − x 2 ) = ‖ L ( x 1 − x 2 ) ‖ 2 2 {\displaystyle D_{W}(x_{1},x_{2})^{2}=(x_{1}-x_{2})^{\top }L^{\top }L(x_{1}-x_{2})=\|L(x_{1}-x_{2})\|_{2}^{2}} . The distance D W ( x 1 , x 2 ) 2 = ‖ x 1 ′ − x 2 ′ ‖ 2 2 {\displaystyle D_{W}(x_{1},x_{2})^{2}=\|x_{1}'-x_{2}'\|_{2}^{2}} corresponds to the Euclidean distance between the transformed feature vectors x 1 ′ = L x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}'=Lx_{1}} and x 2 ′ = L x 2 {\displaystyle x_{2}'=Lx_{2}} . Many formulations for metric learning have been proposed. Some well-known approaches for metric learning include learning from relative comparisons, which is based on the triplet loss, large margin nearest neighbor, and information theoretic metric learning (ITML). In statistics, the covariance matrix of the data is sometimes used to define a distance metric called Mahalanobis distance. == Applications == Similarity learning is used in information retrieval for learning to rank, in face verification or face identification, and in recommendation systems. Also, many machine learning approaches rely on some metric. This includes unsupervised learning such as clustering, which groups together close or similar objects. It also includes supervised approaches like K-nearest neighbor algorithm which rely on labels of nearby objects to decide on the label of a new object. Metric learning has been proposed as a preprocessing step for many of these approaches. == Scalability == Metric and similarity learning scale quadratically with the dimension of the input space, as can easily see when the learned metric has a bilinear form f W ( x , z ) = x T W z {\displaystyle f_{W}(x,z)=x^{T}Wz} . Scaling to higher dimensions can be achieved by enforcing a sparseness structure over the matrix model, as done with HDSL, and with COMET. == Software == metric-learn is a free software Python library which offers efficient implementations of several supervised and weakly-supervised similarity and metric learning algorithms. The API of metric-learn is compatible with scikit-learn. OpenMetricLearning is a Python framework to train and validate the models producing high-quality embeddings. == Further information == For further information on this topic, see the surveys on metric and similarity learning by Bellet et al. and Kulis.
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Universal psychometrics

Universal psychometrics encompasses psychometrics instruments that could measure the psychological properties of any intelligent agent. Up until the early 21st century, psychometrics relied heavily on psychological tests that require the subject to cooperate and answer questions, the most famous example being an intelligence test. Such methods are only applicable to the measurement of human psychological properties. As a result, some researchers have proposed the idea of universal psychometrics - they suggest developing testing methods that allow for the measurement of non-human entities' psychological properties. For example, it has been suggested that the Turing test is a form of universal psychometrics. This test involves having testers (without any foreknowledge) attempt to distinguish a human from a machine by interacting with both (while not being to see either individuals). It is supposed that if the machine is equally intelligent to a human, the testers will not be able to distinguish between the two, i.e., their guesses will not be better than chance. Thus, Turing test could measure the intelligence (a psychological variable) of an AI. Other instruments proposed for universal psychometrics include reinforcement learning and measuring the ability to predict complexity.
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Inauthentic text

An inauthentic text is a computer-generated expository document meant to appear as genuine, but which is actually meaningless. Frequently they are created in order to be intermixed with genuine documents and thus manipulate the results of search engines, as with Spam blogs. They are also carried along in email in order to fool spam filters by giving the spam the superficial characteristics of legitimate text. Sometimes nonsensical documents are created with computer assistance for humorous effect, as with Dissociated press or Flarf poetry. They have also been used to challenge the veracity of a publication—MIT students submitted papers generated by a computer program called SCIgen to a conference, where they were initially accepted. This led the students to claim that the bar for submissions was too low. With the amount of computer generated text outpacing the ability of people to humans to curate it, there needs some means of distinguishing between the two. Yet automated approaches to determining absolutely whether a text is authentic or not face intrinsic challenges of semantics. Noam Chomsky coined the phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" giving an example of grammatically correct, but semantically incoherent sentence; some will point out that in certain contexts one could give this sentence (or any phrase) meaning. The first group to use the expression in this regard can be found below from Indiana University. Their work explains in detail an attempt to detect inauthentic texts and identify pernicious problems of inauthentic texts in cyberspace. The site has a means of submitting text that assesses, based on supervised learning, whether a corpus is inauthentic or not. Many users have submitted incorrect types of data and have correspondingly commented on the scores. This application is meant for a specific kind of data; therefore, submitting, say, an email, will not return a meaningful score.
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