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NoneModern technologies like social media are making it easier than ever for enemies of the United States to emotionally manipulate U.S. citizens. U.S. officials warn that foreign adversaries are trying to produce tremendous amounts of false, misleading information online to sway public opinion in the U.S. Just this July, the Department of Justice announced it had disrupted a Kremlin-backed campaign that used nearly one thousand fake social media accounts in an attempt to spread disinformation. While AI is commonly used on offense in disinformation wars to generate large amounts of content, AI is now playing an important role in defense, too. Mark Finlayson, a professor at FIU's College of Engineering and Computing, is an expert in training AI to understand stories. He has spent more than two decades studying the subject. Persuasive—but false—stories Storytelling is important to spreading disinformation. "A heartfelt narrative or a personal anecdote is often more compelling to an audience than the facts," says Finlayson. "Stories are particularly effective in overcoming resistance to an idea." For example, a climate activist may be more successful in convincing an audience about plastic pollution by sharing a personal story of a rescued sea turtle with a straw lodged in its nose, rather than only citing statistics, Finlayson says. The story makes the problem relatable. "We are exploring the different ways stories are used to drive an argument," he explains. "It's a challenging problem, as stories in social media posts can be as brief as a single sentence, and sometimes, these posts may only allude to well-known stories without explicitly retelling them." Suspicious handles Finlayson's team is also exploring how AI can analyze usernames or handles in a profile. Azwad Islam, a Ph.D. student and co-author on a recent paper published with Finlayson, explains that usernames often contain significant clues about a user's identity and intentions. The paper was in the , a conference in artificial intelligence. "Handles reveal much about users and how they want to be perceived," Islam explains. "For example, a person claiming to be a New York journalist might choose the handle, '@AlexBurnsNYT' rather than '@NewYorkBoy," because it sounds more credible. Both handles, however, suggest the user is a male with an affiliation to New York." The FIU team demonstrated a tool that can analyze a user handle, reliably revealing a person's claimed name, gender, location and even personality (if that information is hinted at in the handle). Although a user handle alone can't confirm whether an account is fake, it can be crucial in analyzing an account's overall authenticity—especially as AI's ability to understand stories evolves. "By interpreting handles as part of the larger narrative an account presents, we believe usernames could become a critical tool in identifying sources of disinformation," Islam says. Questionable cultural cache Objects and symbols can carry different meanings across cultures. If an AI model is unaware of the differences, it can make a grave mistake in how it interprets a story. Foreign adversaries can also use these symbols to make their messages more persuasive to a target audience. Anurag Acharya is a former Ph.D. student of Finlayson's who worked on this problem. He found that training AI with diverse cultural perspectives improves AI's story comprehension. "A story may say, 'The woman was overjoyed in her white dress.' An AI model trained exclusively on weddings from Western stories might read that and say, 'That's great!' But if my mother saw this sentence, she would take great offense, because we only wear white to funerals," says Acharya, who comes from a family of Hindu heritage. It is critical that AI understands these nuances so it can detect when foreign adversaries are using cultural messages and symbols to have a greater malicious impact. Acharya and Finlayson have a recent paper on this topic, presented at a workshop at the Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), an AI conference. Helping AI find order in chaos Another difficulty of understanding stories is that the sequence of events that a narrative tells is rarely laid out neatly and precisely in order. Rather, events are often found in pieces, intertwined with other storylines. For human readers, this adds dramatic effect; but for AI models, such complex interrelations can create confusion. Finlayson's research on timeline extraction has significantly advanced AI's understanding of event sequences within narratives. "In a story, you can have inversions and rearrangements of events in many different, complex ways. This is one of the key things that we have worked on with AI. We have helped AI understand how to map out different events that happen in the real world, and how they might affect each other," Finlayson says. "This is a good example of something that people find easy to understand but is challenging for machines. An AI model must be able to order the events in a story accurately. This is important not only to identify disinformation, but also to support many other applications." The FIU team's advancements in helping AI understand stories are positioned to help intelligence analysts fight disinformation with new levels of efficiency and accuracy.
Jones scores 22 and Fairleigh Dickinson downs Lehman 98-54When Elon Musk first suggested a new effort to cut the size of government, Donald Trump didn't seem to take it seriously. His eventual name for the idea sounded like a joke too. It would be called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a reference to an online meme featuring a surprised-looking dog from Japan. But now that Trump has won the election, Musk's fantasy is becoming reality, with the potential to spark a constitutional clash over the balance of power in Washington. Trump put Musk, the world's richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, in charge of the new department, which is really an outside advisory committee that will work with people inside the government to reduce spending and regulations. Last week, Musk and Ramaswamy said they would encourage Trump to make cuts by refusing to spend money allocated by Congress, a process known as impounding. The proposal goes against a 1974 law intended to prevent future presidents from following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, who held back funding that he didn't like. “We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. ”We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action." Trump has already suggested taking such a big step, saying last year that he would “use the president’s long-recognized impoundment power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.” It would be a dramatic attempt to expand his powers, when he already will have the benefit of a sympathetic Republican-controlled Congress and a conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, and it could swiftly become one of the most closely watched legal fights of his second administration. “He might get away with it," said William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.” Musk and Ramaswamy have started laying out their plans Right now, plans for the Department of Government Efficiency are still coming into focus. The nascent organization has put out a call for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” Applicants are encouraged to submit their resumes through X, the social media company that Musk owns. In the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy provided the most detailed look yet at how they would operate and where they could cut. Some are longtime Republican targets, such as $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Other plans are more ambitious and could reshape the federal government. The two wrote that they would “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions,” leading to “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” Civil service protections wouldn’t apply, they argue, because they wouldn’t be targeting specific people for political purposes. Some employees could choose “voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.” But others would be encouraged to quit by mandating that they show up at the office five days a week, ending pandemic-era flexibility about remote work. The requirement “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said such cutbacks would harm services for Americans who rely on the federal government, and he suggested that Musk and Ramaswamy were in over their heads. “I don’t think they’re even remotely qualified to perform those duties," he said. "That’s my main concern.” Kelley said his union, which represents 750,000 employees for the federal government and the city of Washington, D.C., was ready to fight attempts to slash the workforce. “We’ve been here, we’ve heard this kind of rhetoric before," he said. "And we are prepared.” Federal regulations would be targeted for elimination There was no mention in the Wall Street Journal of Musk's previously stated goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget, which is nearly a third of total annual spending. Nor did they write about “Schedule F,” a potential plan to reclassify federal employees to make them easier to fire. Ramaswamy once described the idea as the “mass deportation of federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C.” However, Musk and Ramaswamy said they would reduce regulations that they describe as excessive. They wrote that their department “will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology," to review regulations that run counter to two recent Supreme Court decisions that were intended to limit federal rulemaking authority. Musk and Ramaswamy said Trump could “immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.” Chris Edwards, an expert on budget issues at the Cato Institute, said many Republicans have promised to reduce the size and role of government over the years, often to little effect. Sometimes it feels like every budget item and tax provision, no matter how obscure, has people dedicated to its preservation, turning attempts at cuts into political battles of attrition. “Presidents always seem to have higher priorities," he said. “A lot of it falls to the wayside.” Although DOGE is scheduled to finish its work by July 4, 2026, Edwards said Musk and Ramaswamy should move faster to capitalize on momentum from Trump's election victory. “Will it just collect dust on a shelf, or will it be put into effect?" Edwards said. "That all depends on Trump and where he is at that point in time.” Ramaswamy said in an online video that they're planning regular “Dogecasts” to keep the public updated on their work, which he described as “a once-in-a-generation project” to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” “However bad you think it is, it’s probably worse,” he said. Musk and Ramaswamy will have allies in Congress House Republicans are expected to put Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally from Georgia, in charge of a subcommittee to work with DOGE, according to two people with knowledge of the plans who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Greene and Rep James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, have already met with Ramaswamy, the two people said. Musk brought up the idea for DOGE while broadcasting a conversation with Trump on X during the campaign. “I think we need a government efficiency commission to say like, ‘Hey, where are we spending money that’s sensible. Where is it not sensible?’” Musk said. Musk returned to the topic twice, volunteering his services by saying “I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.” “I’d love it,” Trump replied, describing Musk as “the greatest cutter.” Musk has his own incentives to push this initiative forward. His companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, have billions of dollars in government contracts and face oversight from government regulators. After spending an estimated $200 million to support Trump's candidacy, he's poised to have expansive influence over the next administration. Trump even went to Texas earlier this week to watch SpaceX test its largest rocket. DOGE will have an ally in Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has railed against federal spending for years. He recently told Fox News that he sent “2,000 pages of waste that can be cut” to Musk and Ramaswamy. “I’m all in and will do anything I can to help them," Paul said.
No. 22 St. John's, Georgia pack busy schedule with game on Sunday
TAMPA, Fla. , Nov. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Partsol is proud to announce a significant agreement with the United States Army for a technology-enabled service subscription powered by our proprietary Cognitive AI and Absolute Truth algorithms. This partnership represents a pivotal step in advancing precision, efficiency, and actionable insights for mission-critical operations. "Our Cognitive AI and Absolute Truth algorithms are designed to deliver unparalleled precision and confidence in decision-making," said Dr. Darryl Williams , CEO of Partsol. "This collaboration underscores our commitment to supporting national security with innovative, reliable technology." Partsol's technology-enabled service subscription leverages cutting-edge Cognitive AI to analyze complex datasets, provide actionable insights in real time, and enhance operational readiness. "This agreement highlights the transformative power of Partsol's solutions to address the most complex challenges with clarity and precision," said John Callahan , President of Partsol. "We are honored to support the U.S. Army in achieving its mission-critical objectives." About Partsol Partsol, a Partnership Solutions International company, is dedicated to advancing Cognitive AI. Leveraging its proprietary Absolute Truth algorithms, Partsol equips organizations with precise, predictive insights that empower confident, data-informed decisions. To learn more, visit Partsol.com or connect with Partsol on LinkedIn. Contact Teresa Salinas Marketing Director teresa.salinas@partsol.com 400 N. Ashley Drive, Ste. 300, Tampa, FL View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/partsol-secures-technology-enabled-service-subscription-with-the-us-army-302316978.html SOURCE Partsol
Barry Keoghan has seemingly responded to rumours that he cheated on Sabrina Carpenter with TikTok star Breckie Hill . The news of pop star Sabrina, 25, and actor Barry, 32, "taking a break" was only announced on December 4, but keyboard warriors claimed that Barry had been unfaithful after he was spotted with Breckie in a hotel in Hollywood . Barry took to Twitter today to clear his name, and stand against the "lies and hatred" spread about him from trolls on social media. "I can only sit and take so much. My name has been dragged across the internet in ways I usually don't respond too. I have to respond now because it's gettin to a place where there are too many lines being crossed," he wrote. "I deactivated my account because I can no longer let this stuff distract from my family and my work. The messages I have received no person should ever have to read them. Absolute lies, hatred, disgusting commentary about my appearance, character, how I am as a parent and every other inhumane thing you can imagine." The Saltburn star continued: "Dragging my character and everything I worked extremely hard for and stand for. Talking about how I was a heroine baby and how I grew up and dragging my dear mother into it also. Knocking on my grannies door. Sitting outside my baby boys house intimidating them. That's crossing a line. "Each and every day I work harder to push myself on every level to be the healthiest and strongest person for that boy. I want to provide opportunities for him to learn, fail and grow. I want him to be able to look up to his daddy, to have full trust in me and know I will have his back no matter what." Barry concluded: "I need you to remember he has to read ALL of this about his father when he is older. Please be respectful to all. Thank u x" The Irish star was talking about his son, two-year-old Brando, whom he shares with his ex-girlfriend Alyson Kierans , who works as a dentist in London. Barry recently lashed out at fans for suggesting he was snubbing his son in favour of the Hollywood life, and leaving all parenting to London dentist Alyson. While speaking on Louis Theroux's podcast last month, Barry opened up about growing up in foster care and his mother's death from a drug addiction , and took umbrage with accusations he was a “deadbeat dad.” "If I didn’t have tough skin or the strength to have, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Of course, (my childhood is) going to affect me being a father when I had no blueprint to take from. People just read that (as) laziness and go, ‘Oh, that’s no excuse to be an absent father’. I’m not an absent father,” he assured Louis. When Barry and Sabrina's split was announced, an insider old People : "They are both young and career-focused, so they've decided to take a break." The insider added that the split was amicable, and suggested that the couple wasn't over for good. * Follow Mirror Celebs on Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .
Lisa Simpson once said during an episode of “The Simpsons:” What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football? On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined. The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast. The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season. The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay. “We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.” While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football. Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters. “That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation. This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars. “The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999. Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+. The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque. The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.” There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith. The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements. The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins. “Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof. The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months. “That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said. Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys. The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology. For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.” Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe. “We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy -- he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly. “If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.” AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
Where are the Vera cast now? Sad death, shock return, new role with famous wife and Barbie movieIreland’s premier has spoken to the Dublin woman who won a civil case against mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor to praise her courage. Taoiseach Simon Harris said he also wanted to tell Nikita Hand, a hair colourist from Drimnagh, that her case had prompted an increase in women coming forward to ask for support. Ms Hand, who accused the sportsman of raping her in a Dublin hotel in December 2018, won her claim against him for damages in a civil case at the High Court in the Irish capital on Friday. The total amount of damages awarded to Ms Hand by the jury was 248,603.60 euro (£206,714.31). Mr McGregor said in a post on social media on Friday that he intends to appeal against the decision. That post has since been deleted. Speaking to the media on Saturday, Mr Harris said he told Ms Hand of the support she has from people across Ireland. “I spoke with Nikita today and I wanted to thank her for her incredible bravery and her courage,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that she knew how much solidarity and support there was across this country for her bravery. “I also wanted to make sure she knew of what the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre had said yesterday – that so many other women have now come forward in relation to their own experiences of sexual abuse as a result of Nikita’s bravery.” The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said the case has had a “profound effect” on the people the charity supports, and that over the first 10 days of the High Court case, calls to its national helpline increased by almost 20%. It said that first-time callers increased by 50% compared to the same period last year, and were largely from people who had experienced sexual violence who were distressed and anxious from the details of case and the views people had to it. Mr Harris said: “I wanted to speak with her and I wanted to wish her and her daughter, Freya, all the very best night, and I was very grateful to talk with Nikita today. “Her bravery, her courage, her voice has made a real difference in a country in which we must continue to work to get to zero tolerance when it comes to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. “I don’t want to say too much more, because conscious there could be further legal processes, but I absolutely want to commend Nikita for her bravery, for her courage, for using her voice.” Justice Minister Helen McEntee praised Ms Hand’s bravery and said she had shown “there is light at the end of the tunnel”. She said: “I just want to commend Nikita for her bravery, for her determination and the leadership that she has shown in what has been – I’ve no doubt – a very, very difficult time for her and indeed, for her family. She added: “Because of wonderful people like Nikita, I hope that it shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that there are supports available to people, and that there is justice at the end of the day.” Ms Hand said in a statement outside court on Friday that she hoped her case would remind victims of assault to keep “pushing forward for justice”. Describing the past six years as “a nightmare”, she said: “I want to show (my daughter) Freya and every other girl and boy that you can stand up for yourself if something happens to you, no matter who the person is, and justice will be served.” During the case, Ms Hand said she was “disappointed and upset” when the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided not to prosecute the case after she made a complaint to the Irish police. In a letter to her in August 2020, the DPP said there was “insufficient evidence” and there was not a reasonable prospect of conviction. Ms Hand asked the DPP to review the decision, saying she felt she was being treated differently because one of the suspects was famous. Asked about the DPP’s decision not to prosecute, Mr Harris and Ms McEntee stressed the importance of the DPP’s independence on whether to prosecute. “There are obviously structures in place where the DPP can meet a victim and can outline to them their reasons for not taking the case,” Mr Harris said. “But there’s also always an opportunity for the DPP in any situation – and I speak broadly in relation to this – to review a decision, to consider any new information that may come to light, and I don’t want to say anything that may ever cut across the ongoing work of the DPP.” Ms McEntee stressed that there should “never be any political interference” in the independence of the DPP’s decisions. “I have, since becoming minister, given priority to and enabled a new office within the DPP to open specifically focused on sexual offences, so that this issue can be given the focus and the priority that it needs,” she said.
Partsol Secures Technology-Enabled Service Subscription with the US Army
