Yesterday must have been pretty busy. I never made any notes.

I wrote a pitch to RadioLab about doing a story on the “living in a simulation” thing. I also turned that into a blog post

SBIRs

• Had a good discussion on SEGs white paper. They are reviewing their changes and will get back to me with their final today. Hopefully.
• Got some good stuff done on the Scale paper. More today

GPT Agents

• Made a lot of progress here! All the new variables are in. I added some instructions. Still need to have the prompt titles and randomize – DONE! I think it’s ready to try out again, though I need to flip the switch back to GPT-4:

• Added my times for potential meetings

SBIRs

• Got the preliminary schedule and task list done yesterday, so waiting for a response to discuss on Wednesday.
• Work more on the historical examples section.
• Speaking of simple sabotage: Poland investigates train mishaps for possible Russian connection
  • Saboteurs exploited the vulnerability in the Polish “radio stop” command system, which automatically brings trains to a stop when three tonal signals are broadcast through the railway’s radio network.

GPT Agents

• Roll in more changes. See how to flag and highlight when the CV text is more than 5,000 words. Test with my test resumes
• The NIST-NSF Institute Trustworthy AI for Law and Society (TRAILS) is pleased to announce a call for research funding proposals

SBIRs

• Sprint demos
• 2:00 MDA Meeting – done
• Finished the LOE part for the white paper. SEG need to add some clarification
• 3:00 Sprint Planning – done

GPT Agents

• Start rolling in changes to test app. Changed the db and a little of experimentService

Do Aaron’s letter

SBIRs

• 10:00 Meeting with Bob
• Wrote up some comments on the LLM tool. I think the scope should be expanded
• Put more guidance in the War Room story – done

GPT Agents

• Add a textarea that displays the read-in text or PDF as a validation tool – done
• Need to read in a few of the new files and get back to work on the new section

Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness

• Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive “indicator properties” of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. We use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and we discuss how future systems might implement them. Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.

SBIRs

• Now that I have a better way to organize groups, I re-labeled and split up some of the groups that I was using
• Working on email to Bob S. Done. Meeting set for tomorrow at 10:00

Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech

• Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing “eyeballs”: these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.

SBIRs

• Phase 2.5 meeting
• Maybe a meeting about our need for a simple method that allows for a single trajectory point input with a single analytic output. Corresponding with Bob to figure out what to do.
• Working on the paper. Need to do the motive, means and opportunity, illustrated by MI6 in the early 1940’s and Jan 6 to show how manipulation through the use of technology always targets the same human nature, and goal is to detect and disrupt those.
• Found a helpful RAND paper from 2020: Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft
  • In this Perspective, the authors urge strategists to consider a new concept for adapting U.S. grand strategy to the information age—noopolitik, which favors the use of “soft power”—as a successor to realpolitik, with its emphasis on “hard power.” The authors illuminate how U.S. adversaries are already deploying dark forms of noopolitik—e.g., weaponized narratives, strategic deception, epistemic attacks. The authors propose new ways to fight back and discuss how the future of noopolitik might depend on what happens to the global commons—i.e., the parts of the Earth and space that fall outside national jurisdictions and to which all nations are supposed to have access.
• AI Ethics?
• Added the ability to filter projects by group, since there are now so many of them:

GPT Agents

• Alden meeting
• Social analytics meeting. Demo!

Order replacement speaker – sent an email

This is very cool: A Manifold View of Connectivity in the Private Backbone Networks of Hyperscalers

SBIRs

• Get some more training done – finished ethics training
• Aarons letter of recommendation
• Ping Eric for Fellow recommendation? He’s on PTO – revisit on September 7
• 9:00 Standup – mention Rukan’s struggles and how that should not be his job
• 2:00 MDA – wrote up a description of the problem and sent it off to Clay, since Lauren is missing?
• Work on lobotomy analysis – finished!

GPT Agents

• I went through and validated that everything works last night. Need to start trying it out on people:

Upgrading my IntelliJ. Hate this part

GPT Agents

• Add “unhelpful” to context and no_context bar chart – done
• Hide “re-run” button done

SBIRs

• Submit MORS abstract – done!
• Create spreadsheet of tasks, FTEs, and milestones for 2:00 meeting – done-ish. More on Wednesday
• 10:00 RFAST meeting – done
• 11:30 LM meeting with Dave M – done

Nice (hard!) ride today!

I have no idea what to make of this:

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

• Humans communicate with each other through language, which enables us talk about things beyond time and space. Do non-human animals learn to associate human speech with specific objects in everyday life? We examined whether cats matched familiar cats’ names and faces (Exp.1) and human family members’ names and faces (Exp.2). Cats were presented with a photo of the familiar cat’s face on a laptop monitor after hearing the same cat’s name or another cat’s name called by the subject cat’s owner (Exp.1) or an experimenter (Exp.2). Half of the trials were in a congruent condition where the name and face matched, and half were in an incongruent (mismatch) condition. Results of Exp.1 showed that household cats paid attention to the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy violation effect; however, café cats did not. In Exp.2, cats living in larger human families were found to look at the monitor for increasingly longer durations in the incongruent condition. Furthermore, this tendency was stronger among cats that had lived with their human family for a longer time, although we could not rule out an effect of age. This study provides evidence that cats link a companion’s name and corresponding face without explicit training.

Home energy audit at 2:00

Friday looks like the day to mow the lawn

Driverless Car Gets Stuck in Wet Concrete in San Francisco

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• CSC touchpoint
• Work on abstract if Aaron is out for the rest of the week.
• Start task/milestone/FTE spreadsheet. One of the variables should be the number of models that we expect to train and validate
• Working on the organizational lobotomy analysis

GPT Agents

• Get SMTP running
• Get ‘remove from study’ working
• Need an additional test to see if someone has completed the study already. If so, put a variant of the ‘Page Not Available’ up?
• Write up a bit of instruction on what a hallucination is, so people can identify them.
• Add tooltips?
• Got nearly everything working. Tomorrow we make a dashboard and add remove from study

This is kind of interesting, particularly from the perspective of how taking advantage of an authoritarian leader’s bias could be an effective weapon: Why didn’t the Nazis beat Oppenheimer to the nuclear bomb?

• “Hitler had difficulties understanding the project” and cut support of it in 1942, Melber said. Without this backing, the nuclear program had very few resources to draw on, especially compared to the US Manhattan Project, which employed 500,000 people, about 1% of the US workforce, and cost the US government around $2 billion (today around $24 billion, or €22 billion).

SBIRs

• Going to spend the morning writing the Q6 report – done, I think
• Also need to do annual training! Got the security course done

GPT Agents

• 1:30 – 3:00 ContextTest dev. Maybe the first version? Will still need to get the Google SMPT working. Very close!
• 4:00 UMBC Social Analytics – postponed till next week since I was still working on getting the code running

SBIRs

• All day meeting in VA. I think it went well? Basically a capabilities briefing.
• Had a good chat with Aaron on the way back. We’re going to add a 4th vignette, which is from the operator’s perspective.

AC service today? Yes! Turned out to be a blown capacitor

A Huge Scam Targeting Kids With Roblox and Fortnite ‘Offers’ Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight

• Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox.

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint demos
• 2:00 MDA meeting
• 3:00 Sprint planning
• Working on the abstract

GPT Agents

• 4:00 more dev. Talking to the GPT 4! Maybe have a first stab on Wednesday

Algorithms and agenda-setting in Wikileaks’ #Podestaemails release

• In the month before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Wikileaks released 37 serialized batches of e-mails authored by former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Each release was announced using a unique PodestaEmail related hashtag (#PodestaEmails2, #PodestaEmails3, etc.). In total, Podesta e-mail related hashtags hit town-wide, country-wide, or worldwide Trending topics lists a total of 1,917 times, remaining on Trending Topic lists everyday within the U.S. for 30 days before election day. In this article, we discuss how Wikileaks’ release methodology increased the potential reach of Podesta E-mail related content. We describe how Wikileaks’ tweets spoke to two audiences: Twitter users and Twitter algorithms. In serializing its content and using new hashtags for each release, Wikileaks increased the potential persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of this content. By creating the possibility for this content to remain persistently visible on the Trending Topics list, Wikileaks was able to potentially realize a greater degree of agenda-setting than would have been possible through singular hashtag use.

Doxfare: Politically Motivated Leaks and the Future of the Norm on Non-Intervention in the Era of Weaponized Information.

• Alleged Russian digital interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election presented international law with the challenge of characterizing the phenomenon of politically motivated leaks by foreign actors, carried out in cyberspace. Traditionally, international law’s norm of non-intervention applies only to acts that are coercive in nature, leaving disruptive acts outside the scope of prohibited intervention. This notion raises a host of questions on the relevancy and limited flexibility of traditional international law in relation to new threats and challenges emanating from the use of cyberspace capabilities. The discourse on transnational cyberspace operations highlights how it has become increasingly difficult to deal with nuanced activities that may cause unprecedented harms, such as the hack of the Democratic National Committee, as well as disinformation campaigns on social media, online propaganda, and sensitive information leaks. This Article argues that state interference with a legitimate political process in another state through cyberspace ought to be considered a violation of the norm of non-intervention. Although the constitutive coercion element is seemingly absent, international law should adapt to the digital era’s threats and consider non-coercive interferences that constitute “doxfare”–the public release of sensitive documents with the intent of disrupting legitimate domestic processes–as violations of the norm. As this paper contends, cyberspace operations are distinct in their effects from their physical counterparts, so a traditional standard of coercion for the norm on non-intervention is outdated and requires the introduction of a more nuanced approach, that takes into account interventions that are non-coercive in nature.

Effects of Algorithmic Trend Promotion: Evidence from Coordinated Campaigns in Twitter’s Trending Topics

• In addition to more personalized content feeds, some leading social media platforms give a prominent role to content that is more widely popular. On Twitter, “trending topics” identify popular topics of conversation on the platform, thereby promoting popular content which users might not have otherwise seen through their network. Hence, “trending topics” potentially play important roles in influencing the topics users engage with on a particular day. Using two carefully constructed data sets from India and Turkey, we study the effects of a hashtag appearing on the trending topics page on the number of tweets produced with that hashtag. We specifically aim to answer the question: How many new tweeting using that hashtag appear because a hashtag is labeled as trending? We distinguish the effects of the trending topics page from network exposure and find there is a statistically significant, but modest, return to a hashtag being featured on trending topics. Analysis of the types of users impacted by trending topics shows that the feature helps less popular and new users to discover and spread content outside their network, which they otherwise might not have been able to do.

CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and AI for credible, trustworthy question answering

• Looks like more context prompting with their own (maybe Llama?) LLM?
• Has been accepted to TPDL2023

SBIR’s

• Soooo many meetings today. I may do my ride at 8:30 – done!
• 10:30 Dahlgren
• 11:00 Intern presentation – much better than the dry run
• 12:00 Technical fellows – as dull as possible
• 1:00 Meeting with Aaron on white paper. We added some LOE information for Monday’s meeting
• Finish sprint, including abstract and slides – never got a chance. Need to do that before Monday morning though

GPT Agents

• More dev with Zach. Lot’s done. Need to add a “role” to the subject table that has “researcher,” “faculty,” “professor,” etc. Maybe as dropdown?