Looks like the last hot, muggy day for a while

SBIRs

• More white paper. Slow progress, but progress. This will have to slide some because of the thunderbolt thing. Talk to Protima about her part. Maybe tomorrow though.
• For USNA meeting with Ron on Friday:
  • Make a copy of the NIST slide deck and tweak for USNA. Add the ATT&CK concept as a ‘Next Steps’ slide.
  • Make an initial pass at a social hacking version of the ATT&CK matrix using the concepts from the slide deck and other student ideas. Ground the ideas in sources with a solid lit review.
  • Text: Killer Apps: Low-Speed, Large-Scale AI Weapons
  • Image:
  • Video: Work by Jon Gratch for sure
  • Audio: Impact of Voice Fidelity on Decision Making: A Potential Dark Pattern?, The Voice: Lessons on Trustworthy Conversational Agents from ‘Dune’
  • Try to use GenAI (and other methods?) to attempt to implement PoC versions of the attacks
  • Try to use GenAI (and other methods?) to attempt to implement PoC defenses
• 10:00 Thunderbolt meeting – done. Added two slides to the deck and a bullet point.

Ouch!

SBIRs

• Write up stories for Social att&ck (For ETF) and WhiteHat AI browser plugin (For IUI)
• Call about Identrust – done!
• White paper. Get charge number. One of the things that I think I’ll mention is very low bandwidth loop management. Something on the order of a coordinate in embedding space (probably projected down to a reasonable number of dimensions. This is sent out as regularly as possible so that other model’s predictions of each other can be validated to a degree. If the distance in embedding space is too great, the likelihood that there is a mutual understanding is low(er)
• 9:00 standup. Get ride in before the heat – done
• 2:30 AI Ethics – done
• 3:30 Thunderbolt – done. Two slides by tomorrow COB? Tricky problem. I guess we just have to sound smart? I think cells could be an interesting direction to think about.
• Write up something for our interns by Friday to go over with Ron. And follow up with the interns on the following Friday.

Gradio is the fastest way to demo your machine learning model with a friendly web interface so that anyone can use it, anywhere!

SBIRs

• Update Jira – done
• Submit expenses (scan parking!) – done
• Write up accomplishments – done
• 1:30 Meeting – done. Not much that we can really do here, I think
• Ping Jonathan Gratch and Cosmin Munteanu – done
• Write up stories for Social att&ck (For ETF) and WhiteHat AI browser plugin (For IUI)
• Restart book club for when Aaron gets back?
• Call about Identrust
• Looks like I gotta write a white paper

GPT Agents

• Ping folks to set up weekly meetings again – done

Back from the CUI 2024 conference, which was fun and useful I think the next thing to do is to put together an “exploit table” for human beings that resembles the ATT&CK matrix. That’s one paper. The other effort will be to put together a white-hat AI Chrome plugin to reduce exploits and scams on the elderly. That should allow progress in a smaller domain to see if such an approach can work. I’d say young adults too, but the IRB might be impossible, and the number of platforms is more daunting. I think it would have to go in a phone OS, and even then it might not be able to handle encryption of all the data presented in, say, a TikTok video.

And this is part of that matrix: Russia recruits sympathizers online for sabotage in Europe, officials say

• Europe has been grappling with an increase in Moscow-led sabotage attacks as Russia turns its focus to increasing the cost of Western support for Ukraine.

Saw this today:

Via BlueSky

Really good summary of the AMOC tipping point:

Played around with NotebookLM on synthesizing the SCOTUS ruling with other sources. It works pretty well! I’ll edit and post later

SBIRs

• Pick up the poster. Groceries too? Yup
• Just got notice the the provocation will be a poster on 9 July
• Identrust. Tried! Put in a ticket
• Maybe a CwoC meeting? Yup

Tasks

• Get recumbent to Aaron? Better yet, have him try it here.
• Call Rhena

SBIRs

• Need to reach out to Iain with the pointer to the Anthropic paper and the snippet of code that shows how to get to layers. Also send the link to DataMapPlot – done, though I forgot to mention the nifty plotting

• Finish poster and send to Staples – done. Should be ready tonight
• Start on 5 slide provocation deck. Well, it’s 11 slides, but made as a rapid sequence
• Identrust thing – tomorrow?

This happened today:

Tasks:

• Plumber – scheduled – done!
• Bank – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 sprint demos – done
• 3:00 sprint planning -done
• Travel expenses – done. And approved!
• Poster – first pass is done
• Put business cards in contacts

Back from the MORS 92ns Symposium. Monterey is lovely. I got to ride my bike along the shore and into the hills. Good presentations. Some particularly good stuff from Sandia on finding markers for when online activity moves into the real world. In this case the data was about the GameStop short squeeze, but it might be more generalizable. Need to keep in touch.

Another, less interesting talk had a really good pointer, MITRE’s Att&ck knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. I think it makes sense to start to put together a AI-based social hacking of theoretical and actual possible hacks and defenses. Some of these would still be human active measures, but could be scaled.

These are some loooooong daylight hours here near the 39th parallel.

SBIRs

• Received a notification from the CUI folks to prepare a video presentation if I wasn’t attending of about 5 minutes, which is the same as a poster. So I think the wise move is slides and a poster. Work on that today and maybe some tomorrow. Otherwise while in CA.
  • Note: Add content about Softbank’s SoftVoice project
• 9:00 Standup. Go over the layer image maybe and then go for a ride. I’ll need to work on the poster & slides next week. I’ll try to get started on UMAP today and have enough done so I can pick it up in two weeks
• 1:00 Overmatch call – might have gone well. More later?
• Got UMAP working with Plotly! Here’s the code. It’s based on this UMAP example here and the plotly scatterplot examples here:

from dash import Dash, dcc, html, Input, Output, callback
import plotly.express as px
from NNMs.utils.DashBaseClass import DashBaseClass

import numpy as np
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
import pandas as pd

import umap

class UmapPenguins(DashBaseClass):
    df:pd.DataFrame

    def initialize(self) -> None:
        penguins = pd.read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/allisonhorst/palmerpenguins/c19a904462482430170bfe2c718775ddb7dbb885/inst/extdata/penguins.csv")
        penguins.head()
        penguins = penguins.dropna()
        print(penguins.species.value_counts())

        print("scaling data")
        reducer = umap.UMAP()
        penguin_data = penguins[
            [
                "bill_length_mm",
                "bill_depth_mm",
                "flipper_length_mm",
                "body_mass_g",
            ]
        ].values
        scaled_penguin_data = StandardScaler().fit_transform(penguin_data)

        print("finished scaling data")

        print("calculating embedding")
        embedding = reducer.fit_transform(scaled_penguin_data)
        print("embedding.shape = {}".format(embedding.shape))
        self.df = pd.DataFrame(embedding, columns=['x', 'y'])

        # nda = np.random.random(size=(333, 3))
        # self.df = pd.DataFrame(nda, columns=['x', 'y', 's'])

    def setup_layout(self) -> None:
        self.add_div(html.H2("UMAP scatterplot", style={'textAlign': 'center'}))
        fig = px.scatter(self.df, x='x', y='y')
        self.add_div(dcc.Graph(figure=fig))
        self.app.layout = html.Div(self.div_list)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    ump = UmapPenguins(True)

• And here’s the result.

The Google Doodle has a nice clickthrough for Juneteenth. Think I’ll go for a nice bike ride.

Tasks:

• Carlos email – done
• Tim at 1:30 – Need to move some money around. We start in October, with the deposit in August

Interesting piece from Bobbie Berjon: The Public Interest Internet

• What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean “internet” the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by “public interest” I don’t mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.

Tasks

• Carlos email

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• Write up what I’ve discovered about the hidden layer info in output vs the activation info. Done
• Connect the heatmap to the running model. Done
• Add the running code to the documentation. Done
• Start figuring out UMAP. Not even started! I blame meetings

Tasks

• Call Judith – done
• Letter to Carlos
• ICTAI-2024

Creativity Has Left the Chat: The Price of Debiasing Language Models

• Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing but can exhibit biases and may generate toxic content. While alignment techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) reduce these issues, their impact on creativity, defined as syntactic and semantic diversity, remains unexplored. We investigate the unintended consequences of RLHF on the creativity of LLMs through three experiments focusing on the Llama-2 series. Our findings reveal that aligned models exhibit lower entropy in token predictions, form distinct clusters in the embedding space, and gravitate towards “attractor states”, indicating limited output diversity. Our findings have significant implications for marketers who rely on LLMs for creative tasks such as copywriting, ad creation, and customer persona generation. The trade-off between consistency and creativity in aligned models should be carefully considered when selecting the appropriate model for a given application. We also discuss the importance of prompt engineering in harnessing the creative potential of base models.
• They were able to do this by comparing the chat vs completion models. There are all kinds of implications here

SBIRs

• Letter to Anthropic – done
• DARPA meeting – cancelled?
• Get the cookiecutter environment finished

Got the heatmap working. Calling it a day

Finally able to get to chores

Via Mastodon

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

• At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
  The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

SBIRs

• 12:00 AI Ethics meeting