In open-source projects, anyone can contribute, so it is important to have an active continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in addition to a protocol for reporting security concerns, especially in projects that are widely used and belong to the software supply chain. Many of these projects are hosted on GitHub, where maintainers can create automated workflows using GitHub Actions, introduced in 2019, for inspecting proposed changes to source code and defining a security policy for reporting vulnerabilities. We conduct an empirical study to measure the usage of GitHub workflows and security policies in thousands of popular repositories based on the number of stars. After querying the top one-hundred and top one-thousand repositories from all 181 trending GitHub topics, and the top 4,900 overall repositories, totaling just over 173 thousand projects, we find that 37% of projects have workflows enabled and 7% have a security policy in place. Using the top 60 repositories from each of the 34 most popular programming languages on GitHub, 2,040 projects total, we find that 57% of projects have workflows enabled and 17% have a security policy in place. Furthermore, from those top repositories that have support for GitHub CodeQL static analysis, which performs bug and vulnerability checks, only 13.5% have it enabled; in fact, we find that only 1.7% of the top repositories using Kotlin have an active CodeQL scanning workflow. These results highlight that open-source project maintainers should prioritize configuring workflows, enabling automated static analysis whenever possible, and defining a security policy to prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced or remaining in source code.
Supply chain operations traditionally involve a variety of complex decision making problems. Over the last few decades, supply chains greatly benefited from advances in computation, which allowed the transition from manual processing to automation and cost-effective optimization. Nonetheless, business operators still need to spend substantial efforts in explaining and interpreting the optimization outcomes to stakeholders. Motivated by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study how this disruptive technology can help bridge the gap between supply chain automation and human comprehension and trust thereof. We design OptiGuide -- a framework that accepts as input queries in plain text, and outputs insights about the underlying optimization outcomes. Our framework does not forgo the state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization technology, but rather leverages it to quantitatively answer what-if scenarios (e.g., how would the cost change if we used supplier B instead of supplier A for a given demand?). Importantly, our design does not require sending proprietary data over to LLMs, which can be a privacy concern in some circumstances. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a real server placement scenario within Microsoft's cloud supply chain. Along the way, we develop a general evaluation benchmark, which can be used to evaluate the accuracy of the LLM output in other scenarios.
This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to improve transcription accuracy. The increasing sophistication of LLMs, with their in-context learning capabilities and instruction-following behavior, has drawn significant attention in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our primary focus is to investigate the potential of using an LLM's in-context learning capabilities to enhance the performance of ASR systems, which currently face challenges such as ambient noise, speaker accents, and complex linguistic contexts. We designed a study using the Aishell-1 and LibriSpeech datasets, with ChatGPT and GPT-4 serving as benchmarks for LLM capabilities. Unfortunately, our initial experiments did not yield promising results, indicating the complexity of leveraging LLM's in-context learning for ASR applications. Despite further exploration with varied settings and models, the corrected sentences from the LLMs frequently resulted in higher Word Error Rates (WER), demonstrating the limitations of LLMs in speech applications. This paper provides a detailed overview of these experiments, their results, and implications, establishing that using LLMs' in-context learning capabilities to correct potential errors in speech recognition transcriptions is still a challenging task at the current stage.
This paper presents the main features of a system that aims to transform regular expressions into shorter equivalent expressions. The system is also capable of computing other operations useful for simplification, such as checking the inclusion of regular languages. The main novelty of this work is that it combines known but distinct ways of representing regular languages into a global unified data structure that makes the operations more efficient. In addition, representations of regular languages are dynamically reduced as operations are performed on them. Expressions are normalized and represented by a unique identifier (an integer). Expressions found to be equivalent (i.e. denoting the same regular language) are grouped into equivalence classes from which a shortest representative is chosen. The article briefly describes the main algorithms working on the global data structure. Some of them are direct adaptations of well-known algorithms, but most of them incorporate new ideas, which are really necessary to make the system efficient. Finally, to show its usefulness, the system is applied to some examples from the literature. Statistics on randomly generated sets of expressions are also provided.
The role of cryptocurrencies within the financial systems has been expanding rapidly in recent years among investors and institutions. It is therefore crucial to investigate the phenomena and develop statistical methods able to capture their interrelationships, the links with other global systems, and, at the same time, the serial heterogeneity. For these reasons, this paper introduces hidden Markov regression models for jointly estimating quantiles and expectiles of cryptocurrency returns using regime-switching copulas. The proposed approach allows us to focus on extreme returns and describe their temporal evolution by introducing time-dependent coefficients evolving according to a latent Markov chain. Moreover to model their time-varying dependence structure, we consider elliptical copula functions defined by state-specific parameters. Maximum likelihood estimates are obtained via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The empirical analysis investigates the relationship between daily returns of five cryptocurrencies and major world market indices.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR), based on machine and deep learning algorithms is considered one of the most promising technologies to monitor professional and daily life activities for different categories of people (e.g., athletes, elderly, kids, employers) in order to provide a variety of services related, for example to well-being, empowering of technical performances, prevention of risky situation, and educational purposes. However, the analysis of the effectiveness and the efficiency of HAR methodologies suffers from the lack of a standard workflow, which might represent the baseline for the estimation of the quality of the developed pattern recognition models. This makes the comparison among different approaches a challenging task. In addition, researchers can make mistakes that, when not detected, definitely affect the achieved results. To mitigate such issues, this paper proposes an open-source automatic and highly configurable framework, named B-HAR, for the definition, standardization, and development of a baseline framework in order to evaluate and compare HAR methodologies. It implements the most popular data processing methods for data preparation and the most commonly used machine and deep learning pattern recognition models.
Interaction-driven modeling of diseases over real-world contact data has been shown to promote the understanding of the spread of diseases in communities. This temporal modeling follows the path-preserving order and timing of the contacts, which are essential for accurate modeling. Yet, other important aspects were overlooked. Various airborne pathogens differ in the duration of exposure needed for infection. Also, from the individual perspective, Covid-19 progression differs between individuals, and its severity is statistically correlated with age. Here, we enrich an interaction-driven model of Covid-19 and similar airborne viral diseases with (a) meetings duration and (b) personal disease progression. The enriched model enables predicting outcomes at both the population and the individual levels. It further allows predicting individual risk of engaging in social interactions as a function of the virus characteristics and its prevalence in the population. We further showed that the enigmatic nature of asymptomatic transmission stems from the latent effect of the network density on this transmission and that asymptomatic transmission has a substantial impact only in sparse communities.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to make large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarize and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.
Despite the plethora of born-digital content, vast troves of important content remain accessible only on physical media such as paper or microfilm. The traditional approach to indexing undigitized content is using manually created metadata that describes it at some level of aggregation (e.g., folder, box, or collection). Searchers led in this way to some subset of the content often must then manually examine substantial quantities of physical media to find what they are looking for. This paper proposes a complementary approach, in which selective digitization of a small portion of the content is used as a basis for proximity-based indexing as a way of bringing the user closer to the specific content for which they are looking. Experiments with 35 boxes of partially digitized US State Department records indicate that box-level indexes built in this way can provide a useful basis for search.
We present this article as a small gesture in an attempt to counter what appears to be exponentially growing hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its capabilities, and the distraction provided by the associated talk of science-fiction scenarios that might arise if AI should become sentient and super-intelligent. It may also help those outside of the field to become more informed about some of the limitations of AI technology. In the current context of popular discourse AI defaults to mean foundation and large language models (LLMs) such as those used to create ChatGPT. This in itself is a misrepresentation of the diversity, depth and volume of research, researchers, and technology that truly represents the field of AI. AI being a field of research that has existed in software artefacts since at least the 1950's. We set out to highlight a number of limitations of LLMs, and in so doing highlight that harms have already arisen and will continue to arise due to these limitations. Along the way we also highlight some of the associated risks for individuals and organisations in using this technology.
Automated Driving Systems (ADS) have made great achievements in recent years thanks to the efforts from both academia and industry. A typical ADS is composed of multiple modules, including sensing, perception, planning and control, which brings together the latest advances in multiple domains. Despite these achievements, safety assurance of the systems is still of great significance, since the unsafe behavior of ADS can bring catastrophic consequences and unacceptable economic and social losses. Testing is an important approach to system validation for the deployment in practice; in the context of ADS, it is extremely challenging, due to the system complexity and multidisciplinarity. There has been a great deal of literature that focuses on the testing of ADS, and a number of surveys have also emerged to summarize the technical advances. However, most of these surveys focus on the system-level testing that is performed within software simulators, and thereby ignore the distinct features of individual modules. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the existing ADS testing literature, which takes into account both module-level and system-level testing. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (1) we build a threat model that reveals the potential safety threats for each module of an ADS; (2) we survey the module-level testing techniques for ADS and highlight the technical differences affected by the properties of the modules; (3) we also survey the system-level testing techniques, but we focus on empirical studies that take a bird's-eye view on the system, the problems due to the collaborations between modules, and the gaps between ADS testing in simulators and real world; (4) we identify the challenges and opportunities in ADS testing, which facilitates the future research in this field.