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Showing new listings for Thursday, 17 April 2025
- [1] arXiv:2504.11481 [pdf, other]
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Title: Leveraging Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models to Track and Analyze Learning TrajectoriesSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
This study addresses the challenges of tracking and analyzing students' learning trajectories, particularly the issue of inadequate knowledge coverage in course assessments. Traditional assessment tools often fail to fully cover course content, leading to imprecise evaluations of student mastery. To tackle this problem, the study proposes a knowledge graph construction method based on large language models (LLMs), which transforms learning materials into structured data and generates personalized learning trajectory graphs by analyzing students' test data. Experimental results demonstrate that the model effectively alerts teachers to potential biases in their exam questions and tracks individual student progress. This system not only enhances the accuracy of learning assessments but also helps teachers provide timely guidance to students who are falling behind, thereby improving overall teaching strategies.
- [2] arXiv:2504.11486 [pdf, other]
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Title: Designing AI-Enabled Countermeasures to Cognitive WarfareComments: NATO Symposium Meaningful Human Control in Information Warfare, 2024, STO-MP-HFM-377Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Foreign information operations on social media platforms pose significant risks to democratic societies. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), this threat is likely to intensify, potentially overwhelming human defenders. To achieve the necessary scale and tempo to defend against these threats, utilizing AI as part of the solution seems inevitable. Although there has been a significant debate on AI in Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), it is equally likely that AI will be widely used in information operations for defensive and offensive objectives. Similar to LAWS, AI-driven information operations occupy a highly sensitive moral domain where removing human involvement in the tactical decision making process raises ethical concerns. Although AI has yet to revolutionize the field, a solid ethical stance is urgently needed on how AI can be responsibly used to defend against information operations on social media platforms. This paper proposes possible AI-enabled countermeasures against cognitive warfare and argues how they can be developed in a responsible way, such that meaningful human control is preserved.
- [3] arXiv:2504.11501 [pdf, other]
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Title: A Framework for the Private Governance of Frontier Artificial IntelligenceSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
This paper presents a proposal for the governance of frontier AI systems through a hybrid public-private system. Private bodies, authorized and overseen by government, provide certifications to developers of frontier AI systems on an opt-in basis. In exchange for opting in, frontier AI firms receive protections from tort liability for customer misuse of their models. Before detailing the proposal, the paper explores more commonly discussed approaches to AI governance, analyzing their strengths and flaws. It also examines the nature of frontier AI governance itself. The paper includes consideration of the political economic, institutional, legal, safety, and other merits and tradeoffs inherent in the governance system it proposes.
- [4] arXiv:2504.11504 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Counterfactual Fairness Evaluation of Machine Learning Models on Educational DatasetsComments: 12 pages, 6 figures, accepted to ITS2025Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
As machine learning models are increasingly used in educational settings, from detecting at-risk students to predicting student performance, algorithmic bias and its potential impacts on students raise critical concerns about algorithmic fairness. Although group fairness is widely explored in education, works on individual fairness in a causal context are understudied, especially on counterfactual fairness. This paper explores the notion of counterfactual fairness for educational data by conducting counterfactual fairness analysis of machine learning models on benchmark educational datasets. We demonstrate that counterfactual fairness provides meaningful insight into the causality of sensitive attributes and causal-based individual fairness in education.
- [5] arXiv:2504.11564 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Perceptions of Agentic AI in Organizations: Implications for Responsible AI and ROIComments: 26 pages, 15 figuresSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems rapidly gain autonomy, the need for robust responsible AI frameworks becomes paramount. This paper investigates how organizations perceive and adapt such frameworks amidst the emerging landscape of increasingly sophisticated agentic AI. Employing an interpretive qualitative approach, the study explores the lived experiences of AI professionals. Findings highlight that the inherent complexity of agentic AI systems and their responsible implementation, rooted in the intricate interconnectedness of responsible AI dimensions and the thematic framework (an analytical structure developed from the data), combined with the novelty of agentic AI, contribute to significant challenges in organizational adaptation, characterized by knowledge gaps, a limited emphasis on stakeholder engagement, and a strong focus on control. These factors, by hindering effective adaptation and implementation, ultimately compromise the potential for responsible AI and the realization of ROI.
- [6] arXiv:2504.11691 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Measuring Global Migration Flows using Online DataSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Applications (stat.AP)
Existing estimates of human migration are limited in their scope, reliability, and timeliness, prompting the United Nations and the Global Compact on Migration to call for improved data collection. Using privacy protected records from three billion Facebook users, we estimate country-to-country migration flows at monthly granularity for 181 countries, accounting for selection into Facebook usage. Our estimates closely match high-quality measures of migration where available but can be produced nearly worldwide and with less delay than alternative methods. We estimate that 39.1 million people migrated internationally in 2022 (0.63% of the population of the countries in our sample). Migration flows significantly changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing by 64% before rebounding in 2022 to a pace 24% above the pre-crisis rate. We also find that migration from Ukraine increased tenfold in the wake of the Russian invasion. To support research and policy interventions, we will release these estimates publicly through the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
- [7] arXiv:2504.11913 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Broadening Participation through Physical Computing: Replicating Sensor-Based Programming Workshops for Rural Students in Sri LankaComments: Accepted to ITiCSE 2025Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
In today's digital world, computing education offers critical opportunities, yet systemic inequities exclude under-represented communities, especially in rural, under-resourced regions. Early engagement is vital for building interest in computing careers and achieving equitable participation. Recent work has shown that the use of sensor-enabled tools and block-based programming can improve engagement and self-efficacy for students from under-represented groups, but these findings lack replication in diverse, resource-constrained settings. This study addresses this gap by implementing sensor-based programming workshops with rural students in Sri Lanka. Replicating methods from the literature, we conduct a between-group study (sensor vs. non-sensor) using Scratch and real-time environmental sensors. We found that students in both groups reported significantly higher confidence in programming in Scratch after the workshop. In addition, average changes in both self-efficacy and outcome expectancy were higher in the experimental (sensor) group than in the control (non-sensor) group, mirroring trends observed in the original study being replicated. We also found that using the sensors helped to enhance creativity and inspired some students to express an interest in information and communications technology (ICT) careers, supporting the value of such hands-on activities in building programming confidence among under-represented groups.
- [8] arXiv:2504.11928 [pdf, other]
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Title: The Jade Gateway to Trust: Exploring How Socio-Cultural Perspectives Shape Trust Within Chinese NFT CommunitiesYi-Fan Cao, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Meng Xia, Leo Yu-Ho Lo, Xiao-Qing Zhang, Mei-Jia Luo, Lennart E. Nacke, Yang Wang, Huamin QuComments: 39 pages, 7 tables, 4 figures, ACM CSCWSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Today's world is witnessing an unparalleled rate of technological transformation. The emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has transformed how we handle digital assets and value. Despite their initial popularity, NFTs face declining adoption influenced not only by cryptocurrency volatility but also by trust dynamics within communities. From a social computing perspective, understanding these trust dynamics offers valuable insights for the development of both the NFT ecosystem and the broader digital economy. China presents a compelling context for examining these dynamics, offering a unique intersection of technological innovation and traditional cultural values. Through a content analysis of eight Chinese NFT-focused WeChat groups and 21 semi-structured interviews, we examine how socio-cultural factors influence trust formation and development. We found that trust in Chinese NFT communities is significantly molded by local cultural values. To be precise, Confucian virtues, such as benevolence, propriety, and integrity, play a crucial role in shaping these trust relationships. Our research identifies three critical trust dimensions in China's NFT market: (1) technological, (2) institutional, and (3) social. We examined the challenges in cultivating each dimension. Based on these insights, we developed tailored trust-building guidelines for Chinese NFT stakeholders. These guidelines address trust issues that factor into NFT's declining popularity and could offer valuable strategies for CSCW researchers, developers, and designers aiming to enhance trust in global NFT communities. Our research urges CSCW scholars to take into account the unique socio-cultural contexts when developing trust-enhancing strategies for digital innovations and online interactions.
- [9] arXiv:2504.12170 [pdf, other]
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Title: AI Behind Closed Doors: a Primer on The Governance of Internal DeploymentCharlotte Stix, Matteo Pistillo, Girish Sastry, Marius Hobbhahn, Alejandro Ortega, Mikita Balesni, Annika Hallensleben, Nix Goldowsky-Dill, Lee SharkeySubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
The most advanced future AI systems will first be deployed inside the frontier AI companies developing them. According to these companies and independent experts, AI systems may reach or even surpass human intelligence and capabilities by 2030. Internal deployment is, therefore, a key source of benefits and risks from frontier AI systems. Despite this, the governance of the internal deployment of highly advanced frontier AI systems appears absent. This report aims to address this absence by priming a conversation around the governance of internal deployment. It presents a conceptualization of internal deployment, learnings from other sectors, reviews of existing legal frameworks and their applicability, and illustrative examples of the type of scenarios we are most concerned about. Specifically, it discusses the risks correlated to the loss of control via the internal application of a misaligned AI system to the AI research and development pipeline, and unconstrained and undetected power concentration behind closed doors. The report culminates with a small number of targeted recommendations that provide a first blueprint for the governance of internal deployment.
New submissions (showing 9 of 9 entries)
- [10] arXiv:2504.11510 (cross-list from cs.IR) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: RAID: An In-Training Defense against Attribute Inference Attacks in Recommender SystemsComments: 17 pagesSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
In various networks and mobile applications, users are highly susceptible to attribute inference attacks, with particularly prevalent occurrences in recommender systems. Attackers exploit partially exposed user profiles in recommendation models, such as user embeddings, to infer private attributes of target users, such as gender and political views. The goal of defenders is to mitigate the effectiveness of these attacks while maintaining recommendation performance. Most existing defense methods, such as differential privacy and attribute unlearning, focus on post-training settings, which limits their capability of utilizing training data to preserve recommendation performance. Although adversarial training extends defenses to in-training settings, it often struggles with convergence due to unstable training processes. In this paper, we propose RAID, an in-training defense method against attribute inference attacks in recommender systems. In addition to the recommendation objective, we define a defensive objective to ensure that the distribution of protected attributes becomes independent of class labels, making users indistinguishable from attribute inference attacks. Specifically, this defensive objective aims to solve a constrained Wasserstein barycenter problem to identify the centroid distribution that makes the attribute indistinguishable while complying with recommendation performance constraints. To optimize our proposed objective, we use optimal transport to align users with the centroid distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets to evaluate RAID. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of RAID and demonstrate its significant superiority over existing methods in multiple aspects.
- [11] arXiv:2504.11524 (cross-list from cs.AI) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: HypoBench: Towards Systematic and Principled Benchmarking for Hypothesis GenerationComments: 29 pages, 6 figures, website link: this https URLSubjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
There is growing interest in hypothesis generation with large language models (LLMs). However, fundamental questions remain: what makes a good hypothesis, and how can we systematically evaluate methods for hypothesis generation? To address this, we introduce HypoBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs and hypothesis generation methods across multiple aspects, including practical utility, generalizability, and hypothesis discovery rate. HypoBench includes 7 real-world tasks and 5 synthetic tasks with 194 distinct datasets. We evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs combined with six existing hypothesis-generation methods. Overall, our results suggest that existing methods are capable of discovering valid and novel patterns in the data. However, the results from synthetic datasets indicate that there is still significant room for improvement, as current hypothesis generation methods do not fully uncover all relevant or meaningful patterns. Specifically, in synthetic settings, as task difficulty increases, performance significantly drops, with best models and methods only recovering 38.8% of the ground-truth hypotheses. These findings highlight challenges in hypothesis generation and demonstrate that HypoBench serves as a valuable resource for improving AI systems designed to assist scientific discovery.
- [12] arXiv:2504.11671 (cross-list from cs.AI) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Steering Prosocial AI Agents: Computational Basis of LLM's Decision Making in Social SimulationSubjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG); General Economics (econ.GN)
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as human-like decision-making agents in social science and applied settings. These LLM-agents are typically assigned human-like characters and placed in real-life contexts. However, how these characters and contexts shape an LLM's behavior remains underexplored. This study proposes and tests methods for probing, quantifying, and modifying an LLM's internal representations in a Dictator Game -- a classic behavioral experiment on fairness and prosocial behavior. We extract ``vectors of variable variations'' (e.g., ``male'' to ``female'') from the LLM's internal state. Manipulating these vectors during the model's inference can substantially alter how those variables relate to the model's decision-making. This approach offers a principled way to study and regulate how social concepts can be encoded and engineered within transformer-based models, with implications for alignment, debiasing, and designing AI agents for social simulations in both academic and commercial applications.
- [13] arXiv:2504.11723 (cross-list from cs.HC) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Probing the Unknown: Exploring Student Interactions with Probeable Problems at Scale in Introductory ProgrammingComments: Accepted at ITiCSE 2025Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
Introductory programming courses often rely on small code-writing exercises that have clearly specified problem statements. This limits opportunities for students to practice how to clarify ambiguous requirements -- a critical skill in real-world programming. In addition, the emerging capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to produce code from well-defined specifications may harm student engagement with traditional programming exercises. This study explores the use of ``Probeable Problems'', automatically gradable tasks that have deliberately vague or incomplete specifications. Such problems require students to submit test inputs, or `probes', to clarify requirements before implementation. Through analysis of over 40,000 probes in an introductory course, we identify patterns linking probing behaviors to task success. Systematic strategies, such as thoroughly exploring expected behavior before coding, resulted in fewer incorrect code submissions and correlated with course success. Feedback from nearly 1,000 participants highlighted the challenges and real-world relevance of these tasks, as well as benefits to critical thinking and metacognitive skills. Probeable Problems are easy to set up and deploy at scale, and help students recognize and resolve uncertainties in programming problems.
- [14] arXiv:2504.11775 (cross-list from stat.ML) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive AttributesSubjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Risk Management (q-fin.RM)
Fairness has emerged as a critical consideration in the landscape of machine learning algorithms, particularly as AI continues to transform decision-making across societal domains. To ensure that these algorithms are free from bias and do not discriminate against individuals based on sensitive attributes such as gender and race, the field of algorithmic bias has introduced various fairness concepts, along with methodologies to achieve these notions in different contexts. Despite the rapid advancement, not all sectors have embraced these fairness principles to the same extent. One specific sector that merits attention in this regard is insurance. Within the realm of insurance pricing, fairness is defined through a distinct and specialized framework. Consequently, achieving fairness according to established notions does not automatically ensure fair pricing in insurance. In particular, regulators are increasingly emphasizing transparency in pricing algorithms and imposing constraints on insurance companies on the collection and utilization of sensitive consumer attributes. These factors present additional challenges in the implementation of fairness in pricing algorithms. To address these complexities and comply with regulatory demands, we propose an efficient method for constructing fair models that are tailored to the insurance domain, using only privatized sensitive attributes. Notably, our approach ensures statistical guarantees, does not require direct access to sensitive attributes, and adapts to varying transparency requirements, addressing regulatory demands while ensuring fairness in insurance pricing.
- [15] arXiv:2504.11974 (cross-list from cs.HC) [pdf, other]
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Title: Who Said Only Military Officers Can Deal with Uncertainty? On the Importance of Uncertainty in EdTech Data VisualisationsComments: 20 pages, 12 figuresJournal-ref: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-20 (2025)Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
AI-powered predictive systems have high margins of error. However, data visualisations of algorithmic systems in education and other social fields tend to visualise certainty, thus invisibilising the underlying approximations and uncertainties of the algorithmic systems and the social settings in which these systems operate. This paper draws on a critical speculative approach to first analyse data visualisations from predictive analytics platforms for education. It demonstrates that visualisations of uncertainty in education are rare. Second, the paper explores uncertainty visualisations in other fields (defence, climate change and healthcare). The paper concludes by reflecting on the role of data visualisations and un/certainty in shaping educational futures. It also identifies practical implications for the design of data visualisations in education.
Cross submissions (showing 6 of 6 entries)
- [16] arXiv:2407.14981 (replaced) [pdf, other]
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Title: Open Problems in Technical AI GovernanceAnka Reuel, Ben Bucknall, Stephen Casper, Tim Fist, Lisa Soder, Onni Aarne, Lewis Hammond, Lujain Ibrahim, Alan Chan, Peter Wills, Markus Anderljung, Ben Garfinkel, Lennart Heim, Andrew Trask, Gabriel Mukobi, Rylan Schaeffer, Mauricio Baker, Sara Hooker, Irene Solaiman, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Nitarshan Rajkumar, Nicolas Moës, Jeffrey Ladish, David Bau, Paul Bricman, Neel Guha, Jessica Newman, Yoshua Bengio, Tobin South, Alex Pentland, Sanmi Koyejo, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Robert TragerComments: Ben Bucknall and Anka Reuel contributed equally and share the first author positionJournal-ref: Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
AI progress is creating a growing range of risks and opportunities, but it is often unclear how they should be navigated. In many cases, the barriers and uncertainties faced are at least partly technical. Technical AI governance, referring to technical analysis and tools for supporting the effective governance of AI, seeks to address such challenges. It can help to (a) identify areas where intervention is needed, (b) identify and assess the efficacy of potential governance actions, and (c) enhance governance options by designing mechanisms for enforcement, incentivization, or compliance. In this paper, we explain what technical AI governance is, why it is important, and present a taxonomy and incomplete catalog of its open problems. This paper is intended as a resource for technical researchers or research funders looking to contribute to AI governance.
- [17] arXiv:2501.14779 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: The Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Upper Secondary Mathematics Education Through the Lens of Technology AcceptanceComments: Published in the Proceedings of the 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'25), March 31--April 4, 2025, Catania, ItalySubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
This study investigated the students' perceptions of using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in upper-secondary mathematics education. Data was collected from Finnish high school students to represent how key constructs of the Technology Acceptance Model (Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment, and Intention to Use) influence the adoption of AI tools. First, a structural equation model for a comparative study with a prior study was constructed and analyzed. Then, an extended model with the additional construct of Compatibility, which represents the alignment of AI tools with students' educational experiences and needs, was proposed and analyzed. The results demonstrated a strong influence of perceived usefulness on the intention to use GenAI, emphasizing the statistically significant role of perceived enjoyment in determining perceived usefulness and ease of use. The inclusion of compatibility improved the model's explanatory power, particularly in predicting perceived usefulness. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how AI tools can be integrated into mathematics education and highlights key differences between the Finnish educational context and previous studies based on structural equation modeling.
- [18] arXiv:2502.04942 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: WikiReddit: Tracing Information and Attention Flows Between Online PlatformsComments: Accepted at the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2025)Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Databases (cs.DB); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
The World Wide Web is a complex interconnected digital ecosystem, where information and attention flow between platforms and communities throughout the globe. These interactions co-construct how we understand the world, reflecting and shaping public discourse. Unfortunately, researchers often struggle to understand how information circulates and evolves across the web because platform-specific data is often siloed and restricted by linguistic barriers. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive, multilingual dataset capturing all Wikipedia mentions and links shared in posts and comments on Reddit 2020-2023, excluding those from private and NSFW subreddits. Each linked Wikipedia article is enriched with revision history, page view data, article ID, redirects, and Wikidata identifiers. Through a research agreement with Reddit, our dataset ensures user privacy while providing a query and ID mechanism that integrates with the Reddit and Wikipedia APIs. This enables extended analyses for researchers studying how information flows across platforms. For example, Reddit discussions use Wikipedia for deliberation and fact-checking which subsequently influences Wikipedia content, by driving traffic to articles or inspiring edits. By analyzing the relationship between information shared and discussed on these platforms, our dataset provides a foundation for examining the interplay between social media discourse and collaborative knowledge consumption and production.
- [19] arXiv:2503.19887 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: AI threats to national security can be countered through an incident regimeSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Recent progress in AI capabilities has heightened concerns that AI systems could pose a threat to national security, for example, by making it easier for malicious actors to perform cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure, or through loss of control of autonomous AI systems. In parallel, federal legislators in the US have proposed nascent 'AI incident regimes' to identify and counter similar threats. In this paper, we consolidate these two trends and present a timely proposal for a legally mandated post-deployment AI incident regime that aims to counter potential national security threats from AI systems. We start the paper by introducing the concept of 'security-critical' to describe sectors that pose extreme risks to national security, before arguing that 'security-critical' describes civilian nuclear power, aviation, life science dual-use research of concern, and frontier AI development. We then present in detail our AI incident regime proposal, justifying each component of the proposal by demonstrating its similarity to US domestic incident regimes in other 'security-critical' sectors. Finally, we sketch a hypothetical scenario where our proposed AI incident regime deals with an AI cyber incident. Our proposed AI incident regime is split into three phases. The first phase revolves around a novel operationalization of what counts as an 'AI incident' and we suggest that AI providers must create a 'national security case' before deploying a frontier AI system. The second and third phases spell out that AI providers should notify a government agency about incidents, and that the government agency should be involved in amending AI providers' security and safety procedures, in order to counter future threats to national security.
- [20] arXiv:2402.02455 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: A Survey on Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable CredentialsComments: 32 pages, 15 figures, and 10 tablesJournal-ref: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2025Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
Digital identity has always been considered the keystone for implementing secure and trustworthy communications among parties. The ever-evolving digital landscape has gone through many technological transformations that have also affected the way entities are digitally identified. During this digital evolution, identity management has shifted from centralized to decentralized approaches. The last era of this journey is represented by the emerging Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), which gives users full control over their data. SSI leverages decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs), which have been recently standardized by the World Wide Web Community (W3C). These technologies have the potential to build more secure and decentralized digital identity systems, remarkably contributing to strengthening the security of communications that typically involve many distributed participants. It is worth noting that the scope of DIDs and VCs extends beyond individuals, encompassing a broad range of entities including cloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) resources. However, due to their novelty, existing literature lacks a comprehensive survey on how DIDs and VCs have been employed in different application domains, which go beyond SSI systems. This paper provides readers with a comprehensive overview of such technologies from different perspectives. Specifically, we first provide the background on DIDs and VCs. Then, we analyze available implementations and offer an in-depth review of how these technologies have been employed across different use-case scenarios. Furthermore, we examine recent regulations and initiatives that have been emerging worldwide. Finally, we present some challenges that hinder their adoption in real-world scenarios and future research directions.
- [21] arXiv:2410.09080 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Leveraging Social Determinants of Health in Alzheimer's Research Using LLM-Augmented Literature Mining and Knowledge GraphsTianqi Shang, Shu Yang, Weiqing He, Tianhua Zhai, Dawei Li, Bojian Hou, Tianlong Chen, Jason H. Moore, Marylyn D. Ritchie, Li ShenComments: Accepted by AMIA-IS'25: AMIA Informatics SummitSubjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Growing evidence suggests that social determinants of health (SDoH), a set of nonmedical factors, affect individuals' risks of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias. Nevertheless, the etiological mechanisms underlying such relationships remain largely unclear, mainly due to difficulties in collecting relevant information. This study presents a novel, automated framework that leverages recent advancements of large language model (LLM) and natural language processing techniques to mine SDoH knowledge from extensive literature and integrate it with AD-related biological entities extracted from the general-purpose knowledge graph PrimeKG. Utilizing graph neural networks, we performed link prediction tasks to evaluate the resultant SDoH-augmented knowledge graph. Our framework shows promise for enhancing knowledge discovery in AD and can be generalized to other SDoH-related research areas, offering a new tool for exploring the impact of social determinants on health outcomes. Our code is available at: this https URL
- [22] arXiv:2410.17088 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Science Out of Its Ivory Tower: Improving Accessibility with Reinforcement LearningHaining Wang, Jason Clark, Hannah McKelvey, Leila Sterman, Zheng Gao, Zuoyu Tian, Sandra Kübler, Xiaozhong LiuSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
A vast amount of scholarly work is published daily, yet much of it remains inaccessible to the general public due to dense jargon and complex language. To address this challenge in science communication, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes a language model to rewrite scholarly abstracts into more comprehensible versions. Guided by a carefully balanced combination of word- and sentence-level accessibility rewards, our language model effectively substitutes technical terms with more accessible alternatives, a task which models supervised fine-tuned or guided by conventional readability measures struggle to accomplish. Our best model adjusts the readability level of scholarly abstracts by approximately six U.S. grade levels -- in other words, from a postgraduate to a high school level. This translates to roughly a 90% relative boost over the supervised fine-tuning baseline, all while maintaining factual accuracy and high-quality language. An in-depth analysis of our approach shows that balanced rewards lead to systematic modifications in the base model, likely contributing to smoother optimization and superior performance. We envision this work as a step toward bridging the gap between scholarly research and the general public, particularly younger readers and those without a college degree.
- [23] arXiv:2501.12537 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Enhancing Privacy in the Early Detection of Sexual Predators Through Federated Learning and Differential PrivacyComments: Accepted to AAAI-Social Impact Track - OralSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
The increased screen time and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a significant surge in cases of online grooming, which is the use of strategies by predators to lure children into sexual exploitation. Previous efforts to detect grooming in industry and academia have involved accessing and monitoring private conversations through centrally-trained models or sending private conversations to a global server. In this work, we implement a privacy-preserving pipeline for the early detection of sexual predators. We leverage federated learning and differential privacy in order to create safer online spaces for children while respecting their privacy. We investigate various privacy-preserving implementations and discuss their benefits and shortcomings. Our extensive evaluation using real-world data proves that privacy and utility can coexist with only a slight reduction in utility.
