Notizie

arXiv:2504.21035v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sanitizing sensitive text data typically involves removing personally identifiable information (PII) or generating synthetic data under the assumption that these methods adequately protect privacy; however, their effectiveness is often only assessed by measuring the leakage of explicit identifiers but ignoring nuanced textual markers that can lead to re-identification. We challenge the above illusion of privacy by proposing a new framework that evaluates re-identification attacks to quantify individual privacy risks upon data release. Our approach shows that seemingly innocuous auxiliary information — such as routine social activities — can be used to infer sensitive attributes like age or substance use history from sanitized data. For instance, we demonstrate that Azure’s commercial PII removal tool fails to protect 74% of information in the MedQA dataset. Although differential privacy mitigates these risks to some extent, it significantly reduces the utility of the sanitized text for downstream tasks. Our findings indicate that current sanitization techniques offer a textit{false sense of privacy}, highlighting the need for more robust methods that protect against semantic-level information leakage.

arXiv:2505.00725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by the emerging demand in the financial industry for the automatic analysis of unstructured and structured data at scale, Question Answering (QA) systems can provide lucrative and competitive advantages to companies by facilitating the decision making of financial advisers. Consequently, we propose a novel financial QA system using the transformer-based pre-trained BERT language model to address the limitations of data scarcity and language specificity in the financial domain. Our system focuses on financial non-factoid answer selection, which retrieves a set of passage-level texts and selects the most relevant as the answer. To increase efficiency, we formulate the answer selection task as a re-ranking problem, in which our system consists of an Answer Retriever using BM25, a simple information retrieval approach, to first return a list of candidate answers, and an Answer Re-ranker built with variants of pre-trained BERT language models to re-rank and select the most relevant answers. We investigate various learning, further pre-training, and fine-tuning approaches for BERT. Our experiments suggest that FinBERT-QA, a model built from applying the Transfer and Adapt further fine-tuning and pointwise learning approach, is the most effective, improving the state-of-the-art results of task 2 of the FiQA dataset by 16% on MRR, 17% on NDCG, and 21% on Precision@1.

An attractive proposition for commercial enterprises and indie developers looking to build speech recognition and transcription services…Read More

Visa launches Intelligent Commerce platform enabling AI assistants to make secure purchases with your credit card, transforming online shopping with personalized automation and consumer-controlled spending limits.Read More

Humans need to embrace domains where AI still falters, and where human creativity, ethics and emotion emain indispensable.Read More

The answer to ‘What customer needs requires an AI solution?’ isn’t always ‘Yes.’ LLMs are still expensive and not always accurate.Read More

RSAC 2025 made one thing clear: AI agents are entering security workflows, but boards want proof they work.Read More

Once again, it shows the importance of incorporating more domains beyond the traditional math and computer science into AI development.Read More

At Gamescom Latam, Roblox announced it has broken ground on a new data center in Brazil — slated to go live in early 2026.Read More

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A senior State Department official demanded records of communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right. The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.  The broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk. Read the full story. —Eileen Guo The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene editing. Not only did they succeed, but its pigs are now poised to enter the food chain following approval of the animals this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Read the full story. —Antonio Regalado This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly health and biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US has closed a China tariff loopholeThe costs of plenty of goods are likely to shoot up in response. (NYT $)+ But China is still extremely dependent on US-made car chips. (WSJ $)+ Chinese retail giant Temu is pivoting its business model. (Bloomberg $)+ Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound. (MIT Technology Review) 2 DOGE’s future is looking uncertainIt’s fallen far short of its goal to slash $2 trillion in spending. (WP $)+ No more late-night ice cream for Elon Musk. (CNBC)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Microsoft is hiking the price of its Xbox games consoleBy a whopping 27% in the US. (The Guardian)+ Apple estimates that the tariffs will add $900 million to its costs. (WP $)+ But Apple isn’t announcing any price increases (yet.) (TechCrunch)+ Here’s what is—and isn’t—getting pricier under the tariffs. (Vox) 4 Tech giants have been accused of deliberately distorting AI rankingsA new study claims they’re making untrue claims about the best models. (New Scientist $)+ It accuses benchmark organisation LM Arena of unfair practices. (TechCrunch)+ The site’s operators refute the findings, saying its conclusions are wrong. (Ars Technica) 5 Europe wants to replicate America’s military-industrial complexAnd US contractors are likely to benefit. (WSJ $)+ US soldiers may finally be able to repair their own equipment. (404 Media)+ Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI will move forwardA judge rejected OpenAI’s attempt to dismiss the case. (FT $) 7 What a post-4Chan internet looks likeWhat was once contained to a tiny corner of the web is now commonplace. (New Yorker $)+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review) 8 How North Korea infiltrates the USFully remote coders are not who they appear to be. (Wired $) 9 You no longer need a password to open a new Microsoft accountThe company’s gone passkey-first. (The Verge) 10 Fecal transplants are a possible way to treat gut disease And the approach is becoming more mainstream. (Undark)+ How bugs and chemicals in your poo could give away exactly what you’ve eaten. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “What about the next Taylor Swift?” —US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria questions how powerful musical AI tools will affect up-and-coming musicians during Meta’s copyright court battle, Wired reports. One more thing Your boss is watching Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-­ending consequences if your productivity flags. But what matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power. Read the full story. —Rebecca Ackermann We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + This is cool: scientists have successfully triggered a lightning strike using a drone. + It’s the age-old question—why do so many men refuse to wear shorts in hot weather?+ The American accent that’s hardest for British actors to pull off seems to be either New York or Boston.+ Happy 50th birthday to David Beckham, best of British.