Pinned post

We meet on the Second and Forth Saturday of the month
10:30 to 15:00
At Paignton Library

Paignton Library are getting their IT learning centre refurbished mid July.

This means that we can get both Code Club and STEM group back up and running.

For this we need BOTH volunteers and people to help. I am NOT struggling to do this fully on my own again.

I will post more information in due course.

Paignton Library STEM group has been paused, I have put more details at

personaljournal.ca/paigntonlib

Hopefully this can restart at some point, in the meantime I am reaching out to various entities to try and get more groups started up.

The next Paignton Library STEM Group will take place on :-

Date: Saturday, April 27th 2024
Time: 10:30am to 15:00
Location: Paignton Library and Information Centre
Room: 13 & IT Learning Centre

The group has a blog where updates to the event, for example what we are doing or hoping to do, will be updated in due course.

personaljournal.ca/paigntonlib

We also use Matrix which is an open source, decentralized communication platform, so we can create an online community that can run along side the main physical event.

Social Skill Training with Large Language Models

Diyi Yang, Caleb Ziems, William Held, Omar Shaikh, Michael S. Bernstein, John Mitchell
arxiv.org/abs/2404.04204 arxiv.org/pdf/2404.04204

arXiv:2404.04204v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: People rely on social skills like conflict resolution to communicate effectively and to thrive in both work and personal life. However, practice environments for social skills are typically out of reach for most people. How can we make social skill training more available, accessible, and inviting? Drawing upon interdisciplinary research from communication and psychology, this perspective paper identifies social skill barriers to enter specialized fields. Then we present a solution that leverages large language models for social skill training via a generic framework. Our AI Partner, AI Mentor framework merges experiential learning with realistic practice and tailored feedback. This work ultimately calls for cross-disciplinary innovation to address the broader implications for workforce development and social equality.

We meet on the Second and Forth Saturday of the month
10:30 to 15:00
At Paignton Library

Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse

Vibhor Agarwal, Aravindh Raman, Nishanth Sastry, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro
arxiv.org/abs/2404.03048 arxiv.org/pdf/2404.03048

arXiv:2404.03048v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The recent development of decentralised and interoperable social networks (such as the "fediverse") creates new challenges for content moderators. This is because millions of posts generated on one server can easily "spread" to another, even if the recipient server has very different moderation policies. An obvious solution would be to leverage moderation tools to automatically tag (and filter) posts that contravene moderation policies, e.g. related to toxic speech. Recent work has exploited the conversational context of a post to improve this automatic tagging, e.g. using the replies to a post to help classify if it contains toxic speech. This has shown particular potential in environments with large training sets that contain complete conversations. This, however, creates challenges in a decentralised context, as a single conversation may be fragmented across multiple servers. Thus, each server only has a partial view of an entire conversation because conversations are often federated across servers in a non-synchronized fashion. To address this, we propose a decentralised conversation-aware content moderation approach suitable for the fediverse. Our approach employs a graph deep learning model (GraphNLI) trained locally on each server. The model exploits local data to train a model that combines post and conversational information captured through random walks to detect toxicity. We evaluate our approach with data from Pleroma, a major decentralised and interoperable micro-blogging network containing 2 million conversations. Our model effectively detects toxicity on larger instances, exclusively trained using their local post information (0.8837 macro-F1). Our approach has considerable scope to improve moderation in decentralised and interoperable social networks such as Pleroma or Mastodon.

Seriously, how cool is this?

Cosmologists have now measured how the expansion of the universe changes over time, to an accuracy of 1%.

They did it by finding frozen sound waves from the Big Bang, and then tracking them across 11 billion years. People can do these things!

youtube.com/watch?v=hoOyOAAj4i #science #nature #astronomy #space

Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.