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Cyber and Data Sciences

q&a

Equity and Social Policy: Q&A with Jessica Welburn Paige
Jessica Welburn Paige, a behavioral and social scientist, focuses on questions of race and inequality. In this interview, she discusses how AI programs being used to monitor students for suicide risk could compromise student privacy and harm vulnerable students.
Sep 3, 2024

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The State of Public Education in 2024 in Five Charts
Every year RAND sends more than a dozen surveys to members of the American Educator Panels to keep tabs on what is happening in classrooms around the country. When we looked back on the last 12 months of reports based on our surveys, these are the findings that told us the most about the state of American public schools.
Aug 30, 2024
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Social Media Manipulation in the Era of AI
AI has opened a potential propaganda gold mine. Large language models like ChatGPT can learn to mimic human speech. They can respond to jokes and cultural references and engage users in debates. Social media platforms should redouble their efforts to identify, attribute, and remove fake accounts.
Aug 29, 2024
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Addressing the National Security Risks of Bulk Data in the Age of AI 
There is an urgent need for a more nuanced and empirically grounded approach to data regulation, one that recognizes how seemingly innocuous data points can, when amassed in large quantities, pose substantial risks to national security.
Aug 23, 2024
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Rampant Nationalism Is Undermining China's 'Three Warfares'
China has invested a fortune in influence operations to shape its national image and sway international public opinion in its favor. Yet grassroots Chinese nationalists are diminishing the return on Beijing's investment.
Aug 23, 2024
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Four Fallacies of AI Cybersecurity
The cybersecurity of AI systems has largely been treated as an afterthought. Success in this area will require recognizing the unique challenges of securing AI systems, developing the right threat models, and fully integrating cybersecurity into the AI workflow.
Aug 23, 2024
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TikTok Is a Threat to National Security, but Not for the Reason You Think
Most videos that Americans post on social media are harmless at face value, but the 34 million videos posted daily on TikTok become ideal training material for generative AI models. These models will be able to create astonishingly convincing deepfakes that could be used in influence operations.
Aug 14, 2024
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Circle of Trust: Six Steps to Foster the Effective Development of Tools for Trustworthy AI in the UK and the U.S.
Artificial intelligence has great potential, but it also introduces considerable risks. Tools for trustworthy AI help bridge the gap between AI principles and their practical implementation, providing resources to ensure AI is developed and used responsibly and ethically.
Aug 2, 2024
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Back to the Future of Comms
Outgunned by Russia in electronic warfare, Kyiv should consider going further than it already has with more cost-effective communication solutions. Sometimes vintage systems and techniques can provide militaries with simpler and cheaper alternatives to keep critical lines of communication open.
Jul 30, 2024
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Black Americans Aren't Buying Election-Year Falsehoods. Here's Why.
In 2020, fewer Black Americans believed the false claims of widespread election and voter fraud than their white counterparts did. What lessons can be learned from Black Americans' resilience to disinformation?
Jul 25, 2024
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CrowdStrike Is Too Big to Fail
The CrowdStrike outage underscores that the global economy and U.S. national security are vulnerable to attack. Managing risks will require intragovernmental and perhaps international coordination.
Jul 22, 2024
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Rethinking Priorities in Quantum Computing
The emergence of quantum computing suggests limitless possibilities in chemistry, material science, simulations to predict outcomes, and other areas. But even if sufficiently good quantum hardware is built, are there algorithms that can leverage the laws of quantum mechanics to solve difficult problems?
Jul 12, 2024
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AI Companies Say Safety Is a Priority. It's Not
AI companies claim they have a laser focus on ensuring that their products are safe. But these claims are undercut when insiders paint a familiar picture of a culture of negligence and secrecy that dismisses warnings and hides evidence about unsafe practices. So what can these companies do differently?
Jul 9, 2024
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The Long Run: High-Quality Employee Investments Boost Stock Performance
Using AI to analyze SEC disclosures, RAND economists found that retailers' post-2020 filings contain important nuggets about how they are investing in people—and that this information can often predict stock performance.
Jun 6, 2024
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India's National Elections—A New Ingredient in the Mix
As India's national elections enter their 7th and final phase of voting on June 1, a new influential phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of what may be called “micro-news providers” almost entirely broadcasting through the medium of YouTube.
May 30, 2024
q&a

Securing AI Model Weights: Q&A with Sella Nevo
Considering the transformative potential and immense commercial value of artificial intelligence systems, it's becoming more and more important to safeguard AI from bad actors. But what does that look like in practice? And where should you even begin?
May 30, 2024

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