Risks of identity theft: Can the market protect the payment system?

Identity theft has been a feature of financial markets for as long as alternatives have existed to cash transactions. But identity theft has recently occurred on a much larger scale. Data breaches often involve the apparent loss or acknowledged theft of the personal identifying information of thousands--or millions--of people. ; Identity theft poses risks, not only to individuals, but to the integrity and efficiency of the payment system--the policies, procedures, and technology that transfer information for authenticating and settling payments among participants. Identity theft can cause a loss of confidence in the security of certain payment methods and an unwillingness to use them. Markets can cease operating or switch to less efficient payment methods. Either represents a loss of efficiency for the economy. ; Schreft looks at the nature of identity theft today and the factors underlying its mounting risks. She also explores whether markets are able to limit the risks identity theft poses to the payment system.Identity theft ; Payment systems

PROPANE: Prompt design as an inverse problem

Carefully-designed prompts are key to inducing desired behavior in Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, great effort has been dedicated to engineering prompts that guide LLMs toward particular behaviors. In this work, we propose an automatic prompt optimization framework, PROPANE, which aims to find a prompt that induces semantically similar outputs to a fixed set of examples without user intervention. We further demonstrate that PROPANE can be used to (a) improve existing prompts, and (b) discover semantically obfuscated prompts that transfer between models.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures, preprin

Root system markup language: toward an unified root architecture description language

The number of image analysis tools supporting the extraction of architectural features of root systems has increased over the last years. These tools offer a handy set of complementary facilities, yet it is widely accepted that none of these software tool is able to extract in an efficient way growing array of static and dynamic features for different types of images and species. We describe the Root System Markup Language (RSML) that has been designed to overcome two major challenges: (i) to enable portability of root architecture data between different software tools in an easy and interoperable manner allowing seamless collaborative work, and (ii) to provide a standard format upon which to base central repositories which will soon arise following the expanding worldwide root phenotyping effort. RSML follows the XML standard to store 2D or 3D image metadata, plant and root properties and geometries, continuous functions along individual root paths and a suite of annotations at the image, plant or root scales, at one or several time points. Plant ontologies are used to describe botanical entities that are relevant at the scale of root system architecture. An xml-schema describes the features and constraints of RSML and open-source packages have been developed in several languages (R, Excel, Java, Python, C#) to enable researchers to integrate RSML files into popular research workflow

Generic 3D Representation via Pose Estimation and Matching

Though a large body of computer vision research has investigated developing generic semantic representations, efforts towards developing a similar representation for 3D has been limited. In this paper, we learn a generic 3D representation through solving a set of foundational proxy 3D tasks: object-centric camera pose estimation and wide baseline feature matching. Our method is based upon the premise that by providing supervision over a set of carefully selected foundational tasks, generalization to novel tasks and abstraction capabilities can be achieved. We empirically show that the internal representation of a multi-task ConvNet trained to solve the above core problems generalizes to novel 3D tasks (e.g., scene layout estimation, object pose estimation, surface normal estimation) without the need for fine-tuning and shows traits of abstraction abilities (e.g., cross-modality pose estimation). In the context of the core supervised tasks, we demonstrate our representation achieves state-of-the-art wide baseline feature matching results without requiring apriori rectification (unlike SIFT and the majority of learned features). We also show 6DOF camera pose estimation given a pair local image patches. The accuracy of both supervised tasks come comparable to humans. Finally, we contribute a large-scale dataset composed of object-centric street view scenes along with point correspondences and camera pose information, and conclude with a discussion on the learned representation and open research questions.Comment: Published in ECCV16. See the project website http://3drepresentation.stanford.edu/ and dataset website https://github.com/amir32002/3D_Street_Vie

The Value of Cultural Hospitality within the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the United States of America

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States has the ironic and complex tension of being the most ethnically diverse denomination, as well as one of the most structurally segregated in terms of ethnicity. This structural segregation both highlights and represents a deep need for the development of intercultural community. The intentionality and value of unified diversity can be traced from the very beginning of Scripture through to Revelation, with Jesus living out its expression during his ministry here on earth. Significantly, the practice of hospitality is also a strong theme that is traced throughout the breadth of Scripture, providing both challenge and encouragement. Biblically defined as “love of the other,” it is a core tenant of the gospel and serves as a step in the journey toward greater unified diversity of cultures, providing both impetus from its theological imperatives and a possible framework for moving forward. This framework, referred to as “Cultural Hospitality,” suggests three practices that would assist the Seventh-day Adventist church in experiencing greater cultural unity: the practice of humility, welcome, and empathy. Each individually significant on their own, when practiced together, they provide a scaffolding that facilitates growth in intercultural unity. Humility provides a foundational awareness and posture that supports the practice of welcome. The practice of welcome, making space for the “cultural other” within one’s community, worship experience, and leadership, in turn facilitates a growth in meaningful relationships that enable the practice of empathy. Practicing empathy leads to repentance and lament, a personal stake in, and concern, for issues of justice. In embracing the blessing of Cultural Hospitality, not only would the church enjoy the fruit of a fuller expression of the gospel, but it would also have far greater relevance and evangelistic reach within the rapidly diversifying society of the United States