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The Turkish government has increased the frequency of its drone strikes against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Syria and Iraq since 2019. Turkeys strategy is easy to understand. Ankara is using low-cost, persistent airpower to strike PKK leaders and lower-ranking cadres in areas that it could not previously reach. Following a series of Turkish military offensives, the strikes have further intensified pressure on the PKK and its affiliates and have pushed them further from Turkeys southeast border.

In the coming years, these drone strikes are likely to remain a persistent feature of Turkeys counter-terrorism campaign. Ankara has no incentive to stop them. At the same time, these strikes will not incapacitate the PKK or end its four-decade-long fight, despite the strikes showing clear signs of degrading the groups capabilities. As a result, Turkeys drone strikes will create more tension in the U.S.-Turkish relationship and more tensions between Washington and its counter-Islamic State partners in Syria.

Washington almost certainly will not apply sufficient pressure on Ankara to stop these strikes. For the United States, there is no Kurdistan, so Kurdish issues are subordinated to the relations with countries in which Kurds reside. This reasonable approach means that Washington will almost certainly favor Ankara over a non-state actor, outside the pressing national security concerns created by the war against the Islamic State. Rather than engage in a futile debate about whether the United States can or should stop Turkish drone strikes, policymakers should focus on managing the fallout across the region.

Turkey has been fighting the PKK since the 1980s. The latest round of the conflict began in July 2015, with the end of a troubled but promising peace process. But Turkeys own forever war retains a high level of support from the government and the broader population. In this context, Ankara has prioritized the development of indigenous drones. Their deployment has proved valuable in decreasing risks to Turkish soldiers and striking PKK lines of communication inside northern Iraq and northern Syria. In short, the use of low-cost airpower is not a significant drain on Turkish resources and has had positive military outcomes.

As Turkish drone use has expanded, so have the number of drone strikes, marrying drone technology with Ankaras cross-border operations in Syria and Iraq. This has increased Turkish presence in traditional PKK strongholds in eastern Iraq. Ankara has managed to leverage its dominant economic position to carve out tighter ties with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls Erbil and is the most powerful Iraqi Kurdish political party. Iraqi Kurds, in general, are riven by division and the Kurdistan Democratic Party benefits from its close relationship with Ankara. As a result, while drone strikes have generated popular protest in northern Iraq, there is little political cost for Ankara.

The PKK, in response, has grown more diffuse, attacking Turkish military targets inside Iraq and using proxies to conduct a persistent insurgency in Turkish-occupied Syria. These tactics, for Ankara, are indicative of PKK weakness. The group has been pushed from its traditional strongholds inside Turkey, and the main areas of contact are now inside Iraq. This position is advantageous to Ankara, even if it does little to politically address the drivers of Kurdish anger toward the state or the appeal of the PKK to a minority of Turkish citizens.

Turkeys drone strikes pose a political problem for the United States. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Syrian-Kurdish militia with which Washington partnered to defeat the Islamic State, has direct links to the PKK, and Turkeys strikes have repeatedly targeted its officials. These strikes are occurring while U.S. forces are on the ground in Syria working alongside the group. The Turkish strikes in Syria began after Turkish talks with Washington to establish a permanent presence in northeastern Syria failed and then led to the start of Operation Peace Spring, the name Ankara gave to its October 2019 invasion. In Iraq, the drone strikes have increased in frequency during this same time period, mirroring the countrys technological advances with drones and munitions.

In the Middle East, there is a pervasive belief that Washington is omnipotent and, if properly motivated, can force countries to do its bidding. For this reason, the Syrian Kurdish leadership is convinced that Washington has the power to stop Turkish strikes if it wanted to, but that the U.S. government simply chooses not to. The U.S. military, therefore, is facing a situation where its partner forces will come under attack, despite the presence of U.S. forces in the area.

This reality demonstrates the importance of the deconfliction mechanisms that Washington and Ankara already have in place. But it also clearly shows that these mechanisms cannot do anything more than provide notification for Turkish air operations in places the United States is also present. Indeed, the instruments that Washington uses to deconflict with Turkey do not hinder Turkish air operations. In Syria, the United States has ceded much of the border to Turkey, giving Ankara a clear cut deconfliction box from which to fly and strike in support of its goals.

Making matters more complicated, the United States actually supports Turkeys airstrikes against PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. When Washington made the decision to deepen support for the Syrian Kurds before the assault on Raqqa, it sought to overcome Turkish objections by providing Turkey assistance with its kinetic strikes in Iraq. But, even were Washington to stop, Turkish capabilities have grown considerably in recent years and now account for the vast majority of intelligence in the area.

Turkish-American Deconfliction

Put simply, the United States has no true solution to this new reality, nor does it have a clear policy regarding Turkish drone strikes.

The United States and Turkey have historically cooperated on aerial surveillance. This cooperation has been fraught and marred by distrust. The Turkish Air Force has operated consistently in northern Iraq for close to three decades. The United States and Turkey have a deconfliction agreement there that Washington manages in coordination with the Iraqi government. According to my interviews with U.S. military officials, there is deconfliction line drawn across northern Iraq. Ankara has control over areas to the north of the line. The United States has control to the south. The areas of control are subdivided into boxes dubbed keypads that correspond to a place on a map, with a pre-notification mechanism to manage flights inside keypads to the north and south of the line. Before most flights, Ankara informs the United States of where it intends to fly, if the flight is armed or not, and whether a strike is planned. The United States can non-concur with planned strikes, but Turkey is not obligated to listen to Washington.

In parallel, the United States also devoted its own surveillance assets to assist Turkey. This intelligence relationship increased during the Syrian civil war, particularly since 2017 when the United States began devoting more Reaper drone orbits and allowing for the resulting intelligence to be used for lethal strikes. However, U.S. officials familiar with the program have told me that the Turkish side was unwilling to share sensitive data about the PKK with the United States, and that the United States did not share all of the data needed to conduct an airstrike. Instead, Washington shared coordinates and information that have allowed Turkish drones to get very close to suspected targets, where they could then conduct the strike on its own. Therefore, U.S. assets do not often yield much usable intelligence for Ankara but have led to strikes on numerous occasions. In any case, this cooperation was reportedly halted after Turkeys October 2019 invasion, ending a program that had begun in 2007 and was expanded during the nadir of the relationship.

The proliferation of indigenous Turkish drones has extended Ankaras reach, which has undermined any coercive effect from the programs suspension. The United States, according to my interviews, has little understanding of Turkish targeting methodology or how strikes are planned or carried out. Regardless, it is clear that Ankara is striking more targets than ever before and striking more high value targets and mid-tier PKK commanders throughout Iraq and Syria.

Ankaras Deconfliction Box in Syria

The United States and Turkey have a similar deconfliction agreement in Syria. Turkey can now operate freely on the ground and in the air within a box stretching roughly 20 kilometers into Syrian territory along the border between the towns of Tel Afar to Tel Abyad. The agreement on Turkeys box stemmed from Ankaras escalatory actions and repeated threats to invade U.S.-held territory in northeastern Syria. In August 2019, Turkish threats became more credible, prompting U.S. diplomatic action to try and manage the threat from the Turkish military. This approach resulted in the formation of a Combined Joint Operations Center, or CJOC, based in Sanliurfa, Turkey, where the two countries coordinated joint ground and helicopter patrols. This diplomatic approach allowed for the Turkish Air Force to overfly Syria, necessitating participation in the Air Tasking Order the mechanism used to control all coalition airstrikes and activity during Operation Inherent Resolve. This initially involved unmanned surveillance platforms but, with the start of joint ground patrols, grew to include armed Turkish F-16s on-call for troops in potential contact situations.

This arrangement did not prevent a Turkish invasion. In October 2019, the Turkish army occupied a stretch of Syrian territory across the border. The Turkish Air Force does have the option to strike targets in Syria from inside its own airspace. However, the flight time for most weapons Ankara uses to strike inside Syria is somewhere between five and 10 minutes from weapons release to impact. This means that fleeting targets cannot really be struck from positions inside Turkey, thereby requiring overflight to hit moving targets. As a result, Turkey has dramatically increased the number of drone strikes within its box. Outside of this area, however, the situation is more chaotic. During Ankaras October 2019 invasion, for example, Air Force pilots I interviewed explained how U.S. jets, Turkish drones, and Russian jets were all operating in close proximity with one another with no coordination or deconfliction. The situation has stabilized, somewhat, because the United States has less overhead presence in areas Turkey controls. It is unclear if Russia and Turkey have a similar deconfliction arrangement, but anecdotal evidence from Idlib suggests the two sides have an agreement to not directly target each others platforms.

Turkish strikes against Syrian Democratic Forces officials have led to widespread protests and calls for Washington to take action. For Ankara, of course, the fact that its drone strikes disrupt U.S.-Kurdish ties is a net positive. The United States is seeking to simultaneously support its NATO ally with counter-terrorism assistance and work with Ankaras enemy to defeat the Islamic State. Ankara has objected to this arrangement, and its drone campaign takes advantage of American incoherence on the topic.

The United States may have little leverage to stop Turkish action, but the split policy means that Washington is riven by division and cannot agree on pushing for de-escalation between the two groups. The provision of lethal support, for example, was intended to sooth Turkish concerns about the rise of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Instead, the lethal support has indirectly helped increase the frequency of drone strikes, which leads to Kurdish reprisal attacks and a continued cycle of violence. The ideal off-ramp, of course, is a return to peace talks, but Washington has few good options to pressure Turkey to return to a peace process. More importantly, the politics in Turkey do not support such a move. Until this political reality changes, Turkish drone strikes will be a constant irritant to U.S. interests that have to be managed.

See the article here:
The American Deconfliction Disadvantage: Ankara's Drone Campaign in Syria and Iraq - War on the Rocks

Spektral is a Python library for graph deep learning, based on the Keras API and TensorFlow 2.The main goal of this project is to provide a simple but flexible framework for creating graph neural networks (GNNs).

You can use Spektral for classifying the users of a social network, predicting molecular properties, generating new graphs with GANs, clustering nodes, predicting links, and any other task where data is described by graphs.

Spektral implements some of the most popular layers for graph deep learning, including:

and many others (see convolutional layers).

You can also find pooling layers, including:

Spektral also includes lots of utilities for representing, manipulating, and transforming graphs in your graph deep learning projects.

See how to get started with Spektral and have a look at the examples for some templates.

The source code of the project is available on Github.Read the documentation here.

If you want to cite Spektral in your work, refer to our paper:

Graph Neural Networks in TensorFlow and Keras with SpektralDaniele Grattarola and Cesare Alippi

Spektral is compatible with Python 3.6 and above, and is tested on the latest versions of Ubuntu, MacOS, and Windows. Other Linux distros should work as well.

The simplest way to install Spektral is from PyPi:

To install Spektral from source, run this in a terminal:

To install Spektral on Google Colab:

The 1.0 release of Spektral is an important milestone for the library and brings many new features and improvements.

If you have already used Spektral in your projects, the only major change that you need to be aware of is the new datasets API.

This is a summary of the new features and changes:

Spektral is an open-source project available on Github, and contributions of all types are welcome. Feel free to open a pull request if you have something interesting that you want to add to the framework.

The contribution guidelines are available here and a list of feature requests is available here.

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graphneural.network - Spektral

Game-playing artificial intelligence

MuZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master games without knowing their rules.[1][2][3] Its release in 2019 included benchmarks of its performance in go, chess, shogi, and a standard suite of Atari games. The algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaZero. It matched AlphaZero's performance in chess and shogi, improved on its performance in Go (setting a new world record), and improved on the state of the art in mastering a suite of 57 Atari games (the Arcade Learning Environment), a visually-complex domain.

MuZero was trained via self-play, with no access to rules, opening books, or endgame tablebases. The trained algorithm used the same convolutional and residual algorithms as AlphaZero, but with 20% fewer computation steps per node in the search tree.[4]

MuZero really is discovering for itself how to build a model and understand it just from first principles.

On November 19, 2019, the DeepMind team released a preprint introducing MuZero.

MuZero (MZ) is a combination of the high-performance planning of the AlphaZero (AZ) algorithm with approaches to model-free reinforcement learning. The combination allows for more efficient training in classical planning regimes, such as Go, while also handling domains with much more complex inputs at each stage, such as visual video games.

MuZero was derived directly from AZ code, sharing its rules for setting hyperparameters. Differences between the approaches include:[6]

The previous state of the art technique for learning to play the suite of Atari games was R2D2, the Recurrent Replay Distributed DQN.[7]

MuZero surpassed both R2D2's mean and median performance across the suite of games, though it did not do better in every game.

MuZero used 16 third-generation tensor processing units (TPUs) for training, and 1000 TPUs for selfplay for board games, with 800 simulations per step and 8 TPUs for training and 32 TPUs for selfplay for Atari games, with 50 simulations per step.

AlphaZero used 64 first-generation TPUs for training, and 5000 second-generation TPUs for selfplay. As TPU design has improved (third-generation chips are 2x as powerful individually as second-generation chips, with further advances in bandwidth and networking across chips in a pod), these are comparable training setups.

R2D2 was trained for 5 days through 2M training steps.

MuZero matched AlphaZero's performance in chess and Shogi after roughly 1 million training steps. It matched AZ's performance in Go after 500 thousand training steps and surpassed it by 1 million steps. It matched R2D2's mean and median performance across the Atari game suite after 500 thousand training steps and surpassed it by 1 million steps, though it never performed well on 6 games in the suite.

MuZero was viewed as a significant advancement over AlphaZero,[8] and a generalizable step forward in unsupervised learning techniques.[9][10] The work was seen as advancing understanding of how to compose systems from smaller components, a systems-level development more than a pure machine-learning development.[11]

While only pseudocode was released by the development team, Werner Duvaud produced an open source implementation based on that.[12]

MuZero has been used as a reference implementation in other work, for instance as a way to generate model-based behavior.[13]

View original post here:
MuZero - Wikipedia

I'm Bin Yu, the head of the Yu Group at Berkeley, which consists of 15-20 students and postdocs from Statistics and EECS. I was formally trained as a statistician, but my research interests and achievements extend beyond the realm of statistics. Together with my group, my work has leveraged new computational developments to solve important scientific problems by combining novel statistical machine learning approaches with the domain expertise of my many collaborators in neuroscience, genomics and precision medicine. We also develop relevant theory to understand random forests and deep learning for insight into and guidance for practice.

We have developed the PCS framework for veridical data science (or responsible, reliable, and transparent data analysis and decision-making). PCS stands for predictability, computability and stability, and it unifies, streamlines, and expands on ideas and best practices of machine learning and statistics.

In order to augment empirical evidence for decision-making, we are investigating statistical machine learning methods/algorithms (and associated statistical inference problems) such as dictionary learning, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), EM and deep learning (CNNs and LSTMs), and heterogeneous effect estimation in randomized experiments (X-learner). Our recent algorithms include staNMF for unsupervised learning, iterative Random Forests (iRF) and signed iRF (s-iRF) for discovering predictive and stable high-order interactions in supervised learning, contextual decomposition (CD) and aggregated contextual decomposition (ACD) for interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).

Stability expanded, in reality. Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR), 2020.

Data science process: one culture. JASA, 2020.

Minimum information about clinical artificial intelligence modeling: the MI-CLAIM checklist, Nature Medicine, 2020.

Veridical data science (PCS framework), PNAS, 2020 (QnAs with Bin Yu)

Breiman Lecture (video) at NeurIPS "Veridical data Science" (PCS framework and iRF), 2019; updated slides, 2020

Definitions, methods and applications in interpretable machine learning, PNAS, 2019

Data wisdom for data science (blog), 2015

IMS Presidential Address "Let us own data science", IMS Bulletin, 2014

Stability, Bernoulli, 2013

Embracing statistical challenges in the IT age, Technometrics, 2007

Honorary Doctorate, University of Lausanne (UNIL) (Faculty of Business and Economics), June 4, 2021 (Interview of Bin Yu by journalist Nathalie Randin, with an introduction by Dean Jean-Philippe Bonardi of UNIL in French (English translation))

CDSS news on our PCS framework: "A better framework for more robust, trustworthy data science", Oct. 2020

UC Berkeley to lead $10M NSF/Simons Foundation program to investigate theoretical underpinnings of deep learning, Aug. 25, 2020

Curating COVID-19 data repository and forecasting county-level death counts in the US, 2020

Interviewed by PBS Nova about AlphaZero, 2018

Mapping a cell's destiny, 2016

Seeking Data Wisdom, 2015

Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2014

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013

One of the 50 best inventions of 2011 by Time Magazine, 2011

The Economist Article, 2011

ScienceMatters @ Berkeley. Dealing with Cloudy Data, 2004

See original here:
Bin Yu

The stakes in one of the most significant Second Amendment cases in U.S. history are high.

The Supreme Courts ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, expected by mid-2022, could declare a New York state restriction on carrying concealed handguns in public places unconstitutional.

Such a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, which include a National Rifle Association affiliate, could loosen gun regulations in many parts of the country.

In my view as a Second Amendment scholar, this case is also noteworthy in that how the court reaches its conclusion could affect the Second Amendment analysis of all weapons laws in the future.

The court is set to hear oral arguments on Nov. 3.

In 1911, after an increase in homicides, New York instituted a handgun permitting system. In 1913, the permitting system was amended to address concealed carrying.

For more than a century, someone seeking to carry a concealed handgun for self-defense in the state has needed to file a permit application showing that they have what the law calls proper cause.

To obtain an unrestricted permit, applicants must demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community, such as by showing they are being stalked.

New Yorks attorneys defend this restrictive approach to issuing concealed carry permits as an effective means to reduce gun violence. In 2020, there were 43,592 gun deaths in the United States, including suicides and homicides. There are also over 80,000 non-fatal firearm injuries each year.

New York has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its homicide rate is below the national average.

Robert Nash and Brandon Koch were denied unrestricted concealed carry permits because a judge determined that they did not satisfy New Yorks proper-cause standard.

Instead, Koch was issued a license to carry a concealed handgun for self-defense while traveling to and from work. Both plaintiffs licenses also permit them to carry concealed handguns for hunting and target practice, and for self-defense in areas not frequented by the general public.

Along with the NRAs New York affiliate, Nash and Koch contend that these limitations on their ability to carry a concealed handgun violate their right to bear arms. They assert a broad view of the right to carry a handgun, one that extends virtually whenever and wherever the need for self-defense might arise.

New Yorks law defies that conception of the Second Amendment.

In considering Bruen, the Supreme Court will focus on the meaning of an important precedent: District of Columbia v. Heller.

When the Supreme Court issued its Heller ruling in 2008, a 5-4 majority struck down Washington, D.C.s ban on the possession of handguns in the home. The court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individuals right to keep and bear arms.

Writing for the majority, the late Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the central component of the Second Amendment was not a well regulated Militia, but rather the inherent right of self-defense.

But the majoritys decision included cautionary language that lower-court judges have since relied on to uphold gun laws.

The right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited and is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose, Scalia wrote. His opinion even contained a list of presumptively lawful regulatory measures, such as restrictions on the possession of firearms by felons or bans on carrying them in sensitive places like schools and government buildings.

The NRA and other gun rights supporters have bristled at the general acceptance by judges of the constitutionality of laws restricting firearm use.

That discontent culminated in Bruen.

In 1980, most Americans lived in places that either banned concealed carry or had a New York-style proper cause permitting regime. An NRA push beginning in the late 1980s loosened public carry laws around the country.

In states where gun rights advocates possess relatively little clout, they hope that Bruen will accomplish through the courts what they have failed to accomplish through the political process.

Today, New York is one of eight states requiring that people seeking to carry concealed handguns have a proper or good cause. California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws on the books.

If the court strikes down New Yorks law, Americans in those states could expect an increase in the number of people legally carrying handguns in their communities. Anyone who wants to carry a concealed handgun would have an easier time doing so.

Bruen could also be a turning point for how judges evaluate all Second Amendment cases whether theyre about assault weapons, tasers or felon-in-possession offenses.

Until now, judges have generally assessed whether such restrictions are justified by current public safety concerns.

Many gun rights advocates are asking the Supreme Court to reject that approach. Instead, they want judges to decide cases on the sole basis of history and tradition unless the judiciarys interpretation of the text of the Second Amendment resolves the issue. This is known as the text, history and tradition test.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh is credited with first articulating this test in a dissent he issued prior to his rise to the Supreme Court.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett all have embraced similar judicial philosophies to some degree.

But theres a catch: Guns have always been regulated in America.

New Yorks regulation has been on the books for over a century and had a legacy that extended back even further.

If the justices abandon a conventional approach for the text, history and tradition test, I would expect a new round of lawsuits over weapons laws that have already survived prior court challenges. Gun rights advocates would likely, for example, sue over restrictions on large-capacity magazines or safe storage requirements in places where those issues have already been resolved.

This litigation would call on judges to rule on the sole basis of a difficult historical exercise: comparing modern laws addressing modern guns and contemporary gun violence to the laws, practices and weapons of a bygone era.

The court has three main options.

It could uphold New Yorks law. It could strike it down. Or it could find a middle ground, such as issuing a narrow ruling that punts big questions about gun restrictions down the road.

Chief Justice John Roberts has steered his colleagues toward narrow rulings before. But he will hold little sway if the three justices former President Donald Trump appointed team up with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the courts two other conservatives, on a far-reaching majority opinion.

Trump conferred with the NRA before nominating Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett all of whom received the gun groups blessing.

The ruling will underscore the significance of their presence on the court.

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First major Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court in over a decade could topple gun restrictions - The Conversation US