Russian air defences have shot down two armed drones headed for Moscow, the city's mayor said, the latest in a surge of drone attacks on Russia's capital city. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Wednesday that one drone was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the city, while the second was shot down in the Minsk highway area, west of the capital. "Two combat drones' attempt to fly into the city was recorded. Both were shot down by air defence," Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging channel, without naming an attacker. "At the moment, there is no information about victims of the fall of the wreckage," he said, adding that emergency services were on the ground.

Traditional machine learning models often yield biased results, favouring groups with large populations or being influenced by unknown factors, and take extensive effort to identify from instances containing patterns and sub-patterns coming from different classes or primary sources. The medical field is one area where there are severe implications for biased machine learning results. Hospital staff and medical professionals rely on datasets containing thousands of medical records and complex computer algorithms to make critical decisions about patient care. Machine learning is used to sort the data, which saves time. However, specific patient groups with rare symptomatic patterns may go undetected, and mislabeled patients and anomalies could impact diagnostic outcomes.

People's hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence. For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. "Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh," says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.

People's hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence. For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. "Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh," says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.

China's cyberspace regulator said it has issued draft rules to oversee the security management of facial recognition technology in the country, following concerns raised in public about the overuse of the technology. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said on Tuesday that facial recognition technology can only be used to process facial information when there is a specific purpose and sufficient necessity as well as with strict protective measures. The use of the technology will also require an individual's consent, the CAC said in a statement. It added that non-biometric identification solutions should be favoured over facial recognition in cases where such methods are equally effective. Biometric identification, especially facial recognition, has become widespread in China.

After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her. The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator's report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender's face to a photo in a database.

The researchers asked language models where they stand on various topics, such as feminism and democracy. They used the answers to plot them on a graph known as a political compass, and then tested whether retraining models on even more politically biased training data changed their behavior and ability to detect hate speech and misinformation (it did). The research is described in a peer-reviewed paper that won the best paper award at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference last month. As AI language models are rolled out into products and services used by millions of people, understanding their underlying political assumptions and biases could not be more important. That's because they have the potential to cause real harm.

Just months after OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot upended the startup economy, cybercriminals and hackers are claiming to have created their own versions of the text-generating technology. The systems could, theoretically at least, supercharge criminals' ability to write malware or phishing emails that trick people into handing over their login information. Since the start of July, criminals posting on dark-web forums and marketplaces have been touting two large language models (LLMs) they say they've produced. The systems, which are said to mimic the functionalities of ChatGPT and Google's Bard, generate text to answer the questions or prompts users enter. But unlike the LLMs made by legitimate companies, these chatbots are marketed for illegal activities.

An AI chatbot named "Ed" will be Los Angeles Unified's newest student advisor, programmed to tell parents about their child's grades, tests results and attendance, Supt. Alberto Carvalho announced Friday in a back-to-school speech at Walt Disney Concert Hall that rivaled a Hollywood extravaganza. Carvalho took the stage as high-volume music pounded and fast-paced video flashed across a giant screen. The audience of district employees -- mostly administrators -- applauded as if on cue as lighting, singers, videos, dancers enmeshed in an annual address unprecedented for its production values in the nation's second-largest school district, a reflection of the superintendent's attentiveness to generating positive publicity. Amid the flashy production -- in anticipation of the Aug. 14 school opening -- Carvalho repeated his pledge to bring about full academic recovery from the pandemic within two years.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied industry data from the UK and 24 other European countries between 1995 and 2017, and found that at low levels of adoption, robots have a negative effect on profit margins. But at higher levels of adoption, robots can help increase profits. According to the researchers, this U-shaped phenomenon is due to the relationship between reducing costs, developing new processes and innovating new products. While many companies first adopt robotic technologies to decrease costs, this'process innovation' can be easily copied by competitors, so at low levels of robot adoption, companies are focused on their competitors rather than on developing new products. However, as levels of adoption increase and robots are fully integrated into a company's processes, the technologies can be used to increase revenue by innovating new products.