Africa
Tesla says Musk should be paid 1tn - will shareholders agree?
It's not clear that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet though, meaning the AGM in Austin, Texas is set to become a referendum on Musk himself, after a rightward political turn which has made him one of the most polarising chief executives in recent memory. Musk himself has taken to X - which he owns - to raise the stakes higher still, saying the fate of Tesla could affect the future of civilization. He's also used his social media megaphone to amplify some of the deal's high-profile backers, including Dell Technologies' Michael Dell, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, and his brother, Kimbal, who sits on the Tesla board. There is no one remotely close to my brother, Kimbal said, extolling his sibling's leadership qualities.
Mystery of the 'golfer's curse' is SOLVED: Scientists pinpoint why golf balls 'lip out' after appearing to enter the hole
Now he's dead, here's the full story of what happened that day... and the ghastly aftermath no one knows about Wake up and see he's the master of the dark arts: MEGYN KELLY blows the lid on the REAL Mamdani... how are they missing this? 'Screaming' Sydney Sweeney'hates' that she was caught hiding in ex-fiancรฉ's car: Now insiders spill truth about backseat rendezvous and lingering'frustrations' Mom is an Oscar winner who has acted with Selena Gomez and Nicole Kidman, who is this nepo kid who came out last year? Bella Thorne continues swimsuit season as she works sexy bikini for Los Cabo trip with her'love' Mark Emms Experts pinpoint typical life expectancy from initial dementia diagnosis - and there's a huge variation between different subtypes Diddy's male prison protector unmasked: How disgraced mogul has repaid him... and turned to God for repentance Teachers threatened over bloody'Problem Solved' T-shirts over claims they mocked murder of Charlie Kirk Astonishing moment Miss Universe winner storms out of this year's event after pageant president reprimands Miss Mexico and tells security to remove her for not showing'respect' Mystery of the'golfer's curse' is SOLVED: Scientists pinpoint why golf balls'lip out' after appearing to enter the hole READ MORE: Golf balls are a'product of colonial exploitation', exhibition says Experts have finally solved the mystery of one of the most infuriating occurrences in golf - the dreaded lip out. The phenomenon occurs when the golf ball appears to enter the hole, only to immediately pop back out again. Scientists have finally pinpointed the physics behind the'curse', which has plagued everyone from amateur hobbyists to PGA professionals. Best of all, they've revealed the best way to avoid it - keeping your score intact.
AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li says she is 'proud to be different'
AI'godmother' Fei-Fei Li says she is'proud to be different' The'godmother' of AI, Professor Fei-Fei Li has told the BBC that being the only woman amongst seven pioneers of artificial Intelligence being presented with a top engineering prize by the King today makes her proud to be different. The King will present the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering to Prof Li and six others during a ceremony at St James's Palace. Those honoured alongside her are Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Prof John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun. They are being recognised for their contributions to the development of modern machine learning, a field that underpins the rapid advancement of AI. Who are the Godparents of AI? Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and Yann LeCun, currently Chief AI Scientist at Meta have widely been recognised as the Godfathers of AI since they were jointly awarded the 2018 Turing Award.
Britain sliding 'into economic crisis' over 85bn sickness bill
The number of sick and disabled people out of work is putting the UK is at risk of an economic inactivity crisis that threatens the country's prosperity, according to a new report. There were 800,000 more people out of work now than in 2019 due to health conditions, costing employers ยฃ85bn a year, according to the review by former John Lewis boss Sir Charlie Mayfield. The problem could worsen without intervention, but Sir Charlie, who will lead a taskforce aimed at helping people return to work, said this was not inevitable. The move has been broadly welcomed, but some business groups said Labour's Employment Rights Bill included some disincentives to hiring people with existing illnesses. One in five working age people were out of work, and not seeking work, according to the report, which was commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions by produced independently.
Investigating the Robustness of Knowledge Tracing Models in the Presence of Student Concept Drift
Lee, Morgan, Frenk, Artem, Worden, Eamon, Gupta, Karish, Pham, Thinh, Croteau, Ethan, Heffernan, Neil
Knowledge Tracing (KT) has been an established problem in the educational data mining field for decades, and it is commonly assumed that the underlying learning process being modeled remains static. Given the ever-changing landscape of online learning platforms (OLPs), we investigate how concept drift and changing student populations can impact student behavior within an OLP through testing model performance both within a single academic year and across multiple academic years. Four well-studied KT models were applied to five academic years of data to assess how susceptible KT models are to concept drift. Through our analysis, we find that all four families of KT models can exhibit degraded performance, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) remains the most stable KT model when applied to newer data, while more complex, attention based models lose predictive power significantly faster.
Strategic Classification with Non-Linear Classifiers
Trachtenberg, Benyamin, Rosenfeld, Nir
In strategic classification, the standard supervised learning setting is extended to support the notion of strategic user behavior in the form of costly feature manipulations made in response to a classifier. While standard learning supports a broad range of model classes, the study of strategic classification has, so far, been dedicated mostly to linear classifiers. This work aims to expand the horizon by exploring how strategic behavior manifests under non-linear classifiers and what this implies for learning. We take a bottom-up approach showing how non-linearity affects decision boundary points, classifier expressivity, and model class complexity. Our results show how, unlike the linear case, strategic behavior may either increase or decrease effective class complexity, and that the complexity decrease may be arbitrarily large. Another key finding is that universal approximators (e.g., neural nets) are no longer universal once the environment is strategic. We demonstrate empirically how this can create performance gaps even on an unrestricted model class.
Measuring AI Diffusion: A Population-Normalized Metric for Tracking Global AI Usage
Misra, Amit, Wang, Jane, McCullers, Scott, White, Kevin, Ferres, Juan Lavista
Measuring global AI diffusion remains challenging due to a lack of population-normalized, cross-country usage data. We introduce AI User Share, a novel indicator that estimates the share of each country's working-age population actively using AI tools. Built from anonymized Microsoft telemetry and adjusted for device access and mobile scaling, this metric spans 147 economies and provides consistent, real-time insight into global AI diffusion. We find wide variation in adoption, with a strong correlation between AI User Share and GDP. High uptake is concentrated in developed economies, though usage among internet-connected populations in lower-income countries reveals substantial latent demand. We also detect sharp increases in usage following major product launches, such as DeepSeek in early 2025. While the metric's reliance solely on Microsoft telemetry introduces potential biases related to this user base, it offers an important new lens into how AI is spreading globally. AI User Share enables timely benchmarking that can inform data-driven AI policy.
AI Diffusion in Low Resource Language Countries
Misra, Amit, Zamir, Syed Waqas, Hamidouche, Wassim, Becker-Reshef, Inbal, Ferres, Juan Lavista
Artificial intelligence (AI) is diffusing globally at unprecedented speed, but adoption remains uneven. Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to perform poorly on low-resource languages due to data scarcity. We hypothesize that this performance deficit reduces the utility of AI, thereby slowing adoption in Low-Resource Language Countries (LRLCs). To test this, we use a weighted regression model to isolate the language effect from socioeconomic and demographic factors, finding that LRLCs have a share of AI users that is approximately 20% lower relative to their baseline. These results indicate that linguistic accessibility is a significant, independent barrier to equitable AI diffusion.
Smart-Hiring: An Explainable end-to-end Pipeline for CV Information Extraction and Job Matching
Khelkhal, Kenza, Lanasri, Dihia
Hiring processes often involve the manual screening of hundreds of resumes for each job, a task that is time and effort consuming, error-prone, and subject to human bias. This paper presents Smart-Hiring, an end-to-end Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline de- signed to automatically extract structured information from unstructured resumes and to semantically match candidates with job descriptions. The proposed system combines document parsing, named-entity recognition, and contextual text embedding techniques to capture skills, experience, and qualifications. Using advanced NLP technics, Smart-Hiring encodes both resumes and job descriptions in a shared vector space to compute similarity scores between candidates and job postings. The pipeline is modular and explainable, allowing users to inspect extracted entities and matching rationales. Experiments were conducted on a real-world dataset of resumes and job descriptions spanning multiple professional domains, demonstrating the robustness and feasibility of the proposed approach. The system achieves competitive matching accuracy while preserving a high degree of interpretability and transparency in its decision process. This work introduces a scalable and practical NLP frame- work for recruitment analytics and outlines promising directions for bias mitigation, fairness-aware modeling, and large-scale deployment of data-driven hiring solutions.
Mortgages and AI to be added to the curriculum in English schools
Children will be taught how to budget and how mortgages work as the government seeks to modernise the national curriculum in England's schools. They will also be taught how to spot fake news and disinformation, including AI-generated content, following the first review of what is taught in schools in over a decade. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the government wanted to revitalise the curriculum but keep a firm foundation in basics like English, maths and reading. Head teachers said the review's recommendations were sensible but would require sufficient funding and teachers. The government commissioned a review of the national curriculum and assessments in England last year, in the hope of developing a cutting edge curriculum that would narrow attainment gaps between the most disadvantaged students and their classmates.