Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies Covid exposed the lack of data on the country's 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.03 EDT Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. Are you going outside for work? He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond.

The Swampy Black Iguana is the oldest specimen living at the Iguana Station scientific station, where they have a breeding and conservation project for black spiny-tailed iguanas. This species, endemic to Utila, is in danger of extinction. The Utila Iguana Conservation Project seeks to ensure the survival of this species. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With the turning of the calendar comes a new year and new vulnerable endangered plant and animal species to keep a watchful eye on.

Securing Dew-Enabled Edge-of-Things (EoT) networks against sophisticated intrusions is a critical challenge. This paper presents HybridGuard, a framework that integrates machine learning and deep learning to improve intrusion detection. HybridGuard addresses data imbalance through mutual information based feature selection, ensuring that the most relevant features are used to improve detection performance, especially for minority attack classes. The framework leverages Wasserstein Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks with Gradient Penalty (WCGAN-GP) to further reduce class imbalance and enhance detection precision. It adopts a two-phase architecture called DualNetShield to support advanced traffic analysis and anomaly detection, improving the granular identification of threats in complex EoT environments. HybridGuard is evaluated on the UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS-2017, and IOTID20 datasets, where it demonstrates strong performance across diverse attack scenarios and outperforms existing solutions in adapting to evolving cybersecurity threats. This approach establishes HybridGuard as an effective tool for protecting EoT networks against modern intrusions.

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is a key affective computing technology that enables emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence. While SER is challenging in general, it is particularly difficult for low-resource languages such as Urdu. This study investigates Urdu SER in a cross-corpus setting, an area that has remained largely unexplored. We employ a cross-corpus evaluation framework across three different Urdu emotional speech datasets to test model generalization. Two standard domain-knowledge based acoustic feature sets, eGeMAPS and ComParE, are used to represent speech signals as feature vectors which are then passed to Logistic Regression and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers. Classification performance is assessed using unweighted average recall (UAR) whilst considering class-label imbalance. Results show that Self-corpus validation often overestimates performance, with UAR exceeding cross-corpus evaluation by up to 13%, underscoring that cross-corpus evaluation offers a more realistic measure of model robustness. Overall, this work emphasizes the importance of cross-corpus validation for Urdu SER and its implications contribute to advancing affective computing research for underrepresented language communities.

The rapid advancement of large language models(LLMs) has intensified the need for domain and culture specific evaluation. Existing benchmarks are largely Anglocentric and domain-agnostic, limiting their applicability to India-centric contexts. To address this gap, we introduce BhashaBench V1, the first domain-specific, multi-task, bilingual benchmark focusing on critical Indic knowledge systems. BhashaBench V1 contains 74,166 meticulously curated question-answer pairs, with 52,494 in English and 21,672 in Hindi, sourced from authentic government and domain-specific exams. It spans four major domains: Agriculture, Legal, Finance, and Ayurveda, comprising 90+ subdomains and covering 500+ topics, enabling fine-grained evaluation. Evaluation of 29+ LLMs reveals significant domain and language specific performance gaps, with especially large disparities in low-resource domains. For instance, GPT-4o achieves 76.49% overall accuracy in Legal but only 59.74% in Ayurveda. Models consistently perform better on English content compared to Hindi across all domains. Subdomain-level analysis shows that areas such as Cyber Law, International Finance perform relatively well, while Panchakarma, Seed Science, and Human Rights remain notably weak. BhashaBench V1 provides a comprehensive dataset for evaluating large language models across India's diverse knowledge domains. It enables assessment of models' ability to integrate domain-specific knowledge with bilingual understanding. All code, benchmarks, and resources are publicly available to support open research.

Graph-based learning is a cornerstone for analyzing structured data, with node classification as a central task. However, in many real-world graphs, nodes lack informative feature vectors, leaving only neighborhood connectivity and class labels as available signals. In such cases, effective classification hinges on learning node embeddings that capture structural roles and topological context. We introduce a fast semi-supervised embedding framework that jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: (i) unsupervised structure preservation via scalable modularity approximation, (ii) supervised regularization to minimize intra-class variance among labeled nodes, and (iii) semi-supervised propagation that refines unlabeled nodes through random-walk-based label spreading with attention-weighted similarity. These components are unified into a single iterative optimization scheme, yielding high-quality node embeddings. On standard benchmarks, our method consistently achieves classification accuracy at par with or superior to state-of-the-art approaches, while requiring significantly less computational cost.

Learned Optimizers (LOs), a type of Meta-learning, have gained traction due to their ability to be parameterized and trained for efficient optimization. Traditional gradient-based methods incorporate explicit regularization techniques such as Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), Gradient-norm Aware Minimization (GAM), and Gap-guided Sharpness-Aware Minimization (GSAM) to enhance generalization and convergence. In this work, we explore a fundamental question: \textbf{Can regularizers be learned?} We empirically demonstrate that LOs can be trained to learn and internalize the effects of traditional regularization techniques without explicitly applying them to the objective function. We validate this through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks (including MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR and Neural Networks such as MLP, MLP-Relu and CNN), comparing LOs trained with and without access to explicit regularizers. Regularized LOs consistently outperform their unregularized counterparts in terms of test accuracy and generalization. Furthermore, we show that LOs retain and transfer these regularization effects to new optimization tasks by inherently seeking minima similar to those targeted by these regularizers. Our results suggest that LOs can inherently learn regularization properties, \textit{challenging the conventional necessity of explicit optimizee loss regularization.

Aims Late diagnosis of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) contributes significantly to its high global mortality rate, with over 50\% of cases detected at advanced stages and a 5-year survival rate below 50\% according to WHO statistics. This study aims to improve early detection of OSCC by developing a multimodal deep learning framework that integrates clinical, radiological, and histopathological images using a weighted ensemble of DenseNet-121 convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Material and Methods A retrospective study was conducted using publicly available datasets representing three distinct medical imaging modalities. Each modality-specific dataset was used to train a DenseNet-121 CNN via transfer learning. Augmentation and modality-specific preprocessing were applied to increase robustness. Predictions were fused using a validation-weighted ensemble strategy. Evaluation was performed using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score. Results High validation accuracy was achieved for radiological (100\%) and histopathological (95.12\%) modalities, with clinical images performing lower (63.10\%) due to visual heterogeneity. The ensemble model demonstrated improved diagnostic robustness with an overall accuracy of 84.58\% on a multimodal validation dataset of 55 samples. Conclusion The multimodal ensemble framework bridges gaps in the current diagnostic workflow by offering a non-invasive, AI-assisted triage tool that enhances early identification of high-risk lesions. It supports clinicians in decision-making, aligning with global oncology guidelines to reduce diagnostic delays and improve patient outcomes.

ByteDance's AI Videos Are Scary Realistic. An image created with Bytedance's AI tool Seedream, via the platform Kapwing, of Minions playing basketball. This week, OpenAI released its latest AI video generation model, Sora 2, advertising it as a big leap forward for the space. As Sora hits the public, it will have to compete for market share in a crowded market, including with a major competitor that is rapidly gaining steam: the Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok . In the past few months, ByteDance released Seedance, an AI video generator that many users are already calling the best in the world, and a new version of Seedream, an elite image model.

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most common neonatal anomaly, highlighting the urgent need for early detection to improve outcomes. Yet, fetal ECG (fECG) signals in abdominal ECG (aECG) are often masked by maternal ECG and noise, challenging conventional methods under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. We propose FetalHealthNet (FHNet), a deep learning framework that integrates Graph Neural Networks with a multi-scale enhanced transformer to dynamically model spatiotemporal inter-lead correlations and extract clean fECG signals. On benchmark aECG datasets, FHNet consistently outperforms long short-term memory (LSTM) models, standard transformers, and state-of-the-art models, achieving R2>0.99 and RMSE = 0.015 even under severe noise. Interpretability analyses highlight physiologically meaningful temporal and lead contributions, supporting model transparency and clinical trust. FHNet illustrates the potential of AI-driven modeling to advance fetal monitoring and enable early CHD screening, underscoring the transformative impact of next-generation biomedical signal processing.