Who cares about kids when adult collectors are willing to pay top dollar? From the moment a pixelated Gengar and Nidorino faced off in the opening animation of the first games on the original Game Boy back in 1996, the franchise has been a perennial favorite of kids and adults alike. With 2026 marking 30th anniversary, Lego's first-ever collaboration with the enduringly popular monster-catching megahit is perfectly timed--a crossover of pop culture titans with just one problem: Anyone who isn't an ultra-fan with cavernously deep pockets isn't invited. The recent announcement of a line of Lego Pokémon wasn't a surprise--the Danish brick brand first revealed it had entered into a "multi-year partnership" with The Pokémon Company back in March 2025 --but the makeup of the range itself was. Despite the mass appeal, Lego is launching with just three sets, and every single one is age-rated 18+.

Lego's Smart Brick Gives the Iconic Analog Toy a New Digital Brain The new sensor-packed Smart Play Brick will land this spring as part of a special Star Wars collection. The update adds interactive lights and sound to the Lego experience--including the minifigs. At CES in Las Vegas today, Lego has unveiled its new Smart Play platform, aimed at taking its distinctly analog plastic blocks and figures into a new world of tech-powered interactive play--but crucially one without any reliance on screens. Smart Play revolves around Lego's patented sensor-and tech-packed brick. It's the same size as a standard 2 x 4 Lego brick, but it is capable of connecting to compatible Smart Minifigures and Smart Tags and interacting with them in real time.

Abstract--Lidar-based SLAM systems are highly sensitive to adverse conditions such as occlusion, noise, and field-of-view (FoV) degradation, yet existing robustness evaluation methods either lack physical grounding or do not capture sensor-specific behavior . This paper presents a sensor-aware, phenomenological framework for simulating interpretable lidar degradations directly on real point clouds, enabling controlled and reproducible SLAM stress testing. Unlike image-derived corruption benchmarks (e.g., SemanticKITTI-C) or simulation-only approaches (e.g., lidarsim), the proposed system preserves per-point geometry, intensity, and temporal structure while applying structured dropout, FoV reduction, Gaussian noise, occlusion masking, sparsification, and motion distortion. Experimental validation across three lidar architectures and five state-of-the-art SLAM systems reveals distinct robustness patterns shaped by sensor design and environmental context. The open-source implementation provides a practical foundation for benchmarking lidar-based SLAM under physically meaningful degradation scenarios.

We present the design and results of the MICCAI Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) Challenge 2024, which focuses on federated learning (FL) for glioma sub-region segmentation in multi-parametric MRI and evaluates new weight aggregation methods aimed at improving robustness and efficiency. Six participating teams were evaluated using a standardized FL setup and a multi-institutional dataset derived from the BraTS glioma benchmark, consisting of 1,251 training cases, 219 validation cases, and 570 hidden test cases with segmentations for enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), and whole tumor (WT). Teams were ranked using a cumulative scoring system that considered both segmentation performance, measured by Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and the 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95), and communication efficiency assessed through the convergence score. A PID-controller-based method achieved the top overall ranking, obtaining mean DSC values of 0.733, 0.761, and 0.751 for ET, TC, and WT, respectively, with corresponding HD95 values of 33.922 mm, 33.623 mm, and 32.309 mm, while also demonstrating the highest communication efficiency with a convergence score of 0.764. These findings advance the state of federated learning for medical imaging, surpassing top-performing methods from previous challenge iterations and highlighting PID controllers as effective mechanisms for stabilizing and optimizing weight aggregation in FL. The challenge code is available at https://github.com/FeTS-AI/Challenge.

The rapid emergence of generative AI tools is transforming the way software is developed. Consequently, software engineering education must adapt to ensure that students not only learn traditional development methods but also understand how to meaningfully and responsibly use these new technologies. In particular, project-based courses offer an effective environment to explore and evaluate the integration of AI assistance into real-world development practices. This paper presents our approach and a user study conducted within a university programming project in which students collaboratively developed computer games. The study investigates how participants used generative AI tools throughout different phases of the software development process, identifies the types of tasks where such tools were most effective, and analyzes the challenges students encountered. Building on these insights, we further examine a repository-aware, locally deployed large language model (LLM) assistant designed to provide project-contextualized support. The system employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to ground responses in relevant documentation and source code, enabling qualitative analysis of model behavior, parameter sensitivity, and common failure modes. The findings deepen our understanding of context-aware AI support in educational software projects and inform future integration of AI-based assistance into software engineering curricula.

However, this is not the case for multilingual text embeddings due to a lack of available benchmarks.

Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have recently enabled novel approaches to robot autonomy and human-robot interfaces. In parallel, vision-language-action models (VLAs) or large behavior models (LBMs) are increasing the dexterity and capabilities of robotic systems. This survey paper reviews works that advance agentic applications and architectures, including initial efforts with GPT-style interfaces and more complex systems where AI agents function as coordinators, planners, perception actors, or generalist interfaces. Such agentic architectures allow robots to reason over natural language instructions, invoke APIs, plan task sequences, or assist in operations and diagnostics. In addition to peer-reviewed research, due to the fast-evolving nature of the field, we highlight and include community-driven projects, ROS packages, and industrial frameworks that show emerging trends. We propose a taxonomy for classifying model integration approaches and present a comparative analysis of the role that agents play in different solutions in today's literature.