Switzerland
Researchers in Switzerland invent a new type of pixel
Pixels either control light or analyze it. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The researchers created their university's logo with Fourier pixels. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .
Relational and Sequential Conformal Inference for Energy Time Series over Graphs via Foundation Models
Niresi, Keivan Faghih, Cicirello, Alice, Fink, Olga
Accurate energy demand forecasting is essential for the reliable operation and planning of modern sustainable energy systems. Spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have recently achieved strong performance in point forecasting by jointly modeling temporal dynamics and relational dependencies across interconnected energy nodes. However, in real-world energy systems, accurate point forecasts alone are insufficient, as operators also require reliable uncertainty estimates to support risk-aware decision-making, grid stability, and operational planning under uncertainty. Conformal prediction provides a principled and model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification with statistical coverage guarantees, making it particularly attractive for safety-critical energy applications. However, existing conformal prediction approaches often fail to fully capture the complex spatial-temporal structure of energy systems. To address these limitations, we propose STOIC (Spatial-Temporal Graph Conformal Prediction with In-Context Learning), a novel framework that integrates graph-based forecasting with the zero-shot calibration capabilities of tabular foundation models. STOIC first generates point forecasts using an STGNN and subsequently reformulates spatial-temporal residuals into a tabular representation suitable for in-context learning. Leveraging a tabular foundation model, STOIC calibrates prediction intervals without task-specific retraining, effectively capturing both sequential and relational dependencies. We evaluate STOIC on five diverse benchmarks, including synthetic simulations as well as real-world electricity and district heating networks. Across all datasets, STOIC consistently outperforms existing conformal prediction baselines, delivering more reliable and robust uncertainty estimates for complex graph-structured energy time series.
Building tech in the world's secret R&D hub
Zurich has created a technology ecosystem nearing the density of Silicon Valley. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people--roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world's most influential technology companies have established R&D operations in and around Zurich, Switzerland. What began with Google's decision to build its largest R&D hub outside the United States has evolved into one of the world's most concentrated centers for AI research, talent, and commercialization, in certain areas at a higher density than Silicon Valley. The question is why so many technology leaders keep choosing the same place to build and scale.
AI brings object-level vision prosthetics closer to reality
This research from the NeuroAI Lab of Martin Schrimpf, part of EPFL's Schools of Computer and Communication Sciences and Life Sciences, uses AI models to predict exactly where to stimulate the brain to evoke images of faces and specific objects in the users instead of simply evoking spots of light. The models developed at EPFL were used by Dutch researchers for live trials on sighted monkeys. The preliminary results, presented in April at the International Conference on Learning Representations, show very promising implications for vision in humans as well. "The motivation for this project is that there are many people with visual deficits that are irreparable, in the sense that somewhere along the visual processing stream, starting with the retina, there is a deficit which cannot be repaired," says Johannes Mehrer, a scientist in the NeuroAI lab who led the research. "One way of tackling this problem is to develop a visual prosthesis."
Robustness in Both Domains: CLIP Needs a Robust Text Encoder
Adversarial input attacks can cause a significant shift of CLIP embeddings. This can affect the downstream robustness of models incorporating CLIP in the pipeline, such as text-to-image generative models or large vision language models. While some efforts have been done towards making the CLIP image encoders robust, the robustness of text encoders remains unexplored. In this work, we cover this gap in the literature. We propose LEAF: an efficient adversarial finetuning method for the text domain, with the ability to scale to large CLIP models. Our models significantly improve the zero-shot adversarial accuracy in the text domain, while maintaining the vision performance provided by robust image encoders. When combined with text-to-image diffusion models, we can improve the generation quality under adversarial noise. In multimodal retrieval tasks, LEAF improves the recall under adversarial noise over standard CLIP models. Finally, we show that robust text encoders facilitate better reconstruction of input text from its embedding via direct optimization.
Inductive Domain Transfer In Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference
Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters in physical systems is often hindered by model misspecification-the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, a recent SBI approach, addresses this challenge through a two-stage domain transfer process that combines semi-supervised calibration with optimal transport (OT)based distribution alignment. However, RoPE operates in a fully transductive setting, requiring access to a batch of test samples at inference time, which limits scalability and generalization. We propose a fully inductive and amortized SBI framework that integrates calibration and distributional alignment into a single, end-to-end trainable model called FRISBI. Our method leverages mini-batch OT with a closed-form coupling to align real and simulated observations that correspond to the same latent parameters, using both paired calibration data and unpaired samples. A conditional normalizing flow is then trained to approximate the OTinduced posterior, enabling efficient inference without simulation access at test time. Across a range of synthetic and real-world benchmarks-including complex medical biomarker estimation-our approach matches or exceeds the performance of RoPE, while offering improved scalability and applicability in challenging, misspecified environments.
EPFL-Smart-Kitchen: An Ego-Exo Multi-Modal Dataset for Challenging Action and Motion Understanding in Video-Language Models
Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to cleaning. Here, we introduce the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen30 dataset, collected in a noninvasive motion capture platform inside a kitchen environment. Nine static RGB-D cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and one head-mounted HoloLens 2 headset were used to capture 3D hand, body, and eye movements. The EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset is a multi-view action dataset with synchronized exocentric, egocentric, depth, IMUs, eye gaze, body and hand kinematics spanning 29.7 hours of 16 subjects cooking four different recipes. Action sequences were densely annotated with 33.78 action segments per minute. Leveraging this multi-modal dataset, we propose four benchmarks to advance behavior understanding and modeling through 1) a vision-language benchmark, 2) a semantic text-to-motion generation benchmark, 3) a multi-modal action recognition benchmark, 4) a pose-based action segmentation benchmark. We expect the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset to pave the way for better methods as well as insights to understand the nature of ecologically-valid human behavior.
Millions in path of 'extreme' life-threatening floods as Arthur slams EIGHT states after making landfall
'Ringleader' of alleged UFC drone attack to kill Trump is unmasked as illegal migrant who was granted DACA stay under Obama Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Horrific new videos blow Texas woman's mystery death wide open: Her agonizing'final gasp'... unthinkably vile corpse claims... and sick past of man who saw her last Taylor Swift's bottomless thirst for attention, her greed and sheer tackiness are now truly unbearable... this latest stunt has shown her true colors: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Spy world panic as Tulsi Gabbard prepares to unleash bombshell file dumps on secret CIA'mind control' project and Dr. Fauci Olivia Wilde, 42, complains about being on Maxim's Hot 100 List calling it the'most f***** up thing in the world' Has Taylor Swift already revealed her wedding dress designer? All my friends are suddenly getting divorced. Mid-life wives share taboo sex confessions about why they really leave... including common position that made one hate her husband: JANA HOCKING Kanye West's wife Bianca Censori raises eyebrows in plunging white lace lingerie as she photographs a nude model at Art Basel in Switzerland Knicks set to come face to face with Trump after president was'thunderously booed' at NBA Finals game Sensational REAL reason Jelly Roll is divorcing Bunnie XO: Insiders reveal'preacher's wife' bombshell that's the talk of Nashville... truth about legendary rocker cuckolding rumor... and G-string mishap Teen tourist thrown to death by Central Park horse was trying to save mom who flew out of carriage during family's first visit to Big Apple Father keeps his cool as shouting man calls cops on him for taking his two young daughters into women's restroom Trump privately frets Bibi Netanyahu's zeal to'bomb everyone' could turn him into another disgraced president'Moscow will burn', Zelensky vows as Russia's capital is blanketed in toxic smoke following huge Ukraine drone attack He drove a Rolls-Royce and lived the American dream. But behind the Gucci was the ATF's most unlikely secret weapon. MORE: Meteorologist reveals America's most dangerous cities in super El Niño's'corridor of chaos'... and warns this is only the beginning As many as 40 million people across eight states are in the deadly path of Tropical Storm Arthur after the first named storm of hurricane season made landfall Wednesday night.
What do aliens EAT? Scientist reveals the foods extraterrestrials would go for on Earth - and why E.T.'s favourite Reese's Pieces are off the cards
'Ringleader' of alleged UFC drone attack to kill Trump is unmasked as illegal migrant who was granted DACA stay under Obama Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Horrific new videos blow Texas woman's mystery death wide open: Her agonizing'final gasp'... unthinkably vile corpse claims... and sick past of man who saw her last Taylor Swift's bottomless thirst for attention, her greed and sheer tackiness are now truly unbearable... this latest stunt has shown her true colors: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Spy world panic as Tulsi Gabbard prepares to unleash bombshell file dumps on secret CIA'mind control' project and Dr. Fauci Beloved mattress company backed by Travis Kelce files for bankruptcy... but makes key promise to customers Olivia Wilde, 42, complains about being on Maxim's Hot 100 List calling it the'most f***** up thing in the world' All my friends are suddenly getting divorced. Mid-life wives share taboo sex confessions about why they really leave... including common position that made one hate her husband: JANA HOCKING Kanye West's wife Bianca Censori raises eyebrows in plunging white lace lingerie as she photographs a nude model at Art Basel in Switzerland Knicks set to come face to face with Trump after president was'thunderously booed' at NBA Finals game Sensational REAL reason Jelly Roll is divorcing Bunnie XO: Insiders reveal'preacher's wife' bombshell that's the talk of Nashville... truth about legendary rocker cuckolding rumor... and G-string mishap Has Taylor Swift already revealed her wedding dress designer? Teen tourist thrown to death by Central Park horse was trying to save mom who flew out of carriage during family's first visit to Big Apple Father keeps his cool as shouting man calls cops on him for taking his two young daughters into women's restroom Trump privately frets Bibi Netanyahu's zeal to'bomb everyone' could turn him into another disgraced president'Moscow will burn', Zelensky vows as Russia's capital is blanketed in toxic smoke following huge Ukraine drone attack He drove a Rolls-Royce and lived the American dream. But behind the Gucci was the ATF's most unlikely secret weapon. What do aliens EAT? Scientist reveals the foods extraterrestrials would go for on Earth - and why E.T.'s favourite Reese's Pieces are off the cards In the 1982 blockbuster, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, E.T. is lured out of hiding using a trail of Reese's Pieces.
Instance-Dependent Regret Bounds for Nonstochastic Linear Partial Monitoring
In contrast to the classic formulation of partial monitoring, linear partial monitoring can model infinite outcome spaces, while imposing a linear structure on both the losses and the observations. This setting can be viewed as a generalization of linear bandits where loss and feedback are decoupled in a flexible manner. In this work, we address a nonstochastic (adversarial), finite-actions version of the problem through a simple instance of the exploration-by-optimization method that is amenable to efficient implementation. We derive regret bounds that depend on the game structure in a more transparent manner than previous theoretical guarantees for this paradigm. Our bounds feature instance-specific quantities that reflect the degree of alignment between observations and losses, and resemble known guarantees in the stochastic setting. Notably, they achieve the standard T rate in easy (locally observable) games and T2/3 in hard (globally observable) games, where T is the time horizon. We instantiate these bounds in a selection of old and new partial information settings subsumed by this model, and illustrate that the achieved dependence on the game structure can be tight in interesting cases.