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Amazon acquires autonomous robotics startup Rivr

Engadget

Its march toward automation continues. Amazon has acquired Rivr, a startup focused on autonomous robotics. Rivr is based in Zurich and was valued at $110 million in a funding round from August 2024, which both Amazon and its CEO's Bezos Expeditions participated in. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Rivr's robots have four legs and wheels that allow it to maneuver on stairs and other potentially uneven surfaces.

  Country: Europe > Switzerland > Zürich > Zürich (0.25)
  Genre: Financial News (0.35)
  Industry:

Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice

The Guardian

Google had said'What People Suggest' feature aimed to provide users with information from people with similar lived experiences. Google had said'What People Suggest' feature aimed to provide users with information from people with similar lived experiences. Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world. The company had said its launch of "What People Suggest", which provided tips from strangers, showed "the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe". But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision.


AIhub coffee corner: AI, kids, and the future – "generation AI"

AIHub

This month we tackle the topic of young people and what AI tools mean for their future. Joining the conversation this time are: Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Michael Littman (Brown University), and Ella Scallan (AIhub). As AI tools have become ubiquitous, we've seen growing concern and increasing coverage about how the use of such tools from a formative age might affect children. What do you think the impact will be and what skills might young people need to navigate this AI world? I met up with a bunch of high school friends when I was last in Switzerland and they were all wondering what their kids should study. They were wondering if they should do social science, seeing as AI tools have become adept at many tasks, such as coding, writing, art, etc. I think that we need social sciences, but that we also need people who know the technology and who can continue developing it. I say they should continue doing whatever they're interested in and those jobs will evolve and they'll look different, but there will still be a whole wealth of different types of jobs.


Days really are dragging! Length of days on Earth is increasing at an 'unprecedented' rate - and scientists say climate change is to blame

Daily Mail - Science & tech

'Comatose' Mojtaba Khamenei'is UNAWARE there is a war on and has no idea he is supreme leader', report says - despite regime issuing his'first statement' FBI storms home of Lebanese-born restaurant worker who drove truck filled with explosives into synagogue and opened fire after his'family were killed in airstrike' Trump slammed after lifting oil sanctions on Russia as gas prices skyrocket: 'It's a betrayal' Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Billy Joel's daughter Alexa Ray gives health update amid his battle with rare brain disorder Concerning whispers inside Trump World that Operation Epic Fury is suddenly at risk... and the critical question that will determine how this ends: MARK HALPERIN Meghan Markle masks up to cheer young patients at Los Angeles children's hospital as she agrees deal to sign her latest documentary Beauty queen slams Trump as she's FIRED by White House: 'I stood by you for 20 years... now, I don't even recognize you' Wall Street issues stark warning that Iran oil attacks could wreck Trump's key election promises Truth behind the massacre of 110 school girls in Iran: How shameful episode sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories and lies... as JAKE WALLIS SIMONS explores what really happened Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. NFL fans left divided as team replace historic logo with'boring' new design as part of franchise rebrand I worked with Carolyn Bessette. This is the'messy' truth about what she was REALLY like in secret. After she met JFK Jr she tried to hide it... but we all knew the nighttime gossip Trump says US is'totally destroying' Iran as he issues chilling threat of more action coming TODAY The 7 types of'hyperarousal' - so, do you get cold sweats or tingling fingers?


NASA shows how Sahara desert dust spread all over Europe

Popular Science

The dust coated the Alps and caused'blood rain' in England. In the light of the setting sun, the sky forms a veil of Saharan dust over the Wurmberg in Lower Saxony, Germany. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The wild winds of winter typically bring snow in the Northern Hemisphere. But sometimes, they carry dust .


Chemistry may not be the 'killer app' for quantum computers after all

New Scientist

Chemistry may not be the'killer app' for quantum computers after all Quantum chemistry calculations that could advance drug development or agriculture have recently emerged as a promising "killer application" of quantum computers, but a new analysis suggests this is unlikely to be the case. Progress in building quantum computers has greatly accelerated in recent years, but it remains an open question what uses are most likely to justify the ongoing investment in this technology. One popular contender is solving problems in quantum chemistry, such as calculating the energy levels of molecules relevant for biomedicine or industry. This requires accounting for the behavior of many quantum particles - electrons in the molecule - simultaneously, so it seems like a good match for computers made from many quantum parts. Quantum computers have finally arrived, but will they ever be useful? However, Xavier Waintal at CEA Grenoble in France and his colleagues have now shown that two leading quantum computing algorithms for this task may actually have, at best, limited use.


4 surprising scientific benefits of music

Popular Science

From reducing dementia to speeding up recovery after surgery, music is more powerful than you knew. Listening to music can help your brain, research suggests. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The oldest known musical instruments-- flutes carved from bones --are over 40,000 years old . And humans were likely making music before that, based on fossils showing our ancestors had the ability to sing over 530,000 years ago.


On's new LightSpray CloudMonster 3 Hyper running shoe is built by robots in 3 minutes flat

Popular Science

Gear Fitness Gear On's new LightSpray CloudMonster 3 Hyper running shoe is built by robots in 3 minutes flat The On LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper running shoe relies on a clever automated production process that makes a lighter, more comfortable sneaker. The LightSpray tech creates a unique upper. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Building a running shoe is, by any reasonable measure, an absurdly complicated process. A conventional pair involves somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 individual manufacturing steps -- cutting fabric panels, stitching seams, gluing layers, trimming edges -- typically spread across multiple factories and dozens of human hands.


Federated Causal Discovery Across Heterogeneous Datasets under Latent Confounding

Hahn, Maximilian, Zajak, Alina, Heider, Dominik, Ribeiro, Adèle Helena

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Causal discovery across multiple datasets is often constrained by data privacy regulations and cross-site heterogeneity, limiting the use of conventional methods that require a single, centralized dataset. To address these challenges, we introduce fedCI, a federated conditional independence test that rigorously handles heterogeneous datasets with non-identical sets of variables, site-specific effects, and mixed variable types, including continuous, ordinal, binary, and categorical variables. At its core, fedCI uses a federated Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) procedure to estimate the parameters of generalized linear models underlying likelihood-ratio tests for conditional independence. Building on this, we develop fedCI-IOD, a federated extension of the Integration of Overlapping Datasets (IOD) algorithm, that replaces its meta-analysis strategy and enables, for the fist time, federated causal discovery under latent confounding across distributed and heterogeneous datasets. By aggregating evidence federatively, fedCI-IOD not only preserves privacy but also substantially enhances statistical power, achieving performance comparable to fully pooled analyses and mitigating artifacts from low local sample sizes. Our tools are publicly available as the fedCI Python package, a privacy-preserving R implementation of IOD, and a web application for the fedCI-IOD pipeline, providing versatile, user-friendly solutions for federated conditional independence testing and causal discovery.


Initialization-Aware Score-Based Diffusion Sampling

Fassina, Tiziano, Cardoso, Gabriel, Corff, Sylvan Le, Romary, Thomas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Score-based generative models (SGMs) aim at generating samples from a target distribution by approximating the reverse-time dynamics of a stochastic differential equation. Despite their strong empirical performance, classical samplers initialized from a Gaussian distribution require a long time horizon noising typically inducing a large number of discretization steps and high computational cost. In this work, we present a Kullback-Leibler convergence analysis of Variance Exploding diffusion samplers that highlights the critical role of the backward process initialization. Based on this result, we propose a theoretically grounded sampling strategy that learns the reverse-time initialization, directly minimizing the initialization error. The resulting procedure is independent of the specific score training procedure, network architecture, and discretization scheme. Experiments on toy distributions and benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive or improved generative quality while using significantly fewer sampling steps.