Why was El Paso airspace shut down? A new United States military laser-based anti-drone system led authorities to halt air traffic in and out of El Paso, Texas, after aviation officials raised serious concerns about risks to commercial aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially announced a 10-day airspace closure on Wednesday but removed the restriction less than eight hours later, a decision reports said stemmed from miscommunication between the Pentagon and aviation regulators. The FAA and the military had planned to discuss the issue at a February 20 meeting, but the army moved ahead without final FAA approval, prompting the agency to halt flights in El Paso, sources said. What happened when El Paso's airspace was shut down?

Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by architectures that restrict language support, making extension inaccessible to most--all while entangled with ethical concerns when pursued without community collaboration. To transcend these limitations, we introduce Omnilingual ASR, the first large-scale ASR system designed for extensibility. Omnilingual ASR enables communities to introduce unserved languages with only a handful of data samples. It scales self-supervised pre-training to 7B parameters to learn robust speech representations and introduces an encoder-decoder architecture designed for zero-shot generalization, leveraging a LLM-inspired decoder. This capability is grounded in a massive and diverse training corpus; by combining breadth of coverage with linguistic variety, the model learns representations robust enough to adapt to unseen languages. Incorporating public resources with community-sourced recordings gathered through compensated local partnerships, Omnilingual ASR expands coverage to over 1,600 languages, the largest such effort to date--including over 500 never before served by ASR. Automatic evaluations show substantial gains over prior systems, especially in low-resource conditions, and strong generalization. We release Omnilingual ASR as a family of models, from 300M variants for low-power devices to 7B for maximum accuracy. We reflect on the ethical considerations shaping this design and conclude by discussing its societal impact. In particular, we highlight how open-sourcing models and tools can lower barriers for researchers and communities, inviting new forms of participation. Open-source artifacts are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr.

Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO). They promise improved generalization across tasks, scalability, and efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data. However, despite the rapid proliferation of geospatial FMs, their real-world utility and alignment with global sustainability goals remain underexplored. We introduce SustainFM, a comprehensive benchmarking framework grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with extremely diverse tasks ranging from asset wealth prediction to environmental hazard detection. This study provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary assessment of geospatial FMs and offers critical insights into their role in attaining sustainability goals. Our findings show: (1) While not universally superior, FMs often outperform traditional approaches across diverse tasks and datasets. (2) Evaluating FMs should go beyond accuracy to include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency as key criteria for their responsible use. (3) FMs enable scalable, SDG-grounded solutions, offering broad utility for tackling complex sustainability challenges. Critically, we advocate for a paradigm shift from model-centric development to impact-driven deployment, and emphasize metrics such as energy efficiency, robustness to domain shifts, and ethical considerations.

Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management. However, traditional SRMs rely on the availability of environmental covariates and high-quality species location observation data, both of which can be challenging to obtain due to geographic inaccessibility and resource constraints. We propose a novel approach combining millions of citizen science species observations with textual descriptions from Wikipedia, covering habitat preferences and range descriptions for tens of thousands of species. Our framework maps locations, species, and text descriptions into a common space, facilitating the learning of rich spatial covariates at a global scale and enabling zero-shot range estimation from textual descriptions. Evaluated on held-out species, our zero-shot SRMs significantly outperform baselines and match the performance of SRMs obtained using tens of observations. Our approach also acts as a strong prior when combined with observational data, resulting in more accurate range estimation with less data. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of the learned representations in the context of range estimation and other spatial tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

RAG systems consist of multiple modules to work together. However, these modules are usually separately trained. We argue that a system like RAG that incorporates multiple modules should be jointly optimized to achieve optimal performance. To demonstrate this, we design a specific pipeline called SmartRAG that includes a policy network and a retriever. The policy network can serve as 1) a decision maker that decides when to retrieve, 2) a query rewriter to generate a query most suited to the retriever, and 3) an answer generator that produces the final response with/without the observations. We then propose to jointly optimize the whole system using a reinforcement learning algorithm, with the reward designed to encourage the system to achieve the best performance with minimal retrieval cost. When jointly optimized, all the modules can be aware of how other modules are working and thus find the best way to work together as a complete system. Empirical results demonstrate that the jointly optimized SmartRAG can achieve better performance than separately optimized counterparts. Although large language models(LLMs) (Chowdhery et al., 2023; Touvron et al., 2023; Chung et al., 2024) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various domains, addressing knowledgerelated issues beyond model parameters remains a challenging task (Mallen et al., 2023b; Min et al., 2023). Retrieval-augmentation generation(RAG) effectively enhances model performance in these scenarios by retrieving additional information from external tools (Ram et al., 2023). RAG systems usually consist of multiple modules including at least a retriever and a generator. Some systems may have other modules like a reranker (Glass et al., 2022), a decision maker deciding when to retrieve (Jeong et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2023a), a query rewriter (Ma et al., 2023; Tan et al., 2024) or a verifier (Lewis et al., 2020; Izacard et al., 2023). These modules are often hand-designed and separately optimized. One of the issues is that the golden answer of the intermediate modules are usually not accessible. What is worse, sometimes the golden answer is model-dependent or retriever-dependent. For example, Asai et al. (2024) uses the result of GPT4 (Achiam et al., 2023) as the ground truth for the decision maker, which can be suboptimal.

This study investigates the application of an artificial neural network framework for analysing water pollution caused by solids. Water pollution by suspended solids poses significant environmental and health risks. Traditional methods for assessing and predicting pollution levels are often time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address these challenges, we developed a model that leverages a comprehensive dataset of water quality from total suspended solids. A convolutional neural network was trained under a transfer learning approach using data corresponding to different total suspended solids concentrations, with the goal of accurately predicting low, medium and high pollution levels based on various input variables. Our model demonstrated high predictive accuracy, outperforming conventional statistical methods in terms of both speed and reliability. The results suggest that the artificial neural network framework can serve as an effective tool for real-time monitoring and management of water pollution, facilitating proactive decision-making and policy formulation. This approach not only enhances our understanding of pollution dynamics but also underscores the potential of machine learning techniques in environmental science.

Former DEA Chief of Operations Ray Donovan joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's warning that cartels are utilizing drones along the southern border. The Mexican army has confirmed that drug cartel-operated bomb-dropping drones have killed soldiers in the western state of Michoacan. Defense Secretary Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval did not provide exact figures on the number of casualties suffered in the attacks, according to the Associated Press. Sandoval stated on Friday that attacks targeted patrol units and included over 260 drone-bomb incidents in 2023 alone. "Our personnel have suffered wounds, and some of our troops have even died" in the attacks, Sandoval said.

Entity linking (EL) is the computational process of connecting textual mentions to corresponding entities. Like many areas of natural language processing, the EL field has greatly benefited from deep learning, leading to significant performance improvements. However, present-day approaches are expensive to train and rely on diverse data sources, complicating their reproducibility. In this thesis, we develop multiple systems that are fast to train, demonstrating that competitive entity linking can be achieved without a large GPU cluster. Moreover, we train on a publicly available dataset, ensuring reproducibility and accessibility. Our models are evaluated for 9 languages giving an accurate overview of their strengths. Furthermore, we offer a~detailed analysis of bi-encoder training hyperparameters, a popular approach in EL, to guide their informed selection. Overall, our work shows that building competitive neural network based EL systems that operate in multiple languages is possible even with limited resources, thus making EL more approachable.

This thesis is a corpus-based, quantitative, and typological analysis of the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and their finite competitors ($jegda$-'when'-clauses). The first part leverages detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor and understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses in the corpus. The second part uses massively parallel data to analyze typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English $when$, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and $jegda$-clauses. Probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept WHEN.