Science Ask Us Anything The most eco-friendly burial option isn't cremation or human composting With more options than ever, we break down which one's best for the planet. Cemeteries are increasingly running out of space. Are there greener options we ought to turn to? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Perhaps one of life's hardest tasks is deciding what to do with a loved one's--or even your own--bodily remains. Do you go the cremation route? If you want your last act on Earth to also be good for the Earth, what do you do?

A restaurant dinner or a hotel stay may lead to memorable experiences when guests encounter unexpected aspects that also match their interests. For example, an origami-making station in the waiting area of a restaurant may be both surprising and enjoyable for a customer who is passionate about paper crafts. Similarly, an exhibit of 18th century harpsichords would be atypical for a hotel lobby and likely pique the interest of a guest who has a passion for Baroque music. Motivated by this insight, in this paper we introduce the new task of engineering serendipity through recommendations of items with atypical aspects. We describe an LLM-based system pipeline that extracts atypical aspects from item reviews, then estimates and aggregates their user-specific utility in a measure of serendipity potential that is used to rerank a list of items recommended to the user. To facilitate system development and evaluation, we introduce a dataset of Yelp reviews that are manually annotated with atypical aspects and a dataset of artificially generated user profiles, together with crowdsourced annotations of user-aspect utility values. Furthermore, we introduce a custom procedure for dynamic selection of in-context learning examples, which is shown to improve LLM-based judgments of atypicality and utility. Experimental evaluations show that serendipity-based rankings generated by the system are highly correlated with ground truth rankings for which serendipity scores are computed from manual annotations of atypical aspects and their user-dependent utility. Overall, we hope that the new recommendation task and the associated system presented in this paper catalyze further research into recommendation approaches that go beyond accuracy in their pursuit of enhanced user satisfaction. The datasets and the code are made publicly available at https://github.com/ramituncc49er/ATARS .

Traditional text-based human-AI interactions often adhere to a strict turn-taking approach. In this research, we propose a novel approach that incorporates overlapping messages, mirroring natural human conversations. Through a formative study, we observed that even in text-based contexts, users instinctively engage in overlapping behaviors like "A: Today I went to-" "B: yeah." To capitalize on these insights, we developed OverlapBot, a prototype chatbot where both AI and users can initiate overlapping. Our user study revealed that OverlapBot was perceived as more communicative and immersive than traditional turn-taking chatbot, fostering faster and more natural interactions. Our findings contribute to the understanding of design space for overlapping interactions. We also provide recommendations for implementing overlap-capable AI interactions to enhance the fluidity and engagement of text-based conversations.

Optimal power flow (OPF) has been used for real-time grid operations. Prior efforts demonstrated that utilizing flexibility from dynamic topologies will improve grid efficiency. However, this will convert the linear OPF into a mixed-integer linear programming network-reconfigured OPF (NR-OPF) problem, substantially increasing the computing time. Thus, a machine learning (ML)-based approach, particularly utilizing graph neural network (GNN), is proposed to accelerate the solution process. The GNN model is trained offline to predict the best topology before entering the optimization stage. In addition, this paper proposes an offline pre-ML filter layer to reduce GNN model size and training time while improving its accuracy. A fast online post-ML selection layer is also proposed to analyze GNN predictions and then select a subset of predicted NR solutions with high confidence. Case studies have demonstrated superior performance of the proposed GNN-accelerated NR-OPF method augmented with the proposed pre-ML and post-ML layers.

When Hurricane Helene and Milton hit the Southeast US, they left a trail of devastation in their wake. Roads, homes, and chunks of towns were swept away by torrential floods. Thousands of residents were left without homes and forced to take refuge in community centers which were cut off from access to critical supplies and resources. One of those shelters, a senior center in Marion, North Carolina, has received a lifeline from an unlikely source. For a little over a week, a white, buzzing autonomous drone operated by Wing has been collecting prescription drugs, baby formula, and other critical resources from a nearby Walmart supercenter and airdropping them to the senior center.

Agents with the FBI Nashville Field Office have been using new fingerprint-recognition technology to identify deceased individuals in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. "When you're doing this, you still take extra care because that was a human and that was somebody's loved one. It was somebody's mother, brother, sister," FBI Special Agent Paul Durant, who has been with the FBI for five years, said in a statement. "It's tough, but it's rewarding to know that we can provide some answers to families who are suffering." The hurricane that devastated parts of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Virginia has left more than 230 people dead since it made landfall on Sept. 27.

Brits largely endured frigid temperatures in September – but globally, the story was quite different. Last month was the second-hottest September on record, the EU's climate change programme has revealed. The global average air temperature for September 2024 was 61.1 F (16.17 C), which is 1.31 F (0.73 C) above the September average. What's more, it's just shy of the record set by September 2023 – 61.4 F (16.38 C). Worryingly, experts point to human-cased greenhouse gas emissions as the cause for this latest temperature'anomaly'.

People often answer yes-no questions without explicitly saying yes, no, or similar polar keywords. Figuring out the meaning of indirect answers is challenging, even for large language models. In this paper, we investigate this problem working with dialogues from multiple domains. We present new benchmarks in three diverse domains: movie scripts, tennis interviews, and airline customer service. We present an approach grounded on distant supervision and blended training to quickly adapt to a new dialogue domain. Experimental results show that our approach is never detrimental and yields F1 improvements as high as 11-34%.

Optimal power flow (OPF) is used to perform generation redispatch in power system real-time operations. N-1 OPF can ensure safe grid operations under diverse contingency scenarios. For large and intricate power networks with numerous variables and constraints, achieving an optimal solution for real-time N-1 OPF necessitates substantial computational resources. To mitigate this challenge, machine learning (ML) is introduced as an additional tool for predicting congested or heavily loaded lines dynamically. In this paper, an advanced ML model known as the augmented hierarchical graph neural network (AHGNN) was proposed to predict critical congested lines and create N-1 reduced OPF (N-1 ROPF). The proposed AHGNN-enabled N-1 ROPF can result in a remarkable reduction in computing time while retaining the solution quality. Several variations of GNN-based ML models are also implemented as benchmark to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed AHGNN approach. Case studies prove the proposed AHGNN and the associated N-1 ROPF are highly effective in reducing computation time while preserving solution quality, highlighting the promising potential of ML, particularly GNN in enhancing power system operations.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging computing paradigm with significant promise for efficient and robust learning. In HDC, objects are encoded with high-dimensional vector symbolic sequences called hypervectors. The quality of hypervectors, defined by their distribution and independence, directly impacts the performance of HDC systems. Despite a large body of work on the processing parts of HDC systems, little to no attention has been paid to data encoding and the quality of hypervectors. Most prior studies have generated hypervectors using inherent random functions, such as MATLAB`s or Python`s random function. This work introduces an optimization technique for generating hypervectors by employing quasi-random sequences. These sequences have recently demonstrated their effectiveness in achieving accurate and low-discrepancy data encoding in stochastic computing systems. The study outlines the optimization steps for utilizing Sobol sequences to produce high-quality hypervectors in HDC systems. An optimization algorithm is proposed to select the most suitable Sobol sequences for generating minimally correlated hypervectors, particularly in applications related to symbol-oriented architectures. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in comparison to two traditional approaches of generating hypervectors based on linear-feedback shift registers and MATLAB random function. The evaluation is conducted for two applications: (i) language and (ii) headline classification. Our experimental results demonstrate accuracy improvements of up to 10.79%, depending on the vector size. Additionally, the proposed encoding hardware exhibits reduced energy consumption and a superior area-delay product.