Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Oceania


India casts doubt on Trump's claim Modi will stop buying Russian oil

BBC News

India casts doubt on Trump's claim Modi will stop buying Russian oil India's foreign ministry has said it is not aware of a phone call in which US President Donald Trump claimed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil. On Wednesday, Trump said his Indian counterpart had assured me today that it would end Russian oil imports, a move the US has pushed for in a bid to increase economic pressure on the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. But asked about the call on Thursday, an Indian government spokesman cast doubt on Trump's account, saying he was not aware of any conversation between the two leaders taking place the previous day. The Indian government had earlier said discussions were still ongoing with the US over its Russian oil purchases. India has become a key energy customer for Russia since the outbreak of the war, partly allowing the Kremlin to withstand the impact of Ukrainian allies slashing oil and gas imports, the country's biggest export market.


Green sea turtle no longer Endangered

Popular Science

These gentle, 400-pound giants are splashing back from the brink of extinction. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In an ocean conservation victory, green sea turtles () have been brought from the brink of extinction. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) elevated the keystone species from Endangered to Least Concern . The global conservation organization moves species between categories once new data indicates changes in their population, threat levels, or habitat.


Barrister found to have used AI to prepare for hearing after citing 'fictitious' cases

The Guardian

The judge said: 'I am bound to observe that one of the cases cited has recently been wrongly deployed by ChatGPT in support of similar arguments.' The judge said: 'I am bound to observe that one of the cases cited has recently been wrongly deployed by ChatGPT in support of similar arguments.' Barrister found to have used AI to prepare for hearing after citing'fictitious' cases Judge rules Chowdhury Rahman used ChatGPT-like software and then tried to hide it, wasting immigration tribunal's time Thu 16 Oct 2025 09.47 EDTFirst published on Thu 16 Oct 2025 09.33 EDT An immigration barrister was found by a judge to be using AI to do his work for a tribunal hearing after citing cases that were "entirely fictitious" or "wholly irrelevant". Chowdhury Rahman was discovered using ChatGPT-like software to prepare his legal research, a tribunal heard. Rahman was found not only to have used AI to prepare his work, but "failed thereafter to undertake any proper checks on the accuracy".


Italian news publishers demand investigation into Google's AI Overviews

The Guardian

The AI-generated summaries created in Google searches have'detrimental effects on Italian users, consumers and businesses', according to FIEG. The AI-generated summaries created in Google searches have'detrimental effects on Italian users, consumers and businesses', according to FIEG. Italian news publishers demand investigation into Google's AI Overviews Newspaper federation says'traffic killer' feature violates legislation and threatens to destroy media diversity Thu 16 Oct 2025 08.53 EDTLast modified on Thu 16 Oct 2025 10.23 EDT Italian news publishers are calling for an investigation into Google's AI Overviews, arguing that the search engine's AI-generated summaries feature is a "traffic killer" that threatens their survival. FIEG, the Italian federation of newspaper publishers, said it has submitted a formal complaint to Agcom, Italy's communications watchdog. Similar complaints have been filed in other EU countries.


Spotify partnering with multinational music companies to develop 'responsible' AI products

The Guardian

Spotify partnering with multinational music companies to develop'responsible' AI products The market-leading music streamer is collaborating with the Sony, Universal and Warner music groups - whose combined rosters feature artists including Beyoncรฉ, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift - to create new AI features. The tension between the music industry and some tech firms has already led to three major labels suing AI companies whose tools create music from user prompts. If the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent, or compensation." Both Udio and Suno have said their technology is designed to generate new musical output and does not reproduce specific artists' work. The head of Universal Music Group, Sir Lucian Grainge, wrote in a memo to staff this week that Universal would seek an artist's consent before licensing use of their voice or existing songs to an AI company.


Scientists reveal the surprising age at which your brain reaches its peak - so, are YOUR best days behind you?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Nancy Pelosi explodes at reporter as she's escorted down Capitol Building steps Trump threatens'land strikes' on Venezuela as CIA begins covert operations in Latin American country and Maduro declares'No to coups' She's the dancer caught'going at it' in bed with Britney Spears. Bella Hadid's health battle takes dark turn: Loved ones reveal hellish new details about model... as ominous texts emerge Diane Keaton's cause of death revealed just days after actress' passing at 79 as her family pens emotional message to fans Emily Ratajkowski fans rejoice as she makes Victoria's Secret show debut at age 34 Murderer's final words and hearty last meal as he's executed after 30 years on death row Nepo babies dare to bare! Celebrity offspring leave nothing to imagination as they dominate Victoria's Secret show... what would their parents say? Victoria's Secret show 2025: Bella Hadid rules the runway after her health woes, Jasmine Tookes opens the show at nine months pregnant and Emily Ratajkowski makes her debut aged 34 as legendary Angels and nepo babies unite after failed woke rebrand Popular food can be used to fight resistant viruses ... and it costs just pennies Disney superfan, 31, vanishes from her Midwest home months after announcing pregnancy... then horrific discovery is made at Walt Disney World Chilling new footage shows knifeman on night he'stabbed Ukrainian refugee to death' on a train in murder that shook America Meghan-linked charity is hit by racism and sexism allegations as staff claim it is a'toxic' and'hostile' workplace Britney Spears unleashes on ex Kevin Federline AND her SONS - accusing him of'gaslighting' and claiming she's seen one boy for just 45 minutes in five years Jailed Diddy's harsh reality check as very unglamorous conditions rapper has to abide by after prison revealed Scientists reveal the surprising age at which your brain reaches its peak - so, are YOUR best days behind you? READ MORE: Actor Tom Hanks thinks 35 is the hardest age - but is he right? With each passing day, you may feel like you're getting further past your peak.


Through the Lens of Doubt: Robust and Efficient Uncertainty Estimation for Visual Place Recognition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) enables robots and autonomous vehicles to identify previously visited locations by matching current observations against a database of known places. However, VPR systems face significant challenges when deployed across varying visual environments, lighting conditions, seasonal changes, and viewpoints changes. Failure-critical VPR applications, such as loop closure detection in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) pipelines, require robust estimation of place matching uncertainty. We propose three training-free uncertainty metrics that estimate prediction confidence by analyzing inherent statistical patterns in similarity scores from any existing VPR method. Similarity Distribution (SD) quantifies match distinctiveness by measuring score separation between candidates; Ratio Spread (RS) evaluates competitive ambiguity among top-scoring locations; and Statistical Uncertainty (SU) is a combination of SD and RS that provides a unified metric that generalizes across datasets and VPR methods without requiring validation data to select the optimal metric. All three metrics operate without additional model training, architectural modifications, or computationally expensive geometric verification. Comprehensive evaluation across nine state-of-the-art VPR methods and six benchmark datasets confirms that our metrics excel at discriminating between correct and incorrect VPR matches, and consistently outperform existing approaches while maintaining negligible computational overhead, making it deployable for real-time robotic applications across varied environmental conditions with improved precision-recall performance.


Lifting Manifolds to Mitigate Pseudo-Alignment in LLM4TS

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pseudo-Alignment is a pervasive challenge in many large language models for time series (LLM4TS) models, often causing them to underperform compared to linear models or randomly initialised backbones. However, there is limited discussion in the community for the reasons that pseudo-alignment occurs. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation into the root causes of pseudo-alignment in LLM4TS and build a connection of pseudo-alignment to the cone effect in LLM. We demonstrate that pseudo-alignment arises from the interplay of cone effect within pretrained LLM components and the intrinsically low-dimensional manifold of time-series data. In addition, we also introduce \textit{\textbf{TimeSUP}}, a novel technique designed to mitigate this issue and improve forecast performance in existing LLM4TS approaches. TimeSUP addresses this by increasing the time series manifold to more closely match the intrinsic dimension of language embeddings, allowing the model to distinguish temporal signals clearly while still capturing shared structures across modalities. As a result, representations for time and language tokens remain distinct yet exhibit high cosine similarity, signifying that the model preserves each modality unique features while learning their commonalities in a unified embedding space. Empirically, TimeSUP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM4TS methods and other lightweight baselines on long-term forecasting performance. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into four existing LLM4TS pipelines and delivers significant improvements in forecasting performance.


Absolute indices for determining compactness, separability and number of clusters

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Finding "true" clusters in a data set is a challenging problem. Clustering solutions obtained using different models and algorithms do not necessarily provide compact and well-separated clusters or the optimal number of clusters. Cluster validity indices are commonly applied to identify such clusters. Nevertheless, these indices are typically relative, and they are used to compare clustering algorithms or choose the parameters of a clustering algorithm. Moreover, the success of these indices depends on the underlying data structure. This paper introduces novel absolute cluster indices to determine both the compactness and separability of clusters. We define a compactness function for each cluster and a set of neighboring points for cluster pairs. This function is utilized to determine the compactness of each cluster and the whole cluster distribution. The set of neighboring points is used to define the margin between clusters and the overall distribution margin. The proposed compactness and separability indices are applied to identify the true number of clusters. Using a number of synthetic and real-world data sets, we demonstrate the performance of these new indices and compare them with other widely-used cluster validity indices.


Is Microsoft's first ever handheld Xbox console worth the wait?

BBC News

Is Microsoft's first ever handheld Xbox console worth the wait? For almost two decades, rumours have swirled about a handheld Xbox console to rival Nintendo and PlayStation. The ROG Xbox Ally has been released worldwide, putting an end to the speculation. It works natively with Xbox's Game Pass subscription service out of the box, meaning members will start off with hundreds of games in their library. But its big trick is that it's really a portable computer running Windows, meaning most digital PC games people already own will work too - so long as they don't need a keyboard and mouse to play.