Officials in San Francisco have voted to give the city's police the power to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations. The 8-3 vote in favour of the move followed an emotionally charged two-hour debate and came despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups in the city on the west coast of the United States. Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that "according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it's definitely not an easy discussion." The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns.

Police in San Francisco will be allowed to deploy potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations. The controversial policy was approved after weeks of scrutiny and a heated debate among the city's board of supervisors during their meeting on Tuesday. Police oversight groups, the ACLU and San Francisco's public defender had urged the 11-member body to reject the police's use of equipment proposal. Opponents of the policy said it would lead to further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with underserved communities. They said the parameters under which use would be allowed were too vague.

We introduce a novel gated recurrent unit (GRU) with a weighted time-delay feedback mechanism in order to improve the modeling of long-term dependencies in sequential data. This model is a discretized version of a continuous-time formulation of a recurrent unit, where the dynamics are governed by delay differential equations (DDEs). By considering a suitable time-discretization scheme, we propose $\tau$-GRU, a discrete-time gated recurrent unit with delay. We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the continuous-time model, and we demonstrate that the proposed feedback mechanism can help improve the modeling of long-term dependencies. Our empirical results show that $\tau$-GRU can converge faster and generalize better than state-of-the-art recurrent units and gated recurrent architectures on a range of tasks, including time-series classification, human activity recognition, and speech recognition.

NASA's Artemis programme is already breaking records, less than two weeks after its very first spaceflight launched. The agency has confirmed its Artemis 1 Orion capsule smashed the record for the furthest distance travelled from Earth by any craft designed to carry humans. At 08:40 EST (13:40 GMT) on Saturday (November 26), Orion reached 248,655 miles from Earth, beating the record set by Apollo 13 in April 1970. Then, at 16:06 EST (21:06 GMT) on Saturday, it reached the farthest point in its orbit – a maximum distance of 268,553 miles. Artemis 1 is an uncrewed test flight for NASA's Artemis programme, comprising the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

Forecasting time series with extreme events has been a challenging and prevalent research topic, especially when the time series data are affected by complicated uncertain factors, such as is the case in hydrologic prediction. Diverse traditional and deep learning models have been applied to discover the nonlinear relationships and recognize the complex patterns in these types of data. However, existing methods usually ignore the negative influence of imbalanced data, or severe events, on model training. Moreover, methods are usually evaluated on a small number of generally well-behaved time series, which does not show their ability to generalize. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel probability-enhanced neural network model, called NEC+, which concurrently learns extreme and normal prediction functions and a way to choose among them via selective back propagation. We evaluate the proposed model on the difficult 3-day ahead hourly water level prediction task applied to 9 reservoirs in California. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits superior generalization ability on data with diverse distributions.

Combining multi-spectral satellite data and machine learning has been suggested as a method for monitoring plastic pollutants in the ocean environment. Recent studies have made theoretical progress regarding the identification of marine plastic via machine learning. However, no study has assessed the application of these methods for mapping and monitoring marine-plastic density. As such, this paper comprised of three main components: (1) the development of a machine learning model, (2) the construction of the MAP-Mapper, an automated tool for mapping marine-plastic density, and finally (3) an evaluation of the whole system for out-of-distribution test locations. The findings from this paper leverage the fact that machine learning models need to be high-precision to reduce the impact of false positives on results. The developed MAP-Mapper architectures provide users choices to reach high-precision ($\textit{abbv.}$ -HP) or optimum precision-recall ($\textit{abbv.}$ -Opt) values in terms of the training/test data set. Our MAP-Mapper-HP model greatly increased the precision of plastic detection to 95\%, whilst MAP-Mapper-Opt reaches precision-recall pair of 87\%-88\%. The MAP-Mapper contributes to the literature with the first tool to exploit advanced deep/machine learning and multi-spectral imagery to map marine-plastic density in automated software. The proposed data pipeline has taken a novel approach to map plastic density in ocean regions. As such, this enables an initial assessment of the challenges and opportunities of this method to help guide future work and scientific study.

This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of such exposure have only been studied in a few constructions in isolation. This paper experiments with (i) the growth rate of the constructicon, (ii) the convergence rate of grammars exposed to independent registers, and (iii) the rate at which constructions are forgotten when they have not been recently observed. These experiments show that the lexicon grows more quickly than the grammar and that the growth rate of the grammar is not dependent on the growth rate of the lexicon. At the same time, register-specific grammars converge onto more similar constructions as the amount of exposure increases. This means that the influence of specific registers becomes less important as exposure increases. Finally, the rate at which constructions are forgotten when they have not been recently observed mirrors the growth rate of the constructicon. This paper thus presents a computational model of usage-based grammar that includes both the emergence and the unentrenchment of constructions.

Minerva CQ, a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is making customer service calls quicker and more efficient for both agents and customers, with a focus on those in the energy sector. The NVIDIA Inception member's name is a mashup of the Roman goddess of wisdom and knowledge -- and collaborative intelligence (CQ), or the combination of human and artificial intelligence. The Minerva CQ platform coaches contact-center agents to drive customer conversations -- whether in voice or web-based chat -- toward the most effective resolutions by offering real-time dialogue suggestions, sentiment analysis and optimal journey flows based on the customer's intent. It also surfaces relevant context, articles, forms and more. Powered by the NVIDIA Riva software development kit, Minerva CQ has best-in-class automatic speech recognition (ASR) capabilities in English, Spanish and Italian.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been widely used by mobile phone intelligent assistants to accomplish tasks such as calendar scheduling or hotel reservation. Current TOD systems usually focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then they would call back-end APIs designed for TODs to perform the task. However, this API-based architecture greatly limits the information-searching capability of intelligent assistants and may even lead to task failure if TOD-specific APIs are not available or the task is too complicated to be executed by the provided APIs. In this paper, we propose a new TOD architecture: GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system (GUI-TOD). A GUI-TOD system can directly perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. Furthermore, we release META-GUI, a dataset for training a Multi-modal convErsaTional Agent on mobile GUI. We also propose a multi-model action prediction and response model, which show promising results on META-GUI. The dataset, codes and leaderboard are publicly available.

Multivariate time series forecasting has long received significant attention in real-world applications, such as energy consumption and traffic prediction. While recent methods demonstrate good forecasting abilities, they have three fundamental limitations. (i) Discrete neural architectures: Interlacing individually parameterized spatial and temporal blocks to encode rich underlying patterns leads to discontinuous latent state trajectories and higher forecasting numerical errors. (ii) High complexity: Discrete approaches complicate models with dedicated designs and redundant parameters, leading to higher computational and memory overheads. (iii) Reliance on graph priors: Relying on predefined static graph structures limits their effectiveness and practicability in real-world applications. In this paper, we address all the above limitations by proposing a continuous model to forecast $\textbf{M}$ultivariate $\textbf{T}$ime series with dynamic $\textbf{G}$raph neural $\textbf{O}$rdinary $\textbf{D}$ifferential $\textbf{E}$quations ($\texttt{MTGODE}$). Specifically, we first abstract multivariate time series into dynamic graphs with time-evolving node features and unknown graph structures. Then, we design and solve a neural ODE to complement missing graph topologies and unify both spatial and temporal message passing, allowing deeper graph propagation and fine-grained temporal information aggregation to characterize stable and precise latent spatial-temporal dynamics. Our experiments demonstrate the superiorities of $\texttt{MTGODE}$ from various perspectives on five time series benchmark datasets.