Think you know what lurks beneath you when you take a dip in the ocean? Scientists have discovered 39 species that are'potentially new to science', while exploring up to 16,700 feet (5,100 metres) underwater. A robot was sent down to the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the central Pacific Ocean - one of the least explored regions of the world - to collect specimens of deep sea creatures. The researchers, from the Natural History Museum in London, recovered 39 brand new species of megafauna as well as nine known species. Amongst those found were spindly starfish, tulip-shaped sea sponges, prickly urchins and'gummy squirrel' sea cucumbers.

One of the more evocative platforms for AI art, Midjourney, has now opened to everyone in beta mode. This is the second time that the platform has opened to all as a beta. On July 18, the platform opened up for 24 hours. In an email sent out to Midjourney beta testers on Tuesday, however, founder David Holz wrote that the "Midjourney beta is now open to everyone." Midjourney is one of the more interesting entrants in the small but growing field of AI art, which takes user-generated queries, runs them through an AI algorithm, and lets the algorithm pull from its source images and apply various artistic techniques to the resulting image.

Amid Taiwan's annual Han Kuang war games, a Chinese Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was spotted off the island's east coast Monday. The UAV, a reconnaissance and strike vehicle, is dubbed the "Twin-Tailed Scorpion." The "Twin-Tailed Scorpion" reportedly flew from the East China Sea area through the Miyako Strait between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyakojima, a statement issued by the Japanese Defense Ministry said. After entering the Pacific Ocean, the UAV turned southwest and flew past the Sakishima Islands. The UAV was then seen heading northwest toward the Bashi Channel and northeastern Taiwan, its last reported position was off the coast of Taiwan's Hualien County, deep inside the eastern sector of Taiwan's ADIZ, reported Taiwan News.

China has for the first time sent a TB001 combat and reconnaissance drone on a solo mission through Okinawa Prefecture's Miyako Strait, traveling from the East China Sea into the Pacific near Taiwan, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry. The flight of the drone, which has a maximum range of 6,000 kilometers and can carry missiles and precision guided bombs, occurred Monday from the morning through the afternoon. The Defense Ministry said it scrambled fighter jets to monitor the drone, which did not violate the country's territorial airspace. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Prior work has demonstrated that data augmentation is useful for improving dialogue state tracking. However, there are many types of user utterances, while the prior method only considered the simplest one for augmentation, raising the concern about poor generalization capability. In order to better cover diverse dialogue acts and control the generation quality, this paper proposes controllable user dialogue act augmentation (CUDA-DST) to augment user utterances with diverse behaviors. With the augmented data, different state trackers gain improvement and show better robustness, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on MultiWOZ 2.1

If you have a habit of perusing satellite imagery of the world's oceans--and who doesn't, really?--you might get lucky and spot long, thin clouds, like white slashes across the sea. That's a peculiar phenomenon known as a ship track. As cargo ships chug along, flinging sulfur into the atmosphere, they actually trace their routes for satellites to see. That's because those pollutants rise into low-level clouds and plump them up by acting as nuclei that attract water vapor, which also brightens the clouds. Counterintuitively, these pollution-derived tracks actually have a cooling effect on the climate, since brighter clouds bounce more of the sun's energy back into space.

As machine learning has made its way into more and more areas of our lives, concerns about algorithmic bias have escalated. Machine learning models, which today facilitate decisions about everything from hiring and lending to medical diagnosis and criminal sentencing, may appear to be data-driven and impartial, at least to naïve users--but the typically opaque models are only as good the data they are trained on, and only as ethical as the value judgments embedded in the algorithms. The burgeoning field of algorithmic fairness, part of the much broader field of responsible computing, is aiming to remedy the situation. For several years now, along with philosophers, legal scholars, and experts in other fields, computer scientists have been tackling the issue. As Stanford University computer science professor Omer Reingold likes to put it, "We are part of the problem, and we should be part of the solution."

Automated detection of anomalous trajectories is an important problem with considerable applications in intelligent transportation systems. Many existing studies have focused on distinguishing anomalous trajectories from normal trajectories, ignoring the large differences between anomalous trajectories. A recent study has made great progress in identifying abnormal trajectory patterns and proposed a two-stage algorithm for anomalous trajectory detection and classification (ATDC). This algorithm has excellent performance but suffers from a few limitations, such as high time complexity and poor interpretation. Here, we present a careful theoretical and empirical analysis of the ATDC algorithm, showing that the calculation of anomaly scores in both stages can be simplified, and that the second stage of the algorithm is much more important than the first stage. Hence, we develop a FastATDC algorithm that introduces a random sampling strategy in both stages. Experimental results show that FastATDC is 10 to 20 times faster than ATDC on real datasets. Moreover, FastATDC outperforms the baseline algorithms and is comparable to the ATDC algorithm.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done," Sydney Carton thinks on his way to the guillotine. That far better thing is dying tragically, for many reasons: to save an innocent man, to fulfill his own redemption, and--of course--to make us cry at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. The death scene is one of the sharpest tools in a writer's toolbox, as likely to wound the writer themself as the reader--for if a well-written death scene can be thrilling, terrifying, or filled with despair, so can a poorly written one be bathetic, stupid, and eye-rolling. But let's not talk about those. Let's talk about the good ones, the deathless death scenes. We've assembled the 50 greatest fictional deaths of all time--the most moving, most funny, most shocking, most influential scenes from books, movies, TV, theater, video games, and more. Spoilers abound: It's a list that spans nearly 2,500 years of human culture, from Athens to A24, and is so competitive that even poor Sydney Carton and his famous last words couldn't make it. We've also talked to many of the creators behind the scenes on our list to ask them how they wrote them, why they killed off characters we loved, what makes a great death scene, and what final moments from fiction have stuck with them all their lives. We've made this list during a pandemic, as real-life death has stalked us all, more tangible than ever. After all, one of the many things art can do is to help us navigate the pitfalls of life, and there's no deeper pitfall than the final one. Here are the scenes that have shown us all what the big goodbye might actually be like, when it comes. Imagine Imagine the horror in Athens' Theatre of Dionysus at the premiere of Medea, as the audience heard the desperate cries of Medea's two sons while she ruthlessly stabbed them to death.

Ten years ago, the authors posited that being a data scientist was the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” A decade later, does the claim stand up? The job has grown in popularity and is generally well-paid, and the field is projected to experience more growth than almost any other by 2029. But the job has changed, in both large and small ways. It’s become better institutionalized, the scope of the job has been redefined, the technology it relies on has made huge strides, and the importance of non-technical expertise, such as ethics and change management, has grown. How it operates in companies — and how executives need to think about managing data science efforts — has changed, too, as businesses now need to create and oversee diverse data science teams rather than searching for data scientist unicorns. Finally, companies need to think about what comes next, and how they can begin to think about democratizing data science.