The Tom Hanks' vehicle "Finch" is "Cast Away" revisited. Instead of a young(ish) Hanks stranded on a desert island, we have an old Hanks stranded in a post-apocalyptic world, where a solar flare has destroyed the ozone layer. The UV rays are deadly. The temperature in direct sunlight is 150 degrees, and the empty, dust-covered and windswept streets are littered with desiccated corpses.. Hanks plays the eponymous Finch Weinberg, a tech genius, who lives in St. Louis, Mo., in a warehouse with his real dog Goodyear and his R2D2-like robo-dog Dewy. Finch can only go outside if he wears a spacesuit-like outfit with a space helmet and cooling device attached.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up when all is said and done, but the environmental cost could be significantly higher, with nearby lakes contaminated for decades, according to a new study. A group of researchers, led by those at the University of Tsukuba, have found that Lake Onuma on Mount Akagi could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the disaster. The researchers used the fractional diffusional method and determined that radioactivity concentration will happen for up to 10,000 days following the accident. Just after the nuclear accident, the radioactivity concentration declined sharply, but that decline slows greatly in the months and years that follow. Lake Onuma is a closed lake and has a limited amount of inflow and runoff water. Japan's Lake Onuma could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the Fukushima disaster, a new study has found'Previous investigations have used the two-component decay function model, which is the sum of two exponential functions, to fit the measured 137Cs radioactivity concentration,' one of the study's co-authors, Professor Yuko Hatano, said in a statement.

To mark Israel's Memorial Day in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces musical ensembles collaborated with a company that specializes in synthetic videos, also known as "deepfake" technology, to bring photos from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war to life. They produced a video in which young singers clad in period uniforms and carrying period weapons sang "Hareut," an iconic song commemorating soldiers killed in combat. As they sing, the musicians stare at faded black-and-white photographs they hold. The past comes to life, Harry Potter style. For the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston's Applied Ethics Center have been studying how everyday engagement with AI challenges the way people think about themselves and politics. We've found that AI has the potential to weaken people's capacity to make ordinary judgments.

Veeva [NYSE: VEEV] is the leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry. Committed to innovation, product excellence, and customer success, our customers range from the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs. Veeva's software helps our customers bring medicines and therapies to patients faster. We are the first public company to become a Public Benefit Corporation. As a PBC, we are committed to making the industries we serve more productive, and we are committed to creating high-quality employment opportunities.

Hierarchical forecasting problems arise when time series compose a group structure that naturally defines aggregation and disaggregation coherence constraints for the predictions. In this work, we explore a new forecast representation, the Poisson Mixture Mesh (PMM), that can produce probabilistic, coherent predictions; it is compatible with the neural forecasting innovations, and defines simple aggregation and disaggregation rules capable of accommodating hierarchical structures, unknown during its optimization. We performed an empirical evaluation to compare the PMM \ to other hierarchical forecasting methods on Australian domestic tourism data, where we obtain a 20 percent relative improvement.

With a rise in false, inaccurate, and misleading information in propaganda, news, and social media, real-world Question Answering (QA) systems face the challenges of synthesizing and reasoning over contradicting information to derive correct answers. This urgency gives rise to the need to make QA systems robust to misinformation, a topic previously unexplored. We study the risk of misinformation to QA models by investigating the behavior of the QA model under contradicting contexts that are mixed with both real and fake information. QA, which contains over 10K human-written and model-generated contradicting pairs of contexts. Experiments show that QA models are vulnerable under contradicting contexts brought by misinformation. To defend against such threat, we build a misinformation-aware QA system as a counter-measure that integrates question answering and misinformation detection in a joint fashion. A typical Question Answering (QA) system (Chen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2019; Karpukhin et al., 2020; Lewis et al., 2020b) starts by retrieving a set of relevant context documents from the Web, which are then examined by a machine reader to identify the correct answer. Existing work equate Wikipedia as the web corpus. Therefore, all retrieved context documents are assumed to be clean and trustable. However, real-world QA faces a much noisier environment, where the web corpus is tainted with misinformation.

The catastrophic Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 caused an estimated 250,000 people to evacuate their homes, but scientists have determined certain wildlife species in the area are thriving, suggesting people could eventually return to the region, according to a new study. Researchers at Colorado State University, the University of Georgia and Fukushima University's Institute of Environmental Radioactivity have found that multiple generations of wild boar and rat snakes have not suffered from any significant adverse health effects. Multiple generations of animals have been exposed to radiation levels above the threshold for human occupancy, but have suffered no ill effects. That may be due to the fact that cesium-134, one of the major radioactive materials released during the accident, saw its levels decrease by almost 90 percent. The researchers looked at biomarkers of DNA damage and stress to determine that the boar and snakes were thriving in the area. The researchers looked at the wild boars and snakes between 2016 and 2018, or five to seven years after the earthquake and resulting tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, releasing massive amounts of radioactive material in the environment.

Machine Learning refers to the process through which a computer learns and changes its operations based on patterns identified in vast quantities of data. When we think about machine learning, we think of a few well-known instances. For example, the way Amazon recommends products is remarkably similar to Google searches you've done. Machine learning's reach is far broader than what we are familiar with and observes in our daily lives. Because machine learning is such a young science, the boundaries of its applicability are continuously being pushed outside. Virtual personal assistants were once the stuff of fantasies, but now they can be found in every other home.

Veeva [NYSE: VEEV] is the leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry. Committed to innovation, product excellence, and customer success, our customers range from the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs. Veeva's software helps our customers bring medicines and therapies to patients faster. We are the first public company to become a Public Benefit Corporation. As a PBC, we are committed to making the industries we serve more productive, and we are committed to creating high-quality employment opportunities.

Veeva [NYSE: VEEV] is the leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry. Committed to innovation, product excellence, and customer success, our customers range from the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs. Veeva's software helps our customers bring medicines and therapies to patients faster. We are the first public company to become a Public Benefit Corporation. As a PBC, we are committed to making the industries we serve more productive, and we are committed to creating high-quality employment opportunities.