The Iberostar Group has announced its ambitious plan to install artificial intelligence in its more than 100 hotels globally to become zero waste, reduce food waste and save more than 1,600 tons of food in the first year. This commitment by the company will become a reality thanks to an innovative system, based on technology from the Winnow company, which will contribute to ending food waste and bringing the company closer to its goal of being free of waste sent to landfill by 2025. The Iberostar Group committed itself to this zero-waste objective in 2020 with its own 2030 Agenda, which also includes being carbon neutral by 2030. According to Sabina Fluxá, Vice-Chairman & CEO of Iberostar Group, "Reducing food waste is key to meeting our 2030 Agenda goals. The value of food cannot be underestimated, and, at Iberostar, we want to ensure it is not wasted. In addition to training our employees to address food waste, we have put in place this innovative system to reduce the amount of waste we produce without affecting the guest experience. We are convinced the use of state-of-the-art technology, training, and innovation dedicated to removing food waste will help us reduce climate impacts, achieve our goals, and contribute to broader global goals that benefit the planet."

After months of anticipation, Elon Musk finally took the wraps off Tesla's first AI humanoid robot, 'Optimus' last week. Optimus, which was first announced in August last year, received a frenzied reception at the firm's AI Day event in California on Friday. The bot was filmed emerging from behind a wall with two robotic hands in a heart shape, before taking a few tentative steps to wild applause. Musk said Tesla is planning to sell the bot for'probably less than $20,000' (£17,700) in three to five years' – meaning another long wait for Tesla fans to get their hands on the firm's most anticipated technology. Following its unveiling, MailOnline has taken a look at the Tesla products that have been announced but are still yet to be released - including Cybertruck, Robotaxi and the second-generation Roadster.

We evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models in multilingual settings. We introduce the Multilingual Grade School Math (MGSM) benchmark, by manually translating 250 grade-school math problems from the GSM8K dataset (Cobbe et al., 2021) into ten typologically diverse languages. We find that the ability to solve MGSM problems via chain-of-thought prompting emerges with increasing model scale, and that models have strikingly strong multilingual reasoning abilities, even in underrepresented languages such as Bengali and Swahili. Finally, we show that the multilingual reasoning abilities of language models extend to other tasks such as commonsense reasoning and word-in-context semantic judgment. The MGSM benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.

A central goal in the cognitive sciences is the development of numerical models for mental representations of object concepts. This paper introduces Variational Interpretable Concept Embeddings (VICE), an approximate Bayesian method for embedding object concepts in a vector space using data collected from humans in a triplet odd-one-out task. VICE uses variational inference to obtain sparse, non-negative representations of object concepts with uncertainty estimates for the embedding values. These estimates are used to automatically select the dimensions that best explain the data. We derive a PAC learning bound for VICE that can be used to estimate generalization performance or determine a sufficient sample size for experimental design. VICE rivals or outperforms its predecessor, SPoSE, at predicting human behavior in the triplet odd-one-out task. Furthermore, VICE's object representations are more reproducible and consistent across random initializations, highlighting the unique advantage of using VICE for deriving interpretable embeddings from human behavior.

Speech is the fundamental mode of human communication, and its synthesis has long been a core priority in human-computer interaction research. In recent years, machines have managed to master the art of generating speech that is understandable by humans. But the linguistic content of an utterance encompasses only a part of its meaning. Affect, or expressivity, has the capacity to turn speech into a medium capable of conveying intimate thoughts, feelings, and emotions -- aspects that are essential for engaging and naturalistic interpersonal communication. While the goal of imparting expressivity to synthesised utterances has so far remained elusive, following recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis, a paradigm shift is well under way in the fields of affective speech synthesis and conversion as well. Deep learning, as the technology which underlies most of the recent advances in artificial intelligence, is spearheading these efforts. In the present overview, we outline ongoing trends and summarise state-of-the-art approaches in an attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of this exciting field.

Grasping the commonsense properties of everyday concepts is an important prerequisite to language understanding. While contextualised language models are reportedly capable of predicting such commonsense properties with human-level accuracy, we argue that such results have been inflated because of the high similarity between training and test concepts. This means that models which capture concept similarity can perform well, even if they do not capture any knowledge of the commonsense properties themselves. In settings where there is no overlap between the properties that are considered during training and testing, we find that the empirical performance of standard language models drops dramatically. To address this, we study the possibility of fine-tuning language models to explicitly model concepts and their properties. In particular, we train separate concept and property encoders on two types of readily available data: extracted hyponym-hypernym pairs and generic sentences. Our experimental results show that the resulting encoders allow us to predict commonsense properties with much higher accuracy than is possible by directly fine-tuning language models. We also present experimental results for the related task of unsupervised hypernym discovery.

We present a novel initialization technique for the range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM) problem. In RA-SLAM we consider measurements of point-to-point distances in addition to measurements of rigid transformations to landmark or pose variables. Standard formulations of RA-SLAM approach the problem as non-convex optimization, which requires a good initialization to obtain quality results. The initialization technique proposed here relaxes the RA-SLAM problem to a convex problem which is then solved to determine an initialization for the original, non-convex problem. The relaxation is a second-order cone program (SOCP), which is derived from a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) formulation of the RA-SLAM problem. As a SOCP, the method is highly scalable. We name this relaxation Second-order COnic RElaxation for RA-SLAM (SCORE). To our knowledge, this work represents the first convex relaxation for RA-SLAM. We present real-world and simulated experiments which show SCORE initialization permits the efficient recovery of quality solutions for a variety of challenging single- and multi-robot RA-SLAM problems with thousands of poses and range measurements.

We explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models, and show that compressed prompts can retain a substantive amount of information about the original prompt. For severely compressed prompts, while fine-grained information is lost, abstract information and general sentiments can be retained with surprisingly few parameters, which can be useful in the context of decode-time algorithms for controllability and toxicity reduction. We explore contrastive conditioning to steer language model generation towards desirable text and away from undesirable text, and find that some complex prompts can be effectively compressed into a single token to guide generation. We also show that compressed prompts are largely compositional, and can be constructed such that they can be used to control independent aspects of generated text.

Among the many merits of Roman Słowiński in his so long and so rich scientific carrier, we have to consider his pioneering approach to the use of artificial intelligence methodologies to decision support, and, in particular, to Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) (for an updated state of the art see [48]). In this perspective, the proposal and the development of the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) is a cornerstone in the domain. The DRSA basic idea of a decision support procedure based on a decision model expressed in natural language and obtained from simple preference information in terms of exemplary decisions has attracted the interest of experts and it is now considered one of the three main approaches to MCDA, together with the classical Multiple Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) [58] and the outranking approach [75]. In fact, DRSA is not a mere application to MCDA of concepts and tools already proposed and developed in the domain of artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, data mining and machine learning. Indeed, consideration of preference orders typical for MCDA problems required a reformulation of many important concepts and methodologies, so that DRSA became a methodology viable and interesting per se also in these domains. Consequently, after more or less 25 years from the proposal of DRSA, we try to present a first assessment taking into consideration the basic ideas and the main developments.

This paper proposes a perceptual visual analysis regarding the personality of virtual humans. Many studies have presented findings regarding the way human beings perceive virtual humans with respect to their faces, body animation, motion in the virtual environment and etc. We are interested in investigating the way people perceive visual manifestations of virtual humans' personality traits when they are interactive and organized in groups. Many applications in games and movies can benefit from the findings regarding the perceptual analysis with the main goal to provide more realistic characters and improve the users' experience. We provide experiments with subjects and obtained results indicate that, although is very subtle, people perceive more the extraversion (the personality trait that we measured), into the crowds of virtual humans, when interacting with virtual humans behaviors, than when just observing as a spectator camera.