South America
Watch: Families in anxious wait for students trapped under collapsed school in Indonesia
Four students have died after a school building collapsed in Indonesia on Monday, 99 others were taken to hospital but it is thought 38 people are still trapped. The BBC reports from a nearby centre where relatives face an anxious wait for any updates. Rescuers say they have been able to communicate with seven students and give them oxygen. Watch: Moments as 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit Philippines At least 69 people are killed after it struck on Tuesday night with officials declaring a state of calamity. Social media footage showed the massive crater in Thailand's capital leaving cars teetering on the edge.
Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over 'AI actor' Tilly Norwood
Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over'AI actor' Tilly Norwood An AI actor named Tilly Norwood has been causing a stir after its Dutch creators said the synthetic performer is in talks with talent agencies. Norwood could be mistaken for a young, aspiring actress when one glances at its social media. The brunette poses for photos and showcases a fully AI-generated comedy sketch, where it is described as having girl next door vibes. I may be AI, but I'm feeling very real emotions right now, Tilly's creators wrote on her page. I am so excited for what's coming next!
90% Faster, 100% Code-Free: MLLM-Driven Zero-Code 3D Game Development
Yang, Runxin, Wan, Yuxuan, Li, Shuqing, Lyu, Michael R.
Developing 3D games requires specialized expertise across multiple domains, including programming, 3D modeling, and engine configuration, which limits access to millions of potential creators. Recently, researchers have begun to explore automated game development. However, existing approaches face three primary challenges: (1) limited scope to 2D content generation or isolated code snippets; (2) requirement for manual integration of generated components into game engines; and (3) poor performance on handling interactive game logic and state management. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate potential capabilities to ease the game generation task, a critical gap still remains in translating these outputs into production-ready, executable game projects based on game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces UniGen, the first end-to-end coordinated multi-agent framework that automates zero-coding development of runnable 3D games from natural language requirements. Specifically, UniGen uses a Planning Agent that interprets user requirements into structured blueprints and engineered logic descriptions; after which a Generation Agent produces executable C# scripts; then an Automation Agent handles engine-specific component binding and scene construction; and lastly a Debugging Agent provides real-time error correction through conversational interaction. We evaluated UniGen on three distinct game prototypes. Results demonstrate that UniGen not only democratizes game creation by requiring no coding from the user, but also reduces development time by 91.4%. We release UniGen at https://github.com/yxwan123/UniGen. A video demonstration is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyJjFfnxUx0.
Perceptual Influence: Improving the Perceptual Loss Design for Low-Dose CT Enhancement
Viana, Gabriel A., Pereira, Luis F. Alves, Ren, Tsang Ing, Cavalcanti, George D. C., Sijbers, Jan
Perceptual losses have emerged as powerful tools for training networks to enhance Low-Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) images, offering an alternative to traditional pixel-wise losses such as Mean Squared Error, which often lead to over-smoothed reconstructions and loss of clinically relevant details in LDCT images. The perceptual losses operate in a latent feature space defined by a pretrained encoder and aim to preserve semantic content by comparing high-level features rather than raw pixel values. However, the design of perceptual losses involves critical yet underexplored decisions, including the feature representation level, the dataset used to pretrain the encoder, and the relative importance assigned to the perceptual component during optimization. In this work, we introduce the concept of perceptual influence (a metric that quantifies the relative contribution of the perceptual loss term to the total loss) and propose a principled framework to assess the impact of the loss design choices on the model training performance. Through systematic experimentation, we show that the widely used configurations in the literature to set up a perceptual loss underperform compared to better-designed alternatives. Our findings show that better perceptual loss designs lead to significant improvements in noise reduction and structural fidelity of reconstructed CT images, without requiring any changes to the network architecture. We also provide objective guidelines, supported by statistical analysis, to inform the effective use of perceptual losses in LDCT denoising. Our source code is available at https://github.com/vngabriel/perceptual-influence.
Neglected Risks: The Disturbing Reality of Children's Images in Datasets and the Urgent Call for Accountability
Caetano, Carlos, Santos, Gabriel O. dos, Petrucci, Caio, Barros, Artur, Laranjeira, Camila, Ribeiro, Leo S. F., de Mendonรงa, Jรบlia F., Santos, Jefersson A. dos, Avila, Sandra
Including children's images in datasets has raised ethical concerns, particularly regarding privacy, consent, data protection, and accountability. These datasets, often built by scraping publicly available images from the Internet, can expose children to risks such as exploitation, profiling, and tracking. Despite the growing recognition of these issues, approaches for addressing them remain limited. We explore the ethical implications of using children's images in AI datasets and propose a pipeline to detect and remove such images. As a use case, we built the pipeline on a Vision-Language Model under the Visual Question Answering task and tested it on the #PraCegoVer dataset. We also evaluate the pipeline on a subset of 100,000 images from the Open Images V7 dataset to assess its effectiveness in detecting and removing images of children. The pipeline serves as a baseline for future research, providing a starting point for more comprehensive tools and methodologies. While we leverage existing models trained on potentially problematic data, our goal is to expose and address this issue. We do not advocate for training or deploying such models, but instead call for urgent community reflection and action to protect children's rights. Ultimately, we aim to encourage the research community to exercise - more than an additional - care in creating new datasets and to inspire the development of tools to protect the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups, particularly children.
Neighbor-aware informal settlement mapping with graph convolutional networks
Hallopeau, Thomas, Guรฉrin, Joris, Demagistri, Laurent, Barcellos, Christovam, Dessay, Nadine
Mapping informal settlements is crucial for addressing challenges related to urban planning, public health, and infrastructure in rapidly growing cities. Geospatial machine learning has emerged as a key tool for detecting and mapping these areas from remote sensing data. However, existing approaches often treat spatial units independently, neglecting the relational structure of the urban fabric. We propose a graph-based framework that explicitly incorporates local geographical context into the classification process. Each spatial unit (cell) is embedded in a graph structure along with its adjacent neighbors, and a lightweight Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is trained to classify whether the central cell belongs to an informal settlement. Experiments are conducted on a case study in Rio de Janeiro using spatial cross-validation across five distinct zones, ensuring robustness and generaliz-ability across heterogeneous urban landscapes. Our method outperforms standard baselines, improving Kappa coefficient by 17 points over individual cell classification. We also show that graph-based modeling surpasses simple feature concatenation of neighboring cells, demonstrating the benefit of encoding spatial structure for urban scene understanding.
European leaders meet in high-security Danish summit after drone disruption
Danish PM calls for strong answer from EU leaders to Russia's hybrid attacks EU leaders have met in Copenhagen under pressure to boost European defence after a series of Russian incursions into EU airspace, and days after drones targeted Danish airports. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters that from a European perspective there is only one country... willing to threaten us and that is Russia, and therefore we need a very strong answer back. The incursions have become most acute for countries on the EU's eastern flank such as Poland and Estonia. A number of member states have already backed plans for a multi-layered drone wall to quickly detect, then track and destroy Russian drones. We meet at a time when Russia have intensified their attacks in Ukraine, where we have seen Russian airspace violations and unwanted drone activity in several European countries, Frederiksen told a news conference after the talks had concluded.
Unpicking the peace plan map
President Trump has announced a 20-point peace plan to end the war in Gaza, showing various lines of Israeli troop withdrawal should President Trump's plan go ahead. BBC Verify has analysed this map alongside the latest satellite imagery and the Israeli military's control of Gaza. Prime Minister Starmer says the move will revive the hope of peace but Israel says it is nothing but a reward for jihadist Hamas. BBC Verify's Merlyn Thomas looks at the latest Israeli strikes on buildings in Gaza City city over the weekend. BBC Verify analyses footage of the suspected drone attacks and images of a device found after the incident.