South America
YouTube Thinks AI Is Its Next Big Bang
On its 20th anniversary, YouTube is venturing into an era of AI-generated video, and may never be the same. Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for second-rate content, and overly cautious on what users could upload, it flopped . In 2006, Google snapped up that year-old company, figuring it would sort out the IP stuff later. Though the $1.65 billion purchase price for YouTube was about a billion dollars more than its valuation, it was one of the greatest bargains ever.
AI-Driven Disaster Response and Displacement Monitoring
The 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquakes, also known as the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, were two catastrophic events that struck nine hours apart on February 6, 2023, with epicenters in the Pazarcık and Elbistan districts of Kahramanmaraş, and magnitudes of 7.8 Mw and 7.5 Mw, respectively (see Figure 1).
Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI 'Superintelligence'
The complaint, filed in July, alleges Meta has been torrenting and seeding Strike 3's videos since 2018. Associated exhibits and details of the complaint were unsealed last week. Strike 3 alleges Meta's motive was partly to obtain otherwise difficult to scrape visual angles, parts of the human body, and extended, uninterrupted scenes--rare in mainstream movies and TV--to help it create what Mark Zuckerberg calls AI "superintelligence." "They have an interest in getting our content because it can give them a competitive advantage for the quality, fluidity, and humanity of the AI," alleges Christian Waugh, an attorney for Strike 3. This process made Strike 3's porn videos accessible to minors, the complaint alleges, since BitTorrent does not have age verification.
Skeletal remains of missing man found by walker
The skeletal remains of a man who went missing six years ago were found by a walker in a secluded area in south Wales, an inquest has heard. Jordan Moray, from Cwmbach, near Aberdare in Rhondda Cynon Taf, was reported missing from his flat with his games console still running and mobile phone on charge in July 2019. Despite extensive police searches, his remains were not found until 29 August 2025 . On Friday, an inquest at Pontypridd Coroner's Court heard the discovery was made in a remote area near Merthyr Tydfil. South Wales Police previously said it had received a report of human remains near the Llwyn-on Reservoir in Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, also known as the Brecon Beacons .
Self-supervised learning for soccer ball detection and beyond: interview with winners of the RoboCup 2025 best paper award
This is the focus of work by and, which won the best paper award at the recent RoboCup symposium . The symposium takes place alongside the annual RoboCup competition, which this year was held in Salvador, Brazil. We caught up with some of the authors to find out more about the work, how their method can be transferred to applications beyond RoboCup, and their future plans for the competition. Could you start by giving us a brief description of the problem that you were trying to solve in your paper "Self-supervised Feature Extraction for Enhanced Ball Detection on Soccer Robots"? The main challenge we faced was that deep learning generally requires a large amount of labeled data. This is not a major problem for common tasks that have already been studied, because you can usually find labeled datasets online.
Houthi drone crashes into hotel in Israel's Eilat
A drone crashed into a hotel in the southern Israeli city of Eilat on Thursday, causing a fire but no casualties, authorities said. Yemen's Houthi group, who have been firing drones and missiles in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack. Palestinians turn to the sea to flee Israel's bombardment Trump says US wants Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base back from Taliban What did Jimmy Kimmel say about Charlie Kirk's killing?
Kim Jong Un declares AI military drone development a 'top priority'
Kim Jong Un declares AI military drone development a'top priority' North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has said the use of artificial intelligence is a "top priority" in modernising his country's increasingly sophisticated weapons technology and building up drone capabilities, state media reports. During a visit to the Unmanned Aeronautical Technology Complex in the capital Pyongyang on Thursday, Kim presided over performance tests of multipurpose drones and unmanned surveillance vehicles, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Friday. Kim also called for "expanding and strengthening the serial production capacity of drones". The visit to the aeronautical complex comes just a week after Kim oversaw another test of a new solid-fuel rocket engine designed for intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he hailed as a "significant" expansion of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities. North Korea's military power includes nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an increasing stockpile of nuclear weapons and a nascent spy satellite programme, according to the United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Explaining deep learning for ECG using time-localized clusters
Boubekki, Ahcène, Patlatzoglou, Konstantinos, Barker, Joseph, Ng, Fu Siong, Ribeiro, Antônio H.
Deep learning has significantly advanced electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis, enabling automatic annotation, disease screening, and prognosis beyond traditional clinical capabilities. However, understanding these models remains a challenge, limiting interpretation and gaining knowledge from these developments. In this work, we propose a novel interpretability method for convolutional neural networks applied to ECG analysis. Our approach extracts time-localized clusters from the model's internal representations, segmenting the ECG according to the learned characteristics while quantifying the uncertainty of these representations. This allows us to visualize how different waveform regions contribute to the model's predictions and assess the certainty of its decisions. By providing a structured and interpretable view of deep learning models for ECG, our method enhances trust in AI-driven diagnostics and facilitates the discovery of clinically relevant electrophysiological patterns.
Combining Minkowski and Chebyshev: New distance proposal and survey of distance metrics using k-nearest neighbours classifier
This work proposes a distance that combines Minkowski and Chebyshev distances and can be seen as an intermediary distance. This combination not only achieves efficient run times in neighbourhood iteration tasks in Z^2, but also obtains good accuracies when coupled with the k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) classifier. The proposed distance is approximately 1.3 times faster than Manhattan distance and 329.5 times faster than Euclidean distance in discrete neighbourhood iterations. An accuracy analysis of the k-NN classifier using a total of 33 datasets from the UCI repository, 15 distances and values assigned to k that vary from 1 to 200 is presented. In this experiment, the proposed distance obtained accuracies that were better than the average more often than its counterparts (in 26 cases out of 33), and also obtained the best accuracy more frequently (in 9 out of 33 cases).
Binarized Neural Networks Converge Toward Algorithmic Simplicity: Empirical Support for the Learning-as-Compression Hypothesis
Sakabe, Eduardo Y., Abrahão, Felipe S., Simões, Alexandre, Colombini, Esther, Costa, Paula, Gudwin, Ricardo, Zenil, Hector
Understanding and controlling the informational complexity of neural networks is a central challenge in machine learning, with implications for generalization, optimization, and model capacity. While most approaches rely on entropy-based loss functions and statistical metrics, these measures often fail to capture deeper, causally relevant algorithmic regularities embedded in network structure. We propose a shift toward algorithmic information theory, using Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) as a first proxy. Grounded in algorithmic probability (AP) and the universal distribution it defines, our approach characterizes learning dynamics through a formal, causally grounded lens. We apply the Block Decomposition Method (BDM) -- a scalable approximation of algorithmic complexity based on AP -- and demonstrate that it more closely tracks structural changes during training than entropy, consistently exhibiting stronger correlations with training loss across varying model sizes and randomized training runs. These results support the view of training as a process of algorithmic compression, where learning corresponds to the progressive internalization of structured regularities. In doing so, our work offers a principled estimate of learning progression and suggests a framework for complexity-aware learning and regularization, grounded in first principles from information theory, complexity, and computability.