Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) models face significant performance limitations due to insufficient training data availability. In this article, we address the challenge of limited data in SLR by introducing a novel and lightweight sign generation model based on CMLPe. This model, coupled with a synthetic data pretraining approach, consistently improves recognition accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art results for the LSFB and DiSPLaY datasets using our Mamba-SL and Transformer-SL classifiers. Our findings reveal that synthetic data pretraining outperforms traditional augmentation methods in some cases and yields complementary benefits when implemented alongside them. Our approach democratizes sign generation and synthetic data pretraining for SLR by providing computationally efficient methods that achieve significant performance improvements across diverse datasets.

First, they showed the world how easy it is to add facial recognition to Meta's smart glasses. Former Harvard students Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen this week announced Halo, a startup of roughly 11 people working to develop always-recording smart glasses. The pair dropped out of Harvard to develop Halo X, smart glasses with a display on the lens that can answer any question someone asks. Powered by a combination of Google's Gemini and Perplexity large language models, the idea is that these glasses will always be listening to the world around you via the built-in microphones (there won't be a camera in this first model.) If someone asks, "What's the capital of Peru?" just look at the display on the glasses, and you'll be able to see the answer.

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent robots, AI and automation. The annual RoboCup event, where teams gather from across the globe to take part in competitions across a number of leagues, this year took place in Salvador, Brazil from 15-21 July. In a series of interviews, we've been meeting some of the RoboCup trustees, committee members, and participants, to find out more about their respective leagues. Christoph Steup is an Executive Committee member and oversees the @Work League. Ahead of the event in Brazil, we spoke to Christoph to find out more about the @Work League, the tasks that teams need to complete, and future plans for the League.

At least 18 people have been killed and dozens injured in two attacks in Colombia attributed to dissident factions of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group. In Cali, the country's third most populated city, a vehicle packed with explosives detonated on Thursday near a military aviation school, in an incident that left six people dead and 71 injured, according to the mayor's office. Hours earlier, a National Police Black Hawk helicopter participating in a coca leaf crop eradication operation was downed by a drone in the municipality of Amalfi, in the department of Antioquia, killing 12 police officers. Colombian President Gustavo Petro blamed the attacks on dissident factions of the now-defunct FARC group that have rejected a 2016 peace agreement to end a prolonged internal conflict that has left more than 450,000 dead in the country. Petro said on X that the attack on the police helicopter occurred as the aircraft was transporting personnel to an area in Antioquia, in northern Colombia, to eradicate coca leaf crops, the raw material for cocaine.

Based on the form of causal knowledge, we divide the related works into two categories, i.e.,