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My A/C unit came with a cruddy manual. Claude made a better one
PCWorld reports how Claude AI transformed a confusing air conditioner manual into a comprehensive 12-page guide with visuals and maintenance tips. The process involved uploading the generic manual and model number to Claude's Cowork feature, which generated accurate operating procedures and quick-start guides. This demonstrates AI's potential to make complex product documentation more user-friendly and accessible for consumers struggling with manufacturer manuals. Um, what does button do? Our new air conditioner had just arrived, a necessity for a sure-to-be-sizzling New York summer, and already I was scratching my head.
Microsoft is force-installing M365 Copilot again after a brief pause
PCWorld reports Microsoft is resuming forced M365 Copilot installations after a brief pause, targeting completion by July 1st for all Microsoft 365 users. Previous forced installations caused significant backlash and critical bugs, including Copilot accessing confidential emails, contributing to Windows 11's stagnating market share. IT administrators can opt out of automatic installation, while Microsoft tests an "uninstall AI bloat" button in Windows Insider builds despite continuing AI-driven OS plans. Between October 2025 and March 2026, many Microsoft 365 users discovered that the Copilot AI app was automatically installed on their computers. After heavy vocal backlash and several crucial bugs, like the one that allowed Copilot to read confidential emails, the forced installation of Microsoft 365 Copilot was suspended. However, Microsoft has now decided to reinstate the app's forced installation.
700,000-year-old squirrel poop helps scientist recreate an ancient world
Descendants of these rodents are still alive today and are'like tiny Arctic pack rats.' More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Researchers document a cluster of ancient Arctic ground squirrel faecal pellets preserved in permafrost at Hunker Creek, Yukon, in August 2022. These coprolites contain remarkably intact ancient DNA, offering rare glimpses into ice age ecosystems. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.
Hawaii: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models
Improving the visual understanding ability of vision-language models (VLMs) is crucial for enhancing their performance across various tasks. While using multiple pretrained visual experts has shown great promise, it often incurs significant computational costs during training and inference. To address this challenge, we propose HAWAII, a novel framework that distills knowledge from multiple visual experts into a single vision encoder, enabling it to inherit the complementary strengths of several experts with minimal computational overhead. To mitigate conflicts among different teachers and switch between different teacher-specific knowledge, instead of using a fixed set of adapters for multiple teachers, we propose to use teacher-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters with a corresponding router. Each adapter is aligned with a specific teacher, avoiding noisy guidance during distillation. To enable efficient knowledge distillation, we propose fine-grained and coarse-grained distillation. At the fine-grained level, token importance scores are employed to emphasize the most informative tokens from each teacher adaptively. At the coarse-grained level, we summarize the knowledge from multiple teachers and transfer it to the student using a set of general-knowledge LoRA adapters with a router. Extensive experiments on various vision-language tasks demonstrate the superiority of HAWAII, compared to the popular open-source VLMs.
Robot Talk Episode 159 – Robot sensing and manipulation, with Maria Koskinopoulou
Maria Koskinopoulou is an Assistant Professor in Robotics and Computer Vision at Heriot-Watt University. Her research interests include robotic manipulation, perception, robot vision, medical robotics, human-robot interaction, and machine learning. She is involved in major UKRI and EU-funded research projects advancing robotic manipulation, surgical and underwater robotics, autonomous assembly, and waste sorting. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.
RoboChem Flex: democratisation of the autonomous synthesis robot
In a paper published in Nature Synthesis, researchers led by Professor Timothy Noël of the University of Amsterdam's Van't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences present an advance in autonomous laboratory systems for synthesis optimisation. A versatile, modular design and the option for "human-in-the-loop" analytics, RoboChem Flex caters to all synthesis laboratories, large or small. The paper provides all the information to build their own system. According to Professor Noël, this new version of the RoboChem concept developed by his group will democratise the use of autonomous, sophisticated AI-powered synthesis systems. Such systems are often very expensive, so that only well-funded institutions can afford them.
Interview with AAAI Fellow Sanmay Das: multiagent systems
Each year the AAAI recognizes a group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence by appointing them as Fellows. We're talking to some of the 2026 AAAI Fellows to find out more about their work. In this interview, we chat to Sanmay Das, who was elected as a Fellow . Could you start with a quick introduction, where you work, and your general area of research? Broadly speaking, I work in multiagent systems. I've done a lot of work at the intersection of AI and economics, and over the last decade or so I've thought a lot about projects in the AI for social impact and social good space. In particular, my interest has been in the allocation of scarce societal resources, thinking about how AI can be integrated, and what it tells us about systems where we don't necessarily want full free market resource allocation.