What is your research area? My research topic, at a high level, hasn't changed much since my dissertation. It has always been the problem of physical scene understanding - building machines that see, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Besides learning algorithms, what are the levels of abstraction needed by Al systems in their representations, and where do they come from? I aim to answer these fundamental questions, drawing inspiration from nature, i.e., the physical world itself, and from human cognition.

Intelligent audio and intuitive tools are transforming collaboration from connection to creativity, says Sam Sabet, chief technology officer at Shure, and Brendan Ittelson, chief ecosystem officer at Zoom. When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined what clear, reliable communication can mean in a hybrid world. For major audio and communications enterprises like Shure and Zoom, that transformation has been powered by artificial intelligence, new acoustic technologies, and a shared mission: making connection effortless. Necessity during the pandemic accelerated years of innovation in months. Audio and video just working is a baseline for collaboration, says chief ecosystem officer at Zoom, Brendan Ittelson. That expectation has shifted from connecting people to enhancing productivity and creativity across the entire ecosystem. Audio is a foundation for trust, understanding, and collaboration.

Why apply AI to figure skating? Skaters can always keep pushing, higher, faster, stronger. OOFSkate is all about helping skaters figure out a way to rotate a little bit faster in their jumps or jump a little bit higher. The system helps skaters catch things that perhaps could pass an eye test, but that might allow them to target some high-value areas of opportunity. The artistic side of skating is much harder to evaluate than the technical elements because it's subjective.

India plans AI'data city' on staggering scale Information technology minister for India's Andhra Pradesh state, Nara Lokesh, speaks during an interview in New Delhi in January. New Delhi - As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new data city to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says. The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it, said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India's AI push. And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we've got to embrace it, he said ahead of an international AI summit this week in New Delhi. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

In this episode of, our hosts dive into WIRED's scoop about a secret Trump administration campaign extending right into your backyard. This week, hosts Brian Barrett, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer discuss WIRED's big scoop on ICE's startling plans to expand to nearly every state in the US. Plus, a WIRED writer lets the viral AI assistant OpenClaw run his life for a week to give listeners a peek of what AI agents can and can't do. ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . I want to continue a conversation that we started yesterday in Slack after work hours for some of us. And this is about the men's short program-- But very specifically want to pick up on the conversation where Zoë had very strong feelings about the results of men's figure skating. I feel like we need to back up because you and Leah authentically care about the Olympics so much and I think just know more about sports than I do. I deeply have never engaged with sports ever, just as a whole rule, as a category. It doesn't exist in my life. Say the lines, say the lines, Zoë, or I'm going to read them verbatim from slack. Wait, I don't even know what you're talking about. I was merely surprised when I watched because the Americans went, I thought, wow, that guy basically fell over and was clumping around the ice, and then Japan went, and they were sailing around like little swans, and then when the gold medal came, it went to the Americans. I couldn't believe what had happened. No one else seemed outraged. For a little backup for our non-ice skating Olympic fans, I was always referring to Ilia Malinin, who a number of publications and sports experts say might actually be one of the greatest figure skaters of all time.

How can robots acquire skills through interactions with the physical world? One of the key challenges in building robots for household or industrial settings is the need to master the control of high-degree-of-freedom systems such as mobile manipulators. Reinforcement learning has been a promising avenue for acquiring robot control policies, however, scaling to complex systems has proved tricky. In their work SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL, and introduce a method that renders real-world reinforcement learning feasible for complex embodiments. We caught up with Jiaheng to find out more.

You were awarded an Honourable Mention for the 2019 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. What was the topic of your dissertation research, and what were the main contributions or findings? My PhD dissertation was on the topic of Visual Question Answering, called VQA. We proposed the task of open-ended and free-form VQA - a new way to benchmark computer vision models by asking them questions about images. We curated a large-scale dataset for researchers to train and test their models on this task.

We asked attendees of Super Bowl LX's pregame festivities for their takes on the competing halftime shows, the potential for ICE actions, and the influence of Silicon Valley on the event. To say this year's Super Bowl came at a charged time in American culture and politics is, perhaps, an understatement. While the pair of teams who took the field Sunday--the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots--comprised a pretty classic matchup (no underdogs here!), the rest of the event was set to be anything but. Santa Clara's Levi's Stadium is in the heart of Silicon Valley, just a few miles from the corporate headquarters of Nvidia and AMD, whose chips are powering the AI arms race that had competitors OpenAI and Anthropic sparring via rival Super Bowl ads . There was an explosion in sports "trading" activity on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket in the lead-up to the game, even in states like California where traditional sports betting is illegal. Sunday could prove to be an extraordinary success for prediction markets, as the industry becomes more mainstream . Fresh off a historic Grammy Album of the Year win (a first for a Spanish-language album), the unapologetically political Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny headlined --a choice that sparked a perhaps inevitable MAGA backlash. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA organized an alternative program called The All-American Halftime Show, featuring the likes of Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert. Never mind that Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, and therefore an American citizen. Rumors were even buzzing about possible actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Super Bowl. Even though the NFL and California governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that there would be " no immigration enforcement tied to the game," anti-ICE protesters were on the streets. We caught up with football fans at a tailgate five minutes away from Levi's Stadium to hear their thoughts on all the drama. Here's what they had to say.

World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill speaks during an interview in Washington on Feb. 3. | JIJI WASHINGTON - World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill has expressed hopes for Japan's cooperation in addressing global economic disparities that may widen due to the uneven adoption of artificial intelligence technology. In a recent interview, Gill said he believes that productivity gains from the adoption of AI could become a key driver of growth in a global economy that has lost its longterm growth momentum. Although the uneven adoption of AI could widen global economic disparities, Gill said Japan could play a key role in addressing this risk by promoting technology transfer through trade and investment. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Your story in this week's issue, " Predictions and Presentiments," is drawn from your forthcoming book, " Beginning Middle End," which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening? Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now.