Personalized food recommendation systems (Food-RecSys) critically underperform due to fragmented component understanding and the failure of conventional machine learning with vast, imbalanced food data. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, current generic Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP) strategies lack the necessary specialization for the food domain's complexity. This thesis tackles these deficiencies by first identifying and analyzing the essential components for effective Food-RecSys. We introduce two key innovations: a multimedia food logging platform for rich contextual data acquisition and the World Food Atlas, enabling unique geolocation-based food analysis previously unavailable. Building on this foundation, we pioneer the Food Recommendation as Language Processing (F-RLP) framework - a novel, integrated approach specifically architected for the food domain. F-RLP leverages LLMs in a tailored manner, overcoming the limitations of generic models and providing a robust infrastructure for effective, contextual, and truly personalized food recommendations.

To responsibly develop Generative AI (GenAI) products, it is critical to define the scope of acceptable inputs and outputs. What constitutes a "safe" response is an actively debated question. Academic work puts an outsized focus on evaluating models by themselves for general purpose aspects such as toxicity, bias, and fairness, especially in conversational applications being used by a broad audience. In contrast, less focus is put on considering sociotechnical systems in specialized domains. Yet, those specialized systems can be subject to extensive and well-understood legal and regulatory scrutiny. These product-specific considerations need to be set in industry-specific laws, regulations, and corporate governance requirements. In this paper, we aim to highlight AI content safety considerations specific to the financial services domain and outline an associated AI content risk taxonomy. We compare this taxonomy to existing work in this space and discuss implications of risk category violations on various stakeholders. We evaluate how existing open-source technical guardrail solutions cover this taxonomy by assessing them on data collected via red-teaming activities. Our results demonstrate that these guardrails fail to detect most of the content risks we discuss.

There is a growing abundance of publicly available or company-owned audio/video archives, highlighting the increasing importance of efficient access to desired content and information retrieval from these archives. This paper investigates the challenges, solutions, effectiveness, and robustness of speaker retrieval systems developed "in the wild" which involves addressing two primary challenges: extraction of task-relevant labels from limited metadata for system development and evaluation, as well as the unconstrained acoustic conditions encountered in the archive, ranging from quiet studios to adverse noisy environments. While we focus on the publicly-available BBC Rewind archive (spanning 1948 to 1979), our framework addresses the broader issue of speaker retrieval on extensive and possibly aged archives with no control over the content and acoustic conditions. Typically, these archives offer a brief and general file description, mostly inadequate for specific applications like speaker retrieval, and manual annotation of such large-scale archives is unfeasible. We explore various aspects of system development (e.g., speaker diarisation, embedding extraction, query selection) and analyse the challenges, possible solutions, and their functionality. To evaluate the performance, we conduct systematic experiments in both clean setup and against various distortions simulating real-world applications. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the developed speaker retrieval systems, establishing the versatility and scalability of the proposed framework for a wide range of applications beyond the BBC Rewind corpus.

The Trump administration is working on changes to a Biden-era rule that would limit global access to AI chips, including possibly doing away with its splitting the world into tiers that help determine how many advanced semiconductors a country can obtain, three sources familiar with the matter said. The sources said the plans were still under discussion and warned they could change. But if enacted, removing the tiers could open the door to using U.S. chips as an even more powerful negotiating tool in trade talks. The regulation, which was issued in January, is aimed at dividing up access to the most advanced AI chips and controlling certain model weights in order to keep the most sophisticated computing power in the United States and among its allies, and away from China and other countries of concern.

In its report The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, the Tony Blair Institute argues that global institutions such as COP and the UN have failed to make sufficient progress in halting climate change. At the same time, it argues, the public have lost faith in climate policies because the promised green jobs and economic growth have failed to materialise, thanks in part to global instability and the Covid pandemic. Writing in the foreword, Sir Tony says: "Though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they're turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy." He says "any strategy based on either'phasing out' fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail". He also warns against the "alarmist" tone of the debate on climate change, which he says is "riven with irrationality".

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo provides a review of'With Love, Meghan' on'The Ingraham Angle.' Meghan Markle found early fame for starring on a popular television show, but her early auditioning days didn't always land success. The Duchess of Sussex admitted beauty brands were reluctant to hire her due to her natural, freckled complexion. Markle, 43, starred as Rachel Zane for seven years on the legal series "Suits," but prior to hitting it big in entertainment, her commercial agent hit major roadblocks. MEGHAN MARKLE SHOOTS DOWN PRINCE HARRY DIVORCE RUMORS, ADMITS ROYAL COUPLE ARE FINALLY IN'HONEYMOON' PHASE Meghan Markle admitted she couldn't land a beauty commercial due to her natural features. The As Ever lifestyle brand founder, who went makeup-free to record the chat, discussed challenges in the beauty industry during an episode of "The Jamie Kern Lima Show."

The current U.S. administration has launched a wara on academia. Indirect costs, or, more accurately, facility and administration expenses, support research but cannot be directly attributed to a specific project, such as lab infrastructure, utilities, and administrative support. These are real costs; the limit, which has since been suspended by courts, is a severe blow to biomedical research in the U.S. Beyond expanding this limit to other agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the administration is also reportedly considering slashing NSF's annual budget from approximately US 9 billion down to about US 3– 4 billion. This would deal a devastating blow to academic U.S. research, especially computing research. As statedc by the Computing Research Association (CRA), "NSF budget cuts would put the future of U.S. innovation and security at risk."

Russia has rejected a proposal from Ukraine to extend Russian President Vladimir Putin's unilateral three-day ceasefire as the United States grows increasingly impatient with stalled efforts to find a long-term solution to end the war. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Tuesday that Moscow had seen Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's offer to extend Putin's brief early May pause in fighting to 30 days. But Peskov said it would be "difficult to enter into a long-term ceasefire" without first clearing up a number of "questions". Zelenskyy had branded Putin's unilateral truce, which will last from May 8 to 10 and coincides with Moscow's celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, as an "attempt at manipulation". The Ukrainian leader also questioned why Moscow would not agree to Kyiv's call for a ceasefire lasting at least 30 days and starting immediately.

The US House of Representatives has passed the Take It Down Act, a bipartisan bill that criminalizes the "publication of non-consensual, sexually exploitative images," including AI-generated deepfakes that depict "identifiable, real people." It would also compel platforms, such as social networks, to remove those images within 48 hours of being notified. The bill enjoyed overwhelming support in Congress and was cleared for approval by President Trump with a vote of 409 to 2. It passed Senate unanimously in February, and Trump, who previously talked about it while addressing Congress, is expected to sign the bill into law. Nearly every state in the country has its own laws revolving around revenge porn, and there are 20 states that already have laws that cover deepfakes. Take It Down's authors, who include Senator Ted Cruz, explained that those laws "vary in classification of crime and penalty and have uneven criminal prosecution." Victims are also still having a tough time getting their images removed under those laws.

That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents are the AI industry's hypiest new product--intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically useful--Simular AI's S2 agent, for example, intelligently switches between models depending on what it's been told to do--they could also be weaponized to execute cyberattacks. Elsewhere, OpenAI is reported to be throwing its hat into the social media arena, and AI models are getting more adept at making music. Oh, and if the results of the first half-marathon pitting humans against humanoid robots are anything to go by, we won't have to worry about the robot uprising any time soon.