Microsoft's six-year-old program to make HoloLens headsets for the US Army could be getting some extra help. If the Department of Defense approves the deal, the company will expand its existing partnership with Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey's defense startup, for the next stages of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program. Microsoft, which spearheaded the program, would transition into supplying AI and cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, Anduril would do pretty much everything else, including "oversight of production, future development of hardware and software and delivery timelines." Anduril makes a wide array of defense tech, including drone interceptors, sentry towers, comms jammers, drones and even an autonomous submarine. But given Luckey's background as the primary inventor of the Oculus Rift -- and, by extension, the modern consumer XR industry -- the IVAS program could perhaps be the defense tech startup's most natural fit.

In discrete undirected graphical models, the conditional independence of node labels Y is specified by the graph structure. We study the case where there is another input random vector X (e.g.

In many practical machine learning problems, the acquisition of labeled data is often expensive and/or time consuming. This motivates us to study a problem as follows: given a label budget, how to select data points to label such that the learning performance is optimized. We propose a selective labeling method by analyzing the out-of-sample error of Laplacian regularized Least Squares (LapRLS). In particular, we derive a deterministic out-of-sample error bound for LapRLS trained on subsampled data, and propose to select a subset of data points to label by minimizing this upper bound. Since the minimization is a combinational problem, we relax it into continuous domain and solve it by projected gradient descent. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

We formulate clustering aggregation as a special instance of Maximum-Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem. For a given dataset, an attributed graph is constructed from the union of the input clusterings generated by different underlying clustering algorithms with different parameters. The vertices, which represent the distinct clusters, are weighted by an internal index measuring both cohesion and separation. The edges connect the vertices whose corresponding clusters overlap. Intuitively, an optimal aggregated clustering can be obtained by selecting an optimal subset of non-overlapping clusters partitioning the dataset together.

This week in tech: Elon Musk and Donald Trump flood the zone and deploy brinkmanship as a negotiating tactic; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement learns search engine optimization amid arrests and deportations; and Spotify tries to soften its algorithmic image with human-centric public relations. Donald Trump has issued a record number of executive orders since his presidency began: ending birthright citizenship, banning gender transitions for anyone under 19, pardoning the rioters of the January 6 attack, and more. Elon Musk, the world's richest man in charge of the "department of government efficiency", has raided an equally dizzying swath of federal agencies with the stated goal of "slashing waste, fraud, and abuse". Among the half-dozen bureaus are the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Education, Department of Labor and, most viciously, the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Trump and Musk are doing their utmost to "flood the zone" – a tactic that the former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon has touted as one that will purposefully overwhelm the opposition and the media.

Vance meets with Prime Minister Modi after making his debut as VP on the world stage at a high-stakes summit on AI in Europe. Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) systems must not become tainted with "ideological bias" and cautioned against coordinating with "hostile foreign adversaries" on AI capabilities. Vance appeared Tuesday at the AI Action Summit in Paris, where world leaders, top tech executives and policymakers teamed up to hash out tech policy and its intersection with global security, economics and governance. The appearance marked his first foreign trip as vice president. While the Trump administration has signaled it plans to take an approach that favors deregulation of AI, Vance's appearance at the summit coincides with recent attempts from the European Union to enforce harsher regulations aimed at promoting greater safety.

This week is the AI Action Summit in Paris and the European Union is using it as an opportunity to deep dive into the growing sector. The bloc has announced it's putting 200 billion ( 206 billion) toward AI development. This number includes 20 billion ( 20.6 billion) for AI gigafactories that process and train large models. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the plan, called InvestAI, at the AI Action Summit on Tuesday. She pushed the position that Europe isn't late to the competition against China and the US.

Many of the assembled audience of global dignitaries listening to JD Vance's speech – his first international engagement since becoming US Vice President – sat increasingly stone-faced as he very bluntly set out the US perspective. It was clearly not what they wanted to hear. Like it or loathe it, the speech was an unmistakable display of strength and Vance did not pull any punches. He dismissed global "hand-wringing" about AI safety. He began his speech by saying he was not even here to talk about it.

The US and the UK have refused to sign the Paris AI summit's declaration on "inclusive and sustainable" artificial intelligence, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology. The two countries did not immediately explain their reasons for not adding their names to a document backed by 60 signatories on Tuesday, including China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada. The UK prime minister's official spokesperson said France was one of the UK's closest partners in AI, but the government would "only ever sign up to initiatives that are in UK national interests". But they added that the UK had signed up to the summit's Coalition for Sustainable AI and had backed a statement on cybersecurity. Asked if the UK had declined to sign up because the US had refused to do so, the spokesperson said they were "not aware of the US reasons or position" on the declaration.

United States Vice President JD Vance has warned against "excessive regulation" of artificial intelligence at a Paris summit on the technology, warning both European allies and rivals like China against tightening governmental grip. "Excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative sector just as it's taking off," Vance told global leaders, tech industry chiefs and policymakers gathered on Tuesday at the French capital's Grand Palais. A three-way race for AI dominance has emerged at the summit, with Europe seeking to regulate and invest, China expanding access through state-backed tech giants and the US, under President Donald Trump, championing a hands-off approach. In a thinly veiled jab against China, Vance also warned global leaders against striking artificial intelligence deals with "authoritarian regimes". "Partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure," he said.