From wildfires in Canada to flooding in India, people across the world are dealing with the realities of climate change. The world recorded its highest temperatures ever this summer and the climate models for 2100 make sobering reading. To tackle climate change we need a data-driven approach, using technology to help decarbonize the sectors that contribute to it. The transportation sector is the largest contributor to climate change in the US and Europe. Simply put, travel is in need of a long-overdue update.

United Kingdom businessman and MP candidate Steve Endacott campaigned using an AI-generated avatar that engages with locals on policy ideas and asks them for their suggestions. Are you worried about AI taking over your job? You can write to your local MP, who might just be an AI too. Businessman Steve Endacott is among hundreds of candidates running in the July 4 national election in Britain to become a member of parliament (MP). Here's his hook: the face on the campaign leaflet is an AI-generated avatar of the 59-year-old, not the man himself.

Alex Galvagni, CEO of Age of Learning and a former artificial intelligence researcher with NASA, says advances in AI now make it possible to deliver to children "a personalized and supportive" experience in education. FILE - A U.S. Air Force F-16 receives fuel from a fuel boom suspended from a US Air Force KC-10 Extender during mid-air refueling support to Operation Inherent Resolve over Iraq and Syria air space, March 15, 2017. CHINA AI ARMS RACE: In the last decade, however, a strategic adversary has emerged – China – so the Air Force must recapitalize its very old fleets quickly. 'FUTURE' NOT HERE: McDonald's has informed franchisees that it is ending an artificial intelligence drive-thru order taking program, a report says. AI SPY TOOL?: Microsoft has announced a change in the rollout plan for the Recall preview feature on Copilot PCs.

For four years, Jacob Hilton worked for one of the most influential startups in the Bay Area -- OpenAI. His research helped test and improve the truthfulness of AI models such as ChatGPT. He believes artificial intelligence can benefit society, but he also recognizes the serious risks if the technology is left unchecked. Hilton was among 13 current and former OpenAI and Google employees who this month signed an open letter that called for more whistleblower protections, citing broad confidentiality agreements as problematic. "The basic situation is that employees, the people closest to the technology, they're also the ones with the most to lose from being retaliated against for speaking up," says Hilton, 33, now a researcher at the nonprofit Alignment Research Center, who lives in Berkeley.

Israel is ready for an "all-out war" in Lebanon and has plans approved for an offensive targeting Hezbollah, officials have said. The claims from Israel's foreign minister and military late on Tuesday followed Hezbollah's release of threatening drone footage. The climbing tension conflicts with United States efforts to avert an escalation amid months of low-level hostilities across the Israel-Lebanon border. The nine-minute drone footage of the Israeli port city of Haifa filmed in daytime, showed civilian and military areas, including malls and residential quarters, in addition to a weapons manufacturing complex and missile defence batteries. Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz responded vehemently in a post on X, calling out Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah for boasting about filming the ports of Haifa, which are operated by foreign companies from China and India.

The U.S. on Tuesday approved the sale of 360 million worth of armed drones and loitering munitions to Taiwan as Washington doubles down on helping Taipei counter a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island. The move reflects U.S. efforts to not only bolster the self-ruled island's asymmetric capabilities but also to use drone swarms to offset any Chinese military advantages in personnel and equipment in a possible conflict -- a strategy also embraced by Taipei as it draws lessons from the war in Ukraine. Announced by U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the potential sale, which must be approved by Congress, includes 291 warhead-equipped Altius-600M drones and 720 Switchblade 300 anti-personnel and anti-armor loitering munitions, marking the 15th arms package approved by U.S. President Joe Biden's administration.

When the Nigerian government announced plans in April to develop a multilingual artificial intelligence tool to boost digital inclusion across the West African nation, 28-year-old computer science student Lwasinam Lenham Dilli was thrilled. Dilli had struggled to scrape datasets from the internet to build a large language model (LLM), used to power AI chatbots, in his native Hausa language as part of his final-year project at university. "I needed texts in English and their corresponding translation in Hausa, but I couldn't get anything online; (there was) no clean data," Dilli said.

No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers demanding big tech companies to drop their contracts with the Israeli government, is close to reaching its goal for a campaign asking students not to work with Google and Amazon. As Wired reports, more than 1,100 people who identified themselves as STEM students and young workers have taken the pledge to refuse jobs from the companies "for powering Israel's Apartheid system and genocide against Palestinians." Based on its website, NOTA's goal is to gather 1,200 signatures for the campaign. "As young people and students in STEM and beyond, we refuse to have any part in these horrific abuses. We're joining the #NoTechForApartheid campaign to demand Amazon and Google immediately end Project Nimbus," part of the pledge reads.

We are interested in the computational study of shock hydrodynamics, i.e. problems involving compressible solids, liquids, and gases that undergo large deformation. These problems are dynamic and nonlinear and can exhibit complex instabilities. Due to advances in high performance computing it is possible to parameterize a hydrodynamic problem and perform a computational study yielding $\mathcal{O}\left({\rm TB}\right)$ of simulation state data. We present an interactive machine learning tool that can be used to compress, browse, and interpolate these large simulation datasets. This tool allows computational scientists and researchers to quickly visualize "what-if" situations, perform sensitivity analyses, and optimize complex hydrodynamic experiments.

In a rapidly evolving job market, skill demand forecasting is crucial as it enables policymakers and businesses to anticipate and adapt to changes, ensuring that workforce skills align with market needs, thereby enhancing productivity and competitiveness. Additionally, by identifying emerging skill requirements, it directs individuals towards relevant training and education opportunities, promoting continuous self-learning and development. However, the absence of comprehensive datasets presents a significant challenge, impeding research and the advancement of this field. To bridge this gap, we present Job-SDF, a dataset designed to train and benchmark job-skill demand forecasting models. Based on 10.35 million public job advertisements collected from major online recruitment platforms in China between 2021 and 2023, this dataset encompasses monthly recruitment demand for 2,324 types of skills across 521 companies. Our dataset uniquely enables evaluating skill demand forecasting models at various granularities, including occupation, company, and regional levels. We benchmark a range of models on this dataset, evaluating their performance in standard scenarios, in predictions focused on lower value ranges, and in the presence of structural breaks, providing new insights for further research.