Called "Tokyo Futari Story," the city hall's new initiative is just that: An effort to create couples, "futari," in a country where it is increasingly common to be "hitori," or alone. While a site offering counsel and general information for potential lovebirds is online, a dating app is also in development. City hall hopes to offer it later this year, accessible through phone or web, a city official said Thursday. City Hall declined to comment on Japanese media reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver's license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married. 'MEET HOT, SINGLE FIREMEN, SCORE A PRIZE': NEWEST WAY WOMEN ARE FINDING THEIR LOVE MATCHES Marriage is on the decline in Japan as the country's birth rate fell to an all-time low, according to health ministry data on Wednesday.

The US has banned companies like Nvidia from selling their most advanced AI chips to China since 2022. But if loopholes exist, profit-hungry corporations will find and exploit them. The Information published a bombshell report on Thursday detailing how Oracle allows TikTok owner ByteDance to rent Nvidia's most advanced chips to train AI models on US soil. ByteDance, which many US lawmakers believe has direct ties to the Chinese government, is reportedly renting US-based servers containing Nvidia's coveted H100 chips from US cloud computing company Oracle to train AI models. The practice, which runs against the spirit of the US government's chip regulations, is technically allowed because Oracle is merely renting out the chips on American soil, not selling them to companies in China.

If India's most recent elections proved anything, it's that the "world's largest democracy" may yet still be worthy of that name. The results of the six-week cycle, which saw more than 640 million voters turn out across the subcontinent, dealt a steep blow to the demagogic Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which lost its single-party hold over the majority of seats in India's lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. The Hindu nationalist BJP still snapped up most of the electorate's votes, and Modi is bound to continue as head of state, but he and his cronies will no longer enjoy the untrammeled federal power they have held for the past half-decade (forget the 400 seats they'd aimed to nab in this election). The INDIA Alliance, a multiparty coalition of opposition candidates, has flipped dozens of seats, and the BJP will have to rely on parliamentary allies--who already desire some significant changes to Modi's Hindu supremacist governing style--for a majority. In light of the clean sweep Modi and Co. achieved in 2019, the increasingly authoritarian grip they brought to India's institutions, the economic depression that has afflicted Indians in the Modi years, the protest movements that resultantly flared up, and the formerly BJP-supporting constituencies the party lost this round, it's hard to view this outcome as anything but a popular rebuke of Modi's antidemocratic excesses.

The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department have reached a deal that would set the stage for antitrust probes into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, setting up unprecedented regulatory scrutiny of the companies' conduct in the AI race, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a probe whose details are not public.

Microsoft is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over its deal with Inflection AI, according to The Wall Street Journal. Back in March, the company hired almost all of Inflection AI's employees, including founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman, who was also a DeepMind cofounder. In addition, Microsoft paid Inflection AI 650 million to license its artificial intelligence technology. Now, the FTC wants to know whether the companies deliberately structured the deal to avoid being the subject of regulatory antitrust review. As The Journal notes, companies are required to report any acquisition that's valued at 119 million or more to federal antitrust agencies.

Until mid-2023, artificial intelligence was something of a niche topic in Washington, largely confined to small circles of tech-policy wonks. That all changed when, nearly two years into Gina Raimondo's tenure as Secretary of Commerce, ChatGPT's explosive popularity catapulted AI into the spotlight. Raimondo, however, was ahead of the curve. "I make it my business to stay on top of all of this," she says during an interview in her wood-paneled office overlooking the National Mall on May 21. "None of it was shocking to me." But in the year since, even she has been startled by the pace of progress.

Thursday, June 6, 2024, marks 80 years since Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy, France during World War II on D-Day. The number of veterans who served in the war is shrinking by the year. But The National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, is helping some of their stories live on through artificial intelligence. Eighteen World War II veterans are part of a new exhibit called "Voices From The Front" that opened to the public in March. It allows people to ask questions and get real responses from the veterans -- one of whom was there the day of the invasion.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia face increased antitrust scrutiny of their roles in the artificial intelligence industry after a report that US regulators have reached an agreement on investigating the companies. The New York Times reported that the US justice department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have reached an agreement on investigations into the main protagonists in the AI market. The deal is expected to be completed in the coming days, according to the report. The justice department will lead on investigating whether Nvidia, the leading maker of chips that train and operate AI systems, has broken antitrust laws that oversee fair competition in business and aim to prevent monopolies, said the NYT on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Thursday that the FTC is investigating whether Microsoft structured a recent deal with startup Inflection AI to avoid an antitrust inquiry.

ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks it has a solution. It wants to turn the rifles of frontline soldiers into "handheld Iron Domes." The idea is simple: Make it easier to shoot a drone out of the sky with a bullet. The problem is that drones are fast and maneuverable, making them hard for even a skilled marksman to hit. ZeroMark's system would add aim assistance to existing rifles, ostensibly helping soldiers put a bullet in just the right place.

In light of growing threats posed by climate change in general and sea level rise (SLR) in particular, the necessity for computationally efficient means to estimate and analyze potential coastal flood hazards has become increasingly pressing. Data-driven supervised learning methods serve as promising candidates that can dramatically expedite the process, thereby eliminating the computational bottleneck associated with traditional physics-based hydrodynamic simulators. Yet, the development of accurate and reliable coastal flood prediction models, especially those based on Deep Learning (DL) techniques, has been plagued with two major issues: (1) the scarcity of training data and (2) the high-dimensional output required for detailed inundation mapping. To remove this barrier, we present a systematic framework for training high-fidelity Deep Vision-based coastal flood prediction models in low-data settings. We test the proposed workflow on different existing vision models, including a fully transformer-based architecture and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with additive attention gates. Additionally, we introduce a deep CNN architecture tailored specifically to the coastal flood prediction problem at hand. The model was designed with a particular focus on its compactness so as to cater to resource-constrained scenarios and accessibility aspects. The performance of the developed DL models is validated against commonly adopted geostatistical regression methods and traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches, demonstrating substantial improvement in prediction quality. Lastly, we round up the contributions by providing a meticulously curated dataset of synthetic flood inundation maps of Abu Dhabi's coast produced with a physics-based hydrodynamic simulator, which can serve as a benchmark for evaluating future coastal flood prediction models.