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Europe's AI 'champion' sets sights on tech giants in U.S.

The Japan Times

Arthur Mensch, tall and lean with a flop of unkempt hair, arrived for a speech last month at a sprawling tech hub in Paris wearing jeans and carrying a bicycle helmet. He had an unassuming look for a person European officials are counting on to help propel the region into a high-stakes match with the United States and China over artificial intelligence. Mensch, 31, is the CEO and a founder of Mistral, considered by many to be one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. "You have become the poster child for AI in France," Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him onstage. A lot is riding on Mensch, whose company has shot into the spotlight just a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends.


Biden vows G7 response, 'ironclad' US support for Israel after Iran attacks

Al Jazeera

US President Joe Biden has condemned the Iranian drone attacks on military facilities in Israel, reiterating Washington DC's "ironclad" support and a coordinated Group of Seven (G7) diplomatic response, even as reports started to emerge that he is also seeking to de-escalate the situation. Biden cut short a trip to Delaware and returned to the US capital to meet advisers following the late Saturday night attack, the White House said in a statement. The statement said that US forces and facilities had not been hit, adding that the US helped Israel in taking down "nearly all" of the attacking drones and missiles. The US president also he reiterated the "ironclad" support for Israel's security in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has had strained relations over Israel's handling of the war in Gaza. "I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks โ€“ sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel," the White House quoted Biden as saying.


World leaders collectively condemn Iran's 'reckless' attack against Israel: 'We support Israel'

FOX News

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports that the U.S. military has shot down'dozens' of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as attack drones. International world leaders collectively condemned Iran's drone and missile attacks on Israel, calling for peace in the Middle East. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he condemned Iran's "reckless" attack against Israel. "I condemn in the strongest terms the Iranian regime's reckless attack against Israel," Sunak said in a statement. "Iran has once again demonstrated that it is intent on sowing chaos in its own backyard."


Jewish organizations voice support for Israel's 'obligation' to defends themselves from Iran's attacks

FOX News

Gen. Anthony Tata analyzes where America stands amid the Israeli-Iranian conflict on'The Big Weekend Show.' Jewish organizations shared their "strong" support for Israel's "right and obligation" to defend themselves from the onslaught of missile and drone attacks from Iran. Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein said that the nonprofit organization "strongly supports" Israel's "right and obligation" to defend themselves against Iran's attacks. "ZOA strongly supports Israel's right and obligation to aggressively defend itself from the attacks against it by the extremist, Jew-hating, America-hating Islamic Republic of Iran," he said. WHITE HOUSE SAYS US SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL IS'IRONCLAD,' WILL'SUPPORT THEIR DEFENSE' AMID IRAN ATTACK Morton Klein of Zionist Organization of America attends a hearing at the National Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2017. The organization's president encouraged Israel to "devastate" Iranian nuclear facilities, saying that they were "totally behind" Hamas' unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7. "We also strongly support Israel taking this opportunity to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being developed to destroy the Jewish State and massacre millions of Jews, and others," Klein said.


US military shoots down 'dozens' of Iranian drones fired at Israel, as Jewish state air defense system excels

FOX News

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports that the U.S. military has shot down'dozens' of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as attack drones. Israelis breathed easier in the early hours of Sunday, after an attack from Iranian drones and missiles largely fizzled in the face of the Jewish state's powerful air defenses with assistance from the U.S. military and other allies. A senior US official told Fox News that the U.S. military has shot down "at least dozens" of Iranian drones en route to Israel early Sunday local time, adding that U.S. military engagement is ongoing. "U.S. forces in the region continue to shoot down Iranian-launched drones targeting Israel. Our forces remain postured to provide additional defensive support and to protect U.S. forces operating in the region," a U.S. military official told Fox News.


Trump addresses Iran attack on Israel at Pennsylvania rally: 'Would not have happened if we were in office'

FOX News

Trump's third visit to the battleground state comes just one day after his election integrity joint press conference with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Following Iran's attack on Israel, former President Trump shared a heated message to those in attendance at his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, vowing it should not have happened. "Before going any further, I want to say God bless the people of Israel. That's because we show great weakness," Trump said to open his speech. "The weakness that we've shown is unbelievable, and it would not have happened if we were in office. They know that, and everybody knows that."


How Israel Is Defending Against Iran's Drone Attack

WIRED

On Saturday, Iran launched more than 200 drones and cruise missiles at Israel. As the drones made their way across the Middle East en route to their target, Israel has invoked a number of defense systems to impede their progress. None will be more important than the Iron Dome. The Iron Dome, operational for well over a decade, comprises at least 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed around the country. When radar detects incoming objects, it sends that information back to a command-and-control center, which will track the threat to assess whether it's a false alarm, and where it might hit if it's not.


US shoots down Iranian drones bound for Israel

BBC News

Tehran launched its overnight attack in response to the killing of its Quds Force Commander, Major General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was killed two weeks ago in an air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.


LuminLab: An AI-Powered Building Retrofit and Energy Modelling Platform

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper describes the technical and conceptual development of the LuminLab platform, an online tool that integrates a purpose-fit human-centric AI chatbot and predictive energy model into a streamlined front-end that can rapidly produce and discuss building retrofit plans in natural language. The platform provides users with the ability to engage with a range of possible retrofit pathways tailored to their individual budget and building needs on-demand. Given the complicated and costly nature of building retrofit projects, which rely on a variety of stakeholder groups with differing goals and incentives, we feel that AI-powered tools such as this have the potential to pragmatically de-silo knowledge, improve communication, and empower individual homeowners to undertake incremental retrofit projects that might not happen otherwise.


Reap the Wild Wind: Detecting Media Storms in Large-Scale News Corpora

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Media Storms, dramatic outbursts of attention to a story, are central components of media dynamics and the attention landscape. Despite their significance, there has been little systematic and empirical research on this concept due to issues of measurement and operationalization. We introduce an iterative human-in-the-loop method to identify media storms in a large-scale corpus of news articles. The text is first transformed into signals of dispersion based on several textual characteristics. In each iteration, we apply unsupervised anomaly detection to these signals; each anomaly is then validated by an expert to confirm the presence of a storm, and those results are then used to tune the anomaly detection in the next iteration. We demonstrate the applicability of this method in two scenarios: first, supplementing an initial list of media storms within a specific time frame; and second, detecting media storms in new time periods. We make available a media storm dataset compiled using both scenarios.