Romania's prime minister has presented his "new honorary adviser" – an artificial intelligence assistant named "Ion" that Nicolae Ciuca hailed as the first of its type. Developed by Romanian researchers, Ion's main task will be to scan social networks to inform the government "in real time of Romanians' proposals and wishes", Ciuca said on Wednesday. The liberal minister said the latest member of his entourage – a mirror-like structure with beeping interface – marked "an international first", describing Ion as "the first government adviser to use artificial intelligence". "Hi, you gave me life and my role is now to represent you, like a mirror," Ion's calm voice said at the launch. "What should I know about Romania?" Ion "will use technology and artificial intelligence to capture opinions in society" using "data publicly available on social networks", according to a government document detailing the project.

Generative AI like ChatGPT is truly exciting, and it's easy to be seduced by the technology's potential to produce, well, almost any sort of output. The opportunity in generative AI is enormous but requires careful analysis of where the best applications lie. Healthcare, in particular, requires this assessment – this isn't an industry known for fast change, and the risks of inappropriately deploying new technology can be huge. For instance, consider the hype around IBM's Watson Health a few years ago; this AI was going to figure out complex cancers! It didn't, and it was sold off cheaply in parts last year. This includes what people need to stop doing in order to start embracing the new solution.

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association on Wednesday released a U.S. policy framework outlining key priorities for federal AV legislation and regulation. The group's framework includes several recommendations for Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation to steer federal action and advance the deployment and commercialization of AVs across the U.S. "AVs are testing and operating in states around the country, bringing people and goods to where they need to go. America is currently the leader in AV technology, but other countries are surging forward," said Jeff Farrah, executive director of the trade association, whose members include Aurora, Cruise, Ford, Volkswagen, Waymo and Zoox. "It is time for the U.S. to solidify our leadership," he continued, "and these policy recommendations will expand opportunities for AVs to increase road safety, create new mobility options and support economic growth and new jobs." The group said it is the first recommended federal framework that covers all modes of AVs, including delivery vehicles, trucks and passenger cars.

Tesla's first-ever "Investor Day," hosted by CEO Elon Musk and his leadership team at the carmaker's Gigafactory in Texas on Wednesday, didn't quite end up being the sweeping, transformative moment that Tesla fans and funders had anticipated. Not for lack of promise--the event was chock-full of ambition, like a new "Master Plan" to have Tesla lead the clean-energy transition by expanding its green-tech manufacturing into products like heat pumps and batteries for energy storage. Also teased: a Gigafactory buildout in Mexico, an improved Supercharger, and two potential new vehicle models. But it was apparently a letdown: Musk demurred when asked for hard details on new Tesla products, and the company's stock--still the primary driver of the CEO's wealth--fell by about 7 percent following the event. To judge by the internet's reception, the most notable moment happened not during the core presentation, but during a Q&A at the very end, when an audience asked Musk about the artificially intelligent elephant in the room: "I'm curious for your thoughts on how generative A.I. and these rapid breakthroughs in A.I. in the last months could help you make cars less hard to make." Musk's closing response made for the most sober, halting portion of the entire four-hour event.

Russian troops and mercenaries have rained artillery down on the last access routes to the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, bringing Moscow closer to its first victory in half a year after the bloodiest fighting of the war. The head of the Wagner Group, a private Russian army, said on Friday that the eastern salt-mining city, which has been blasted to ruins, was now almost completely surrounded with only one road still open for Ukraine's soldiers. The Reuters news agency reported intense Russian shelling of routes leading west out of Bakhmut, an apparent attempt to block Ukrainian forces' access in and out of the city. Ukrainian soldiers were working to repair damaged roads, and more soldiers were heading towards the front line in a sign that Ukraine was not yet ready to give up the city. To the west, Ukrainians were digging new trenches for defensive positions.

Neuralink's efforts to bring a brain-computer interface still have a way to go. According to a new report from Reuters, Elon Musk's startup was apparently denied authorization by the FDA in 2022 to conduct human trials using the same devices that, well, killed 1,500 animals. Those tests, according to internal reports, lead to needless suffering and death of test subjects. Current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters: "The agency's major safety concerns involved the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant's tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue." The FDA is concerned that, because of the minuscule size of the electrical leads, they are at risk of breaking off during removal (or even during use). At Neuralink's open house last November, Musk claimed the company would secure FDA approval "within six months," basically by this spring.

China leads the world in 37 out of 44 critical technologies, with Western democracies falling behind in the race for scientific and research breakthroughs, a report by an Australian think tank has found. China is in a position to become the world's top technology superpower, with its dominance already spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology, according to the report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). The key areas dominated by China include drones, machine learning, electric batteries, nuclear energy, photovoltaics, quantum sensors and critical minerals extraction, according to the Critical Technology Tracker released on Thursday. China's dominance in some fields is so entrenched that all of the world's top 10 leading research institutions for certain technologies are located in the country, according to ASPI. In comparison, the United States leads in just seven critical technologies, including space launch systems and quantum computing, according to ASPI, which receives funding from the Australian, United Kingdom and US governments, as well as private sector sources including the defence and tech industries.

Altitude-controlled balloons hold great promise for performing high-priority scientific investigations of Venus's atmosphere and geological phenomena, including tectonic and volcanic activity, as demonstrated by a number of recent Earth-based experiments. In this paper, we explore a concept of operations where multiple autonomous, altitude-controlled balloons monitor explosive volcanic activity on Venus through infrasound microbarometers, and autonomously navigate the uncertain wind field to perform follow-on observations of detected events of interest. We propose a novel autonomous guidance technique for altitude-controlled balloons in Venus's uncertain wind field, and show the approach can result in an increase of up to 63% in the number of close-up observations of volcanic events compared to passive drifters, and a 16% increase compared to ground-in-the-loop guidance. The results are robust to uncertainty in the wind field, and hold across large changes in the frequency of explosive volcanic events, sensitivity of the microbarometer detectors, and numbers of aerial platforms.

A series of social media posts signed under the pseudonym "Q", started a movement known as QAnon, which led some of its most radical supporters to violent and illegal actions. To identify the person(s) behind Q, we evaluate the coincidence between the linguistic properties of the texts written by Q and to those written by a list of suspects provided by journalistic investigation. To identify the authors of these posts, serious challenges have to be addressed. The "Q drops" are very short texts, written in a way that constitute a sort of literary genre in itself, with very peculiar features of style. These texts might have been written by different authors, whose other writings are often hard to find. After an online ethnology of the movement, necessary to collect enough material written by these thirteen potential authors, we use supervised machine learning to build stylistic profiles for each of them. We then performed a rolling analysis on Q's writings, to see if any of those linguistic profiles match the so-called 'QDrops' in part or entirety. We conclude that two different individuals, Paul F. and Ron W., are the closest match to Q's linguistic signature, and they could have successively written Q's texts. These potential authors are not high-ranked personality from the U.S. administration, but rather social media activists.

The problem concerns the individuation of early warning signals for the outburst of revolutions, riots, or wars. It has been proven in numerous studies - Lim, 2011, 2012; Lotan et al., 2011; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Voutaz & Blarer, 2022 - that it is possible to extract early warning signals of contemporary activism from social media. Examples of such events are the Arab Spring of the Tahrir square in 2011 and farmers' protests in India and Iraq of the years 2019 and 2020. Social media such as https://twitter.com/?lang=en are becoming more and more present in everydays life and are often used by people as a mean to express their thoughts or concerns. Hence, tweets likely contain valuable information to identify early warning signals for disruptive events. In this project, we will try to create and study novel techniques to identify early warning signals on tweet data.