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Mexico City's 'Xoli' Chatbot Will Help World Cup Tourists Navigate the City

WIRED

The launch of "Xoli" adds to the technological efforts promoted by the federal government to turn the 2026 World Cup into an engine of development for the entire country. Xoli, the new chatbot, is named after the axolotl, a salamander with external gills. The Government of Mexico City has launched Xoli, a chatbot that will provide information on services, tourism, and cultural offerings. The platform was designed to meet the demand of the millions of visitors expected to arrive during the 2026 FIFA World Cup . However, the authorities assure that the tool will remain active once the sporting event is over, with the aim of promoting economic activities and facilitating access to public services in the capital.


Shaw hat-trick heroics 'like watching video game'

BBC News

Image caption, Khadija Shaw is the top goalscorer in the Women's Super League this season If Khadija Shaw is on your team, you have a very good chance of winning. She's that good, her Manchester City team-mate Sam Coffey felt like she was watching a video game with Shaw the star of the show. I said earlier that I feel like I'm playing Fifa. You can score three goals like that in 20 minutes? the bewildered US international said after their emphatic 5-2 win over Spurs. It was actually three goals in 13 minutes - the fastest hat-trick in Women's Super League history - and City fans are so desperate to keep Shaw at the club that, each time she scored, they chanted sign her up on repeat.


Sutton's predictions v Crookhaven stars Amari Bacchus & Genesis Lynea

BBC News

Two of the teams fighting relegation meet on Sunday when Tottenham host Nottingham Forest, but are there more than just points at stake? If we do get a winner here, it is a huge boost for that team psychologically going into the international break, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. But, for the losing manager, it could mean the sack. That applies to Forest's Vitor Pereira as well as Igor Tudor at Spurs - this is a classic game where triumph or disaster awaits both clubs. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. His guests for week 31 are Amari Bacchus and Genesis Lynea, stars of new CBBC drama series Crookhaven. Crookhaven begins with a double bill on Sunday, 22 March at 15:05 GMT on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, and at 17:25 on CBBC. The full series will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from this date.


Are Iran's athletes political pawns?

Al Jazeera

Will Gulf states join war? Game Theory: Are Iran's athletes political pawns? Game Theory Are Iran's athletes political pawns? While in Australia, members of Iran's women's football team found themselves at the centre of an international political storm. As several players choose to return home, difficult questions are being raised about athlete safety, agency and Western intervention.


Adaptive Skills Adaptive Partitions (ASAP)

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce the Adaptive Skills, Adaptive Partitions (ASAP) framework that (1) learns skills (i.e., temporally extended actions or options) as well as (2) where to apply them. We believe that both (1) and (2) are necessary for a truly general skill learning framework, which is a key building block needed to scale up to lifelong learning agents. The ASAP framework is also able to solve related new tasks simply by adapting where it applies its existing learned skills. We prove that ASAP converges to a local optimum under natural conditions. Finally, our experimental results, which include a RoboCup domain, demonstrate the ability of ASAP to learn where to reuse skills as well as solve multiple tasks with considerably less experience than solving each task from scratch.


Ball x Pit on mobile, Piece by Piece x2 and other new indie games worth checking out

Engadget

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. A bunch of intriguing games arrived this week, including a mobile port of one of the most absorbing things I've played in years and two completely different titles with the same name. Let's get things started with a look at a few projects that were featured in the latest edition of the Future Games Show . To recharge your weapons and systems, you have to plug a cable that trails behind your spaceship into a socket. While you're plugged in, your movement is restricted by the length of the tether, but you gain more firepower.


Translating music into light and motion with robots

Robohub

A system developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo lets people collaborate with groups of robots to create works of art inspired by music. The new technology features multiple wheeled robots about the size of soccer balls that trail coloured light as they move within a fixed area on the floor in response to key features of music including tempo and chord progression. A camera records the co-ordinated light trails as they snake within that area, which serves as the canvas for the creation of a "painting," or visual representation of the emotional content of a particular piece of music. "Basically, we programmed a swarm of robots to paint based on musical input," said Dr Gennaro Notomista, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Waterloo. "The result is a cohesive system that not only processes musical input, but also co-ordinates multiple painting robots to create adaptive, expressive art that reflects the emotional essence of the music being played."