While many of these interactions happen through direct contact, like the concert-goers' nudging, some interactions can transmit through the material the objects are on or in -- these are known as indirect interactions. For example, a bridge with pedestrians on it can transmit vibrations, like in the famous Millennium Bridge "wobbly bridge" instance. While the results of direct interactions (like nudging) are of increasing interest and study, and the results of indirect interactions through mechanisms like vision are well-studied, researchers are still learning about indirect mechanical interactions (for example, how two rolling balls might influence each other's movement on a trampoline by indenting the trampoline's surface with their weight, thus exerting mechanical forces without touching). Physicists are using small wheeled robots to better understand these indirect mechanical interactions, how they play a role in active matter, and how we can control them. Their findings, "Field-mediated locomotor dynamics on highly deformable surfaces" are recently published in the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Google said it will terminate services for Stadia, its troubled cloud gaming service, after it failed to gain traction with players almost three years after its launch. Stadia was an attempt from Alphabet Inc.'s Google to take on the video game console giants with a platform of its own. Unlike traditional consoles, Stadia allowed users to play games on devices such as Android phones and Chromecast apps for TV, by funneling data directly from Google's server clusters. "While Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected," Phil Harrison, Stadia vice president and general manager, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "So we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service."

While Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected,

Recently the philosopher William MacAskill, with his book What We Owe The Future, has been popularizing the idea that the fate of humanity should be our top moral priority. His core proposition is that today's 8 billion humans are vastly outweighed in importance by the hundreds of billions of humans who could live in future generations if we can avoid wiping out humanity in the near term. MacAskill's argument is known by the slogan "longtermism," (often written as long-termism) and it has already been sharply criticized. For example, columnist Christine Emba has written in The Washington Post: "It's compelling at first blush, but as a value system, its practical implications are worrisome." In practice, she explains, it implies seeing "preventing existential threats to humanity as the most valuable philanthropic cause"--which means we should invest far more in addressing risks that threaten humanity's very long-term existence. As Emba says, this can seem impossible to disagree with.

In the 1935 science fiction novel Pygmalion's Spectacles by Stanley Weinbaum, the main character Dan Burke puts on a pair of magic spectacles and enters a virtual world where he interacts with other virtual characters and can taste, touch and smell what they do. Fast forward nearly seven decades, the virtual world now has a name, in the 1992 novel Snow Crash by bestselling science fiction author Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist, moves between Los Angeles and a location called the "metaverse" to gather information about a dangerous drug. While both Weinbaum and Stephenson were futurists depicting the virtual reality technology that was to come, the 21st century has yet to meet up to the expectations about what a virtual world or the metaverse could be. Both novelists imagined a metaverse where people can act just like they would in the physical world, whether they're wearing a special device such as virtual reality goggles or not.

Meta unveiled its Make-a-Scene text-to-image generation AI in July, which like Dall-E and Midjourney, utilizes machine learning algorithms (and massive databases of scraped online artwork) to create fantastical depictions of written prompts. As its name implies, Make-a-Video is, "a new AI system that lets people turn text prompts into brief, high-quality video clips," Zuckerberg wrote in a Meta blog Thursday. Functionally, Video works the same way that Scene does -- relying on a mix of natural language processing and generative neural networks to convert non-visual prompts into images -- it's just pulling content in a different format. "Our intuition is simple: learn what the world looks like and how it is described from paired text-image data, and learn how the world moves from unsupervised video footage," a team of Meta researchers wrote in a research paper published Thursday morning. Doing so enabled the team to reduce the amount of time needed to train the Video model and eliminate the need for paired text-video data, while preserving "the vastness (diversity in aesthetic, fantastical depictions, etc.) of today's image generation models."

What do I mean by "recommender systems", and why are they useful? Let's look at the top 3 websites on the Internet, according to Alexa: Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Recommender systems form the very foundation of these technologies. They are why Google is the most successful technology company today. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's accidentally spent hours on YouTube when I had more important things to do! Just how do they convince you to do that?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to cause global disaster, but humans can take steps to prevent calamity, experts say.

Greg Cross: You know, the art of creating digital characters and digital personalities, I mean, that's been finely honed in the movie industry and what makes us fall in love with these avatars and these CGI characters is that they do express emotion in a very human-like way. Soul machines is an artificial intelligence company. We make avatars and we bring them to life using a completely new paradigm in the world of animation. Something we call autonomous animation. So autonomous animation is what we are doing in this conversation.

The minor opened to all students at the start of the Fall 2022 semester.