Media
Cutting-edge drone tech maps land and water with laser accuracy
YellowScan's Navigator system is designed to map underwater topography in rivers, ponds and coastal areas. Below, its lidar system scans the landscape, mapping both the land and the shallow waters with pinpoint accuracy. This is precisely what YellowScan's new Navigator system is designed to do. Built specifically for mapping underwater topography in rivers, ponds and coastal areas, the Navigator is changing the game for environmental monitoring. With precision where traditional methods struggle, it's giving researchers and conservationists a whole new way to understand our planet's changing waterways.
How AI can help supercharge creativity
The audience watched, heads nodding, as Wilson tapped out code line by line on the projected screen--tweaking sounds, looping beats, pulling a face when she messed up. Wilson is a live coder. Instead of using purpose-built software like most electronic music producers, live coders create music by writing the code to generate it on the fly. It's an improvised performance art known as algorave. "It's kind of boring when you go to watch a show and someone's just sitting there on their laptop," she says.
Black Mirror is now a delightful escape from reality
The latest season of Black Mirror feels almost therapeutic as we peer over the cliff of civilizational collapse. Everything is awful, but at least we don't have to worry about renting out access to our brains from skeevy startups, or dealing with the consequences of a PC game's super-intelligent AI. While Black Mirror felt like a horrifying harbinger of an over-teched future when it debuted in 2011, now it's practically an escape from the fresh hell of real world headlines. That's not to say that the show has lost any of the acerbic bite from creator Charlie Brooker. But now Brooker and his writers -- Ms. Marvel showrunner Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges, Ella Road and Bekka Bowling -- more deftly wield their talent for cultural analysis. Not all of the new episodes revolve around nefarious new tech, sometimes the tools themselves are genuinely helpful -- it's humans who are often the real problem.
You Can Play the New Game in 'Black Mirror'--and It's an Adorable Nightmare
When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.
Analyzing Examinee Comments using DistilBERT and Machine Learning to Ensure Quality Control in Exam Content
To ensure that the items are of sufficient quality to be included in the test, multiple rounds of item review are conducted both before and after the test is administered. Typically, once the testing period has ended, psychometricians will analyze the response data using var ious methods to identify any items that require further review based on their statistical properties (e.g., p - value, point - biserial correlation, etc.). For example, one item with a low point - biserial correlation value can be flagged for further review due to poor discrimination. While flagging items using their statistics can help identify potentially problematic items, it does not guarantee that the flagged items actually contain issues. Therefore, subject matter experts (SMEs) need to review the flagged items to determine whether they indeed pose any problems.
Don't Let It Hallucinate: Premise Verification via Retrieval-Augmented Logical Reasoning
Qin, Yuehan, Li, Shawn, Nian, Yi, Yu, Xinyan Velocity, Zhao, Yue, Ma, Xuezhe
Large language models (LLMs) have shown substantial capacity for generating fluent, contextually appropriate responses. However, they can produce hallucinated outputs, especially when a user query includes one or more false premises-claims that contradict established facts. Such premises can mislead LLMs into offering fabricated or misleading details. Existing approaches include pretraining, fine-tuning, and inference-time techniques that often rely on access to logits or address hallucinations after they occur. These methods tend to be computationally expensive, require extensive training data, or lack proactive mechanisms to prevent hallucination before generation, limiting their efficiency in real-time applications. We propose a retrieval-based framework that identifies and addresses false premises before generation. Our method first transforms a user's query into a logical representation, then applies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to assess the validity of each premise using factual sources. Finally, we incorporate the verification results into the LLM's prompt to maintain factual consistency in the final output. Experiments show that this approach effectively reduces hallucinations, improves factual accuracy, and does not require access to model logits or large-scale fine-tuning.
EXCLAIM: An Explainable Cross-Modal Agentic System for Misinformation Detection with Hierarchical Retrieval
Wu, Yin, Zhang, Zhengxuan, Wang, Fuling, Luo, Yuyu, Xiong, Hui, Tang, Nan
Misinformation continues to pose a significant challenge in today's information ecosystem, profoundly shaping public perception and behavior. Among its various manifestations, Out-of-Context (OOC) misinformation is particularly obscure, as it distorts meaning by pairing authentic images with misleading textual narratives. Existing methods for detecting OOC misinformation predominantly rely on coarse-grained similarity metrics between image-text pairs, which often fail to capture subtle inconsistencies or provide meaningful explainability. While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in visual reasoning and explanation generation, they have not yet demonstrated the capacity to address complex, fine-grained, and cross-modal distinctions necessary for robust OOC detection. To overcome these limitations, we introduce EXCLAIM, a retrieval-based framework designed to leverage external knowledge through multi-granularity index of multi-modal events and entities. Our approach integrates multi-granularity contextual analysis with a multi-agent reasoning architecture to systematically evaluate the consistency and integrity of multi-modal news content. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness and resilience of EXCLAIM, demonstrating its ability to detect OOC misinformation with 4.3% higher accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while offering explainable and actionable insights.
Google used AI to 'reconceptualize' The Wizard of Oz for the Las Vegas Sphere
Google has used AI to revamp one of the most beloved films of all time for a 360-degree Sin City screen with the highest resolution in the world. The rerolled version of The Wizard of Oz will debut this August at The Sphere, the Las Vegas entertainment venue with a famously globular LED screen. Whether a technical marvel, dystopian nightmare fuel or some combination, the project will surely continue The Sphere's penchant for extravagant spectacles that persuade tourists to plunk down hundreds of dollars to sit for a few hours in one of its 17,600 seats. Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the venue, worked on the project with Google, Magnopus and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns The Wizard of Oz rights. Google describes it as an "epic undertaking of creativity and technology," humbly likening it to the cinematic boundaries broken by the acclaimed Technicolor original.
Fox News AI Newsletter: The dangers of oversharing with AI tools
Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier has the latest on regulatory uncertainty amid AI development on'Special Report.' DON'T OVERSHARE DEETS: Have you ever stopped to think about how much your chatbot knows about you? Over the years, tools like ChatGPThave become incredibly adept at learning your preferences, habits and even some of your deepest secrets. But while this can make them seem more helpful and personalized, it also raises some serious privacy concerns. As much as you learn from these AI tools, they learn just as much about you.
The best drone for 2025
Drones have become an important tool in a creator's bag of tricks, allowing them to capture aerial footage that elevates their videos. And nowadays, they've become more accessible as video quality and features have dramatically improved while prices have dropped. Recent budget-friendly models include DJI's Neo and Flip drones, along with the HoverAir X1 Pro lineup, all under 500. If you've got more to spend, the options are similarly plentiful with drones like the DJI Mini 4 Pro and HoverAir X1 Pro Max. And for the price of a good mirrorless camera, you can get DJI's Mavic 3 Pro that offers awesome image quality, range and other features.