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Wheeled, rugged robot dog built for extreme industrial missions

FOX News

The machine is designed to inspect industrial sites, respond to disasters, carry out logistics operations and support scientific research. Deep Robotics, a company from China, has unveiled a durable four-legged robot built to operate in extreme environments that humans struggle to traverse. It's called the Lynx M20, and it builds upon the agility of its predecessor, the Lynx robot dog. This versatile machine is designed to handle anything from inspecting industrial sites and responding to disasters to carrying out logistics operations and supporting scientific research. Here's what you need to know.


AI Melania: First lady embarks on 'new frontier' in publishing with audiobook of memoir

FOX News

EXCLUSIVE: First lady Melania Trump is launching an audiobook of her memoir using artificial intelligence (AI) audio technology in multiple languages, Fox News Digital has learned. The first lady released her first memoir, "Melania," last year. This week, she is breaking new ground by releasing "Melania, the Audiobook," which has been "created entirely" with AI. "I am proud to be at the forefront of publishing's new frontier – the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and audio," Trump told Fox News Digital. The first lady said ElevenLabs AI developed "an AI-generated replica of my voice under strict supervision, which will establish an unforgettable connection with my personal story, in multiple languages for listeners worldwide." ElevenLabs AI CEO Mati Staniszewski told Fox News Digital that they are "excited that Melania Trump trusted our technology to power this first-of-its-kind audiobook project."


My Friend's Life's Work Is Being Slashed Into Oblivion. It Hurts to Watch.

Slate

Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? One of my dearest friends was recently squeezed into an unwanted early retirement by DOGE. The work she was doing at the government agency where she's spent most of her career is on the verge of being eliminated or slashed into oblivion, and it kills me to know that her life's work is about to be reversed. I want to support her through this.


'Shakespeare would be writing for games today': Cannes' first video game Lili is a retelling of Macbeth

The Guardian

The Cannes film festival isn't typically associated with video games, but this year it's playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran. "It's been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes," says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. "People have gone in saying, I'm not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. The Cannes festival's Immersive Competition began in 2024, although the lineup doesn't usually feature traditional video games. "VR films and projection mapping is the thrust of it," says iNK Stories' other co-founder, Vassiliki's husband Navid Khonsari. But Lili weaves live-action footage with video game mechanics in a similar way to a game such as Telling Lies or Immortality. Its lead, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, won best actress at Cannes three years ago. Lili focuses on the story of Lady Macbeth, here cast as the ambitious wife of an upwardly mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran). As in the play, she plots a murder to secure her husband's rise. "I think that the narrative of Lady Macbeth is that she's manipulative, and that's exactly what got us interested," says Navid. "The social limitations based on her gender forced her to try to attain whatever leadership role she can," he continues. "If she was a man, she would have been one of the greatest kings that country would have ever experienced, but because she was a woman she had to work within the structure that was there for her.


Dogs can fulfill our need to nurture

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just as birth rates decline in many wealthy and developed nations, dog parenting is remaining steady and even gaining in popularity. Up to half of households in Europe and 66 percent of homes in the United States have at least one dog and these pets are often regarded as a family member or "fur baby." To dig into what this shift says about our society, researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary conducted a literature review to analyze the data. They propose that while dogs do not replace children, they can offer a chance to fulfill an innate nurturing drive similar to parenting, but with fewer demands than raising biological children.


LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models You Chen Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science Tsinghua University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks.



Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,183

Al Jazeera

Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones. Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said one person was killed in a Russian artillery attack on the region. H said over the past day, 35 areas in Kherson, including Kherson city, came under artillery shelling and air attacks, wounding 11 people. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said the "most intense situation" is in the Donetsk region, and the army is continuing "active operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions". Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones.


Generalizing Bayesian Optimization with Decision-theoretic Entropies Willie Neiswanger

Neural Information Processing Systems

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for efficiently inferring optima of an expensive black-box function via a sequence of queries. Existing informationtheoretic BO procedures aim to make queries that most reduce the uncertainty about optima, where the uncertainty is captured by Shannon entropy. However, an optimal measure of uncertainty would, ideally, factor in how we intend to use the inferred quantity in some downstream procedure. In this paper, we instead consider a generalization of Shannon entropy from work in statistical decision theory [13, 39], which contains a broad class of uncertainty measures parameterized by a problem-specific loss function corresponding to a downstream task. We first show that special cases of this entropy lead to popular acquisition functions used in BO procedures such as knowledge gradient, expected improvement, and entropy search. We then show how alternative choices for the loss yield a flexible family of acquisition functions that can be customized for use in novel optimization settings.


Causal Discovery from Event Sequences by Local Cause-Effect Attribution

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sequences of events, such as crashes in the stock market or outages in a network, contain strong temporal dependencies, whose understanding is crucial to react to and influence future events. In this paper, we study the problem of discovering the underlying causal structure from event sequences. To this end, we introduce a new causal model, where individual events of the cause trigger events of the effect with dynamic delays. We show that in contrast to existing methods based on Granger causality, our model is identifiable for both instant and delayed effects. We base our approach on the Algorithmic Markov Condition, by which we identify the true causal network as the one that minimizes the Kolmogorov complexity. As the Kolmogorov complexity is not computable, we instantiate our model using Minimum Description Length and show that the resulting score identifies the causal direction.