Industry
New LAFD chief won't look into who watered down Palisades fire report
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. New LAFD chief won't look into who watered down Palisades fire report Deputy Chief Jaime Moore fields questions from city council members before being confirmed as the new LAFD chief after a unanimous vote by the L.A. City Council on Nov. 14. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . LAFD Chief Jaime Moore said he is taking a forward-looking approach and not seeking to assign blame for changes to the report.
Taking humanoid soccer to the next level: An interview with RoboCup trustee Alessandra Rossi
A core objective of RoboCup is to promote and advance robotics and AI research through the challenges offered by its various leagues. The ultimate goal of the soccer competition is that, by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots will defeat the most recent winner of the FIFA World Cup. To bring this vision closer to reality, the RoboCup Federation has announced several changes to the leagues . We spoke with Alessandra Rossi, a trustee who has been involved in the humanoid soccer league for many years, to learn more. Could you start by introducing yourself and tell us how you've been involved in RoboCup throughout the years, because you've been involved in so many aspects of the competition!
One prompt, dozens of AI results from top models--now 79 for life
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. ChatPlayground AI lets you compare 25+ AI models side by side with unlimited lifetime access for $79--one prompt, better answers every time. AI is moving fast--and if you're only using one model, you're missing half the picture. ChatPlayground AI is built for people who want better answers, not just faster ones. It puts today's top AI models into a single interface so you can compare responses side by side from one prompt.
RSF drone attack kills 27 in southeast Sudan: Report
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed 27 people in a reported drone attack on a Sudanese army base in the southeastern city of Sinja, a military source told Al Jazeera. Monday's attack coincided with an announcement a day prior that the government, aligned with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), would be returning to the capital, Khartoum, three years after it had shifted its base of operations to Port Sudan. The military source, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, said Monday's drone attack targeted not only leaders in the government forces but also the security teams and civilians accompanying them. It was unclear how many people were wounded in the attack. Al Jazeera received reports that 13 people were injured, while some estimates have put the number much higher.
Russian drone attack kills 4 in Ukraine's Kharkiv as peace remains elusive
Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian drone attack kills 4 in Ukraine's Kharkiv as peace remains elusive A Russian drone attack on Ukraine's northeastern city of Kharkiv has killed at least four people and wounded six, officials have said, just hours after Washington accused Moscow of "dangerous and inexplicable escalation" of the war and as a peace deal remains distant. Kharkiv Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said Tuesday that the death toll from the attack on the outskirts of the frequently targeted city, just 30km (19 miles) from the border, had risen to four.
Love Machines by James Muldoon review – the risks and rewards of getting intimate with AI
The sociology professor is suitably comfortable with AI helpers that he creates his own - it's their inventors' motives and unregulated environment he argues we should be concerned about I f much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren't merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead. To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in "synthetic personas".
'Genius' chimpanzee Ai dies in Japan at 49
'Genius' chimpanzee Ai dies in Japan at 49 Studies involving Ai, a genius chimpanzee who has died at the age of 49, are said to have revealed various aspects of the chimpanzee mind. Ai, a genius chimpanzee that could recognize more than 100 Chinese characters and the English alphabet, has died at the age of 49, Japanese researchers have said. Ai, whose name meant love in Japanese, took part in studies on perception, learning and memory that advanced our understanding of primate intelligence, the Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior at Kyoto University said in a statement. She died Friday from multiple organ failure and ailments related to old age, the school said. Aside from mastering Chinese characters and the alphabet, Ai could also identify the Arabic numerals from zero to nine and 11 colors, primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa said in 2014.
New Proposed Legislation Would Let Self-Driving Cars Operate in New York State
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she will propose a new law allowing limited autonomous vehicle pilots in smaller cities. Full-blown services could be next. As self-driving car services from Alphabet's Waymo, Amazon's Zoox, and Tesla have slowly, quietly expanded across the US, one big, important state has mostly stayed mum: New York . The union's fourth most populous state has some of the tightest laws governing autonomous vehicles, requiring companies approved to test in the state to only do so with a driver behind the wheel. There's no current path for companies to operate the sort of commercial robotaxi services like the sort seen in San Francisco or Las Vegas.
Reinforcement Learning for Micro-Level Claims Reserving
Avanzi, Benjamin, Richman, Ronald, Wong, Bernard, Wüthrich, Mario, Xie, Yagebu
Outstanding claim liabilities are revised repeatedly as claims develop, yet most modern reserving models are trained as one-shot predictors and typically learn only from settled claims. We formulate individual claims reserving as a claim-level Markov decision process in which an agent sequentially updates outstanding claim liability (OCL) estimates over development, using continuous actions and a reward design that balances accuracy with stable reserve revisions. A key advantage of this reinforcement learning (RL) approach is that it can learn from all observed claim trajectories, including claims that remain open at valuation, thereby avoiding the reduced sample size and selection effects inherent in supervised methods trained on ultimate outcomes only. We also introduce practical components needed for actuarial use -- initialisation of new claims, temporally consistent tuning via a rolling-settlement scheme, and an importance-weighting mechanism to mitigate portfolio-level underestimation driven by the rarity of large claims. On CAS and SPLICE synthetic general insurance datasets, the proposed Soft Actor-Critic implementation delivers competitive claim-level accuracy and strong aggregate OCL performance, particularly for the immature claim segments that drive most of the liability.
Near-Optimal Private Linear Regression via Iterative Hessian Mixing
Lev, Omri, Shenfeld, Moshe, Srinivasan, Vishwak, Ligett, Katrina, Wilson, Ashia C.
We study differentially private ordinary least squares (DP-OLS) with bounded data. The dominant approach, adaptive sufficient-statistics perturbation (AdaSSP), adds an adaptively chosen perturbation to the sufficient statistics, namely, the matrix $X^{\top}X$ and the vector $X^{\top}Y$, and is known to achieve near-optimal accuracy and to have strong empirical performance. In contrast, methods that rely on Gaussian-sketching, which ensure differential privacy by pre-multiplying the data with a random Gaussian matrix, are widely used in federated and distributed regression, yet remain relatively uncommon for DP-OLS. In this work, we introduce the iterative Hessian mixing, a novel DP-OLS algorithm that relies on Gaussian sketches and is inspired by the iterative Hessian sketch algorithm. We provide utility analysis for the iterative Hessian mixing as well as a new analysis for the previous methods that rely on Gaussian sketches. Then, we show that our new approach circumvents the intrinsic limitations of the prior methods and provides non-trivial improvements over AdaSSP. We conclude by running an extensive set of experiments across standard benchmarks to demonstrate further that our approach consistently outperforms these prior baselines.