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The Greek island of Santorini saw thousands of earthquakes last year - now scientists know why

BBC News

Scientists reveal what triggered Santorini'earthquake swarm' The swarm of tens of thousands of earthquakes near the Greek island of Santorini earlier this year was triggered by molten rock pumping through an underground channel over three months, scientists have discovered. They used physics and artificial intelligence to work out exactly what caused the more than 25,000 earthquakes, which travelled about 20km (12 miles) horizontally through the Earth's crust. They used each of the tremors as virtual sensors, then used artificial intelligence to analyse patterns associated with them. One of the lead researchers, Dr Stephen Hicks from UCL, said combining physics and machine learning in this way could help forecast volcanic eruptions. The seismic activity started to stir beneath the Greek islands of Santorini, Amorgos, and Anafi in January 2025.


Asia tech stocks tumble on AI bubble fears

The Japan Times

Japanese and South Korean tech stocks tumbled Friday, with Softbank falling over 10% amid AI bubble concerns. HONG KONG - Japanese and South Korean tech stocks plummeted on Friday, with tech investor SoftBank plunging more than 10% as fears over an AI bubble weighed on the market. The selling followed a downbeat session on Wall Street after U.S. jobs data clouded hopes of further interest rate cuts and fears about whether red-hot valuations for artificial intelligence shares are justified. Seoul's benchmark Kospi index was trading down nearly 4%, while Tokyo's Nikkei index shed 2.3% in morning trade. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.



Hands On With Google's Nano Banana Pro Image Generator

WIRED

Google's latest AI image model is vastly better than the previous release at generating text in images. You can expect companies to go buck wild with this update. Nano Banana Pro generated this image, assembling a crowd of standalone characters into one scene. Corporate AI slop feels inescapable in 2025. From website banner ads to outdoor billboards, images generated by businesses using AI tools surround me.


Paws-itively terrifying! Lions produce not just one, but TWO distinct types of roar, study finds

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Defiant Dems receive 24/7 protection from Capitol Police after Trump accused them of'seditious behavior' and threatened them with execution What Meghan's announcements in her pseudo-Royal court get wrong and why they'speak volumes', revealed by experts Presidential hopeful is dragged into criminal probe... as shock texts emerge: 'It will open Pandora's Box' Multiple cast members speak to Daily Mail and hurl ugly allegations at each other... and reveal co-stars they can't stand Family panic as Britney Spears takes'disturbing' measures... after world was shocked by her unrecognizable new look Everybody Loves Raymond stars now unrecognizable as they reunite for sitcom's 30th anniversary Democratic candidate gives bizarre defense after comments that she'hates' Nashville resurface Private school where teacher'had sex with five students as soon as they turned 16' - and it was LEGAL Kansas City Chiefs coach slams Donald Trump in brutal putdown: 'He has no idea what's going on' Anna Kepner's ex-boyfriend claims stepbrother'climbed on top of her' months before cheerleader was found dead on cruise Bruce Willis' daughter Rumer makes heartbreaking confession about famous father's dementia battle Truth about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo's'secret marriage'... and the depressing reason insiders say their friendship could soon be OVER America's most forgiving wife lists enormous $6m NYC apartment she shares with disgraced CEO caught with woman on Coldplay kisscam Kessler twins who worked with Frank Sinatra and wowed Elvis Presley'paid a lot of money' to die together at 89 A lion's roar is undeniably one of the most fearsome sounds across the entire animal kingdom. Now, it turns out these majestic creatures produce not just one, but two distinct types of roar. That's according to researchers from the University of Exeter, who have identified a brand new type of growl in African lions. The animals - often referred to as the'King of the Jungle' - are best known for their full-throated roar, an immensely powerful vocalization that can be heard up to five miles away. However, using AI, the researchers were able to identify a second type of roar, which they've called the'intermediary roar'.


"To Survive, I Must Defect": Jailbreaking LLMs via the Game-Theory Scenarios

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As LLMs become more common, non-expert users can pose risks, prompting extensive research into jailbreak attacks. However, most existing black-box jailbreak attacks rely on hand-crafted heuristics or narrow search spaces, which limit scalability. Compared with prior attacks, we propose Game-Theory Attack (GTA), an scalable black-box jailbreak framework. Concretely, we formalize the attacker's interaction against safety-aligned LLMs as a finite-horizon, early-stoppable sequential stochastic game, and reparameterize the LLM's randomized outputs via quantal response. Building on this, we introduce a behavioral conjecture "template-over-safety flip": by reshaping the LLM's effective objective through game-theoretic scenarios, the originally safety preference may become maximizing scenario payoffs within the template, which weakens safety constraints in specific contexts. We validate this mechanism with classical game such as the disclosure variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and we further introduce an Attacker Agent that adaptively escalates pressure to increase the ASR. Experiments across multiple protocols and datasets show that GTA achieves over 95% ASR on LLMs such as Deepseek-R1, while maintaining efficiency. Ablations over components, decoding, multilingual settings, and the Agent's core model confirm effectiveness and generalization. Moreover, scenario scaling studies further establish scalability. GTA also attains high ASR on other game-theoretic scenarios, and one-shot LLM-generated variants that keep the model mechanism fixed while varying background achieve comparable ASR. Paired with a Harmful-Words Detection Agent that performs word-level insertions, GTA maintains high ASR while lowering detection under prompt-guard models. Beyond benchmarks, GTA jailbreaks real-world LLM applications and reports a longitudinal safety monitoring of popular HuggingFace LLMs.


Kaggle Chronicles: 15 Years of Competitions, Community and Data Science Innovation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Since 2010, Kaggle has been a platform where data scientists from around the world come together to compete, collaborate, and push the boundaries of Data Science. Over these 15 years, it has grown from a purely competition-focused site into a broader ecosystem with forums, notebooks, models, datasets, and more. With the release of the Kaggle Meta Code and Kaggle Meta Datasets, we now have a unique opportunity to explore these competitions, technologies, and real-world applications of Machine Learning and AI. And so in this study, we take a closer look at 15 years of data science on Kaggle - through metadata, shared code, community discussions, and the competitions themselves. We explore Kaggle's growth, its impact on the data science community, uncover hidden technological trends, analyze competition winners, how Kagglers approach problems in general, and more. We do this by analyzing millions of kernels and discussion threads to perform both longitudinal trend analysis and standard exploratory data analysis. Our findings show that Kaggle is a steadily growing platform with increasingly diverse use cases, and that Kagglers are quick to adapt to new trends and apply them to real-world challenges, while producing - on average - models with solid generalization capabilities. We also offer a snapshot of the platform as a whole, highlighting its history and technological evolution. Finally, this study is accompanied by a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVOV9bIUNrM) and a Kaggle write-up (https://kaggle.com/competitions/meta-kaggle-hackathon/writeups/kaggle-chronicles-15-years-of-competitions-communi) for your convenience.


Multidimensional scaling of two-mode three-way asymmetric dissimilarities: finding archetypal profiles and clustering

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multidimensional scaling visualizes dissimilarities among objects and reduces data dimensionality. While many methods address symmetric proximity data, asymmetric and especially three-way proximity data (capturing relationships across multiple occasions) remain underexplored. Recent developments, such as the h-plot, enable the analysis of asymmetric and non-reflexive relationships by embedding dissimilarities in a Euclidean space, allowing further techniques like archetypoid analysis to identify representative extreme profiles. However, no existing methods extract archetypal profiles from three-way asymmetric proximity data. This work extends the h-plot methodology to three-way proximity data under both symmetric and asymmetric, conditional and unconditional frameworks. The proposed approach offers several advantages: intuitive interpretability through a unified Euclidean representation; an explicit, eigenvector-based analytical solution free from local minima; scale invariance under linear transformations; computational efficiency for large matrices; and a straightforward goodness-of-fit evaluation. Furthermore, it enables the identification of archetypal profiles and clustering structures for three-way asymmetric proximities. Its performance is compared with existing models for multidimensional scaling and clustering, and illustrated through a financial application. All data and code are provided to facilitate reproducibility.


A Primer on Quantum Machine Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Quantum machine learning (QML) is a computational paradigm that seeks to apply quantum-mechanical resources to solve learning problems. As such, the goal of this framework is to leverage quantum processors to tackle optimization, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and generative modeling-among other tasks-more efficiently than classical models. Here we offer a high level overview of QML, focusing on settings where the quantum device is the primary learning or data generating unit. We outline the field's tensions between practicality and guarantees, access models and speedups, and classical baselines and claimed quantum advantages-flagging where evidence is strong, where it is conditional or still lacking, and where open questions remain. By shedding light on these nuances and debates, we aim to provide a friendly map of the QML landscape so that the reader can judge when-and under what assumptions-quantum approaches may offer real benefits.


Structured adaptive and random spinners for fast machine learning computations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider an efficient computational framework for speeding up several machine learning algorithms with almost no loss of accuracy. The proposed framework relies on projections via structured matrices that we call Structured Spinners, which are formed as products of three structured matrix-blocks that incorporate rotations. The approach is highly generic, i.e. i) structured matrices under consideration can either be fully-randomized or learned, ii) our structured family contains as special cases all previously considered structured schemes, iii) the setting extends to the non-linear case where the projections are followed by non-linear functions, and iv) the method finds numerous applications including kernel approximations via random feature maps, dimensionality reduction algorithms, new fast cross-polytope LSH techniques, deep learning, convex optimization algorithms via Newton sketches, quantization with random projection trees, and more. The proposed framework comes with theoretical guarantees characterizing the capacity of the structured model in reference to its unstructured counterpart and is based on a general theoretical principle that we describe in the paper. As a consequence of our theoretical analysis, we provide the first theoretical guarantees for one of the most efficient existing LSH algorithms based on the HD3HD2HD1 structured matrix [Andoni et al., 2015]. The exhaustive experimental evaluation confirms the accuracy and efficiency of structured spinners for a variety of different applications.