Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning threekiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Bench-mark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The rest of Dyson's promised 2026 vacuum lineup is here, from the new Dyson V16 Piston Animal to an updated version of the favored Dyson V8 Cyclone. Dyson's vacuum lineup had a new look planned for this year . Some of the vacuums have already arrived, like the Dyson PencilVac and Dyson Spot+Scrub robot vacuum, but others we've still been waiting to see. That wait is over as of this month, as Dyson has finally dropped the rest of its anticipated models. Dyson now has three new cordless vacuums you can shop, plus one with a Submarine head variant: the Dyson V16 Piston Animal ($980) and Dyson V16 Piston Animal Submarine ($1,100), the Dyson V10 Konical ($500), and the Dyson V8 Cyclone ($400) .

Large language model (LLM) watermarks enable authentication of text provenance, curb misuse of machine-generated text, and promote trust in AI systems. Current watermarks operate by changing the next-token predictions output by an LLM. The updated (i.e., watermarked) predictions depend on random side information produced, for example, by hashing previously generated tokens. LLM watermarking is particularly challenging in low-entropy generation tasks -- such as coding -- where next-token predictions are near-deterministic. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework for watermark design.

Clinical risk prediction plays a crucial role in early disease detection and personalized intervention. While recent models increasingly incorporate multimodal data, their development typically assumes access to large-scale, multimodal datasets and substantial computational resources. In practice, however, most clinical sites operate under resource constraints, with access limited to EHR data alone and insufficient capacity to train complicated models. This gap highlights the urgent need to democratize clinical risk prediction by enabling effective deployment in data-and resource-limited local clinical settings. In this work, we propose a cross-cohort cross-modal knowledge transfer framework that leverages the multimodal model trained on a nationwide cohort and adapts it to local cohorts with only EHR data. We focus on EHR and genetic data as representative multimodal inputs and address two key challenges. First, to mitigate the influence of noisy or less informative biological signals, we propose a novel mixture-of-aggregations design to enhance the modeling of informative and relevant genetic features. Second, to support rapid model adaptation in low-resource sites, we develop a lightweight graph-guided fine-tuning method that adapts pretrained phenotypical EHR representations to target cohorts using limited patient data. Extensive experiments on real-world clinical data validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Officer accused of using AI to'create evidence' Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create evidential material in a number of cases. The Derbyshire Police officer has been removed from frontline duties, pending the outcome of the investigation, said the force. The officer is alleged to have perverted the course of justice, but no arrests have been made, said police. A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said they were working with police, adding: We are engaging with defence teams and the courts in appropriate cases. They added: As police inquiries continue, it would not be appropriate to comment further.

The issue of AI sovereignty was in focus at London Tech Week. The issue of AI sovereignty was in focus at London Tech Week. UK sets out AI infrastructure push at London Tech Week - how does it stack up? Ownership of the commanding heights of the AI economy is a political talking point around the world, as countries seek to assert some control of a technology dominated by the US and China. London Tech Week, the showcase event for the UK tech industry, focused heavily on that theme this week.

Tim Smith: 'Today's short-form, fast-paced, highly captivating content may affect children's attention, comprehension and emotional response'. Tim Smith: 'Today's short-form, fast-paced, highly captivating content may affect children's attention, comprehension and emotional response'. Pioneering UK Nerve Lab harnesses AI to map effect of children's screen time P arents are constantly being told to limit their children's screen time. A relatively slow-paced programme such as Bluey offers a very different viewing experience to a fast-moving action series such as PAW Patrol, yet both are broadly considered suitable for young children. This challenge is growing as the type of content children are exposed to evolves.

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Plus, the next game from the Mouthwashing devs and trying to survive as a sentient guitar. Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. However, we've still got some neat new games that you can play this weekend to highlight, and news on a bunch of intriguing upcoming titles that might have slipped under your radar during SGF. Before all of that, I have game bundles to tell you about. Inkle has offered up a collection of all of its games (and the four-part novelization of) on Humble Bundle .

After WIRED reported last week that Meta's smart glasses app contained code that would enable the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices, the company removed the code this week without commenting on why or whether it plans to add such functionality back into the app later. Another WIRED investigation this week found that xAI's Grok is still hosting sexualized deepfakes, including "nudified" images and videos, of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician. After limiting the release of its new Mythos-class AI model over concerns about its potential impacts on cybersecurity, Anthropic announced a model upgrade for partners in its limited-access group this week and launched a "safe" version of the model to the public with guardrails meant to keep the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a new directive to federal agencies this week in reaction to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most urgent software vulnerabilities in as little as three days. As Europe looks to separate and insulate itself from US Big Tech, WIRED created a timeline that tracks all the ways EU governments, companies, and other organizations are moving away from US tech.