Technology
My Father Wants to Age in Place. AI Will Be Watching
Devices that monitor seniors for safety are appealing to worried loved ones and underresourced home care agencies. It was January of 2026 in North Seattle, and my 86-year-old father was struggling to move around his house. "I'm stumbling around here," my 86-year-old father told a guest in his home this past January. "Oooh, ooh, careful," the guest replied. "Yeah, I almost fell down."
Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary
An icon of Silicon Valley's counterculture, Stewart Brand is confronting his final years in a home that embodies the self-sufficient, DIY ethos of his famous Whole Earth Catalog. The three-building cluster in Petaluma where Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan live. The new studio is in the center. This past January, Stewart Brand published a book, "Maintenance is what keeps everything going," he begins. "It's what keeps life going." Brand's life has been going for 87 years, but lately the going has been tough. The man known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog --the 1960s countercultural guide to self-sufficiency that Steve Jobs was fond of --has an incurable disease and is down to 130 pounds, an alarming weight for a nearly 6-footer. Brand's mind is sharp as ever; you can't talk to the man for five minutes without learning something. But his once-nimble movements are now cautious, and he's never far from an oxygen tank. Stewart Brand's body, in other words, requires constant maintenance.
ABayesian Approach to Contextual Dynamic Pricing using the Proportional Hazards Model with Discrete Price Data
Dynamic pricing algorithms typically assume continuous price variables, which may not reflect real-world scenarios where prices are often discrete. This paper demonstrates that leveraging discrete price information within a semi-parametric model can substantially improve performance, depending on the size of the support set of the price variable relative to the time horizon. Specifically, we propose a novel semi-parametric contextual dynamic pricing algorithm, namely BayesCoxCP, based on a Bayesian approach to the Cox proportional hazards model. Our theoretical analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds that adapt to the sparsity level γ, proving that our algorithm achieves a regret upper bound of eO(T(1+γ)/2 + dT) for γ < 1/3 and eO(T2/3 + dT) for γ 1/3, where γ represents the sparsity of the price grid relative to the time horizon T. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms an existing method, particularly in scenarios with sparse discrete price points.
Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models
AF3 introduces: CMM (i) AF-Whisper, a unified audio encoder trainedPrevious SOTA (Closed Source) using a novel strategy for joint representation learning across all 3 modalities of speech, sound, and music; (ii) flexible, on-demand thinking, allowing the model to do chain-of-thought-type reasoning before answering; (iii) multi-turn, multiaudio chat; (iv) long audio understanding and reasoning (including speech) up MMSU to 10 minutes; and (v) voice-to-voice interaction. To enable these capabilities, (avg.)
Online Functional Tensor Decomposition via Continual Learning for Streaming Data Completion
Online tensor decompositions are powerful and proven techniques that address the challenges in processing high-velocity streaming tensor data, such as traffic flow and weather system. The main aim of this work is to propose a novel online functional tensor decomposition (OFTD) framework, which represents a spatialtemporal continuous function using the CP tensor decomposition parameterized by coordinate-based implicit neural representations (INRs). The INRs allow for natural characterization of continually expanded streaming data by simply adding new coordinates into the network. Particularly, our method transforms the classical online tensor decomposition algorithm into a more dynamic continual learning paradigm of updating the INR weights to fit the new data without forgetting the previous tensor knowledge. To this end, we introduce a long-tail memory replay method that adapts to the local continuity property of INR. Extensive experiments for streaming tensor completion using traffic, weather, user-item, and video data verify the effectiveness of the OFTD approach for streaming data analysis. This endeavor serves as a pivotal inspiration for future research to connect classical online tensor tools with continual learning paradigms to better explore knowledge underlying streaming tensor data.
These 240W USB-C cables fast-charge almost any device for under 10
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New wheeled robot says no thanks to humanoid hype
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . Grandparents are identity theft's biggest payday Do not click fake'account recovery' Amazon email Americans need protection against'warrantless surveillance': Rep Chip Roy Spencer Pratt's use of AI to boost campaign sparks debate China approves world's first commercial brain chip Kurt Knutsson unveils his top Father's Day gift picks FBI releases list of'most wanted fraudsters' as crackdown continues Genesis AI's Eno robot skips legs for a practical design built for factories first and homes later Fox News Flash top headlines are here.
Eliciting Reasoning in Language Models with Cognitive Tools
The recent advent of reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 was met with excited speculation by the AI community about the mechanisms underlying these capabilities in closed models, followed by a rush of replication efforts, particularly from the open source community. These speculations were largely settled by the demonstration from DeepSeek-R1 that chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning (RL) can effectively replicate reasoning on top of base LLMs. However, it remains valuable to explore alternative methods for theoretically eliciting reasoning that could help elucidate the underlying mechanisms, as well as providing additional methods that may offer complementary benefits. Here, we build on the long-standing literature in cognitive psychology and cognitive architectures, which postulates that reasoning arises from the orchestrated, sequential execution of a set of modular, predetermined cognitive operations. Crucially, we implement this key idea within a modern agentic tool-calling framework. In particular, we endow an LLM with a small set of "cognitive tools" encapsulating specific reasoning operations, each executed by the LLM itself. Surprisingly, this simple strategy results in considerable gains in performance on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks compared to base LLMs, for both closed and open-weight models. For instance, providing our "cognitive tools" to GPT-4.1 increases its pass@1 performance on AIME2024 from 32% to 53%, even surpassing the performance of o1-preview. In addition to its practical implications, this demonstration contributes to the debate regarding the role of post-training methods in eliciting reasoning in LLMs versus the role of inherent capabilities acquired during pre-training, and whether posttraining merely uncovers these latent abilities.
RANK++LETR: Learn to Rank and Optimize Candidates for Line Segment Detection
It is observed that the confidence score may fail to reflect the predicting quality accurately in previous proposal-based line segment detection methods, since the scores and the line locations are predicted simultaneously. We find that the line segment detection performance can be further improved by learning-based line candidate ranking and optimizing strategy. To this end, we build a novel end-to-end line detecting model named RANK++LETR upon deformable DETR architecture, where the encoder is used to select the line candidates while the decoder is applied to rank and optimize these candidates. We design line-aware deformable attention (LADA) module in which attention positions are distributed in a long narrow area and can align well with the elongated geometry of line segments. Moreover, we innovatively apply ranking-based supervision in line segment detection task with the design of contiguous labels according to the detection quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous SOTA methods in prediction accuracy and gets faster inferring speed than other Transformer-based methods.