The evolution of biological sequences, such as proteins or DNAs, is driven by the three basic edit operations: substitution, insertion, and deletion. Motivated by the recent progress of neural network models for biological tasks, we implement two neural network architectures that can treat such edit operations. The first proposal is the edit invariant neural networks, based on differentiable Needleman-Wunsch algorithms. The second is the use of deep CNNs with concatenations. Our analysis shows that CNNs can recognize star-free regular expressions, and that deeper CNNs can recognize more complex regular expressions including the insertion/deletion of characters. The experimental results for the protein secondary structure prediction task suggest the importance of insertion/deletion. The test accuracy on the widely-used CB513 dataset is 71.5%, which is 1.2-points better than the current best result on non-ensemble models.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Iran war: What is happening on day 17 of US-Israel attacks? Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Tehran as the US-Israel war on Iran entered its 17th day on Monday. Escalations continue in the Gulf region, where authorities suspended flights at Dubai international airport after a drone incident sparked a fire nearby. Dubai-based Emirates announced later that it was resuming limited flights, with several planned routes cancelled for the day.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced diversion of some flights from the Dubai international airport, one of the world's busiest, after a drone attack sparked a fire near the facility, as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia also reported intercepting drones and missiles. The Dubai Media Office on Monday said civil defence teams had "successfully contained the fire resulting from impact to one of the fuel tanks in the vicinity" of the airport, noting that no injuries had been reported so far. The Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, meanwhile, said it was temporarily suspending flights at the airport "as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of all passengers and staff". It did not say when they expected flights to resume.

Beyond local convolution networks, we explore how to harness various external human knowledge for endowing the networks with the capability of semantic global reasoning.

We propose a new type of generative model for high-dimensional data that learns a manifold geometry of the data, rather than density, and can generate points evenly along this manifold. This is in contrast to existing generative models that represent data density, and are strongly affected by noise and other artifacts of data collection. We demonstrate how this approach corrects sampling biases and artifacts, thus improves several downstream data analysis tasks, such as clustering and classification. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is especially useful in biology where, despite the advent of single-cell technologies, rare subpopulations and gene-interaction relationships are affected by biased sampling. We show that SUGAR can generate hypothetical populations, and it is able to reveal intrinsic patterns and mutual-information relationships between genes on a single-cell RNA sequencing dataset of hematopoiesis.

I t was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo - a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind. "Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented," game designer Alex Randolph once said. "Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered."

We consider a multi-armed bandit game where N players compete for K arms for T turns. Each player has different expected rewards for the arms, and the instantaneous rewards are independent and identically distributed. Performance is measured using the expected sum of regrets, compared to the optimal assignment of arms to players. We assume that each player only knows her actions and the reward she received each turn. Players cannot observe the actions of other players, and no communication between players is possible. We present a distributed algorithm and prove that it achieves an expected sum of regrets of near-O\left(\log^{2}T\right). This is the first algorithm to achieve a poly-logarithmic regret in this fully distributed scenario. All other works have assumed that either all players have the same vector of expected rewards or that communication between players is possible.

Recurrent networks of spiking neurons (RSNNs) underlie the astounding computing and learning capabilities of the brain. But computing and learning capabilities of RSNN models have remained poor, at least in comparison with ANNs. We address two possible reasons for that. One is that RSNNs in the brain are not randomly connected or designed according to simple rules, and they do not start learning as a tabula rasa network. Rather, RSNNs in the brain were optimized for their tasks through evolution, development, and prior experience. Details of these optimization processes are largely unknown. But their functional contribution can be approximated through powerful optimization methods, such as backpropagation through time (BPTT). A second major mismatch between RSNNs in the brain and models is that the latter only show a small fraction of the dynamics of neurons and synapses in the brain. We include neurons in our RSNN model that reproduce one prominent dynamical process of biological neurons that takes place at the behaviourally relevant time scale of seconds: neuronal adaptation.

Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies Covid exposed the lack of data on the country's 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.03 EDT Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. Are you going outside for work? He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond.

Has Trump failed to sell the Iran war to the world? Are US-Israeli attacks against Iran legal? As anticipated, it ended up being One Battle After Another's night at the 98th annual Academy Awards, with the political thriller carting away six Oscars out of a total of 13 nominations. But while Paul Thomas Anderson's magnum opus continued its march towards awards-season domination, there were moments of genuine surprise and subversion in Sunday's ceremony. Host Conan O'Brien and his fellow presenters deftly avoided mentioning President Donald Trump by name, but their barbs took direct aim at his policies since returning to office.