Asia


Drone war, ground offensive continue despite new Russia-Ukraine peace push

Al Jazeera

Russia and Ukraine have launched a wave of drone attacks against each other overnight, even as Moscow claimed it was finalising a peace proposal to end the war. Ukrainian air force officials said on Tuesday that Russia deployed 60 drones across multiple regions through the night, injuring 10 people. Kyiv's air defences intercepted 43 of them – 35 were shot down while eight were diverted using electronic warfare systems. In Dnipropetrovsk, central Ukraine, Governor Serhiy Lysak reported damage to residential properties and an agricultural site after Russian drones led to fires during the night. In Kherson, a southern city frequently hit by Russian strikes, a drone attack on Tuesday morning wounded a 59-year-old man and six municipal workers, officials said.


Watch as two lifesize robots swing punches at each other in the world's first humanoid robot boxing match

Daily Mail - Science & tech

In a world where human boxers are at risk of dangerous injuries, we may have a glimpse of what the fight of the future could look like. New footage shows the world's first humanoid robot boxing tournament, which took place over the weekend in Hangzhou, east China. In the bizarre clip, two lifesize robots wearing gloves and protective headgear fight each other in a ring as a human officiator looks on. Each fighter robot weighs about 35kg and is 4.3ft (132cm) tall – roughly the height of the average eight-year-old child. Both the bots initially have trouble seeing exactly where their opponent is before successfully trading punches and kicks, to the delight of a baying crowd.


OpenAI's 6.5B new acquisition signals Apple's biggest AI crisis yet

FOX News

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits down with Shannon Bream to discuss the positives and potential negatives of artificial intelligence and the importance of maintaining a lead in the AI industry over China. OpenAI has just made a move that's turning heads across the tech world. The company is acquiring io, the AI device startup founded by Jony Ive, for nearly 6.5 billion. It's a collaboration between Sam Altman, who leads OpenAI, and the designer responsible for some of Apple's most iconic products, including the iPhone and Apple Watch. Together, they want to create a new generation of AI-powered devices that could completely change how we use technology.


Bandit Learning with Implicit Feedback Yi Qi

Neural Information Processing Systems

Implicit feedback, such as user clicks, although abundant in online information service systems, does not provide substantial evidence on users' evaluation of system's output. Without proper modeling, such incomplete supervision inevitably misleads model estimation, especially in a bandit learning setting where the feedback is acquired on the fly. In this work, we perform contextual bandit learning with implicit feedback by modeling the feedback as a composition of user result examination and relevance judgment. Since users' examination behavior is unobserved, we introduce latent variables to model it. We perform Thompson sampling on top of variational Bayesian inference for arm selection and model update. Our upper regret bound analysis of the proposed algorithm proves its feasibility of learning from implicit feedback in a bandit setting; and extensive empirical evaluations on click logs collected from a major MOOC platform further demonstrate its learning effectiveness in practice.




Man who posted deepfake images of prominent Australian women could face 450,000 penalty

The Guardian

The online safety regulator wants a 450,000 maximum penalty imposed on a man who posted deepfake images of prominent Australian women to a website, in the first case of its kind heard in an Australian court. The eSafety commissioner has launched proceedings against Anthony Rotondo over his failure to remove "intimate images" of several prominent Australian women from a deepfake pornography website. The federal court has kept the names of the women confidential. Rotondo initially refused to comply with the order while he was based in the Philippines, the court heard, but the commissioner launched the case once he returned to Australia. Rotondo posted the images to the MrDeepFakes website, which has since been shut down.



Watch: Humanoid robots fight in Chinese kick-boxing competition

BBC News

Two humanoid robots traded punches while fans watched on, in a competition held in Hangzhou, China, on Sunday. The fight was part of the China Media Group World Robot Competition and featured robots developed by Unitree Robotics. The event included both fighting demonstrations and matches, marking a world-first combat sports event featuring humanoid robots.