4-legged hydrogen-powered robot you can actually ride
Kawasaki's CORLEO is a hydrogen-powered, AI-driven rideable robot. Kawasaki Heavy Industries has introduced something that feels straight out of a video game: CORLEO, a hydrogen-powered, four-legged robot prototype designed to be ridden by humans. Unveiled at the Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025, this futuristic machine is built to handle rugged terrain with ease, combining cutting-edge robotics and sustainable energy. Let's take a closer look at what makes CORLEO so cutting-edge. GET SECURITY ALERTS & EXPERT TECH TIPS โ SIGN UP FOR KURT'S'THE CYBERGUY REPORT' NOW Instead of wheels, it has four robotic legs that move independently, allowing it to handle uneven ground like rocks, grass and steep inclines.
How to Survive the A.I. Revolution
In the early hours of April 12, 1812, a crowd of men approached Rawfolds Mill, a four-story stone building on the banks of the River Spen, in West Yorkshire. This was Brontรซ country--a landscape of bleak moors, steep valleys, and small towns nestled in the hollows. The men, who'd assembled on the moors hours earlier, were armed with muskets, sticks, hatchets, and heavy blacksmith's hammers. When they reached the mill, those at the front broke windows to gain entry, and some fired shots into the darkened factory. But the mill's owner, William Cartwright, had been preparing for trouble.
Donald Trump Wants to Save the Coal Industry. He's Too Late.
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel. "I call it beautiful, clean coal," President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. "I tell my people never use the word coal unless you put'beautiful, clean' before it." Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he's been in politics.
Repurposing protein folding models for generation with latent diffusion
PLAID is a multimodal generative model that simultaneously generates protein 1D sequence and 3D structure, by learning the latent space of protein folding models. What comes next after protein folding? In PLAID, we develop a method that learns to sample from the latent space of protein folding models to generate new proteins. It can accept compositional function and organism prompts, and can be trained on sequence databases, which are 2-4 orders of magnitude larger than structure databases. Unlike many previous protein structure generative models, PLAID addresses the multimodal co-generation problem setting: simultaneously generating both discrete sequence and continuous all-atom structural coordinates.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,145
At least 34 people were killed and another 117, including 11 children, were injured by a Russian missile attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, Ukraine's state emergency service said. This was the deadliest attack on Ukraine this year. The Ukrainian Air Force said its units intercepted and destroyed 43 of 55 Russian drones launched at Ukraine overnight. The attacks reportedly targeted the northern, southern and central areas of Ukraine. Russian forces captured the village of Yelyzavetivka in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Russia's Ministry of Defence said.
Adaptive Sensor Steering Strategy Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Data Acquisition in Digital Twins
Ogbodo, Collins O., Rogers, Timothy J., Borgo, Mattia Dal, Wagg, David J.
This paper introduces a sensor steering methodology based on deep reinforcement learning to enhance the predictive accuracy and decision support capabilities of digital twins by optimising the data acquisition process. Traditional sensor placement techniques are often constrained by one-off optimisation strategies, which limit their applicability for online applications requiring continuous informative data assimilation. The proposed approach addresses this limitation by offering an adaptive framework for sensor placement within the digital twin paradigm. The sensor placement problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, enabling the training and deployment of an agent capable of dynamically repositioning sensors in response to the evolving conditions of the physical structure as represented by the digital twin. This ensures that the digital twin maintains a highly representative and reliable connection to its physical counterpart. The proposed framework is validated through a series of comprehensive case studies involving a cantilever plate structure subjected to diverse conditions, including healthy and damaged conditions. The results demonstrate the capability of the deep reinforcement learning agent to adaptively reposition sensors improving the quality of data acquisition and hence enhancing the overall accuracy of digital twins.
Session-based Recommender Systems: User Interest as a Stochastic Process in the Latent Space
Balcer, Klaudia, Lipinski, Piotr
This paper jointly addresses the problem of data uncertainty, popularity bias, and exposure bias in session-based recommender systems. We study the symptoms of this bias both in item embeddings and in recommendations. We propose treating user interest as a stochastic process in the latent space and providing a model-agnostic implementation of this mathematical concept. The proposed stochastic component consists of elements: debiasing item embeddings with regularization for embedding uniformity, modeling dense user interest from session prefixes, and introducing fake targets in the data to simulate extended exposure. We conducted computational experiments on two popular benchmark datasets, Diginetica and YooChoose 1/64, as well as several modifications of the YooChoose dataset with different ratios of popular items. The results show that the proposed approach allows us to mitigate the challenges mentioned.
Learning with Positive and Imperfect Unlabeled Data
Lee, Jane H., Mehrotra, Anay, Zampetakis, Manolis
We study the problem of learning binary classifiers from positive and unlabeled data when the unlabeled data distribution is shifted, which we call Positive and Imperfect Unlabeled (PIU) Learning. In the absence of covariate shifts, i.e., with perfect unlabeled data, Denis (1998) reduced this problem to learning under Massart noise; however, that reduction fails under even slight shifts. Our main results on PIU learning are the characterizations of the sample complexity of PIU learning and a computationally and sample-efficient algorithm achieving a misclassification error $\varepsilon$. We further show that our results lead to new algorithms for several related problems. 1. Learning from smooth distributions: We give algorithms that learn interesting concept classes from only positive samples under smooth feature distributions, bypassing known existing impossibility results and contributing to recent advances in smoothened learning (Haghtalab et al, J.ACM'24) (Chandrasekaran et al., COLT'24). 2. Learning with a list of unlabeled distributions: We design new algorithms that apply to a broad class of concept classes under the assumption that we are given a list of unlabeled distributions, one of which--unknown to the learner--is $O(1)$-close to the true feature distribution. 3. Estimation in the presence of unknown truncation: We give the first polynomial sample and time algorithm for estimating the parameters of an exponential family distribution from samples truncated to an unknown set approximable by polynomials in $L_1$-norm. This improves the algorithm by Lee et al. (FOCS'24) that requires approximation in $L_2$-norm. 4. Detecting truncation: We present new algorithms for detecting whether given samples have been truncated (or not) for a broad class of non-product distributions, including non-product distributions, improving the algorithm by De et al. (STOC'24).
Challenges in interpretability of additive models
Zhang, Xinyu, Martinelli, Julien, John, ST
We review generalized additive models as a type of ``transparent'' model that has recently seen renewed interest in the deep learning community as neural additive models. We highlight multiple types of nonidentifiability in this model class and discuss challenges in interpretability, arguing for restraint when claiming ``interpretability'' or ``suitability for safety-critical applications'' of such models.
Truncated Matrix Completion - An Empirical Study
Naik, Rishhabh, Trivedi, Nisarg, Tarzanagh, Davoud Ataee, Balzano, Laura
Low-rank Matrix Completion (LRMC) describes the problem where we wish to recover missing entries of partially observed low-rank matrix. Most existing matrix completion work deals with sampling procedures that are independent of the underlying data values. While this assumption allows the derivation of nice theoretical guarantees, it seldom holds in real-world applications. In this paper, we consider various settings where the sampling mask is dependent on the underlying data values, motivated by applications in sensing, sequential decision-making, and recommender systems. Through a series of experiments, we study and compare the performance of various LRMC algorithms that were originally successful for data-independent sampling patterns.