If an eighth-grader in California shared a nude photo of a classmate with friends without consent, the student could conceivably be prosecuted under state laws dealing with child pornography and disorderly conduct. If the photo is an AI-generated deepfake, however, it's not clear that any state law would apply. According to the district, the images used real faces of students atop AI-generated nude bodies. Lt. Andrew Myers, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills police, said no arrests have been made and the investigation is continuing. Michael Bregy said the district's investigation into the episode is in its final stages.

Konami today dropped a ton of news about the future of its iconic horror franchise. Aside from confirming that remake of Silent Hill 2, the studio revealed three new games. Townfall comes from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, a Glasgow studio known for strong narrative titles like Observation and Stories Untold. The short teaser for Townfall looks to be the most traditional Silent Hill game of the trio. Ascension, due out in 2023, is the least game-like installment, but it will feature the influence of J.J. Abrams.

It's already been a good week for Stephen King, with an adaptation of his short story The Boogeyman landing a movie order from Hulu. Now, Deadline is reporting that King's 2021 crime novel, Billy Summers, will be produced as a miniseries by J.J. Abrams and his production company, Bad Robot. Additionally, Bad Robot has lined up screenwriters Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz to adapt Billy Summers, with Zwick also set up to direct the miniseries. According to Deadline, the miniseries will only run six to 10 episodes, and it will be shopped to streaming services and premium cable networks. Abrams and King have previously collaborated on adaptations of 11.22.63 and Castle Rock on Hulu, as well as Lisey's Story for Apple TV .

Gridworlds have been long-utilised in AI research, particularly in reinforcement learning, as they provide simple yet scalable models for many real-world applications such as robot navigation, emergent behaviour, and operations research. We initiate a study of gridworlds using the mathematical framework of reconfigurable systems and state complexes due to Abrams, Ghrist & Peterson. State complexes represent all possible configurations of a system as a single geometric space, thus making them conducive to study using geometric, topological, or combinatorial methods. The main contribution of this work is a modification to the original Abrams, Ghrist & Peterson setup which we believe is more naturally-suited to the context of gridworlds. With this modification, the state complexes may exhibit geometric defects (failure of Gromov's Link Condition), however, we argue that these failures can indicate undesirable or dangerous states in the gridworld. Our results provide a novel method for seeking guaranteed safety limitations in discrete task environments with single or multiple agents, and offer potentially useful geometric and topological information for incorporation in or analysis of machine learning systems.

Spotify's growing podcast ambitions now include a pact with a big studio before it truly gets started. The streaming music service has struck a multi-year deal that gives it "first look" access to podcasts from J.J. Abrams' new Bad Robot Audio unit. The move lets Spotify snap up exclusives from Bad Robot's planned mix of fiction and non-fiction shows. Bad Robot Audio hasn't yet detailed its releases, but it will have an experienced leader. She played an important role in Spotify's early podcast efforts, and is unsurprisingly eager to collaborate with her former employer in her field of expertise.

JJ Abrams first floated the possibility of a Portal movie eight years ago, but there hasn't been much noise about it since. Don't worry, though -- it's finally moving forward. Abrams told IGN that a script for the Portal flick is currently in progress at Warner Bros., and that the team was thrilled with the angle for the production. The games' narrow storytelling focus left "huge" potential for the movie, according to Abrams. Abrams didn't name the writers or anyone else attached to the production, but he did recognize the pressure to bring back JK Simmons for a live action take on Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson.

When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit -- and blew the future of privacy in America wide open. In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user's account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was grainy, the angle a bit oblique. The agent sent the man's face to child-crime investigators around the country in the hope that someone might recognize him. When an investigator in New York saw the request, she ran the face through an unusual new facial-recognition app she had just started using, called Clearview AI. The team behind it had scraped the public web -- social media, employment sites, YouTube, Venmo -- to create a database with three billion images of people, along with links to the webpages from which the photos had come. This dwarfed the databases of other such products for law enforcement, which drew only on official photography like mug shots, driver's licenses and passport pictures; with Clearview, it was effortless to go from a face to a Facebook account. The app turned up an odd hit: an Instagram photo of a heavily muscled Asian man and a female fitness model, posing on a red carpet at a bodybuilding expo in Las Vegas. The suspect was neither Asian nor a woman. But upon closer inspection, you could see a white man in the background, at the edge of the photo's frame, standing behind the counter of a booth for a workout-supplements company. On Instagram, his face would appear about half as big as your fingernail. The federal agent was astounded. The agent contacted the supplements company and obtained the booth worker's name: Andres Rafael Viola, who turned out to be an Argentine citizen living in Las Vegas.

AI algorithms can assess the pain that someone with sickle cell disease is experiencing by using just their vital signs. Doing so could ensure people receive the most suitable pain management therapy for their condition. "There's always a trade-off between giving people sufficient medicine to reduce the pain and giving people too much medication so that they have bad side effects or a higher risk of addiction," says Daniel Abrams at Northwestern University in Illinois. But since pain is subjective, it is difficult to measure in a standardised way. Abrams and his colleagues set out to determine whether physiological data that is already routinely taken – including body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure – could be used to devise a system that assesses pain levels in a more objective manner.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. It may have the same basic external configuration, weight and 120mm cannon, but today's Abrams tank is, simply put, far more lethal than ever before due to the addition of sensors, ammunition, armor, EW (Electronic Warfare) and new weapons. The battle-tested platform has over the years, continued to incorporate cutting-edge innovations. For example, the Army is now testing and preparing a new Advanced.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. It destroyed Iraqi T-72 tanks in the Gulf War in now-famous tank battles, using highly accurate, long-range thermal sensors able to destroy targets without being seen itself. It patrolled the streets in Iraq in 2003. It is a major mechanized attack platform with massive amounts of fire-power and an "intimidating" presence when used as a psychological deterrent.