The example shows the learned IT map with high w =2 0 approximating the ET map.

It's time to lock in and let your winter arc begin Have you ever locked in? No, not finding yourself locked in a lift or a bathroom. We're talking about locking IN - the phrase you might have seen on social media or heard people saying lately. To lock in is to focus; to endure short-term pain for long-term gain - whether that be building your body or your business. Do it today - not tomorrow.

We present AniME, a director-oriented multi-agent system for automated long-form anime production, covering the full workflow from a story to the final video. The director agent keeps a global memory for the whole workflow, and coordinates several downstream specialized agents. By integrating customized Model Context Protocol (MCP) with downstream model instruction, the specialized agent adaptively selects control conditions for diverse sub-tasks. AniME produces cinematic animation with consistent characters and synchronized audio visual elements, offering a scalable solution for AI-driven anime creation.

The example shows the learned IT map with high w =2 0 approximating the ET map.

Nissan revamps ProPilot to rival Tesla's driver-assist technology Nissan Motor is on a mission under new CEO Ivan Espinosa to rebuild its business, and while refreshing its lineup is a key part of that, so is winning back customers who demand cutting-edge technology. Leveraging its partnership with Wayve Technologies, a U.K.-based artificial intelligence startup backed by SoftBank Group, Nissan is preparing to launch the newest generation of its ProPilot driver-assistance system during the fiscal year ending March 2028. The automaker says the most advanced iteration of its driver-assist technology will be on par with Tesla's Full Self-Driving, which despite its name requires human supervision and intervention. While the systems still amount to Level 2 autonomy -- meaning a person must always be ready to take over -- ProPilot amounts to Nissan's best foot forward in contending with the U.S. EV giant and Alphabet's Waymo in the race to build self-driving cars. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Recommender systems for niche and dynamic communities face persistent challenges from data sparsity, cold start users and items, and privacy constraints. Traditional collaborative filtering and content-based approaches underperform in these settings, either requiring invasive user data or failing when preference histories are absent. We present DeepNaniNet, a deep neural recommendation framework that addresses these challenges through an inductive graph-based architecture combining user-item interactions, item-item relations, and rich textual review embeddings derived from BERT. Our design enables cold start recommendations without profile mining, using a novel "content basket" user representation and an autoencoder-based generalization strategy for unseen users. We introduce AnimeULike, a new dataset of 10,000 anime titles and 13,000 users, to evaluate performance in realistic scenarios with high proportions of guest or low-activity users. DeepNaniNet achieves state-of-the-art cold start results on the CiteULike benchmark, matches DropoutNet in user recall without performance degradation for out-of-matrix users, and outperforms Weighted Matrix Factorization (WMF) and DropoutNet on AnimeULike warm start by up to 7x and 1.5x in Recall@100, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that DeepNaniNet delivers high-quality, privacy-preserving recommendations in data-sparse, cold start-heavy environments while effectively integrating heterogeneous content sources.

If you were around for the electropop zeitgeist of the early 2010s, chances are that Purity Ring feature prominently on your nostalgia playlist. And if you were a young adult at that time, well, there's also a high chance that you played Japanese role-playing games as a teenager – whether that was Chrono Trigger on an SNES or Final Fantasy on a PlayStation. Purity Ring's new single Many Lives is an attempt to recapture the feeling of the RPG that you discovered as a 12-year-old and immediately made into your whole personality. Inspired by games such as Skies of Arcadia, Phantasy Star Online and Secret of Mana, it is poised to tug on the heartstrings of fans of a certain vintage. This is a bold decision for a band who have previously collaborated with Deftones and covered Eurodance classics, but members Megan James and Corin Roddick have the gaming expertise to pull it off. "We're huge fans of the JRPG genre," they say, naming Nier: Automata and Final Fantasy X as major influences on the sonic atmosphere of their latest work.

If asked to come up with a quintessentially "human" work of art, one could do worse than to name a film by Studio Ghibli. The Japanese animation studio, founded by the legendary eighty-four-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki, is known for its hand-drawn imagery, lushly organic color palettes, epic narratives, and evocation of both the emotional ambiguities of childhood and the twisting path to becoming an adult. We American millennials were blessed to have the films translated and distributed in English just as we were growing up, and so movies including "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," and "Spirited Away" are nigh-universally recognizable touchstones of our youth. Any Ghibli imagery is primed to make us feel a combination of pleasurable nostalgia and mournful shivers, evoking the doomed forest creatures, greedy bathhouse ghosts, and missed connections featured in Miyazaki's cinematic story lines. Unfortunately, that sense of poignancy quickly erodes when you are bombarded with thousands of Ghibli-esque copycat images, as we all were online last week, thanks to OpenAI's latest version of its ChatGPT tool.

The new Terminator anime heading to Netflix looks absolutely brutal in a trailer that dropped this weekend. Terminator Zero is set in 2022 and 1997 (the year of Judgment Day, as described in Terminator 2) and focuses on new characters: Eiko and the scientist Malcom Lee, who are being hunted by a Terminator. The series was produced by Skydance and Production I.G., the Japanese animation studio behind Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass. Fittingly, it drops on August 29, in a nod to the date of the fictional nuclear annihilation event. You can check out the new trailer below -- but just a heads up for anyone who isn't into anime gore, this clip is packed with it.

And speaking of Christian iconography and angry women: Neon Genesis Evangelion! Asus has been pumping out some PC gear branded with the license of the classic anime for a few years now, most recently a ROG Z790 motherboard based on the fire engine red Eva Unit 02 giant mech design. But Asuka stans were shocked and outraged to find a prominent misspelling on their pricey bit of anime merchandise. One of the decorative shielding plates on the ROG Maximumus Z790 Hero EVA-02 Edition reads "Evangenlion" instead of "Evangelion." Anime fans drooling over every last millimeter of the design noticed the issue back in September, according to VideoCardz.com (translating from German site HardwareLuxx), but Asus is only now addressing the issue with an official statement after it was thrust into the spotlight via a JayzTwoCents tweet. The company offered recompense with a free replacement for those who ask, and an additional year of warranty coverage even for those who don't.