These cuddly, connected companions could disrupt everything from make-believe to bedtime stories. No wonder some lawmakers want them banned. The main antagonist of, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids' tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise . But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids' toy instead. AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category.

Ikea's Smart Home Reset Goes Back to Basics Ikea's new 21-product series of bulbs, sensors, and remotes is dirt cheap, idiot-proof, Matter-ready, and designed to work with everything. But it's still years from the promised house of the future. That's what you might be thinking if you've been following smart-home tech for the past decade or, indeed, building out your own fortress of missed connections. The first Nest thermostat launched in 2011, Philips Hue in 2012, the Amazon Echo in 2014. But for anyone who has spent long nights scrolling through IoT troubleshooting forums since then, here's the latest: It's finally time for a do-over.

The Bluetooth tracker maker is adding free and paid SOS features to its products, including emergency contact alerts, silent alarms, and real-time location sharing. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Think of Bluetooth trackers and safety in the past few years and your first thought might be the misuse of Apple AirTags and similar devices against women in domestic abuse and stalking cases. Alongside collaborative initiatives to counter and shut down these malicious uses (such as the IETF's Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers, or DULT, standard), tracker makers themselves are flipping the script, turning tech that has been used to monitor women against their will into tech that protects them.

Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. "This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

Scopus: With the rapid development of medical imaging techniques, artificial intelligence (AI) and radiomics have been heralded as the frontiers in medical imaging (MI). AI in MI is the science and engineering of making intelligent imaging machines, especially intelligent computer programs for clinical practices. While the radiomics refers to the high-throughput extraction of a large number of imaging and genetic features from multi-modality data sets and characterizes the region of interests (ROIs) for further analyses of grading, classification, predication, planning and prognosis assessment. The ultimate goal of AI and Radiomics in MI is to improve patient outcomes for better prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. Therefore, the aim of this special issue is willing to provide the readers with an up-to-date research progress and future development of this field in order to help improve human health.

Prof. Jong Chul Ye is a Professor of the Graduate School of AI and Affiliated Professor at Dept. of Bio/Brain Engineering and Dept. of Mathematical Sciences of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea. Before joining KAIST, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a Senior Researcher at Philips Research at New York, and then GE Global Research in Niskayauna. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Trans. He is currently an associate editor for IEEE Trans. He is an IEEE Fellow, and was the Chair of IEEE SPS Computational Imaging TC, and IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer in 2021-2022.

PDF has better equation formatting than kindle. Charu Aggarwal is a Distinguished Research Staff Member (DRSM) at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He has worked extensively in the field of data mining, with particular interests in data streams, privacy, uncertain data and social network analysis. He has published 19 (8 authored and 11 edited) books, over 400 papers in refereed venues, and has applied for or been granted over 80 patents. Because of the commercial value of the above-mentioned patents, he has received several invention achievement awards and has thrice been designated a Master Inventor at IBM.

Jack Morrison and Isaac Roberts (far left and right) previously cofounded and sold 3D scanning company Replica Labs to Occipital. There they met electrical engineer Davis Foster (center), with whom they went on to cofound Scythe Robotics. Self-driving cars get all the hype. But while the category continues to face a long and uncertain path to commercialization, a burgeoning crop of autonomous vehicles is already hitting the market. The latest is Scythe Robotics, a Boulder, Colorado-based company that announced today it is launching a zero-emission, autonomous lawn mower backed by $18.6 million from Inspired Capital, True Ventures and more.

Prof. Zheng-Hua Tan is a Professor of Machine Learning and Speech Processing, a Co-Head of the Centre for Acoustic Signal Processing Research (CASPR), and Machine Learning Research Group Leader in the Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University, Denmark. Prof. Zheng-Hua Tan was a Visiting Scientist/Professor at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and a postdoctoral fellow at AI Spoken Language Lab, in the Department of Computer Science at KAIST, Korea. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Hunan University, China, in 1990 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 1999. His research interests include machine learning, deep learning, pattern recognition, speech and speaker recognition, noise-robust speech processing, multimodal signal processing, and social robotics. He has over 200 publications.

In this technical talk, Amanda Prorok, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, discusses her team's latest research on what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks. Effective communication is key to successful multi-agent coordination. Yet it is far from obvious what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks. In this talk, I discuss our recent work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to solve multi-agent coordination problems. In my first case-study, I show how we use GNNs to find a decentralized solution to the multi-agent path finding problem, which is known to be NP-hard.