The healthcare landscape is evolving, with patients seeking more reliable information about their health conditions, treatment options, and potential risks. Despite the abundance of information sources, the digital age overwhelms individuals with excess, often inaccurate information. Patients primarily trust doctors and hospital staff, highlighting the need for expert-endorsed health information. However, the pressure on experts has led to reduced communication time, impacting information sharing. To address this gap, we propose CataractBot, an experts-in-the-loop chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs). Developed in collaboration with a tertiary eye hospital in India, CataractBot answers cataract surgery related questions instantly by querying a curated knowledge base, and provides expert-verified responses asynchronously. CataractBot features multimodal support and multilingual capabilities. In an in-the-wild deployment study with 49 participants, CataractBot proved valuable, providing anytime accessibility, saving time, and accommodating diverse literacy levels. Trust was established through expert verification. Broadly, our results could inform future work on designing expert-mediated LLM bots.

The COVID pandemic has led to the wide adoption of online video calls in recent years. However, the increasing reliance on video calls provides opportunities for new impersonation attacks by fraudsters using the advanced real-time DeepFakes. Real-time DeepFakes pose new challenges to detection methods, which have to run in real-time as a video call is ongoing. In this paper, we describe a new active forensic method to detect real-time DeepFakes. Specifically, we authenticate video calls by displaying a distinct pattern on the screen and using the corneal reflection extracted from the images of the call participant's face. This pattern can be induced by a call participant displaying on a shared screen or directly integrated into the video-call client. In either case, no specialized imaging or lighting hardware is required. Through large-scale simulations, we evaluate the reliability of this approach under a range in a variety of real-world imaging scenarios.

Which three-word phrase should always be spoken cautiously? All of them, actually, but that last one -- depending on your choice of ride, a full tank of gas can now cost you within fumes-sniffing distance of a hundred bucks. How did it come to this -- again? Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.

To mitigate local warming, cities including Milan have wrapped condominium balconies and high-rise facades in expansive vertical gardens. A dense stack of vegetation can help keep a building cool by creating natural shading and releasing moisture into the air, says Theodore Endreny, a professor of environmental resources engineering at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The compact foliage augments the benefits trees and plants naturally provide when planted on sidewalks or roofs, including pollution removal, carbon dioxide sequestration and oxygen production. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Crews of urban arborists certified as tree climbers will be hired to rappel down buildings and maintain these ecosystems as they sprout on more buildings, says Dr. Endreny.

DETROIT (Reuters) - Waymo on Thursday will relaunch and expand its fully automated, robo-taxi ride hailing service in Phoenix, rebooting its effort to transform years of autonomous vehicle research into a revenue-producing business. Some of the Waymo vans in Phoenix will still have attendants on board. Waymo has not said where or when it will expand its robo-taxi business beyond Phoenix. "You can imagine we'd love the opportunity to bring the Waymo One driver to our home state of California," Krafcik said. Before the coronavirus pandemic forced Waymo to suspend operations this spring, Waymo was using vehicles with no human attendant on board to provide five to ten percent out of a total of 1,000 to 2,000 rides per week in its Phoenix service zone, Krafcik said.

Two years after the Alphabet-owned Waymo launched a limited self-driving taxi service in the Metro Phoenix, Arizona, area (and two years after people started attacking the autonomous cars), the company has kicked off a fully driverless car service in and around Phoenix. Whereas in 2018 passengers would be assuaged by the site of a human in the driver seat, ready to take over in case of an emergency, the newly retooled robot taxi service lacks those human attendants. As Ars Technica notes, this is two years behind schedule for the autonomous mobility company, who initially promised a driverless taxi experience at the end of 2018. Efficacy of self-driving car claims aside, that was the same year that Uber had to suspend its own self-driving car testing in Arizona after one of their test cars (with attendant at the wheel) hit and killed a pedestrian. What did launch in 2018 was the aforementioned Waymo One service, which was only available to research testers previously enrolled with Waymo. So the technology wasn't there yet, but it appears Waymo is more confident this time around.

The technology to power connected cities exists today--and continued growth is predicted. Will all our cities soon be connected? Or do hurdles stand in the way? Perhaps one of the biggest challenge will be overcoming regulatory hurdles that could slow the progress down. Technavio says the autonomous bus market, as an example, will grow by 2364 units during 2020 and 2024, which is a growth rate of 32%.

As cities become more connected, construction companies will need to be aware of how transportation systems are evolving, requiring future municipalities to be built. This is where robotics and autonomous vehicles enter the equation, and offers big opportunities for cities. Technavio says the autonomous bus market, as an example, will grow by 2364 units during 2020 and 2024, which is a growth rate of 32%. At the end of last year, IDTechEx also predicted that that the robotaxi services will become a $2.5 trillion market by 2040. Further, if you were at CES earlier this year, then you know intelligent transportation systems and autonomous vehicles were big trends at the show and it is a topic that has been covered in depth over on Constructech TV.

Dialogue systems intend to facilitate the interaction between humans and computers. A key element in a dialogue system is the conceptual model which represents a domain. Folksonomies are very simple forms of knowledge representation which may be used to specify the conceptual model. However, folksonomies suffer by nature from issues related to ambiguity. In this paper, we present a method which uses linguistic context for learning folksonomies from task-oriented dialogues. The linguistic context can be useful for reducing ambiguity, for instance, when using the folksonomies for interpreting utterances. Experiments show that the learned folksonomies increase the accuracy of the interpretation compared when not using the contextual information.

On March 23rd 2016, Microsoft released a new artificial intelligence Twitter bot named Tay. "Hellooooooo world!!!" read its cutesy first message. Within hours, however, human users had persuaded Tay to replace its light hearted banter with anti-semitic, sexist, and racist Tweets. The media got hold of the story and pilloried Microsoft and its new CEO, Satya Nadella. While it probably didn't feel like it at the time, Tay represented the start of a significant turnaround in Microsoft's fortunes that would eventually lead the tech giant to reclaim its position as the most valuable company in the world.