In 1992, a Minnesota-based software company known for its educational hit The Oregon Trail released another simulation-style game to school districts across the country. Freedom! took kids on a journey along the Underground Railroad, becoming the first American software program to use slavery as its subject matter. Less than four months later, it was pulled from the market. In this episode, we revisit this well-intentioned, but flawed foray into historical trauma that serves as a reminder that teaching Black history in America has always been fraught. This episode was written by Willa Paskin.

Modern Large language models (LLMs) can still generate responses that may not be aligned with human expectations or values. While many weight-based alignment methods have been proposed, many of them still leave models vulnerable to attacks when used on their own. To help mitigate this issue, we introduce Bergeron, a framework designed to improve the robustness of LLMs against adversarial attacks. Bergeron employs a two-tiered architecture. Here, a secondary LLM serves as a simulated conscience that safeguards a primary LLM. We do this by monitoring for and correcting potentially harmful text within both the prompt inputs and the generated outputs of the primary LLM. Empirical evaluation shows that Bergeron can improve the alignment and robustness of several popular LLMs without costly fine-tuning. It aids both open-source and black-box LLMs by complementing and reinforcing their existing alignment training.

It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California. A drone crash in June forced an estimated 3,000 of the sleek seabirds with their pointed orange bills to abandon their eggs on Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County. Experts say it's possible that many of the birds set up camp on two commercial barges in nearby Long Beach Harbor. Now droves of the baby birds are falling into the ocean and drowning. "They basically landed on the barge a day or so, and it may have been two or three days, after the incident involving the drones when they left Bolsa Chica," said Tim Daly, spokesman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Although machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are terms that are often used interchangeably, they are quite different. That difference becomes more important as applications for these technologies become more prevalent. Tech Briefs posed questions to machine learning/AI industry executives to get their views on issues such as machine learning platform selection, interpreting data created by these platforms, and pros and cons of implementing machine learning. Our participants are Dr. Florian Baumann, Chief Technology Officer - Automotive & AI, at Dell Technologies; Mario Bergeron, Technical Marketing Engineer at Averna Technologies; Zach Mayer, Vice President of Data Science at Data Robot; George Rendell, Senior Director of NX Design at Siemens Digital Industries Software; and Rajesh Ramachandran, Chief Digital Officer - Industrial Automation, at ABB Inc. Tech Briefs: Machine learning is a term that has confused many people, partly because its definition has taken on multiple forms. How do you define machine learning and how do you see it being used in manufacturing, medical, transportation, or other industrial applications?

In hopes of luring skilled workers both at home and form abroad with a chance to reside in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto, Line Corp., a popular messaging app service, opened a new development base in the heart of the city in June. The firm plans to raise the number of engineers to 3,000, from around 2,100, in the near future. At present, the Kyoto office has 19 engineers of which 10 are from overseas. While more tech staffers are needed, "we won't lower our hiring bar," said Ryohei Miyota, who oversees the hiring of engineers at Line's Kyoto branch. Still, Line has shown it is willing to be flexible with other conditions.

At an after-party for the red carpet premiere of the seventh season of "Game of Thrones" at Walt Disney Concert Hall, partygoers watched as Westeros came to life on the building before them. An icy visage of the Night King loomed over the affair while dragons soared across the hall's sweeping arched facade, breathing flames that appeared to envelope the iconic structure. Santa Monica-based designer Bart Kresa created the multimedia installation for the HBO event using a technique called projection mapping. Employing high-powered video projectors and sophisticated spatial mapping software, projection mapping enables artists and designers to cast virtual graphics onto the physical world, fitting them to the exact contours and dimensions of just about any surface. Projected light shows have been popular in Europe for years, thanks to generous public funding for the arts.

Pilot Matt Standridge will compete in the Cybathlon using an exoskeleton from the University of Houston's Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory designed to help people with paraplegia to walk. Vance Bergeron was once an amateur cyclist who rode 7,000 kilometres per year -- much of it on steep climbs in the Alps. But in February 2013, as the 50-year-old chemical engineer was biking to work at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyons, France, he was hit by a car. The impact sent him flying through the air and onto his head, breaking his neck. When he woke, he learnt that he would never again move his legs on his own, and would have only limited use of his arms.