Wimbledon will break with tradition and replace line judges with electronic line calling from next year's championships, the All England Club confirmed. The sight of immaculately dressed line judges standing or crouching at the side and back of the grass courts has been a feature at the Grand Slam for 147 years. Electronic line calling was first used as an experiment at the ATP Next Gen Finals in Milan in 2017 and was adopted more widely during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be used on all courts across ATP Tour events from 2025. The Australian Open and US Open have already replaced line judges with electronic calling although the French Open still relies on the human eye.

Large language models with vision capabilities (VLMs), e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro are powering countless image-text applications and scoring high on many vision-understanding benchmarks. We propose BlindTest, a suite of 7 visual tasks absurdly easy to humans such as identifying (a) whether two circles overlap; (b) whether two lines intersect; (c) which letter is being circled in a word; and (d) counting the number of circles in a Olympic-like logo. Surprisingly, four state-of-the-art VLMs are, on average, only 56.20% accurate on our benchmark, with \newsonnet being the best (73.77% accuracy). On BlindTest, VLMs struggle with tasks that requires precise spatial information and counting (from 0 to 10), sometimes providing an impression of a person with myopia seeing fine details as blurry and making educated guesses. Code is available at: https://vlmsareblind.github.io/

Cutting-edge NASA imaging technology can detect early signs of a plant virus that, if unaddressed, often proves devastating for wineries and grape growers, new research has found. While the breakthrough is good news for the wine and grape industry, which loses billions of dollars a year to the crop-ruining disease, it could eventually help global agriculture as a whole. Using intricate infrared images captured by airplane over California's Central Valley, researchers were able to distinguish Cabernet Sauvignon grape vines that were infected but not showing symptoms -- before the point at which growers can spot the disease and respond. The technology, coupled with machine learning and on-the-ground analysis, successfully identified infected plants with almost 90% accuracy in some cases, according to two new research papers. "This is the first time we've ever shown the ability to do viral disease detection on the airborne scale," said Katie Gold, an assistant professor of grape pathology at Cornell University and a lead researcher on the project.

Providing personalised support for patients undergoing cancer treatment has taken a big step forward thanks to human-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed at La Trobe University. The Centre for Data Analytics and Cognition (CDAC) at La Trobe University has teamed up with international cancer researchers to create the Patient-Reported Information Multidimensional Framework (PRIME) for detection and analysis of patient behaviours, clinical factors, decision-making and deep emotions when dealing with cancer. Using new AI algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to make sense of vast quantities of information, Professor Damminda Alahakoon – Director of CDAC and Analytics Discipline Head at La Trobe University – said PRIME can better understand a patient's mental health status based entirely on the data shared by the patient. "This data can be the text a patient provides to an online chatbot, an online cancer support group or other online support service," ...

WASHINGTON – With presidential tweets in Persian and stern warnings to the regime, Donald Trump's administration is rallying behind the latest protests in Iran -- and renewing suspicions that his real goal is regime change. Just a week ago, massive crowds took to the streets in Iran to mourn powerful Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad, and Tehran fired retaliatory missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq without inflicting casualties. Trump's response was, briefly, unusually conciliatory -- seeking a de-escalation with Iran and noting that they shared common interests, including fighting the Islamic State group. But all has changed since Saturday, when Iran admitted that it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people, setting off a new round of protests by Iranians furious at the deaths and the regime's initial denial. The tragedy has "turned the tide against the Iranian leadership again," said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, which promotes conflict resolution.

People are often a little suspicious of automation. The Industrial Revolution sparked fear in workers that they'd become superfluous to modern production. But the reality was much different. Humans and machines work together, with the former using the latter to improve their roles. AI, with capabilities never seen before in machines, adds a fresh element to this long-standing human narrative.

TEHRAN - Iran said Tuesday it will further free itself from the 2015 nuclear deal in defiance of new American sanctions as U.S. President Donald Trump warned the Islamic republic of "overwhelming" retaliation for any attacks. Tensions between Iran and the U.S. have spiraled since last year when Trump withdrew the United States from the deal under which Tehran was to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. The two arch-rivals have been locked in an escalating war of words since Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in what it said was its own airspace, a claim the US vehemently denies. On Monday, Washington stepped up pressure by blacklisting Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top military chiefs, saying it would also sanction Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later in the week. Tehran was defiant on Tuesday, saying the new US sanctions against Iran showed Washington was "lying" about an offer of talks.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - One person was killed and seven others were wounded in an attack by Iranian-allied Yemeni rebels on an airport in the kingdom Sunday evening as U.S. Secretary of State was on his way to the country for talks on Iran, Saudi Arabia said. Regional tensions have flared in recent days, The U.S. abruptly called off military strikes against Iran in response to the shooting down of an unmanned American surveillance drone. The Trump administration has vowed to combine a "maximum pressure" campaign of economic sanctions with a buildup of American forces in the region, following the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. A new set of U.S. sanctions on Iran are expected to be announced Monday. The Sunday attack by the Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, targeted the Saudi airport in Abha.

ABU DHABI - President Donald Trump's national security adviser warned Iran on Wednesday that any attacks in the Persian Gulf will draw a "very strong response" from the U.S., taking a hard-line approach with Tehran after his boss only two days earlier said America wasn't "looking to hurt Iran at all." John Bolton's comments are the latest amid heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran that have been playing out in the Middle East. Bolton spoke to journalists in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which only days earlier saw former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warn there that "unilateralism will not work" in confronting the Islamic Republic. The dueling approaches highlight the divide over Iran within American politics. The U.S. has accused Tehran of being behind a string of incidents this month, including the alleged sabotage of oil tankers off the Emirati coast, a rocket strike near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and a coordinated drone attack on Saudi Arabia by Yemen's Iran-allied Houthi rebels. On Wednesday, Bolton told journalists that there had been a previously unknown attempt to attack the Saudi oil port of Yanbu as well, which he also blamed on Iran.

Writing recently in the UK professional HR journal People Management, Georgi Gyton and Robert Jeffery tell their readers that'Chatbots can already perform basic HR roles, and what's coming next is a game-changer'. Chatbots are text-based applications that carry out a'natural language' conversation by accessing a database of predetermined phrases. American Express has integrated one into Facebook Messenger for accessing accounts on the move. A start-up is reported to be building a chatbot to replace the NHS's non-emergency 111 number. HR-focused chatbots are becoming available in the UK.