Author profiling is the task of inferring characteristics about individuals by analyzing content they share. Supervised machine learning still dominates automatic systems that perform this task, despite the popularity of prompting large language models to address natural language understanding tasks. One reason is that the classification instances consist of large amounts of posts, potentially a whole user profile, which may exceed the input length of Transformers. Even if a model can use a large context window, the entirety of posts makes the application of API-accessed black box systems costly and slow, next to issues which come with such "needle-in-the-haystack" tasks. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a new method for author profiling which aims at distinguishing relevant from irrelevant content first, followed by the actual user profiling only with relevant data. To circumvent the need for relevance-annotated data, we optimize this relevance filter via reinforcement learning with a reward function that utilizes the zero-shot capabilities of large language models. We evaluate our method for Big Five personality trait prediction on two Twitter corpora. On publicly available real-world data with a skewed label distribution, our method shows similar efficacy to using all posts in a user profile, but with a substantially shorter context. An evaluation on a version of these data balanced with artificial posts shows that the filtering to relevant posts leads to a significantly improved accuracy of the predictions.

A new learning model based on autoassociative neural networks is developped and applied to face detection. To extend the de(cid:173) tection ability in orientation and to decrease the number of false alarms, different combinations of networks are tested: ensemble, conditional ensemble and conditional mixture of networks. The use of a conditional mixture of networks allows to obtain state of the art results on different benchmark face databases. Our purpose is to classify an extracted window x from an image as a face (x E V) or non-face (x EN). The set of all possible windows is E V uN, with V n N 0. Since collecting a representative set of non-face examples is impossible, face detection by a statistical model is a difficult task.

Walmart is expanding its drone delivery program from one pocket of the Dallas-Fort Worth area to millions of people in 30 municipalities in the area, Chief Executive Doug McMillon announced Tuesday at CES 2024. The retailer will use drone delivery systems operated by startup Zipline and by Alphabet subsidiary Wing, companies that have made hundreds of thousands of deliveries in recent years. They each recently obtained FAA clearance to fly their drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) -- in other words, out of the eyesight of a human operator -- which makes large-scale drone delivery operations more practical and economical. Delivery drones offer fast service, with Walmart packages arriving between 10 and 30 minutes after an order is placed from stores up to 10 miles away. Walmart touts the technology for people who need missing cooking ingredients, last-minute birthday gifts, over-the-counter medications or movie night snacks.

OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT brought AI chatbots to mainstream awareness, said Monday that it'll let you build special-purpose AI apps using its technology. And with a new app store coming that'll let you find or share these GPTs, as the company is calling these customized artificial intelligence tools, OpenAI looks like it's hoping to have something an iPhone moment. You don't need to know how to program to make a new GPT. You have to give it plain-language instructions, upload some of your own knowledge in the form of PDFs, videos or other files, then steer the bot's purpose in a direction like creating images or searching the web. "GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT for a specific purpose," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at the OpenAI DevDay conference in San Francisco.

If you subscribe to Apple Arcade ($5, £5 or AU$8 a month), you can play this game at no additional charge, and without ads or in-app purchases, which is why this version is called "Stardew Valley Plus." This game was developed by ConcernedApe. It was nominated for a handful of awards in 2016 and won the Golden Joystick Awards's Breakthrough Award that same year. Stardew Valley opens with you leaving your office job and moving back to your grandfather's rundown farm with the hope of living a simpler life. But if you scratch beneath the surface you'll find that this game is anything but simple. Sure, you can stay on your land as you grow crops, raise animals and fix your home, but there's so much to do in Stardew Valley Plus.

Some redditors seem very excited about a new World of Warcraft feature called Glorbo, which some believe will "make a huge impact on the game." Their palpable enthusiasm for Glorbo caught the attention of a blog named The Portal, which publishes "gaming content powered by Z League," an app that aims to bring gamers together. The Portal appears to be using AI to scrape Reddit posts and turn them into content. Redditor u/kaefer_kriegerin noticed that The Portal was seemingly turning discussions from some gaming subreddits into blog posts. They decided to try and trick the content farm into covering a fake WoW feature. The ruse was a success.

Apple has created its own generative artificial intelligence tools to compete with ChatGPT, according to a Bloomberg report Wednesday. Apple built its own framework that can create large language models, called "Ajax," as well as a chatbot service that internal engineers are calling Apple GPT, according to Bloomberg citing unnamed sources. It's part of the iPhone giant's bid to compete in the AI space, the report said. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Large language models are what power generative artificial intelligence chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

The US Federal Trade Commission has reportedly launched an investigation into whether OpenAI, the company behind popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has violated consumer protection laws. The FTC sent OpenAI a 20-page request for documents covering concerns related to data privacy and reputational harm, according to a report Thursday from The Washington Post. The agency also asked for details on OpenAI's large language model, the technology behind its generative AI chatbot, including all sources used to train the model and how data was obtained, according to the request, which was shared by the Post. CNET hasn't independently verified the request. The FTC declined to comment.