A room's acoustic properties are a product of the room's geometry, the objects within the room, and their specific positions. A room's acoustic properties can be characterized by its impulse response (RIR) between a source and listener

When Dario Amodei gets excited about AI--which is nearly always--he moves. The cofounder and CEO springs from a seat in a conference room and darts over to a whiteboard. He scrawls charts with swooping hockey-stick curves that show how machine intelligence is bending toward the infinite. His hand rises to his curly mop of hair, as if he's caressing his neurons to forestall a system crash. You can almost feel his bones vibrate as he explains how his company, Anthropic, is unlike other AI model builders.

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union's list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine. In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the "Good Old USA Project." The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full time team dedicated to the cause. On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the last two years been targeting Ukraine, and more recently, the US elections.

Chris Lord relates the story of a space planner at one higher educational institution who faced a conundrum: Plenty of square footage had been allocated for study space, but students were complaining that there weren't enough places to sit. The university had equipped the space with large trestle tables that seated six people, but it turned out that if just one person was sitting at a table nobody else would. The solution: Place houseplants in the middle of the table to divide the space and create a perception of privacy. In short, the space plan looked good on paper but didn't account for human behavior. That's a bug Boston-based Lambent is hoping to fix.

Scott Mann had a problem: too many f-bombs. The writer-director had spent production on "Fall," his vertigo-inducing thriller about rock climbers stuck atop a remote TV tower, encouraging the two leads to have fun with their dialogue. That improv landed a whopping 35 "f-cks" in the film, placing it firmly in R-rated territory. But when Lionsgate signed on to distribute "Fall," the studio wanted a PG-13 edit. Sanitizing the film would mean scrubbing all but one of the obscenities. "How do you solve that?" Mann recalled from the glass-lined conference room of his Santa Monica office this October, two months after the film's debut.

Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential source of knowledge for agents that need to acquire new task competencies within a performance environment. We describe efforts toward a novel agent capability that can construct cues (or "prompts") that result in useful LLM responses for an agent learning a new task. Importantly, responses must not only be "reasonable" (a measure used commonly in research on knowledge extraction from LLMs) but also must be specific to the agent's task context and in a form that the agent can interpret given its native language capacities. We summarize a series of empirical investigations of agent prompting strategies and evaluate LLM responses against the goals of targeted and actionable responses for task learning. Our results demonstrate that actionable task knowledge can be obtained from LLMs in support of online agent task learning.

The multidisciplinary artist Nayland Blake was once a child gazing in wonder at Alexander Calder's "circus" in the lobby of the Whitney Museum. "Who's the circus now?" Blake said the other day, some fifty years later, gesturing around a conference room across from the museum's education center. Blake, bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners, was preparing for a session in their performance series, "Got an Art Problem?," part of this year's Whitney Biennial. In June, Blake threw a "Gender Discard Party" in the museum's lobby, to which guests were invited to "bring your own baggage" and dance away the woes of classification, in view of the artist's "Rear Entry," a reproduction of the door to the Mineshaft, the former gay club in the meatpacking district. Blake thought the curators would never go for "Rear Entry."

Rapid advancements in digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are driving significant change in the Nordic real estate sector and quickening the pace of transition to smart offices, factory buildings and high-street retail spaces. While existing and emerging technologies remain the primary catalyst for change, the real estate industry's transition is heavily motivated by a more robust focus on embracing energy-reduction technology to support the construction of next-generation smart buildings. The broader adoption of AI and digital technologies in smart building design is also influenced by the transformative nature of working practices across the Nordic countries that was triggered by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In Sweden, the mass return of employees to normal office functions during the first quarter of 2022 coincided with a national multi-sector debate on "workplace wellbeing" that looked at how AI and digital technologies, integrated into building design, could be used to deliver safer and superior environments for all employees. A link between the workplace environment and higher safety measures being demanded by trade unions at employers in Sweden features in a research-based report from real estate group Wihlborgs that was undertaken in partnership with NAVET Analytics and Quilt.AI.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Earlier this year a chilling academic study was published by researchers at Lancaster University and UC Berkeley. Using a sophisticated form of AI known as a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) they created artificial human faces (i.e. They discovered that this type of AI technology has become so effective, we humans can no longer tell the difference between real people and virtual people (or "veeple" as I call them). You see, they also asked their test subjects to rate the "trustworthiness" of each face and discovered that consumers find AI-generated faces to be significantly more trustworthy than real faces.