Doctors from Scotland and the US have completed what is thought to be a world-first stroke procedure using a robot. Prof Iris Grunwald, of the University of Dundee, performed the remote thrombectomy - the removal of blood clots after a stroke - on a human cadaver that had been donated to medical science. The professor was at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, while the body she was operating on while using the machine was across the city at the university. Hours later, Ricardo Hanel - a neurosurgeon in Florida - used the technology to carry out the first transatlantic surgery from his Jacksonville base on a human body in Dundee over 4,000 miles (6,400km) away. The team has called it a potential game changer if it becomes approved for use on patients.

Numerous previous studies have sought to determine to what extent language models, pretrained on natural language text, can serve as useful models of human cognition. In this paper, we are interested in the opposite question: whether we can directly optimize a language model to be a useful cognitive model by aligning it to human psychometric data. To achieve this, we introduce a novel alignment technique in which we fine-tune a language model to implicitly optimize the parameters of a linear regressor that directly predicts humans' reading times of in-context linguistic units, e.g., phonemes, morphemes, or words, using surprisal estimates derived from the language model. Using words as a test case, we evaluate our technique across multiple model sizes and datasets and find that it improves language models' psychometric predictive power. However, we find an inverse relationship between psychometric power and a model's performance on downstream NLP tasks as well as its perplexity on held-out test data. While this latter trend has been observed before (Oh et al., 2022; Shain et al., 2024), we are the first to induce it by manipulating a model's alignment to psychometric data.

Over the past two decades, numerous studies have demonstrated how less predictable (i.e., higher surprisal) words take more time to read. In general, these studies have implicitly assumed the reading process is purely responsive: Readers observe a new word and allocate time to process it as required. We argue that prior results are also compatible with a reading process that is at least partially anticipatory: Readers could make predictions about a future word and allocate time to process it based on their expectation. In this work, we operationalize this anticipation as a word's contextual entropy. We assess the effect of anticipation on reading by comparing how well surprisal and contextual entropy predict reading times on four naturalistic reading datasets: two self-paced and two eye-tracking. Experimentally, across datasets and analyses, we find substantial evidence for effects of contextual entropy over surprisal on a word's reading time (RT): in fact, entropy is sometimes better than surprisal in predicting a word's RT. Spillover effects, however, are generally not captured by entropy, but only by surprisal. Further, we hypothesize four cognitive mechanisms through which contextual entropy could impact RTs -- three of which we are able to design experiments to analyze. Overall, our results support a view of reading that is not just responsive, but also anticipatory.

A man has told his story of going from living on a council estate to founding one of Britain's largest biotech companies which floated on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange for $2.9bn. The Welsh scientist's company - which uses artificial intelligence to cut the time and money being spent on discovering new drugs - has earned him a whopping €470 million, but he says he is nowhere near finished. Andrew Hopkins grew up on a council estate in the UK but described how he has since swapped that life for one in the prestigious city of Oxford after setting up his company, Exscientia. The 50-year-old founder retains 18.6 million shares, giving him a 15.8% stake of the company. On paper, he's worth around €470m since the flotation in October 2021, but in real life, Andrew, or Professor Hopkins as he's known in the field, is only just beginning.

When you try to describe the much-loved video game Lemmings, it sounds like a wind-up. It looked, if not bad, then wilfully basic even for 1991. But, released years before mobile phone games were a thing, it was nonetheless a fiendishly addictive game that feels like the spiritual precursor to the likes of Angry Birds. And it was manna to many, many kids like me, whose sole household computing device was a rubbish PC with a horrible four-colour CGA screen that basically couldn't play any video game of the time … except Lemmings! To mark 30 years since its release, Exient – current holders of the franchise – has made a YouTube documentary about it.

Exscientia today announced the opening of a 21,000 square foot expansion of its facilities at Oxford Science Park, increasing capacity for its technology teams as well as significantly expanding its laboratory-based experimental capabilities in structural biology, biophysics and high-content pharmacology. In parallel, Exscientia is building a new 26,000 square foot robotic laboratory at nearby Milton Park, Oxfordshire focused on the automation of chemistry and biology to accelerate drug discovery. This will take Exscientia towards its goal of drugs designed by AI, made by robot. "Exscientia has grown significantly in 2021, driven by new partnerships with leading pharma and biotech companies, as well as by our in-house drug discovery work. Our pipeline includes more than 25 active research programs across therapeutic areas, with a focus on immunology and oncology," said Dr. David Hallet, Chief Operating Officer of Exscientia.

There was a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four required some suspension of disbelief: it didn't seem possible, in the first several decades after the book's publication, that any government or institution would have the resources and organisation to put transmitting and receiving devices in every home and then monitor the information they captured. We now know how very plausible that is. What Orwell didn't guess was that people would, at the prompting of Amazon and Apple, actually invite such things into their homes. No state programme of installation was needed. That the future has become the present, in shapes that weren't quite predicted, is part of the premise of Hello, Robot, an exhibition now showing at the V&A Dundee.

The Monroe News reports the Michigan Department of Transportation and the village of Dundee are monitoring the Michigan highway 50 bridge over the river as the water rises. A flood warning is in effect for Dundee, Blissfield and other area communities.

The ability to argue, to express our reasoning to others, is one of the defining features of what it is to be human. Processes of argumentation run our governments, structure scientific endeavour and frame religious belief. So should we worry that new advances in artificial intelligence are taking steps towards equipping computers with these skills? As technology reshapes our lives, we are all getting used to new ways of working and new ways of interacting. Millennials have known nothing else.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The ability to argue, to express our reasoning to others, is one of the defining features of what it is to be human. Processes of argumentation run our governments, structure scientific endeavor and frame religious belief. So should we worry that new advances in artificial intelligence are taking steps towards equipping computers with these skills? As technology reshapes our lives, we are all getting used to new ways of working and new ways of interacting.