Birds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles and tendons, how insects control these movements remains unclear, as mechanisms of wing deployment and retraction vary among insect species. Beetles (Coleoptera) display one of the most complex wing mechanisms. For example, in rhinoceros beetles, the wing deployment initiates by fully opening the elytra and partially releasing the hindwings from the abdomen. Subsequently, the beetle starts flapping, elevates the hindwings at the bases, and unfolds the wingtips in an origami-like fashion. Whilst the origami-like fold have been extensively explored, limited attention has been given to the hindwing base deployment and retraction, which are believed to be driven by thoracic muscles. Using high-speed cameras and robotic flapping-wing models, here we demonstrate that rhinoceros beetles can effortlessly elevate the hindwings to flight position without the need for muscular activity. We show that opening the elytra triggers a spring-like partial release of the hindwings from the body, allowing the clearance needed for subsequent flapping motion that brings the hindwings into flight position. The results also show that after flight, beetles can leverage the elytra to push the hindwings back into the resting position, further strengthening the hypothesis of a passive deployment mechanism. Finally, we validate the hypothesis with a flapping microrobot that passively deploys its wings for stable controlled flight and retracts them neatly upon landing, which offers a simple yet effective approach to the design of insect-like flying micromachines.

The flourishing ecosystem centered around voice personal assistants (VPA), such as Amazon Alexa, has led to the booming of VPA apps. The largest app market Amazon skills store, for example, hosts over 200,000 apps. Despite their popularity, the open nature of app release and the easy accessibility of apps also raise significant concerns regarding security, privacy and quality. Consequently, various testing approaches have been proposed to systematically examine VPA app behaviors. To tackle the inherent lack of a visible user interface in the VPA app, two strategies are employed during testing, i.e., chatbot-style testing and model-based testing. The former often lacks effective guidance for expanding its search space, while the latter falls short in interpreting the semantics of conversations to construct precise and comprehensive behavior models for apps. In this work, we introduce Elevate, a model-enhanced large language model (LLM)-driven VUI testing framework. Elevate leverages LLMs' strong capability in natural language processing to compensate for semantic information loss during model-based VUI testing. It operates by prompting LLMs to extract states from VPA apps' outputs and generate context-related inputs. During the automatic interactions with the app, it incrementally constructs the behavior model, which facilitates the LLM in generating inputs that are highly likely to discover new states. Elevate bridges the LLM and the behavior model with innovative techniques such as encoding behavior model into prompts and selecting LLM-generated inputs based on the context relevance. Elevate is benchmarked on 4,000 real-world Alexa skills, against the state-of-the-art tester Vitas. It achieves 15% higher state space coverage compared to Vitas on all types of apps, and exhibits significant advancement in efficiency.

No matter the sport, every team is trying to get an edge over the competition. The front office of any organization is always looking for innovative ways to make sure the product on the field reaches its peak. That's why Sevilla FC, one of La Liga's top soccer clubs, has teamed with IBM and its watsonx generative AI to develop a new way of evaluating players in the scouting department. Sevilla FC introduced Scout Advisor Tuesday. It's an innovative tool built by IBM's watsonx to revamp its recruitment process.

The United States and China explore the lunar presence of critical minerals. Mexico will launch its first lunar mission next month, a historic step for the country and Latin America as a whole, according to officials. "This project will make history and is the first of its kind in Latin America, which elevates the name of our country, confirming once again that Mexican engineering is at the level of the best in the world," Salvador Landeros, director of the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), said in a press release. A team of scientists and nearly 250 university students developed five microrobots that the AEM will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, between Jan. 8 and Jan. 11 as part of project Colmena. Each robot weighs 60 grams -- a little over one-tenth of a pound -- and measures just under 5 inches in diameter.

In this episode I'm discussing adapting to change within your business. I take you through the 14-year history of ELEVATE. It's just inspiring the evolution from where we started, how we started to what ELEVATE has become today. I discuss the reasons why we changed so many times and how we used change to our advantage. I also give advice to business owners to on the importance of adapting your business.

After investigating several external training programs, LG CNS decided to partner with Google Cloud Learning Services to guarantee they received the right level of training and support to further elevate their world-class team. They recognized and respected Google's global leadership in AI and machine learning (ML), and believed Google was the only partner that could elevate their company to a global level, in line with their already prominent position within the Korean market. LG CNS's employees participated in 5 weeks of machine learning and 1 week of machine learning operations (MLOps) training through the Advanced Solutions Lab (ASL) via ASL Virtual. This immersive learning program enabled participants to collaborate and learn directly from Google Cloud engineers and ML experts, without having to attend a Google campus. LG CNS' participants for this transformative training program were selected based on a strict criteria.

It's remarkable to watch a five-year-old draw, void of any anxiety about what the world will think. We all start our lives creatively confident, happy to create and share our work with pride. And then, as we age, our comfort with creative expression declines. We're discouraged by the learning curve of creative skills and tools, by our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and by the harsh opinions of critics. As Picasso famously quipped, "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up."

Ben Meisner is the founder of the leading online photo editing platform Ribbet.com. In recent times a flurry of AI-powered photo and video editing tools have emerged, ranging from those that simply save time by automatically removing backgrounds, to more sophisticated tools that replace people (deepfakes) or that generate completely new and realistic scenes from scratch, such as DALL·E and Stable Diffusion. When you consider the development of AI technology in driverless cars, there are clear problems that are being addressed. For example, there's the potential benefit of fewer accidents, where approximately 1.3 million people currently lose their lives each year in road fatalities. But when it comes to photo and video manipulation, what is it we are ultimately working toward solving?

Xoxoday, a global SaaS Fintech company known for its rewards, engagement, and loyalty infrastructure for businesses, announced a technology partnership with UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, & workforce management solutions. This will help organizations and HR leaders elevate the workplace experience through a holistic employee engagement approach that connects, aligns, empowers, & motivates teams. This partnership helps solve significant new-age crises of disengagement and attrition by focusing on employee experience. While UKG helps streamline human capital management and HR service delivery, Xoxoday Empuls helps drive multi-dimensional employee engagement. The partnership also aims to address challenges brought about by the'Great Resignation' by attracting and retaining top talent, maximizing ROI from every business' biggest resource – their people.

Most people are looking for one of two things in a soundbar: the most affordable option or the best-sounding one. While it's easy to find products that fit one of those criteria, Vizio's M-Series Elevate tries to meet both. Like the original Elevate we reviewed in 2021, the new M-Series Elevate uses rotating, ceiling-firing drivers for the Dolby Atmos height channels. However, the new bar opts for a wired setup and ditches extra features like Wi-Fi to cut costs. This "best of both worlds" approach could have easily mired the M-Series Elevate in a no man's land of compromises, but it manages to be one of those rare Goldilocks options that delivers great-sounding 5.1.2