The killing of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a wave of statements from tech companies and CEOs. Today, pushback against ICE is largely coming from employees, not executives. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump's permission to sell their products to China . It's been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms. But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration's tactics.

"Eddington" is a slog, but a slog with ambitions--and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly "Beau Is Afraid" (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn't seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With "Eddington," his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic.

Back in 2022, when ChatGPT arrived, I was part of the first wave of users. Delighted but also a little uncertain what to do with it, I asked the system to generate all kinds of random things. The quality of what it produced was variable, but it made clear something that is even more apparent now than it was then. Instead its arrival is an inflection point in human history. Over coming years and decades, AI will transform every aspect of our lives.

Podcasts provide highly diverse content to a massive listener base through a unique on-demand modality. However, limited data has prevented large-scale computational analysis of the podcast ecosystem. To fill this gap, we introduce a massive dataset of over 1.1M podcast transcripts that is largely comprehensive of all English language podcasts available through public RSS feeds from May and June of 2020. This data is not limited to text, but rather includes audio features and speaker turns for a subset of 370K episodes, and speaker role inferences and other metadata for all 1.1M episodes. Using this data, we also conduct a foundational investigation into the content, structure, and responsiveness of this ecosystem. Together, our data and analyses open the door to continued computational research of this popular and impactful medium.

Minority groups have been using social media to organize social movements that create profound social impacts. Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Stop Asian Hate (SAH) are two successful social movements that have spread on Twitter that promote protests and activities against racism and increase the public's awareness of other social challenges that minority groups face. However, previous studies have mostly conducted qualitative analyses of tweets or interviews with users, which may not comprehensively and validly represent all tweets. Very few studies have explored the Twitter topics within BLM and SAH dialogs in a rigorous, quantified and data-centered approach. Therefore, in this research, we adopted a mixed-methods approach to comprehensively analyze BLM and SAH Twitter topics. We implemented (1) the latent Dirichlet allocation model to understand the top high-level words and topics and (2) open-coding analysis to identify specific themes across the tweets. We collected more than one million tweets with the #blacklivesmatter and #stopasianhate hashtags and compared their topics. Our findings revealed that the tweets discussed a variety of influential topics in depth, and social justice, social movements, and emotional sentiments were common topics in both movements, though with unique subtopics for each movement. Our study contributes to the topic analysis of social movements on social media platforms in particular and the literature on the interplay of AI, ethics, and society in general.

In a world where seeing is increasingly no longer believing, experts are warning that society must take a multi-pronged approach to combat the potential harms of computer-generated media. As Bill Whitaker reports this week on 60 Minutes, artificial intelligence can manipulate faces and voices to make it look like someone said something they never said. The result is videos of things that never happened, called "deepfakes." Often, they look so real, people watching can't tell. Even Justin Bieber has been tricked by a series of deepfake videos on the social media video platform TikTok that appeared to be of Tom Cruise.

Advanced technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), are leveraged by many companies in various industries to help fuel business growth, achieve efficiencies and support human workers. Organizations that implement AI solutions tend to benefit from enhanced performance due to the plethora of opportunities and applications, and this shouldn't come as a surprise. AI has seeped into daily life, from digital assistants to the technology that powers our smartphones. It's expected that law enforcement agencies nationwide will continue to adopt AI-powered tools to serve various purposes. How are these organizations using AI currently?

In a world where seeing is increasingly no longer believing, experts are warning that society must take a multi-pronged approach to combat the potential harms of computer-generated media. As Bill Whitaker reports this week on 60 Minutes, artificial intelligence can manipulate faces and voices to make it look like someone said something they never said. The result is videos of things that never happened, called "deepfakes." Often, they look so real, people watching can't tell. Just this month, Justin Bieber was tricked by a series of deepfake videos on the social media video platform TikTok that appeared to be of Tom Cruise.

One of the victims killed in last week's Tesla car crash in Texas, which police suspect to have involved the vehicle's autopilot mode, was William Varner, a 58-year-old anaesthesiologist, his employer said. In the incident on Saturday, two men were killed after their 2019 Tesla Model S, travelling at a high speed, failed to negotiate a curve and crashed into a tree, catching fire, police reports noted. According to the police, one of the victims was found in the passenger seat and the other in the back seat, while nobody was at the driving seat at the time of impact, raising doubts on the involvement of the car's autopilot mode. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Monday saying that data logs retrieved from the crashed car by the company ruled out the use of the autopilot system. "Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled ... Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have," he tweeted.

Data suggests that 94% of the officers are at minimal risk, 4% at advisable risk and 2% are at actionable risk. The brutal custodial death of George Floyd has sparked worldwide protests. Not only it has revealed the bitter reality of police misconduct, but has also shredded light on the skewed judicial system. Though the protests started after George Floyd was killed due to gruesome racial bias, but police brutality has existed in the society for a long time. Moreover, the USA is not the only country where the responsibility of the police is being questioned. In India, the custodial death of Father-Son duo Jayaraj and Phoenix has put police accountability under heavy scrutiny.