Belgium's air traffic was severely disrupted after drone sightings forced two major airports to temporarily suspend operations as a security precaution. A drone was first spotted near Brussels airport at 8pm (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday evening, followed by another incident at the nearby Liege airport, one of Europe's largest cargo airports, according to Belgium's public broadcaster RTBF. Both airports resumed normal operations at 11pm (22:00 GMT). Brussels airport said that the shutdowns may still impact air traffic on Wednesday in a notice on its website. "Following drone sightings on Tuesday evening, flight operations at Brussels Airport were suspended for safety reasons," the notice said.

The ability to track general whole-body motions in the real world is a useful way to build general-purpose humanoid robots. However, achieving this can be challenging due to the temporal and kinematic diversity of the motions, the policy's capability, and the difficulty of coordination of the upper and lower bodies. To address these issues, we propose GMT, a general and scalable motion-tracking framework that trains a single unified policy to enable humanoid robots to track diverse motions in the real world. GMT is built upon two core components: an Adaptive Sampling strategy and a Motion Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. The Adaptive Sampling automatically balances easy and difficult motions during training. The MoE ensures better specialization of different regions of the motion manifold. We show through extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world the effectiveness of GMT, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of motions using a unified general policy. Videos and additional information can be found at https://gmt-humanoid.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized lots of fields of research. Although it is well-known that fine-tuning is essential for enhancing the capabilities of LLMs, existing research suggests that there is potential redundancy in the fine-tuning process and therefore proposes to update only a subset of parameters. However, these methods fail to leverage the task-specific information to identify important parameters during training. Based on the insight that gradients inherently contain information on task-specific data, we propose Gradient-Mask Tuning (GMT), a method that selectively updates parameters during training based on their gradient information. Specifically, we compute the absolute values of the gradients and apply masking to those with relatively smaller magnitudes. Our empirical results across various tasks demonstrate that GMT not only outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods but also elevates the upper limits of LLM performance. Further analysis indicates that GMT exhibits insensitivity to mask ratio and possesses computational efficiency comparable to vanilla SFT.

The western Ukrainian city of Lviv was rocked by early morning explosions as air defences engaged in stopping waves of Russian air attacks, local officials said. The city's mayor, Andriy Sadoviy, wrote on the Telegram messaging app early on Tuesday that "air defences are operating in our region", and warned residents to seek shelter. Ukraine's Air Force wrote on Telegram that "the threat of Shahed [Iranian-made drones] remains in the Lviv region. Western Ukraine came under an air raid alert starting at about 00:00 GMT. According to reports, several waves of drones attempted to hit targets in Lviv city starting at about 01:30 GMT with numerous explosions heard as air defences intercepted the incoming unmanned aerial vehicles. Sadoviy later reported that a fire at an industrial warehouse had broken out and emergency services were tackling the blaze. Initial reports were of one person injured, he said. "So far, only one person has been injured in the attack," the mayor said on Telegram, adding that a man in his mid-20s was found under the rubble of a warehouse and transported to hospital. The scale of the attack and full extent of the damage were not immediately known. There was no immediate comment from Russia. The head of the Lviv region's military administration, Maksym Kozytskyi, said that two people, a man and a woman, were rescued from beneath rubble in the city. "The woman is initially believed to have no injuries.

It is important to predict how the Global Mean Temperature (GMT) will evolve in the next few decades. The ability to predict historical data is a necessary first step toward the actual goal of making long-range forecasts. This paper examines the advantage of statistical and simpler Machine Learning (ML) methods instead of directly using complex ML algorithms and Deep Learning Neural Networks (DNN). Often neglected data transformation methods prior to applying different algorithms have been used as a means of improving predictive accuracy. The GMT time series is treated both as a univariate time series and also cast as a regression problem. Some steps of data transformations were found to be effective. Various simple ML methods did as well or better than the more well-known ones showing merit in trying a large bouquet of algorithms as a first step. Fifty-six algorithms were subject to Box-Cox, Yeo-Johnson, and first-order differencing and compared with the absence of them. Predictions for the annual GMT testing data were better than that published so far, with the lowest RMSE value of 0.02 $^\circ$C. RMSE for five-year mean GMT values for the test data ranged from 0.00002 to 0.00036 $^\circ$C.

Some humans would say a football match is impossible to predict with any great certainty, but Kashef, our Artificial Intelligence (AI) predictor, would disagree. Kashef has been playing with historical data and performance to predict the results of each game all the way to the final. No surprise that Kashef is backing Lionel Messi and his team to beat the Green Falcons in today's first fixture. Kashef is siding with the Danish Dynamite on this one. However, Tunisia still stands an almost 50 percent chance of picking up at least a point.

Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) predictor, is to the 2022 World Cup what Paul the Octopus was to the 2010 edition. Kashef has been playing with historical data and performance to predict the results of each game, all the way to the final. Kashef is predicting a win for England this afternoon. Good start to Harry Kane's team if things go according to Kashef's plans. The European team to come out on top in the second match of the day as well, says Kashef.

The series is designed to help you get started on a Microsoft Azure AI learning journey. Not matter your previous knowledge of AI, this actionable set of sessions will take you through what is available in Azure AI, Computer Vision and Conversational AI and give you space to ask a set of experts questions about each topic. We will only scratch the surface of what is available on Microsoft Learn and will encourage you to continue your learning between weekly sessions in the series. This series partners with the Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals certification – if you follow this learning path you will be well on your way to taking this exam. Join us for this live learning experience where you will be guided by subject matter experts through the Learn modules below in real time along with developers around the globe.

A suspected drone attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels targeting a key oil facility in Abu Dhabi killed three people and started a separate fire at Abu Dhabi's international airport, police said. Police in the United Arab Emirates identified the dead as two Indian nationals and one Pakistani. "Small flying objects" were found as three petrol tanks exploded in an industrial area and a fire was ignited at the airport, police said, as Houthi rebels announced "military operations" in the UAE. The UAE which had largely scaled down its military presence in Yemen in 2019, continues to hold sway through the Yemeni forces it armed and trained. Drone attacks are a hallmark of the Houthis' assaults on Saudi Arabia, the UAE ally that is leading the coalition fighting for Yemen's government in the grinding civil war.

The US is about to take a major step towards being able to fly its astronauts into space once again. California's SpaceX firm is performing a demonstration of a new rocket and capsule system, which, if it works well, will be approved to carry people. Routine crew missions to the space station could start later this year. Not since the retirement of the shuttles in 2011 has America been able to put humans in orbit. It's had to pay to use Russian Soyuz vehicles instead.