Colombia has been submerged in decades of armed conflict, yet until recently, the systematic documentation of violence was not a priority for the Colombian government. This has resulted in a lack of publicly available conflict information and, consequently, a lack of historical accounts. This study contributes to Colombia's historical memory by utilizing GPT, a large language model (LLM), to read and answer questions about over 200,000 violence-related newspaper articles in Spanish. We use the resulting dataset to conduct both descriptive analysis and a study of the relationship between violence and the eradication of coca crops, offering an example of policy analyses that such data can support. Our study demonstrates how LLMs have opened new research opportunities by enabling examinations of large text corpora at a previously infeasible depth.

This paper presents a 6-DoF range-based Monte Carlo localization method with a GPU-accelerated Stein particle filter. To update a massive amount of particles, we propose a Gauss-Newton-based Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) with iterative neighbor particle search. This method uses SVGD to collectively update particle states with gradient and neighborhood information, which provides efficient particle sampling. For an efficient neighbor particle search, it uses locality sensitive hashing and iteratively updates the neighbor list of each particle over time. The neighbor list is then used to propagate the posterior probabilities of particles over the neighbor particle graph. The proposed method is capable of evaluating one million particles in real-time on a single GPU and enables robust pose initialization and re-localization without an initial pose estimate. In experiments, the proposed method showed an extreme robustness to complete sensor occlusion (i.e., kidnapping), and enabled pinpoint sensor localization without any prior information.

A TikToker warned of a growing trend involving child predators who use artificial intelligence to turn photos and videos of kids into explicit content. Posting imagery of children on social media can invite "digital kidnappers" to steal their likeness and use them in exploitative AI-generated videos, Alex Hoffman said in a viral TikTok video. "Digital kidnapping is when somebody steals the photos of your minor from the internet, usually a social media platform, and either pretends to be the child or pretends to be the child's parents," she said. "Oftentimes digital kidnappers will take normal photos of a child on the internet and alter them to look explicit or show the child doing something inappropriate." "Digital kidnappers can also take photos of a child and make them into an inappropriate video using AI materials," said Hoffman, a law student who has worked with the government investigating online sex crimes against children.

An Arizona mother detailed a terrifying phone scam that faked her 15-year-old daughter’s voice using artificial intelligence to claim she was kidnapped.

A Chicago man was arrested for allegedly holding a woman he met on a dating app against her will and beating her. An Illinois man was arrested for allegedly holding a woman he met on a dating app against her will and beating her. The victim may have also been sexually assaulted. The man had been holding the woman against her will in his mother's house since Sunday, Dolton police told FOX 32 Chicago. On Monday, the pair went to an Advanced Auto Parts store.

Tinder, the most popular dating app in the world, has banned teens under the age of 18 but it's not stopping them from signing up. A Massachusetts man is accused of kidnapping and assaulting a woman he met on Tinder, threatening to kill her and her child if she went to the cops, authorities said. Peter Bozier, 28, was arrested Tuesday during a traffic stop in Sudbury after the victim told investigators she was severely beaten and strangled while being held against her will at Bozier's home, police said. The victim said the harrowing ordeal began a day earlier, police spokesman Lt. Robert Grady told the MetroWest Daily News. Grady said the woman managed to "release herself from the situation" and then went to a hospital in Burlington, where hospital staffers contacted police, the newspaper reported.

The American drone attack that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week is the latest move in a low-level war between Iran and the U.S. that has been waged with varying degrees of intensity for over 40 years – and is likely to continue long into the future. Some people fear that recent events will escalate the long conflict into a costly all-out war between the two countries. Others may welcome what they see as the necessary and inevitable showdown leading ultimately to regime change in Tehran. The killing of Soleimani – the most prominent military figure in Iran and close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – can be seen as an escalation and will almost certainly provoke Iranian retaliation. President Trump's boast of ordering the killing of Soleimani may further increase pressure on Iran to respond.

Abu Sayyaf extremists on Saturday freed a Norwegian man kidnapped a year ago in the southern Philippines with two Canadians who were later beheaded and a Filipino woman who has been released by the ransom-seeking militants, officials said. Kjartan Sekkingstad was freed in Patikul town in Sulu province and was eventually secured by rebels from the larger Moro National Liberation Front, which has signed a peace deal with the government and helped negotiate his release, Philippine government officials said. Sekkingstad, held in jungle captivity since being kidnapped last September, was to stay overnight at the house of Moro National Liberation Front chairman Nur Misuari in Sulu and then be flown to the southern city of Davao on Sunday to meet with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, said Jesus Dureza, who advises Duterte on peace talks with insurgent groups. A plan to fly the freed hostage out of Sulu, a jungle-clad Muslim region about 590 miles south of Manila, on Saturday was scrapped because of bad weather, Dureza said. Dureza said that when he spoke on the phone with Sekkingstad, the Norwegian expressed his gratitude to Duterte.

Uber may be gaining riders. It may be on the cutting edge of developing self-driving car technology. That's according to details given by Gautam Gupta, Uber Technologies Inc.'s finance head, who in a recent conference call with Uber investors said the ride-hailing giant lost at least 1.27 billion during the first half of this year. In a report Thursday, Bloomberg cited "people familiar with the matter" as saying Gupta gave the money-losing score last week as part of an update that the privately held San Francisco company gives to its investors and shareholders every three months. According to those sources, Uber lost about 520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization during the first quarter of the year, and its second-quarter losses ballooned to more than 750 million.

The revelation that a private company has been conducting secret aerial surveillance on behalf of the Baltimore Police Department -- collecting and storing footage from city neighborhoods in the process -- sparked confusion and outrage Wednesday among elected officials and civil liberties advocates. Some demanded an immediate halt to the program pending a full, public accounting of its capabilities and its use in the city to date, including in the prosecution of criminal defendants. Some called it "astounding" in its ability to intrude on individual privacy rights, and legally questionable in terms of constitutional law. Others did not fault the program but said it should have been disclosed publicly before it began in January. The program -- in which Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems has for months been testing sophisticated surveillance cameras aboard a small Cessna airplane flying high above the city -- was first disclosed by Bloomberg Businessweek.