One of the brain's most important properties is its flexibility. Our cerebral circuitry changes constantly--every day, new links are made amongst the 86 billion individual neurons in our heads, and old connections are allowed to fall away. The result is a dizzyingly complicated network that is in a constant state of flux, rewiring itself on the fly in response to its environment and the life experience of its owner. The brain's ability to do this is called neuroplasticity, and it's what gives us the capacity to learn, grow, develop new skills and ideas, and adapt to the environment in which we live. We understand some aspects of neuroplasticity fairly well but others, including the reason that certain connections get made instead of others, remain deeply mysterious.

Empathy is fundamental to human interactions, yet it remains unclear whether embodied agents can provide human-like empathetic support. Existing works have studied agents' tasks solving and social interactions abilities, but whether agents can understand empathetic needs and conduct empathetic behaviors remains overlooked. To address this, we introduce EmpathyAgent, the first benchmark to evaluate and enhance agents' empathetic actions across diverse scenarios. EmpathyAgent contains 10,000 multimodal samples with corresponding empathetic task plans and three different challenges. To systematically evaluate the agents' empathetic actions, we propose an empathy-specific evaluation suite that evaluates the agents' empathy process. We benchmark current models and found that exhibiting empathetic actions remains a significant challenge. Meanwhile, we train Llama3-8B using EmpathyAgent and find it can potentially enhance empathetic behavior. By establishing a standard benchmark for evaluating empathetic actions, we hope to advance research in empathetic embodied agents. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/xinyan-cxy/EmpathyAgent.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken over our imagination in recent months, with Large Language Models, in particular, being touted as a ground-breaking development. However, as we move beyond the hype, the true capabilities and limitations of the technology are beginning to emerge. It is hard to deny, the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that have been released are beginning to highlight to the masses the potential of AI in both our personal and professional lives. Over the past several weeks, people have revelled in the capabilities of chatbots, such as ChatGPT, even declaring that it could replace certain roles, such as those associated with customer care, media (advertising, content creation and technical writing) and research. However, over time, as more questions have been thrown as these chatbots and people actively test their limits, several cracks have begun to emerge, as few of which we outline below. As a result, people are beginning to ask more questions about the deficiencies and limitations of AI, especially the Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, which to some degree, was being marketed as "the best thing since sliced bread" and being able to transform life as we know it.

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."

A new MIT research center promises to accelerate our journey to a future in which bionics help people everywhere overcome the challenges of disabilities -- and even enhance human potential. The future is near: Bionics replace or restore the function of missing or damaged body parts with electronic devices -- examples include leg exoskeletons and mind-controlled prosthetic arms. These devices can be life-changing, but many are still unique and experimental, meaning the only people to benefit from them are a handful of study participants. The faster we can advance bionics research, the sooner they'll be available to everyone who needs them. "We must continually strive towards a technological future in which disability is no longer a common life experience," MIT professor Hugh Herr, himself a double amputee, told MIT News.

Artificial intelligence is the wave of today and tomorrow, and content marketers are struggling not be left in its wake. Among those bridging the gap between marketing and technology is Christopher S. Penn. He co-founded the machine learning and analytics consulting firm Trust Insights along with Katie Robbert, a data scientist and machine learning practitioner. Penn talked about artificial intelligence and content marketing with digital marketing expert Madalyn Sklar, bluntly discussing challenges and what AI can -- and cannot -- do. "Today's content marketing has four key problems: strategy, tactics, execution and measurement," Penn said.

Artificial intelligence is here and it's coming for your jobs. That's, at least, what you might think after considering the ever-growing sophistication of AI-generated music. While the concept of machine-composed music has been around since the 1800s (computing pioneer Ada Lovelace was one of the first to write about the topic), the fantasy has become reality in the past decade, with musicians such as Francois Pachet creating entire albums co-written by AI. Some have even used AI to create'new' music from the likes of Amy Winehouse, Mozart and Nirvana, feeding their back catalogue into a neural network. Even stranger, this July, countries across the world will even compete in the second annual'AI Song Contest', a Eurovision-style competition in which all songs must be created with the help of artificial intelligence. But will this technology ever truly become mainstream?

On May 26, Image Comics is releasing a new book about artificial intelligence. Rather than asking big existential questions -- Why are we here? The couple purchased the artificial surrogate child in an attempt to grow their family. However, upon the robot Jesse's arrival, she discovers her new parents aren't the only ones who are in need of her talents. Put simply, Made in Korea is like if British TV series Humans were reimagined through the lens of legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka and fixated on the question of nature vs. nurture.

"Current machine text-generation models can write an article that may be convincing to many humans, but they're basically mimicking what they have seen in the training phase," said [PhD student Yuchen] Lin. "Our goal in this paper is to study the problem of whether current state-of-the-art text-generation models can write sentences to describe natural scenarios in our everyday lives." Essentially, fake news bots can sound like the New York Times or marketing copy by generating mimics, after taking in thousands of natural examples. Specifically, Ren and Lin tested the models' ability to reason and showed there is a large gap between current text generation models and human performance. Given a set of common nouns and verbs, state-of-the-art NLP computer models were tasked with creating believable sentences describing an everyday scenario.

Considering everything else we're seeing from AI, this was just a matter of time. An artificially intelligent robot has been cast as the lead actor in a $70 million movie being made by the same people behind the Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent. Filming with the robot called Erica has already begun in Japan and is expected to wrap up in Europe next year. "Actors involve their own life experiences in the role but Erica has no life experiences," said one of her creators. "We had to simulate her motions and emotions through one-on-one sessions, such as controlling the speed of her movements, talking through her feelings and coaching character development and body language."