As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA).

Up until six months ago, artificial intelligence might not have squeaked into the top five areas of climatetech for most people. But the Cambrian explosion of large language models -- led by ChatGPT -- has suddenly hooked hundreds of millions of users, offered mind-boggling creative capabilities that have surprised almost everyone, and kicked off an AI arms race in the tech world. What are the most compelling applications for AI in energy? This week, we feature a live conversation with Priya Donti, MIT professor and executive director of Climate Change AI; Amy Francetic, managing general partner at Buoyant Ventures; and Jesse Morris, CEO of the Energy Web Foundation. In this episode, recorded at Greentown Labs in the Boston area, we explore the wide range of AI applications for grid modeling, renewable energy integration, research & development, and product development.

The Differentiable Neural Computer is an awesome model that DeepMind recently released. It's a memory augmented network that can perform meta-learning (learning to learn). We'll go over it's architecture details and implement it ourselves in Tensorflow. That's what keeps me going.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that there are now 2 billion active devices based on the company's Android software and touted the company's new AI efforts as he took the stage at Google's annual developer conference on Wednesday. He also announced a new product called Google Lens, which will be part of the Google Assistant for Android phones. Lens can identify objects in the real world for a variety of uses. "It's been a very busy year since last year. We've been focused on our core mission of organizing the world's information," he said.

Google is expected to reveal its future plans for its Google Home smart speaker and Android operating system on Wednesday. The technology giant is holding its annual I/O developer conference, where the company shares early news on how its various software will change in the coming year. The Google Home smart speaker, launched in the UK earlier this year, as well as Google Assistant, the company's artificial intelligence software, are expected to feature heavily. Google Home and Amazon's Echo have taken the lead in the smart speaker market since late 2016. However Microsoft has already announced plans to launch its own smart speakers using its virtual assistant Cortana, and rumours claim Apple may follow this year too.

If you could have any superpower, which would it be? For Hilary Mason, it's not a question of if, because she already has one: She uses technology to unearth hidden insights, from how to catch people's attention online, to where you can find the best burgers in New York City. She has been at the forefront of machine learning, AI, and analytics. Hilary will discuss how your business can use these tools to move from insight to action to competitive advantage faster than a speeding bullet. She is the co-founder of Fast Forward Labs, Data Scientist in Residence at Accel and is the former Chief Scientist at Bitly.

Michael Witbrock received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently a distinguished research staff member at IBM T J Watson Research center, leading work at the intersection of learning and reasoning. Previously he Founded and acted as CEO at Curious Cat Company, building assistants that actually understand you and what you do, and was Vice President for Research at Cycorp, and CEO at Cycorp Europe, where he lead research in automated knowledge acquisition from text and dialogue, automated reasoning, and intelligent human-computer interaction. Previously to that he was Principal Scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding web user behavior, a research scientist at Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center, working on statistical text summarization, and a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon on the Informedia spoken and video document information retrieval project. He is the author of numerous publications in areas ranging from neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition, and is an inventor on seven US patents.

A futuristic novel, "2084" centers on a self-driving car named Winston that lives in a world where humans have reversed global warming. His owner is a math teacher named Julia. Children from every state are invited to participate in a national art competition as a result of the incredibly well-endowed federal arts budget. The winners travel to Washington, D.C., and meet the President of the United States, who is a very kind woman and also a doctor. Written in Seussian rhyme, this children's book is filled with many cute animals that live wherever they like, not necessarily on a farm!

When looking for a date online, it can be difficult to get a proper idea of what potential suitors are really like just by looking at their photos. But that could be set to change, with the introduction of a new video feature on Bumble. The dating app is set to launch BumbleVID, allowing users to create a story of 10-second videos, which will delete after 24 hours. Users will record 10-second videos directly within Bumble, which are posted to their profile. The videos can be viewed by anyone who comes across the profile while swiping.

It may sound like the premise of a science fiction film. But, believe it or not, scientists at Boston University claim to have discovered a game-changing blood test that could help predict lifespans. The study, published in the journal Aging Cell on Friday, used biomarker data collected from 5,000 blood samples and analysed it against the donors' health developments over the subsequent eight years. Together, they identified patterns which indicated both good and bad futures. In all, the researchers generated 26 different predictive biomarker signatures.