In conversation, humans use multimodal cues, such as speech, gestures, and gaze, to manage turn-taking. While linguistic and acoustic features are informative, gestures provide complementary cues for modeling these transitions. To study this, we introduce DnD Gesture++, an extension of the multi-party DnD Gesture corpus enriched with 2,663 semantic gesture annotations spanning iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and discourse types. Using this dataset, we model turn-taking prediction through a Mixture-of-Experts framework integrating text, audio, and gestures. Experiments show that incorporating semantically guided gestures yields consistent performance gains over baselines, demonstrating their complementary role in multimodal turn-taking.

Women in tech can supercharge teams' creativity and help them stay under budget, meet deadlines and improve outcomes, studies show, so it's time for more women to pursue tech careers, according to a lead Department of Labor official speaking at GovernmentCIO Media & Research's Women Tech Leaders event Thursday. Kathy McNeill, who leads emerging technology strategy at the agency, said the federal government needs more women in AI to produce accurate data sets and data analysis. "AI is a reflection of those who develop it and the data sets we use," she said during a fireside chat. McNeill provided an example of how Google Translate took the phrase "she is a doctor and he is a babysitter" and translated it to "he is a doctor and she is a babysitter" in another language, to illustrate biases inherent in artificially intelligent algorithms. "A lot of systems were developed 10 to 20 years ago," she said.

Mr. Schwall's exit comes after Tesla said Friday that its engineering chief, Doug Field, was taking a leave of absence to recharge and spend time with his family. Mr. Field is stepping away from the company for several weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. One person described the absence as a "six-week sabbatical" while Tesla declined to say when he would come back. "He has not left Tesla," a company spokesman said. Mr. Field, a key leader at the auto maker since joining in 2013 from Apple Inc., oversees the engineering of Tesla's vehicles, and last year he was also given oversight of production to better align those efforts.

More than 350 years ago, Gottfried Leibniz theorized that all rational thought could be broken down into a series of binary expressions, that whatever went on in a person's head could be transferred to a mechanical device. It was this theory that Leibniz believed could lead the world away from wars and arguments. Logic and rational solutions, he forecast, could be arrived at through a non-partisan device. The German mathematician-philosopher went on to devise a calculating language comprised of just two things: 1s and 0s. We now know Leibniz's breakthrough as the binary computing language, of course, the language of machines.