In 2023, Noam Chomsky, considered the founder of modern linguistics, wrote that LLMs "learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages with equal facility." However, in the Mission: Impossible Language Models paper that received a Best Paper award at the 2024 Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference, researchers shared the results of their testing of Chomsky's theory, having discovered that language models actually struggle with learning languages with non-standard characters. Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, CTO of DataChat Inc., a company that he cofounded while working at the University of Wisconsin as a data science researcher, said the Mission: Impossible paper challenged the idea that LLMs can learn impossible languages as effectively as natural ones. "The models [studied for the paper] exhibited clear difficulties in acquiring and processing languages that deviate significantly from natural linguistic structures," said John. "Further, the researchers' findings support the idea that certain linguistic structures are universally preferred or more learnable both by humans and machines, highlighting the importance of natural language patterns in model training. This finding could also explain why LLMs, and even humans, can grasp certain languages easily and not others."

With the last Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning, the long-running franchise officially entered science fiction territory by making intelligent AI its villain. We've seen Tom Cruise's Ethan hunt jump off of buildings and hang from the side of planes, but how can he fight a computer program? The latest trailer for the series' next film, and potentially the last to feature Hunt, doesn't answer that question, but clearly it will involve even more death-defying stunts (like hanging on to a flipping bi-plane!), As I wrote in my review of Deck Reckoning: "As much as I love other action film franchises – like John Wick's increasingly elaborate choreography, or the sheer ridiculousness of the Fast and the Furious – Mission: Impossible remains uniquely enjoyable. It's committed to delivering astonishing practical stunt work. And a part of me hopes that somehow, a team of geeks can also fight back against the excesses of AI." Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning hits theaters on May 23.

It's a simple mission, raise Omega-3 levels for all Americans. Because Omega-3s are an essential nutrient our bodies need to thrive but cannot make on its own and one in which over 70% of Americans are sorely deficient in. Unfortunately, the leading supplement brands have stopped investing to keeping Omega-3s top of mind for consumers. However, in Antarctica there is a brilliant resource that is a powerful source of Omega-3 nutrients called krill. Krill, a small but mighty multi-nutrient source of Omega-3 EPA & DHA and essential choline (known to support brain and nervous system health) which has superior absorption over traditional fish oils is relatively unknown to most consumers.

Jongboom is an embedded engineer and machine learning advocate, always looking for ways to gather more intelligence from the real world.

On July 3rd, Tom Cruise will be sixty years old. The fact that he does not look it, at all, even in IMAX closeups so tight you can study the grain of his tooth enamel, adds a note of cognitive dissonance to "Top Gun: Maverick," the long-aborning sequel in which he's called back to mentor a squad of younger stick-jockeys who address him as Pops and Old-Timer until he wins their respect in the air. Even for a physical performer like Cruise, sixty is no longer an expiration date. Mick Jagger blew by that milestone in 2003, as did Sylvester Stallone in 2006, and, thanks presumably to healthy habits and/or medical technology dreamt of only by science fiction, they're both still out there, doing a version of the kind of thing they've always done. But the level of performance expected of a Rolling Stone or an Expendable is one thing, and the work that Tom Cruise appears to demand of himself is something else entirely.

A machine learning consulting project helped e-card platform JibJab overcome technical obstacles and launch a product line. The Los Angeles-based company had traditionally offered customers a simple interface and cropping tool to upload photos, capture head images in an oval shape and place them in personalized digital content. That method worked well enough, but JibJab was launching a new offering -- a physical coffee-table book that called for higher-fidelity images. Matt Cielecki, vice president of engineering at JibJab, began exploring machine learning (ML) as the way to boost image quality. He tinkered with pre-trained models but ran into limitations.

Robotics is on its way to enhancing the productivity of global industries. Robots are now used to upscale the production of various products and services. After conquering almost all businesses and industries on a global basis, scientists are now on their attempt to build micro insect-like robots that can be used in life and death situations, such as finding people in collapsed buildings. Recently, researchers from the University of Bristol created a new insect-sized flying robot with flapping wings. The aim was to pave the way for smaller, lighter, and more effective micro flying robots for environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and deployment in a hazardous environment.

Fully robotic surgery may be a couple of decades away. But one thing could speed it up: billionaire engineer Elon Musk's very public mission to Mars. Early this year a fully autonomous robot completed a complex soft tissue surgery for the very first time at Johns Hopkins University. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, "excelled at suturing two ends of intestine--one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in abdominal surgery," Johns Hopkins reported. That said, there is a big caveat.

The reconstruction of geographical data over a century, allows to figuring out the evolution of the French railway landscape, and how it has been impacted by major events (eg.: WWII), or longer time span processes : industry outsourcing, metropolization, public transport policies or absence of them. This work is resulting from the fusion of several public geographical data (SNCF, IGN), enriched with the computer-assisted addition of multiple data gathered on the Internet (Wikipedia, volunteer geographic information). The dataset compounds almost every rail stations (even simple stops) and railway branch nodes, whose link to their respective rail lines allows to build the underlying consistent graph of the network. Every rail line has a "valid to" date (or approx) so that time evolution can be displayed. The present progress of that reconstruction sums up to roughly 90% of what is expected (exact total unknown). This allows to consider temporal demographic analysis (how many cities and towns served by the railway since 1925 up on today), and environmental simulations as well (CO2 cost by given destination ).

The innovative reapplication of a multiagent system for human-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation was a consequence of appropriate agent-oriented design. The use of intelligent agents for simulating human decision making offers the potential for analysis and design methodologies that do not distinguish between agent and human until implementation. With this as a driver in the design process, the construction of systems in which humans and agents can be interchanged is simplified. Two systems have been constructed and deployed to provide defense analysts with the tools required to advise and assist the Australian Defense Force in the conduct of maritime surveillance and patrol. The experiences gained from this process indicate that it is simpler, both in design and implementation, to add humans to a system designed for intelligent agents than it is to add intelligent agents to a system designed for humans.