Prior work has largely treated future event prediction as a static task, failing to consider how forecasts and the confidence in them should evolve as new evidence emerges. To address this gap, we introduce EVOLVECAST, a framework for evaluating whether large language models appropriately revise their predictions in response to new information. In particular, EVOLVECAST assesses whether LLMs adjust their forecasts when presented with information released after their training cutoff. We use human forecasters as a comparative reference to analyze prediction shifts and confidence calibration under updated contexts. While LLMs demonstrate some responsiveness to new information, their updates are often inconsistent or overly conservative. We further find that neither verbalized nor logits-based confidence estimates consistently outperform the other, and both remain far from the human reference standard. Across settings, models tend to express conservative bias, underscoring the need for more robust approaches to belief updating.

A student in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) has used reinforcement learning to help control nuclear fusion reactions, a significant step toward harnessing the immense power produced in nuclear fusion as a source of clean, abundant energy. Ian Char, a doctoral candidate in the Machine Learning Department, used reinforcement learning to control the hydrogen plasma of the tokamak machine at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. He was the first CMU researcher to run an experiment on the sought-after machines, the first to use reinforcement learning to affect the rotation of a tokamak plasma, and the first person to try reinforcement learning on the largest operating tokamak machine in the United States. Char collaborated with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) on the work. "Reinforcement learning affected the plasma's pressure and its rotation," Char said.

While news podcasts are increasingly popular, most focus on national and global news. It tends to be harder to find local news, especially in an on-demand, audio format. Google wants to change this. Today, it announced plans to bring Your News Update to Google Podcasts and to make it easier to listen to local news via Google Assistant. If you subscribe to Your News Update in the Google Podcasts app, Google will offer a mix of short news stories based on your interests, location, user history and preferences.

Most of us know how delightful it is to hear a computer-generated song playlist that feels entirely personal. Now, Google wants to create a similar type of bespoke audio experience--not with music, but with news. The company is adding some new features to its existing news aggregation service called Your News Update, which gathers news clips from different outlets and plays them in one continuous audio feed. Think of it like a Feedly or Flipboard-type service for spoken stories from your preferred news publications. Google has updated the service to create a more fluid listening experience, so that sitting through an entire session doesn't feel like you're just working your way through a hodgepodge of disparate stories.

Google is launching a new service for the Google Assistant called "Your news update" Take the idea of an algorithmically determined news source, the kind you get from Facebook or Google news, and convert it into an audio stream. To play it, simply ask a Google speaker or smart assistant on your phone to "listen to the news" Google uses the information it has learned about you over the years along with your location to create a personalized series of short news updates from the partners you have an audio license for. He hopes to foster an ecosystem that he calls "the audio web" according to Liz Gannes, Google audio news product manager. These are not podcasts, but news, similar to the hourly news updates that can be heard on the radio. Your News Update replaces the current way to get news updates from the Assistant, which consists of a direct list of news sources. With that system, you must choose which sources you want and in what order they are reproduced.

As more news organisations are turning to chatbots on Facebook as a way to make editorial content go further, you might be wondering how to get started yourself. Here is a guide to show you how to set up a Facebook chatbot account, a few ways to get audiences to subscribe to messages, how to set up manual broadcasts. To get started, head to www.manychat.com Note: you will need admin status to go any further. You will need to submit some business information around your role, the size of the company, level of experience and the purposes of signing up - you can tick that you are trying it out as a dummy run.

Anyone whose working environment is plagued by long lines at the coffee machine will be interested in CASE – a cognitive coffee machine that recognizes its users, makes their favourite drink and engages them in conversation to while away the wait. For un-chatty types, there's the option to listen to music news updates too. CASE, named in homage to one of Interstellar's humanity-serving robots from, is brought to life by a team of students from Imperial College, London and IBM Senior Inventor John McNamara, and bears a personality inspired by Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. Coordinator Sam Zatland says that the team's idea was to go beyond the capabilities of the'smart' coffee-machines currently on the market. While these simply allow the user to set a time for their coffee or control the machine from their smartphones, CASE offers much more.

Consumers are still mixed about Siri, but according to an exclusive new poll for USA TODAY, they like her more than other personal assistants. LOS ANGELES -- "Siri, will you finally catch up to Amazon and Google this year? We'd like to believe she might say, "Yes...Jefferson. I'll have more accurate, chattier responses, and good news -- I'll be able to understand you much better, too." Apple, which introduced the world to voice-activated computing in 2011 with the release of Siri, is feeling the heat. The tech press has given raves to the superior results from Google's Assistant, now available on the iPhone. It's also been wowed by the constant drumbeat generated by Amazon for its Alexa assistant, coming to new speakers and other devices on an ongoing basis. So on the eve of the Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple touts all the cool new things app makers get to do in 2017 with software updates, the company is expected to once again put the spotlight on a newer, improved Siri, ...