Accurate vision-based action recognition is crucial for developing autonomous robots that can operate safely and reliably in complex, real-world environments. In this work, we advance video-based recognition of indoor daily actions for robotic perception by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) enriched with domain-specific knowledge. We adapt a prompt-learning framework in which class-level textual descriptions of each action are embedded as learnable prompts into a frozen pre-trained VLM backbone. Several strategies for structuring and encoding these textual descriptions are designed and evaluated. Experiments on the ETRI-Activity3D dataset demonstrate that our method, using only RGB video inputs at test time, achieves over 95\% accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. These results highlight the effectiveness of knowledge-augmented prompts in enabling robust action recognition with minimal supervision.

The burgeoning field of social-emotional AI is tackling the very jobs that people used to think were reserved for human beings--jobs that rely on emotional connections, such as therapists, teachers, and coaches. AI is now widely used in education and other human services. Vedantu, an Indian web-based tutoring platform valued at 1 billion, uses AI to analyze student engagement, while a Finnish company has created "Annie Advisor," a chatbot working with more than 60,000 students, asking how they are doing, offering help, and directing them to services. Berlin-based startup clare&me offers an AI audio bot therapist it calls "your 24/7 mental health ally," while in the UK, Limbic has a chatbot "Limbic Care" that it calls "the friendly therapy companion." This story is from the WIRED World in 2025, our annual trends briefing.

More than 12,000 people are turning 65 each day in the US. And with that, individuals and families are starting to make considerations on what might be entailed to better manage the aging process. There is a strong desire from seniors to age in place, meaning staying in their home instead of moving to a dedicated facility. Marc Glickman, CEO of long-term care planning experts BuddyIns, estimated that today, around 75% of seniors are using home care services to age in place instead of moving to an assisted living or nursing homes. An AARP survey showed 90% of individuals 65 and over would prefer to age in place.

So are all the things we'd like to fill said homes with. But Amazon Prime Day is ripe with deals to pick up all your dream home goods--like a KitchenAid mixer, a robot mop-vac, a smart security camera, or a fantastic weighted blanket--at a better price. We've rounded up all the best Prime Day home and kitchen deals worth shopping for. Note: Many of these deals may require a membership, including Amazon Prime, Target Circle, or Walmart Plus. Amazon Prime has a free 30-day trial if you don't already have it (set a reminder to cancel it before it automatically renews). Target Circle is free to sign up, but you'll need to save the offer to your account from the main offer page or on the actual purchase page for a particular item to see the deal price at checkout. Many of Walmart's deals are in early access for subscribers but will be available for everyone later in the day. Update July 12: We added a bunch of new deals to this post. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. KitchenAid stand mixers are pricey, but they're a long-term investment that's well worth it for many home chefs and bakers. This 4.5-quart version is a solid sale and a nice size for smaller kitchens and homes. This isn't as good of a deal as we saw over Memorial Day, and we usually see prices dip a little lower during Black Friday if you aren't in a hurry to own a KitchenAid. If your kitchen space is lacking, sometimes you need to use your stovetop as prep space. One of these cutting boards covers half a typical stove, giving you a workstation for chopping or setting down your utensils, or you can get two to cover all four burners. It's good to use less plastic and these wraps are some of our favorite reusable products.

So are all the things we'd like to fill said homes with. But Amazon Prime Day is ripe with deals to pick up all your dream home goods--like a KitchenAid mixer, a robot mop-vac, a smart security camera, or a fantastic weighted blanket--at a better price. We've rounded up all the best Prime Day home and kitchen deals worth shopping for. Note: Many of these deals may require a membership, including Amazon Prime, Target Circle, or Walmart Plus. Amazon Prime has a free 30-day trial if you don't already have it (set a reminder to cancel it before it automatically renews). Target Circle is free to sign up, but you'll need to save the offer to your account from the main offer page or on the actual purchase page for a particular item to see the deal price at checkout. Many of Walmart's deals are in early access for subscribers but will be available for everyone later in the day. Update July 11: We added many, many new deals including smart cams, Instant Pots, and smart lighting. We also updated links and prices. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. The Nutribullet Smart Touch is a powerful, stylish addition to your kitchen, with a sleek touchscreen display that lights up against the blender's black finish.

So are all the things we'd like to fill said homes with. But Amazon Prime Day is ripe with deals to pick up all your dream home goods--like a KitchenAid mixer, a robot mop-vac, a smart security camera, or a fantastic weighted blanket--at a better price. We've rounded up all the best Prime Day home and kitchen deals worth shopping for. Note: Many of these deals may require a membership, including Amazon Prime, Target Circle, or Walmart Plus. Amazon Prime has a free 30-day trial if you don't already have it (set a reminder to cancel it before it automatically renews). Target Circle is free to sign up, but you'll need to save the offer to your account from the main offer page or on the actual purchase page for a particular item to see the deal price at checkout. Many of Walmart's deals are in early access for subscribers but will be available for everyone later in the day. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. The Nutribullet Smart Touch is a powerful, stylish addition to your kitchen, with a sleek touchscreen display that lights up against the blender's black finish.

There is growing interest in searching for information from large video corpora. Prior works have studied relevant tasks, such as text-based video retrieval, moment retrieval, video summarization, and video captioning in isolation, without an end-to-end setup that can jointly search from video corpora and generate summaries. Such an end-to-end setup would allow for many interesting applications, e.g., a text-based search that finds a relevant video from a video corpus, extracts the most relevant moment from that video, and segments the moment into important steps with captions. To address this, we present the HiREST (HIerarchical REtrieval and STep-captioning) dataset and propose a new benchmark that covers hierarchical information retrieval and visual/textual stepwise summarization from an instructional video corpus. HiREST consists of 3.4K text-video pairs from an instructional video dataset, where 1.1K videos have annotations of moment spans relevant to text query and breakdown of each moment into key instruction steps with caption and timestamps (totaling 8.6K step captions). Our hierarchical benchmark consists of video retrieval, moment retrieval, and two novel moment segmentation and step captioning tasks. In moment segmentation, models break down a video moment into instruction steps and identify start-end boundaries. In step captioning, models generate a textual summary for each step. We also present starting point task-specific and end-to-end joint baseline models for our new benchmark. While the baseline models show some promising results, there still exists large room for future improvement by the community. Project website: https://hirest-cvpr2023.github.io

The recent wave of AI and automation has been argued to differ from previous General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), in that it may lead to rapid change in occupations' underlying task requirements and persistent technological unemployment. In this paper, we apply a novel methodology of dynamic task shares to a large dataset of online job postings to explore how exactly occupational task demands have changed over the past decade of AI innovation, especially across high, mid and low wage occupations. Notably, big data and AI have risen significantly among high wage occupations since 2012 and 2016, respectively. We built an ARIMA model to predict future occupational task demands and showcase several relevant examples in Healthcare, Administration, and IT. Such task demands predictions across occupations will play a pivotal role in retraining the workforce of the future.

Scientists have created a robot that may be able to help the elderly perform tasks amid a shortage of nurses in the UK. Named Baxter, it has two arms and 3D printed'fingers', allowing it to step in when a person is struggling with things such as getting dressed. Artificial intelligence allows the robot to detect when assistance is needed and learn about the owners difficulties over time. When it's ready for use in healthcare settings, it could help free up the time of staff so they can do other work. There are around 40,000 nurse vacancies in NHS England, which is expected to double after Brexit, according to figures. Scientists have created a robot named Baxter that can help the elderly perform tasks amid a national nurse shortage.