This paper presents Project Riley, a novel multimodal and multi-model conversational AI architecture oriented towards the simulation of reasoning influenced by emotional states. Drawing inspiration from Pixar's Inside Out, the system comprises five distinct emotional agents - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust - that engage in structured multi-round dialogues to generate, criticise, and iteratively refine responses. A final reasoning mechanism synthesises the contributions of these agents into a coherent output that either reflects the dominant emotion or integrates multiple perspectives. The architecture incorporates both textual and visual large language models (LLMs), alongside advanced reasoning and self-refinement processes. A functional prototype was deployed locally in an offline environment, optimised for emotional expressiveness and computational efficiency. From this initial prototype, another one emerged, called Armando, which was developed for use in emergency contexts, delivering emotionally calibrated and factually accurate information through the integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and cumulative context tracking. The Project Riley prototype was evaluated through user testing, in which participants interacted with the chatbot and completed a structured questionnaire assessing three dimensions: Emotional Appropriateness, Clarity and Utility, and Naturalness and Human-likeness. The results indicate strong performance in structured scenarios, particularly with respect to emotional alignment and communicative clarity.

IBM's new AI Hardware Composer tool aims to boost the performance of analog AI hardware. The tool is being released on the second anniversary of the IBM Research AI Hardware Center. IBM's pioneering centre launched in 2019 with the aim of improving AI hardware compute efficiency by 2.5 times every year for a decade. AI Hardware Composer claims to help both novice and experienced developers to create neural networks and tune analog devices to build accurate AI models. The new tool can be used with IBM's existing Analog Hardware Acceleration Kit (AIHWKIT), an open-source Python toolkit for exploring and using the capabilities of in-memory computing devices in the context of artificial intelligence.

SUNY Polytechnic Institute has begun research on the use of artificial intelligence in classrooms. "The basic gist of it is we're trying to recognize the emotional states that a student is feeling while they are using virtual reality or augmented reality in the classroom." Dr. Reale says that in order for professors to be able to correctly respond to how a student is performing in class, they need to understand how the student is feeling. "The goal here is to have a device that's on the virtual or augmented reality headset such that it recognizes the emotional state of the student, and for this particular project we are targeting what are called non-standard expressions." The project has 2 phases.

Sophisticated machine learning applications require not only enormous amounts of training data, but powerful computer hardware on which to train. An analysis conducted by San Francisco research firm OpenAI found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time, and that it's grown by more than 300,000 times over that same time period. The trend spurred the development of supercomputers like the U.S. Department of Energy's Sierra and Summit, which leverage dedicated accelerator chips to speed up AI computation. Now, IBM's Hardware Center, in collaboration with New York State, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and other members of IBM's AI Hardware Center, has delivered a new machine for the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) that's optimized for state-of-the-art machine learning workloads. It's dubbed Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System, or AiMOS (in honor of Rensselaer cofounder Amos Eaton), and it will principally tackle projects in biology, chemistry, the humanities, and related domains underway at the new IBM Research AI Hardware Center on the SUNY campus in Albany.

Last week, I, alongside my colleague Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee Chair Steve Englebright, held the first-ever NYS Assembly roundtable on artificial intelligence and how we can utilize it to predict and combat climate change. We head into our last three intensive legislative weeks with June with a few thousand bills pending – though only a fraction will end up passing both bodies. Serious work continues and a whole host of important yet controversial bills including on housing and tenant protections, climate control and protection, surrogacy laws and driver licenses to name just a few! The Assembly and Senate this week passed a legislative package aimed at protecting people with disabilities and improving and expanding services available to them. As always, check out community events to see what's happening around the district!

IBM and SUNY Polytechnic Institute are creating an artificial intelligence "hardware lab" in Albany. The facility will be part of a larger, $2 billion commitment by the company to New York state that will keep IBM in Albany for years to come. Under the terms of the deal, Empire State Development will provide a five-year, $300 million grant to SUNY Poly for what's being called the AI Hardware Center at the institute's Albany campus. The facility is expected to create hundreds of new jobs. In exchange, IBM has agreed to extend its presence at SUNY Poly's Center for Semiconductor Research through 2023, with an option for another five-year agreement after that.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are immersing themselves in Chinese culture without setting foot outside their classroom. The Mandarin Project, a collaboration between RPI, located in upstate New York, and the tech giant IBM, places students in a virtual world where they can practice their Mandarin language skills in a series of simulated scenarios, such as ordering lunch in a restaurant or taking a tai chi class. The project aims to make students feel as if they are actually in China, without the inconvenience of traveling there, says Helen Zhou, assistant professor of communication and media at RPI, who has been actively involved in designing the project. In a high-tech "cognitive immersive room," a classroom with a 360-degree floor-to-ceiling screen, students can practice their Mandarin with artificial intelligence-powered animated characters (including a floating panda head). The CIR combines several emerging technologies -- natural language processing, speech-to-text and movement tracking -- to create a unique learning experience, said Zhou.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are immersing themselves in Chinese culture without setting foot outside their classroom. The Mandarin Project, a collaboration between RPI, located in upstate New York, and the tech giant IBM, places students in a virtual world where they can practice their Mandarin language skills in a series of simulated scenarios, such as ordering lunch in a restaurant or taking a tai chi class. The project aims to make students feel as if they are actually in China, without the inconvenience of traveling there, says Helen Zhou, assistant professor of communication and media at RPI, who has been actively involved in designing the project. In a high-tech "cognitive immersive room," a classroom with a 360-degree floor-to-ceiling screen, students can practice their Mandarin with artificial intelligence-powered animated characters (including a floating panda head). The CIR combines several emerging technologies -- natural language processing, speech-to-text and movement tracking -- to create a unique learning experience, said Zhou.

Teams of researchers are hoping to give life to a six-foot, 330-pound humanoid robot at the the Robotics Challenge in Homestead, Florida on December 20 and 21. The teams are expected to enable the robot--and others--to autonomously walk, use human tools, and drive a car. The event is sponsored by DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense that focuses on advanced research. DARPA said the program at the Homestead Miami Speedway, is aimed at developing robots capable of working hand-in-hand with humans during natural or man-made disasters. "Think of the nuclear plants that were damaged during the tsunami in Japan," said David Conner, a senior research scientist with TORC Robotics, whose team is includes with roboticists from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, better known as Virginia Tech.

These underpinnings in genetics and fields are vast, variegated, informed by memetics, studying phenomena such disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, as coalition formation in an artificial and interrelated. Other applications provided an updated perspective ethical concerns related to the use of included case-based retrieval of to a previous symposium held in fall eldercare technology to ensure that narratives culturally relevant to a 2005 on the same topic. Some models focused One major theme of the symposium The symposium ended with a more directly on adaptation, from machine-learning was to investigate the use of sensor brainstorming session on possible solutions and game-theoretic networks in the home environment to for two real-life scenarios for perspectives, but discussions suggested provide safety, to monitor activities of ailing elders and their caregivers. The ways in which those adaptations daily living, to assess physical and cognitive exercise was helpful in grounding the might vary from one cultural context function, and to identify participants in the lives of older adults to another. Work was also should address real needs.