The machine learning random Fourier feature method for data in high dimension is computationally and theoretically attractive since the optimization is based on a convex standard least squares problem and independent sampling of Fourier frequencies. The challenge is to sample the Fourier frequencies well. This work proves convergence of a data adaptive method based on resampling the frequencies asymptotically optimally, as the number of nodes and amount of data tend to infinity. Numerical results based on resampling and adaptive random walk steps together with approximations of the least squares problem by conjugate gradient iterations confirm the analysis for regression and classification problems.

In this week's edition: Elon Musk suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Apple beats itself up over Siri, and Meta goes after one of its own over a tell-all book. The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession – as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire's role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve "stranded" astronauts. The company tried again two days later.

Last week saw the release of Kara Swisher's Burn Book, the highly anticipated career memoir from a titanic, justly celebrated veteran of tech journalism. Considering her unique, outsize stature in Silicon Valley, and her decadeslong record of landing bombshell inside scoops about the single most important industry of the 21st century, Swisher's choice to promote her latest project with the help of famous friends (Don Lemon, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, etc.) certainly makes sense. What makes much less sense, however, is her selection of tech-world executives. The book tour is going to be lit -- with guest moderators like @RobertIger, @laurenepowell, @mcuban, @donlemon, @reidhoffman, @sama and more. Some of the "moderators" on her tour include Laurene Powell Jobs, Disney CEO Bob Iger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Lean In board member Adam Grant. Per NPR's Steve Inskeep, she personally requested that these folks "interview her on stage," in a series of conversations she intends to turn into individual podcast episodes.

Samsung's big Unpacked event yesterday unashamedly focused on the company's annual flagship phone refresh. Just kidding: It's mostly just changes to cameras and screen size. Same as it's been since the Galaxy S20. While introducing the Galaxy S24, S24 and S24 Ultra, the company wheeled out streamer and YouTuber Pokimane to cheerlead the even brighter screens, while MrBeast -- who Samsung couldn't afford to have there in person? However, beyond the predictable spec bumps, Samsung went to town on AI features this year.

Gizmodo is 20 years old! To celebrate the anniversary, we're looking back at some of the most significant ways our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital tools. Like so many others after 9/11, I felt spiritually and existentially lost. It's hard to believe now, but I was a regular churchgoer at the time. Watching those planes smash into the World Trade Center woke me from my extended cerebral slumber and I haven't set foot in a church since, aside from the occasional wedding or baptism. I didn't realize it at the time, but that godawful day triggered an intrapersonal renaissance in which my passion for science and philosophy was resuscitated. My marriage didn't survive this mental reboot and return to form, but it did lead me to some very positive places, resulting in my adoption of secular Buddhism, meditation, and a decade-long stint with vegetarianism.

Five years ago, one of Telenor's top boffins feared that Google, Amazon and Facebook were set to become an unstoppable force in artificial intelligence (AI). "There is a real risk that the most fundamental technology of the 21st century will be dominated by a few large companies, unless we take the necessary steps," said Bjørn Taale Sandberg, the Norwegian telco's head of research. For Telenor, the necessary steps meant investing in its own AI lab and backing the right startups. Conversely, it is hard to see how a strategic partnership with one of the AI bogeymen would produce alternatives to them. But that is what Telenor did five years after Sandberg first warned of an AI oligopoly, announcing a Google Cloud tie-up today. Among other things, it will be "exploring how to leverage" Google's AI expertise.

This paper presents local asymptotic minimax regret lower bounds for adaptive Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR). We consider affinely parametrized $B$-matrices and known $A$-matrices and aim to understand when logarithmic regret is impossible even in the presence of structural side information. After defining the intrinsic notion of an uninformative optimal policy in terms of a singularity condition for Fisher information we obtain local minimax regret lower bounds for such uninformative instances of LQR by appealing to van Trees' inequality (Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao) and a representation of regret in terms of a quadratic form (Bellman error). It is shown that if the parametrization induces an uninformative optimal policy, logarithmic regret is impossible and the rate is at least order square root in the time horizon. We explicitly characterize the notion of an uninformative optimal policy in terms of the nullspaces of system-theoretic quantities and the particular instance parametrization.

The world has a new AI toy, and it's called GPT-3. The latest iteration of OpenAI's text generating model has left many starstruck by its abilities – although its hype may be too much. GPT-3 is a machine learning system that has been fed 45TB of text data, an unprecedented amount. All that training allows it to generate sorts of written content: stories, code, legal jargon, all based on just a few input words or sentences. And the beta test has already produced some jaw-dropping results.

The first decade of the 21st century introduced us to sweeping mobile and social revolutions largely driven by names like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Bezos. In the second decade that's now closing, things got a little more… complicated. During those years, a new collection of faces have joined the earlier tech titans to continue moving us into the future. A person wears a Guy Fawkes mask, which today is a trademark and symbol for the online hacktivist group Anonymous. More a decentralized collective than a personality, Anonymous was the name claimed by the loose affiliation of hackers who brought "hacktivism" into the mainstream. During the first half of the decade, Anonymous launched attacks against targets like ISIS, the governments of the US and Tunisia, and corporations such as Sony and PayPal.

Travel protection may be one of the least exciting elements of the vacation purchase journey, but technology has radically reshaped the product and service delivery over the last five years, with even greater changes on the horizon for travel agents and consumers alike. Today, travelers can avail themselves of a host of services that could not have been developed without technology. For example, airline passengers can request their insurance company track their flights, and if there is a delay that meets their plan's terms and conditions, a claim can be automatically filed, and funds transferred to their bank account even while they are waiting in an airport lounge to depart. "Proactive payments for some travel delays, digital payments made directly to debit cards, and a focus on claims automation have drastically altered the way our customers get reimbursed for covered travel situations," said Dan Durazo, Allianz director, marketing and communications, USA. "These innovations have simplified and expedited the claims process to put money back in travelers' pockets faster than ever before," he said.