Religious communities around the US are getting hit with AI depictions of their leaders sharing incendiary sermons and asking for donations. Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest and podcaster, addressed his congregation of more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers in November with an unusual kind of homily. You couldn't always trust the words coming out of his mouth, Schmitz said, because sometimes they weren't really his words--or his mouth. Schmitz had become the target of AI-generated impersonation scams . "You're being watched by a demonic human," said the fake Schmitz in one video that the real Schmitz, wearing an L.L. Bean jacket over his clerical suit, included in his public service announcement as an example.

These genetic libraries plan for worse-case scenarios. An employee at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany shows off a specimen of frozen plant seeds from the institute's genebank. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Amid the 872-day siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, nine people died protecting a library. This library was not for books, but for seeds collected from around the globe.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. More than 180 million years ago, ichthyosaurs ruled the early Jurassic oceans. The carnivorous marine reptiles ranged from the size of a briefcase to larger than a school bus. The biggest of these whale-like creatures were apex predators, hunting ancient fish, ammonites, and even their smaller reptile relatives. As they searched for prey, some may have swum with surprising stealth.

Three residents filed a lawsuit this week against Sonoma County seeking to block code enforcement from using drones to take aerial images of their homes in what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a "runaway spying operation." The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU Wednesday on behalf of the three residents, alleges that the county began using drones with high-powered cameras and zoom lenses in 2019 to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but in the years since, officials have used the devices more than 700 times to find other code violations on private property without first seeking a warrant. "For too long, Sonoma County code enforcement has used high-powered drones to warrantlessly sift through people's private affairs and initiate charges that upend lives and livelihoods. All the while, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media," Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement. A spokesperson for Sonoma County said the county is reviewing the complaint and takes "the allegations very seriously."

Skill transfer from humans to robots is challenging. Presently, many researchers focus on capturing only position or joint angle data from humans to teach the robots. Even though this approach has yielded impressive results for grasping applications, reconstructing motion for object handling or fine manipulation from a human hand to a robot hand has been sparsely explored. Humans use tactile feedback to adjust their motion to various objects, but capturing and reproducing the applied forces is an open research question. In this paper we introduce a wearable fingertip tactile sensor, which captures the distributed 3-axis force vectors on the fingertip. The fingertip tactile sensor is interchangeable between the human hand and the robot hand, meaning that it can also be assembled to fit on a robot hand such as the Allegro hand. This paper presents the structural aspects of the sensor as well as the methodology and approach used to design, manufacture, and calibrate the sensor. The sensor is able to measure forces accurately with a mean absolute error of 0.21, 0.16, and 0.44 Newtons in X, Y, and Z directions, respectively.

At the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), I recently attended the debut of an exciting new machining-related event where machining had to be explained to some attendees. The inaugural meeting of the Consortium for Self-Aware Machining and Metrology (CSAM) brought together manufacturing experts with mathematicians who had little basic familiarity with machining operations, all with the goal of advancing the development of, in the words of meeting organizer Dr. Tony Schmitz, "production systems with the ability to know their own state and respond." In short, this was a conference entirely focused on uniting machining with artificial intelligence (AI). Of course, the manufacturing people in attendance needed basic instruction also. The hope of applying AI to manufacturing is still in its early stages, and one of the first steps is just to figure out what the one might mean for the other.

At the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), I recently attended the debut of an exciting new machining-related event where machining had to be explained to some attendees. The inaugural meeting of the Consortium for Self-Aware Machining and Metrology (CSAM) brought together manufacturing experts with mathematicians who had little basic familiarity with machining operations, all with the goal of advancing the development of, in the words of meeting organizer Dr. Tony Schmitz, "production systems with the ability to know their own state and respond." In short, this was a conference entirely focused on uniting machining with artificial intelligence (AI). Of course, the manufacturing people in attendance needed basic instruction also. The hope of applying AI to manufacturing is still in its early stages, and one of the first steps is just to figure out what the one might mean for the other.

BERLIN -- A shoebox-sized European space robot turned up a few surprises when it hopped around on an asteroid last week. In newly released images, the surface of the asteroid Ryugu is "even crazier" than expected, said Ralf Jaumann of the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, the scientific director of the MASCOT mission. "Everything is covered in rough blocks and strewn with boulders," he added in an image release. With a diameter of about 3,000 feet (900 meters), Ryugu is one of 17,000 known near-Earth asteroids, and it's made up of some of the most primordial material in the solar system. Studying the space rock's properties and composition could help scientists understand the building blocks of planet formation.

Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) is a principled and domain-independent way of analyzing why a system under examination is not behaving as expected. Given an abstract description (model) of the system's components and their behavior when functioning normally, MBD techniques rely on observations about the actual system behavior to reason about possible causes when there are discrepancies between the expected and observed behavior. Due to its generality, MBD has been successfully applied in a variety of application domains over the last decades. In many application domains of MBD, testing different hypotheses about the reasons for a failure can be computationally costly, e.g., because complex simulations of the system behavior have to be performed. In this work, we therefore propose different schemes of parallelizing the diagnostic reasoning process in order to better exploit the capabilities of modern multi-core computers. We propose and systematically evaluate parallelization schemes for Reiter's hitting set algorithm for finding all or a few leading minimal diagnoses using two different conflict detection techniques. Furthermore, we perform initial experiments for a basic depth-first search strategy to assess the potential of parallelization when searching for one single diagnosis. Finally, we test the effects of parallelizing "direct encodings" of the diagnosis problem in a constraint solver.