They're born as tiny'toadlets.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A frog's lifecycle is likely one of the earliest bits of science that many of us remember learning. They start as eggs, hatch into tadpoles, and soon grow into the recognizable adult amphibians. While that remains true for the vast majority of the planet's nearly 8,000 known frog species, a handful of the amphibians have evolved a more streamlined reproductive process.

In light of recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the expectations for the next generation of virtual assistants include enhanced naturalness and adaptability across diverse usage scenarios. However, the creation of high-quality annotated data for Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) is recognized to be slow and costly. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs (TOAD), a novel and scalable TOD dataset along with its automatic generation pipeline. The TOAD dataset simulates realistic app context interaction and provide a variety of system response style options. Two aspects of system response styles are considered, verbosity level and users' expression mirroring. We benchmark TOAD on two response generation tasks and the results show that modelling more verbose or responses without user expression mirroring is more challenging.

Scientific discoveries form an ongoing, ever-evolving process. Each new experiment offers an opportunity to suggest new hypotheses based on results that have come before. Traditionally, the hypotheses researchers plan to test in an experiment are prespecified before any data from the experiment is visible, as this facilitates control of either the false discovery rate (FDR; Benjamini and Hochberg, 1995) or the probability of producing any false positives (the familywise error rate, or FWER; see, for example Efron and Hastie, 2016) within that experiment. In contrast to fully prespecified procedures, online procedures test hypotheses sequentially, and allow the results of preliminary tests to inform choices about which hypotheses to focus on in future tests (Foster and Stine, 2008). These procedures typically require that error rates be controlled at every stage of the sequence (e.g., Javanmard and Montanari, 2015; Ramdas et al., 2017).

This weekend, Jungle Cruise heads upriver towards the deep, dark heart of box office success, marking the eleventh feature film or TV movie based on an attraction at a Disney theme park. The studio's return on these projects has been, let's say, uneven: The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been wildly successful, but the second-tier of Disney rides adapted for the big screen is a parade of embarrassments like The Haunted Mansion, oddities like Mission to Mars, and outright weirdness like the 1997 Tower of Terror TV movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Steve Gutenberg, a kid-friendly riff on The Shining that I promise actually exists: As Disney tries once again to create cinematic greatness out of amusement park rides, here are some of the Disney attractions that are most overdue for screen adaptations. Look, you can't create something as unholy and terrifying as the Donald Trump figure in the Hall of Presidents and not make a movie where it kills people, that's just mad science. The obvious choice for a Hall of Presidents movie would be a riff on Westworld or Five Nights at Freddy's, but this might work best as a Frankenstein-type story, as the audio-animatronic Trump cuts a bloody swath through the Imagineering department trying to find his creator and get him to admit he began life as Hillary Clinton. Maybe the Trump robot could team up with what's left of the original "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" figure from the 1964 New York World's Fair, who looks like he'd like to have a word or two with whoever stole his clothes: Verhoeven would knock this out of the park.

We recently reported on a systemdeveloped by Scottish scientists to help identify mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer. A team of researchers from the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital has designed an artificial intelligence model that can find the origin of metastases. In addition, this tool could generate a "differential diagnosis" for patients with cancers whose origin is not known to doctors. For doctors, knowing the primary site of origin of a tumor is essential in order to target the actions they wish to take to fight the cancer and thus increase the survival rate. Most modern therapies are specific to the primary tumor, hence the importance of locating and analyzing it.

In the Guide's weekly Solved! Over the course of almost three decades playing video games and 15 years writing about them, I have seen a few recurrent questions that just refuse to die. Are video games art? (Yes, when they want to be.) Is Sonic better than Mario? Does playing games turn you into a sociopathic murderer?

Vivek Goyal isn't a professional photographer, but he and his colleagues have developed an intriguing party trick: they can capture the image of an object completely out of sight. They demonstrated the trick in a windowless room on the Boston University campus, where Goyal works as an electrical engineering professor. In the room, a flat-screen monitor displayed a series of crude drawings created by Goyal's graduate student, Charles Saunders. Among them were several masterpieces: A mushroom that resembles Toad from Mario Kart, a Simpsons-yellow dude wearing a sideways red baseball cap, the red letters "BU" for school pride. These are the images that Goyal and his team wanted to capture while pointing the camera lens in a completely different direction.

Frogs and toads provide interesting parallels to the way in which humans can see the world about them, and use what they see in determining their actions. What they lack in subtlety of visually-guided behaviour, they make up for in the amenability of their behaviour and the underlying neural circuitry to experimental analysis. This paper presents three specific models of neural circuitry underlying visually-guided behaviour in frog and toad. They form an'evolutionary sequence' in that each model incorporates its predecessor as a subsystem in such a way as to explain a wider range of behaviour data in a manner consistent with current neurophysiology and anatomy. The models thus form stages in the evolution of Rana computatrix, an increasingly sophisticated model of neural circuitry underlying the behaviour of the frog.

Frogs and toads provide interesting parallels to the way in which humans can see the world about them, and use what they see in determining their actions. What they lack in subtlety of visually-guided behaviour, they make up for in the amenability of their behaviour and the underlying neural circuitry to experimental analysis. This paper presents three specific models of neural circuitry underlying visually-guided behaviour in frog and toad. They form an 'evolutionary sequence' in that each model incorporates its predecessor as a subsystem in such a way as to explain a wider range of behaviour data in a manner consistent with current neurophysiology and anatomy. The models thus form stages in the evolution of Rana computatrix, an increasingly sophisticated model of neural circuitry underlying the behaviour of the frog.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.