In this paper, we introduce a dataset of multilingual news articles covering the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. A total of 10,940 news articles were gathered from 1,918 different publishers, covering 1,350 sub-events of the 2021 Olympics, and published between July 1, 2021, and August 14, 2021. These articles are written in nine languages from different language families and in different scripts. To create the dataset, the raw news articles were first retrieved via a service that collects and analyzes news articles. Then, the articles were grouped using an online clustering algorithm, with each group containing articles reporting on the same sub-event. Finally, the groups were manually annotated and evaluated. The development of this dataset aims to provide a resource for evaluating the performance of multilingual news clustering algorithms, for which limited datasets are available. It can also be used to analyze the dynamics and events of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics from different perspectives. The dataset is available in CSV format and can be accessed from the CLARIN.SI repository.

We introduce FarExStance, a new dataset for explainable stance detection in Farsi. Each instance in this dataset contains a claim, the stance of an article or social media post towards that claim, and an extractive explanation which provides evidence for the stance label. We compare the performance of a fine-tuned multilingual RoBERTa model to several large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and parameter-efficient fine-tuned settings on our new dataset. On stance detection, the most accurate models are the fine-tuned RoBERTa model, the LLM Aya-23-8B which has been fine-tuned using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Regarding the quality of the explanations, our automatic evaluation metrics indicate that few-shot GPT-4o generates the most coherent explanations, while our human evaluation reveals that the best Overall Explanation Score (OES) belongs to few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The fine-tuned Aya-32-8B model produced explanations most closely aligned with the reference explanations.

'The show must go on,' an often heard sentence that makes absolute sense in the pandemic hit the world. Yes, it all became at the end of 2019 when Covid-19 was first reported in Wuhan. Later, the virus spread across the globe and pushed governments to impose strict lockdowns. An international sports event that was supposed to take place in 2020 got delayed and finally, when people started living with the virus in 2021, the IOC and Japan, the host country, came forward to go on with it. One of the most welcomed guests in the summer Tokyo Olympics is artificial intelligence.

While CUE is experiencing a moment in the spotlight, the robot isn't the best three-point shooter the world has ever known. American podiatrist Tom Amberry set the world record for humans, 2,750 consecutive shots, in 1993 at age 71. Ted St. Martin of Jacksonville, Fla., pushed the consecutive mark to 5,221 in 1996 and still holds the record today. Others have achieved a number of basketball shooting feats, some while blindfolded.

More technology companies want to get into the video game business. Just within the past week Netflix, Peloton, Zoom and Amazon have added games to their business plans. The potential promise of video games makes the medium attractive. The global video games market, estimated at $177.8 billion in 2020, is expected to surpass $200 billion by 2023, forecasts Tom Wijman at research firm Newzoo. But there's no guarantee these big names will succeed.

Timing of Olympic races has not always been sophisticated. On April 10, 1896, some 17 runners competed in the very first Olympic marathon. The course ran approximately 40 km, and of the athletes representing five different nations, it was a Greek water carrier, Spyridon Louis, who eventually emerged victorious, winning in two hours, 58 minutes, and 50 seconds. How do we know this impressive statistic? The very same stopwatch set running by the judge in Marathon at the start of that historic race was then delivered ahead of the runners--by bicycle, no less--to record the momentous time as Louis crossed the finish line in Athens just shy of three hours later.

Ready to participate in your own Summer Games? Google will roll out a new interactive game Friday available through its Search logo, one of several updates planned to keep visitors up to date on the Tokyo Olympics. The company's interactive Doodle game will have players competing in several competitions including skateboarding, rugby and climbing. The games, made in partnership with Studio 4 C, will feature a "16-bit" visual style resembling classic home video game console titles. Interactive games available through Google's logo is nothing new.

Japan plans to use facial recognition technology, originally intended for security purposes, to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus when it hosts the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics next year, government sources said Wednesday. The technology was initially intended to ensure security identification of personnel involved in the games and the media, and detect suspicious persons. But virus countermeasures have become an urgent concern for the government in its hope of staging a successful Olympics, which has already been delayed by a year due to the pandemic. According to the sources, one plan is to station security cameras equipped with the technology at stadiums and venues to record spectators' faces and body surface temperatures, and to see if they are wearing masks. The recorded data is expected to help prevent cluster infections in case an individual at a game is discovered to be infected later, by helping pinpoint possible virus carriers, tracing their routes and notifying those who were in close contact.

Ever feel like the broadcasts for running meets lack a few bells and whistles that you may notice during other sporting events? If so, Tokyo 2020 is hoping to change that--and revamp the viewer experience with artificial technology innovations. On Wednesday, Intel announced a new partnership with International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, and as part of it, also revealed some of the tech they will have at the event to offer broadcasters in Tokyo next July. As a result, track and field fans should be in for a very different viewing experience than they are used to. For starters, the tech giant is debuting what they call 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT).

When athletes and organizers descend on Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games, they'll be ferried around in autonomous cars, while torch relay runners will be accompanied by AI-equipped cars. Robots will ferry javelins and hammers. All told, Toyota Motor Corp. will provide 3,700 vehicles, including dozens of self-driving cars, about 500 fuel-cell vehicles and 850 battery-electric cars to the international sports competition. As a top sponsor of the Tokyo Olympics and an automaker facing a murky future when gasoline-powered engines will fade away, Toyota is doing everything it can to market its transition into an eventual provider of on-demand transportation for consumers and businesses, instead of being merely an industrial manufacturer. "We want to use the Olympics and Paralympics that happen every two years as a milestone," Masaaki Ito, general manager of Toyota's Olympic and Paralympic Division, said in an interview.