There's no doubt Great Britain lays claim to some of the greatest scientific discoveries and inventions that have changed the face of modern society. Now, MailOnline's interactive map reveals the birthplace of 30 of these famous British marvels, from stainless steel to the jet engine and the electric motor. Who can forget Alan Turing's Bombe machine, used to break Enigma-enciphered messages about enemy military operations during WWII? Turing developed the Bombe in 1939 at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire and hundreds were built, marking a crucial contribution to the war effort. Also on the map is the hovercraft invented by Christopher Cockerell in 1955 and first launched four years later on the the Isle of Wight.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, APIs, etc.) and solve tasks. However, current frameworks do not enable these agents to work with users and interact with them to align on the details of their tasks and reach user-defined goals; instead, in ambiguous situations, these agents may make decisions based on assumptions. This work introduces ReSpAct (Reason, Speak, and Act), a novel framework that synergistically combines the essential skills for building task-oriented "conversational" agents. ReSpAct addresses this need for agents, expanding on the ReAct approach. The ReSpAct framework enables agents to interpret user instructions, reason about complex tasks, execute appropriate actions, and engage in dynamic dialogue to seek guidance, clarify ambiguities, understand user preferences, resolve problems, and use the intermediate feedback and responses of users to update their plans. We evaluated ReSpAct in environments supporting user interaction, such as task-oriented dialogue (MultiWOZ) and interactive decision-making (AlfWorld, WebShop). ReSpAct is flexible enough to incorporate dynamic user feedback and addresses prevalent issues like error propagation and agents getting stuck in reasoning loops. This results in more interpretable, human-like task-solving trajectories than relying solely on reasoning traces. In two interactive decision-making benchmarks, AlfWorld and WebShop, ReSpAct outperform the strong reasoning-only method ReAct by an absolute success rate of 6% and 4%, respectively. In the task-oriented dialogue benchmark MultiWOZ, ReSpAct improved Inform and Success scores by 5.5% and 3%, respectively.

They're inside millions of homes and are useful for setting a timer or answering a query. But smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Nest may be unsafe for famous people because they can'give away how you live', an academic has warned. Sadie Creese, professor of cybersecurity at Oxford University, says the popular tech devices can make certain notable figures especially'targetable' to hackers. That's because they're fitted with microphones and even cameras that record and save data to the cloud. These recordings can potentially be accessed by cybercriminals remotely, which could could harm the victim's organisation or their family, she said.

The advantages of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) are apparent in a variety of language processing tasks. But can a language model's knowledge be further harnessed to effectively disambiguate objects and navigate decision-making challenges within the realm of robotics? Our study reveals the LLM's aptitude for solving complex decision making challenges that are often previously modeled by Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). A pivotal focus of our research is the object disambiguation capability of LLMs. We detail the integration of an LLM into a tabletop environment disambiguation task, a decision making problem where the robot's task is to discern and retrieve a user's desired object from an arbitrarily large and complex cluster of objects. Despite multiple query attempts with zero-shot prompt engineering (details can be found in the Appendix), the LLM struggled to inquire about features not explicitly provided in the scene description. In response, we have developed a few-shot prompt engineering system to improve the LLM's ability to pose disambiguating queries. The result is a model capable of both using given features when they are available and inferring new relevant features when necessary, to successfully generate and navigate down a precise decision tree to the correct object--even when faced with identical options.

State-of-The-Art (SoTA) image captioning models often rely on the Microsoft COCO (MS-COCO) dataset for training. This dataset contains annotations provided by human annotators, who typically produce captions averaging around ten tokens. However, this constraint presents a challenge in effectively capturing complex scenes and conveying detailed information. Furthermore, captioning models tend to exhibit bias towards the ``average'' caption, which captures only the more general aspects. What would happen if we were able to automatically generate longer captions, thereby making them more detailed? Would these captions, evaluated by humans, be more or less representative of the image content compared to the original MS-COCO captions? In this paper, we present a novel approach to address previous challenges by showcasing how captions generated from different SoTA models can be effectively fused, resulting in richer captions. Our proposed method leverages existing models from the literature, eliminating the need for additional training. Instead, it utilizes an image-text based metric to rank the captions generated by SoTA models for a given image. Subsequently, the top two captions are fused using a Large Language Model (LLM). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as the captions generated by our model exhibit higher consistency with human judgment when evaluated on the MS-COCO test set. By combining the strengths of various SoTA models, our method enhances the quality and appeal of image captions, bridging the gap between automated systems and the rich, informative nature of human-generated descriptions. This advance opens up new possibilities for generating captions that are more suitable for the training of both vision-language and captioning models.

As a staple of every cutlery draw, it is probably safe to say that most of us use forks at dinner time without batting an eyelid. Yet bots like ChatGPT have flipped this on its head, suggesting forks could also be used for playing'I spy', fighting zombies and digging trenches. Artificial intelligence and humans went head-to-head in a new study that sought to find out which was better at coming up with the most imaginative ideas. As it turns out, new bots are more creative than 90 per cent of humans - thinking of bizarre uses for everyday items like toothbrushes, pants, forks and tyres. ChatGPT was among six state-of-the-art bots tested by scientists at Berlin's Humboldt University and the University of Essex.

But you don't always have to reach for the most extravagant items to add to your cart. There are plenty of affordable options that'll make for great gifts regardless of who you're shopping for. To help make it easier, we've rounded up a plethora of Cyber Monday deals under $50 on streaming sticks, smart displays, video games, and more. Check out our 25 Gifts Under $25 guide for more budget-friendly holiday gift ideas. Updated November 27, 2022: We've added deals on several packs and bags, a USB hub, desktop iPad stand, MagSafe wallets, and more. We've also updated pricing and availability. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out . We'll update this guide throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.

But you don't always have to reach for the most extravagant items to add to your cart. There are plenty of affordable options that'll make for great gifts regardless of who you're shopping for. To help make it easier, we've rounded up a plethora of Black Friday deals under $50 on streaming sticks, smart displays, video games, and more. Check out our 25 Gifts Under $25 guide for more budget-friendly holiday gift ideas. Updated November 26, 2022: We've added a deal on a kid-friendly 3D printer, more mobile accessories, and updated prices and retailers throughout. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out . We'll update this guide throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

But you don't always have to reach for the most extravagant items to add to your cart. There are plenty of affordable options that'll make for great gifts regardless of who you're shopping for. To help make it easier, we've rounded up a plethora of Black Friday deals under $50 on streaming sticks, smart displays, video games, and more. Check out our 25 Gifts Under $25 guide for more budget-friendly holiday gift ideas. Updated November 26, 2022: We've added a deal on a kid-friendly 3D printer, more mobile accessories, and updated prices and retailers throughout. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out . We'll update this guide throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

But you don't always have to reach for the most extravagant items to add to your cart. There are plenty of affordable options that'll make for great gifts regardless of who you're shopping for. To help make it easier, we've rounded up a plethora of Black Friday deals under $50 on streaming sticks, smart displays, video games, and more. Check out our 25 Gifts Under $25 guide for more budget-friendly holiday gift ideas. Updated November 25, 2022: We've added new deals like the Peak Design Universal Bar Mount. We test products year-round and handpicked these deals.