Goto

Collaborating Authors

 traveler


Will this high-tech lounge change how you wait at airports?

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .


LaGuardia Airport AI hologram answers traveler questions

FOX News

LaGuardia Airport's Terminal B now features an AI hologram concierge that answers traveler questions and provides step-by-step directions using real-time maps.



Start your 2026 Resolutions with a lifetime membership to Rosetta Stone's language learning program for just 149

Popular Science

Grab a lifetime membership and learn up to 25 languages instead of scrolling your life away in 2026. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learning a new language is a very common resolution. It's useful, stimulating, and can even be fun if you choose the right method. Right now, Rosetta Stone has discounted its lifetime memberships, which means you can pay once and learn forever.


Invariant Price of Anarchy: a Metric for Welfarist Traffic Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a standard metric for quantifying inefficiency in socio-technical systems, widely used to guide policies like traffic tolling. Conventional PoA analysis relies on exact numerical costs. However, in many settings, costs represent agents' preferences and may be defined only up to possibly arbitrary scaling and shifting, representing informational and modeling ambiguities. We observe that while such transformations preserve equilibrium and optimal outcomes, they change the PoA value. To resolve this issue, we rely on results from Social Choice Theory and define the Invariant PoA. By connecting admissible transformations to degrees of comparability of agents' costs, we derive the specific social welfare functions which ensure that efficiency evaluations do not depend on arbitrary rescalings or translations of individual costs. Case studies on a toy example and the Zurich network demonstrate that identical tolling strategies can lead to substantially different efficiency estimates depending on the assumed comparability. Our framework thus demonstrates that explicit axiomatic foundations are necessary in order to define efficiency metrics and to appropriately guide policy in large-scale infrastructure design robustly and effectively.


PromptTailor: Multi-turn Intent-Aligned Prompt Synthesis for Lightweight LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Lightweight language models remain attractive for on-device and privacy-sensitive applications, but their responses are highly sensitive to prompt quality. For open-ended generation, non-expert users often lack the knowledge or time to consistently craft high-quality prompts, leading them to rely on prompt optimization tools. However, a key challenge is ensuring the optimized prompts genuinely align with users' original intents and preferences. We introduce PromptTailor, a system for controllable prompt generation for open-ended text that improves model output quality by intent-aligned prompt synthesis. PromptTailor expands minimal user instructions into rich, domain-aware prompts while preserving the user's stated preferences. The system is a quantized Llama3-8B model fine-tuned with a lightweight LoRA adapter on 12,300 prompt-refinement dialogues spanning 41 everyday domains, distilled from three stronger LLMs. The adapter attaches to any Llama3-8B base, enabling edge deployment. In human and LLM-judge evaluations across multiple target models and optimization baselines, PromptTailor yields higher preference rates than chain-of-thought prompting and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods while requiring fewer model calls (e.g., 3 vs. 9). These results show that a compact student, guided by powerful teachers, can learn effective prompt-generation strategies that enhance response quality while maintaining alignment with user intent.


Fake flight cancellation texts target travelers

FOX News

Cybercriminals send fake airline texts claiming flight cancellations to trick travelers into calling scammer phone numbers that steal credit card details.


LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning with Representative Agents for Traffic Modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as behavioral proxies for self-interested travelers in agent-based traffic models. Although more flexible and generalizable than conventional models, the practical use of these approaches remains limited by scalability due to the cost of calling one LLM for every traveler. Moreover, it has been found that LLM agents often make opaque choices and produce unstable day-to-day dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose to model each homogeneous traveler group facing the same decision context with a single representative LLM agent who behaves like the population's average, maintaining and updating a mixed strategy over routes that coincides with the group's aggregate flow proportions. Each day, the LLM reviews the travel experience and flags routes with positive reinforcement that they hope to use more often, and an interpretable update rule then converts this judgment into strategy adjustments using a tunable (progressively decaying) step size. The representative-agent design improves scalability, while the separation of reasoning from updating clarifies the decision logic while stabilizing learning. In classic traffic assignment settings, we find that the proposed approach converges rapidly to the user equilibrium. In richer settings with income heterogeneity, multi-criteria costs, and multi-modal choices, the generated dynamics remain stable and interpretable, reproducing plausible behavioral patterns well-documented in psychology and economics, for example, the decoy effect in toll versus non-toll road selection, and higher willingness-to-pay for convenience among higher-income travelers when choosing between driving, transit, and park-and-ride options.


Aligning LLM agents with human learning and adjustment behavior: a dual agent approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effective modeling of how human travelers learn and adjust their travel behavior from interacting with transportation systems is critical for system assessment and planning. However, this task is also difficult due to the complex cognition and decision-making involved in such behavior. Recent research has begun to leverage Large Language Model (LLM) agents for this task. Building on this, we introduce a novel dual-agent framework that enables continuous learning and alignment between LLM agents and human travelers on learning and adaptation behavior from online data streams. Our approach involves a set of LLM traveler agents, equipped with a memory system and a learnable persona, which serve as simulators for human travelers. To ensure behavioral alignment, we introduce an LLM calibration agent that leverages the reasoning and analytical capabilities of LLMs to train the personas of these traveler agents. Working together, this dual-agent system is designed to track and align the underlying decision-making mechanisms of travelers and produce realistic, adaptive simulations. Using a real-world dataset from a day-to-day route choice experiment, we show our approach significantly outperforms existing LLM-based methods in both individual behavioral alignment and aggregate simulation accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method moves beyond simple behavioral mimicry to capture the evolution of underlying learning processes, a deeper alignment that fosters robust generalization. Overall, our framework provides a new approach for creating adaptive and behaviorally realistic agents to simulate travelers' learning and adaptation that can benefit transportation simulation and policy analysis.


CBP Searched a Record Number of Phones at the US Border Over the Past Year

WIRED

The total number of US Customs and Border Protection device searches jumped by 17 percent over the 2024 fiscal year, but more invasive forensic searches remain relatively rare. Over the Past year, United States Customs and Border Protection staff searched more phones and electronic devices at the border than ever before, according to new statistics published by the government agency. Phone searches jumped around 17 percent during the past 12 months--with a marked increase over the past six months. Newly published CBP figures show that for the full fiscal year of 2025--running from October 2024 to the end of September 2025--border agents conducted around 55,424 searches of electronic devices. This is up from around the 47,000 searches that were completed during the government's 2024 fiscal year.