-- There are still many museums that present accessibility barriers, particularly regarding perceptual, cultural, and cognitive aspects. This is especially evident in low-density population areas. The aim of the ROBSO-PM project is to to improve the accessibility of small museums with the use of social robots and social telepresence robots, focusing on three museums as a case study: the Museum of the Holy Shroud in T urin, a small but globally known institution, and two lesser-known mountain museums, the Museum of the Champlas du Col Carnival, and the Pragelato Museum of Alpine Peoples' Costumes and Traditions. The project explores two main applications for robots: as guides to support inclusive visits for foreign or disabled visitors, and as telepresence tools allowing people with limited mobility to access museums remotely. From a research perspective, key topics include storytelling, robot personality, empathy, personalization, and, in the case of telepresence, collaboration between the robot and the person, with clearly defined roles and autonomy.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Our planet runs on pollinators. Without bees, moths, weevils, and more zooming around and spreading plants' reproductive cells, plants and important crops would not grow. Without plants we would not breathe or eat. When these crucial pollinating species visit flowers and other plants, they produce a number of characteristic sounds, such as wing flapping when hovering, landing, and taking off.

The recent exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has relied on GPU-based systems. However, CPUs are emerging as a flexible and lower-cost alternative, especially when targeting inference and reasoning workloads. RISC-V is rapidly gaining traction in this area, given its open and vendor-neutral ISA. However, the RISC-V hardware for LLM workloads and the corresponding software ecosystem are not fully mature and streamlined, given the requirement of domain-specific tuning. This paper aims at filling this gap, focusing on optimizing LLM inference on the Sophon SG2042, the first commercially available many-core RISC-V CPU with vector processing capabilities. On two recent state-of-the-art LLMs optimized for reasoning, DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B and DeepSeek R1 Distill QWEN 14B, we achieve 4.32/2.29 token/s for token generation and 6.54/3.68 token/s for prompt processing, with a speed up of up 2.9x/3.0x compared to our baseline.

Scientists in Italy hit the headlines this week, after claiming the famous Shroud of Turin dates from Jesus' lifetime around 2,000 years ago. Now, AI has reimagined what the son of God might have actually looked like based on the treasured relic, which is said to feature an imprint of Jesus' face. MailOnline asked the AI tool Merlin: 'Can you generate a realistic image of Jesus Christ based on the face in the Shroud of Turin?' The AI-generated result suggests Christ was white with big blue eyes, a trim beard and thorn marks on his face. So, can you see the similarities with the famous holy imprint? The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long linen cloth with a faint image of a crucified man.

Urban heat islands, defined as specific zones exhibiting substantially higher temperatures than their immediate environs, pose significant threats to environmental sustainability and public health. This study introduces a novel machine-learning model that amalgamates data from the Sentinel-3 satellite, meteorological predictions, and additional remote sensing inputs. The primary aim is to generate detailed spatiotemporal maps that forecast the peak temperatures within a 24-hour period in Turin. Experimental results validate the model's proficiency in predicting temperature patterns, achieving a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.09 degrees Celsius for the year 2023 at a resolution of 20 meters per pixel, thereby enriching our knowledge of urban climatic behavior. This investigation enhances the understanding of urban microclimates, emphasizing the importance of cross-disciplinary data integration, and laying the groundwork for informed policy-making aimed at alleviating the negative impacts of extreme urban temperatures.

A social robot is an autonomous robot that interact with people by engaging in social emotive behaviors, skills, capacities, and rules attached to its collaborative role. In order to achieve these goals we believe that modeling the interaction with the user and adapt the robot behavior to the user herself are fundamental for its social role. This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to reuse the approach with different kind of social robots.

During the 2017-18 academic year we carried out a series of coding activities, lasting about 3 months, in a third of the Giulia Falletti primary school in Barolo in Turin (Gena et a., 2020). These activities aimed to teach students not only the basics of programming, but also to introduce a new language and a new way of thinking and solving problems: computational thinking. The class consisted of 25 pupils: 14 males and 11 females, which we then operationally divided into two working groups (13 + 12) to make coding lessons more manageable and provide better childcare. The lessons lasted one hour and were conducted, in the presence of one of the teachers, by a computer teacher assisted by a student / facilitator. At the end of the three months of this positive experience, we realized that having an educational robot that can perform the same kind of actions that virtual robots do, like those of code.org, is very useful for children, especially to help them to solve orientation problems. Therefore, since no commercial robot had the characteristics we wanted, we decided to create an educational robot from scratch, equipped with social, interactive and emotional skills, able to involve children and establish an emotional bond with them in order to increase their learning and involvement. We decided from the beginning to design the robot as an open source project, made at a low cost, proposing a kit that can be easily reproduced and improved by anyone who wishes.

A self-driving shuttle is tested in the first self-driving public transport experiment in Turin, Italy, August 9, 2022. Italy looks set to receive its first self-driving public transportation system soon, with electric-powered shuttles now hitting the roads in Turin as a pilot project for testing. The autonomous vehicle has been developed by French start-up Navya, and can carry up to 14 people (11 seated and 3 standing). However, it will be tested without passengers until October 2022. The autonomous vehicle can drive in normal urban traffic and use its GPS and other sensors to detect obstacles, cars, bicycles or pedestrians, but during this pilot project, a driver will be always be present in order to steer the vehicle if necessary using a joypad.

On April 28, 2022, Reply, a company specialized in the design and implementation of solutions based on new communication channels and digital media, inaugurated its new applied research center in Turin focused on the development of the most innovative technologies. The cutting-edge work of Area42's workshops focuses on the areas of autonomous warehouse, last mile delivery, robotics, connected products, blockchain and metaverse. Reply is a company specializing in Consulting, Systems Integration and Digital Services, including the design and implementation of solutions based on new communication channels and digital media. It partners with key industrial groups in defining and developing business models made possible by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, Big Data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things and mobile and social networks. Reply's experts work daily on these technologies, transforming ideas into innovative prototypes, exploiting their full potential and applying them to real industrial use cases.

Cars have become icons of style, mobility and luxury. Design teams around the globe are creating concept vehicles for the future that will drive themselves. Icona started in 2010 in Italy and has now has grown to a global design company with 180 employees and studios, in Turin, Italy, Shanghai, China and Santa Margarita, California. Auto Futures talked to Icona's Global Design Director, Samuel Chuffart, at AutoMobility LA ahead of the North American debut of the Icona Nucleus. "In the future of cars we have to reset our values and adapt to the needs of new technology such as Level 5 autonomous driving," says Chuffart who sees autonomous cars as s more like a private yacht on wheels and draws inspiration for the Concorde airplane.