In response to a growing backlash, Microsoft said it would take steps to ensure that data centers don't raise utility bills in surrounding areas and address other public concerns. A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would be taking a series of steps toward becoming a "good neighbor" in communities where it is building data centers--including promising to ask public utilities to set higher electricity rates for data centers. Speaking onstage at an event in Great Falls, Virginia, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith directly referenced a growing national pushback to data centers, describing it as creating "a moment in time when we need to listen, and we need to address these concerns head-on." "When I visit communities around the country, people have questions--pointed questions. They even have concerns," Smith said, as a slide showed headlines from various news outlets about opposition to data centers.

State's Republican-led public service commission to decide on power expansion and prices, as Democrats vie for voice Georgia is facing the largest demand for electricity in its history, driven by nation-leading datacenter construction. The Georgia Power company has made an unprecedented bid to the agency that oversees the utility for about 10 additional gigawatts of energy in the coming years - enough to power 8.3m homes, at an estimated cost of nearly $16bn, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center . But those huge numbers are not primarily for homes or local businesses in Georgia . Instead about 80% of the company's ask is driven by datacenters, primarily for artificial intelligence, according to Tom Krause, spokesperson for the state's public service commission, or PSC. It is the largest increase ever considered by the commission in a multiyear plan and comes as the Atlanta metro area led the nation in datacenter construction last year - a phenomenon playing out across the US and increasingly sparking protests and pushback.

Extracting alphanumeric data from form-like documents such as invoices, purchase orders, bills, and financial documents is often performed via vision (OCR) and learning algorithms or monolithic pipelines with limited potential for systemic improvements. We propose an agen-tic AI system that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents and a reinforcement learning (RL) driver agent to automate consistent, self-improving extraction under LLM inference uncertainty. Our work highlights the limitations of monolithic LLM-based extraction and introduces a modular, multi-agent framework with task-specific prompts and an RL policy of rewards and penalties to guide a meta-prompting agent to learn from past errors and improve prompt-based actor agents. This self-corrective adaptive system handles diverse documents, file formats, layouts, and LLMs, aiming to automate accurate information extraction without the need for human intervention. Results as reported on two benchmark datasets of SOIRE, and CORD, are promising for the agen-tic AI framework.

Now that most of the country is hunkered down at home to quell the spread of COVID-19, chances are you're spending more on electricity and other utilities. After all, more lights are on and for a longer period of time. You may be turning up the heat to stay warm (especially for northern states). Appliances – ovens, stoves, dishwashers, and washers and dryers – are getting more use than ever before. And then there's laptops and desktops constantly on for doing work or attending virtual classes at school, or perhaps binging TV shows or playing video games.

Homeowners often invest in energy-saving upgrades to make their homes more comfortable and lower their expenses, hoping to see reductions in their upcoming utility bills. Government-backed and utility-backed programs that provide energy-efficient home improvements share the same goal of reducing costs. But measuring the costs and effects of hundreds of different retrofits in thousands of households is a complex process, and the big picture -- which changes should be prioritized for the biggest benefit to the resident -- is difficult to put together. While energy efficiency programs have developed sophisticated models to improve decision making, documented disparities between predicted and realized savings demonstrate that there is still substantial progress that could be made. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), researchers are used to using compute power to dig for answers in piles of untamed data.

Appliances, even large ones, are getting in on the action. But that doesn't mean you need to toss your old "dumb" stuff and buy brand new smart devices. Air conditioners are certainly one type of appliance that is heading down the smart path, but if you have a window or wall unit you already love (or can't afford to replace), you might consider turning your dumb unit into a smart A/C. With a few tweaks, you can convert the unit you have into a cooling solution you can turn on and off remotely with an app or through your favorite smart home ecosystems, such as Google Assistant or Alexa. A window or wall unit (or a portable A/C) works just fine when you manually turn it on with buttons, so why is it even necessary to make it smart?

Stephen Stuut is the CEO of leading digital identity verification company Jumio. He has a wealth of experience in the financial services industry and is a leading senior technology executive with an extensive track record of transforming companies into profitable businesses with a clear market strategy. We sat down with Stephen to discuss Jumio's recent partnership with digital bank Monzo and the importance of building trust within a business. Tell us about your career in fintech and your role as CEO of Jumio. I previously worked at McKinsey & Company and at Deloitte (Braxton Associates).

Living in New England, it seems like I can never catch a break from high utility bills. If paying your utilities hurts your wallet every month, there are a lot of different ways you can slash those bills down to a more manageable number. For one, smart home technology can help you be more efficient with both heating and cooling, as well as with water and electricity use. Here are 10 smart products that can help reduce your utility bills and put money back in your pocket. Are you forever leaving the living room light on?

The digital identity management and biometric verification space is a busy one, with many technology providers touting some sort of machine learning or computer vision solution. So what constitutes a unique selling point in this crowd of contenders? Jumio, which offers a "hybrid" approach and counts Airbnb among its clients, says it has become familiar with 3,000 different types of onboarding identity documents from all over the planet, and currently does some 110,000 verifications a day. It's a three-pillared approach: firstly, the entry point to the system, which involves knowing some variant of government-issued ID and its particular security features, as well as the weaknesses fraudsters might attempt to exploit. Then, determining it is valid using facial recognition biometrics.

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.