Sometimes journalists befuddle me, and I'm a journalist – although my touchy detractors would dispute that. Perhaps like you, I have been watching – with a healthy dose of bemusement and amusement – the outrage-du-jour dominate the latest 24-hour "news cycle" in North America and beyond. Such is the squirrel-like attention span of many of my perpetually outraged colleagues, that today's outrage usually has a short life expectancy since another outrage inevitably comes along tomorrow. But the outrage seizing Washington, DC – the capital of outrage – appears poised to consume the Beltway press corps for more than a day or two. When that happens, the outrage tends to evolve into a four-alarm scandal which journalists crave because it often translates into a big, ego-boosting award for the lucky scribe who triggered the original outrage.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have designed an AI-enabled robot that can perform a Waltz simply by mirroring the moves of its human partner. As far as we can tell, the robot was even able to pull off the ballroom dance without stepping on its partner's toes. To make their dancing robot, the team first designed an AI model trained on human motion capture videos and then integrated it into two bipedal Unitree G1 robots. Using another model, those robots were then able to analyze the motions of humans in front of them and mimic those movements themselves. The result was a humanoid robot able to seamlessly walk, dodge, squat, and dance by copying a human.

An AI that helps humanoid robots mirror a person's movement could allow robots to walk, dance and fight in more convincingly human ways. The most agile and fluid robotic movements, such as Boston Dynamics's impressive demonstrations of robot acrobatics, are typically narrow, pre-programmed sequences. Teaching robots to perform a wider repertoire of convincingly human movements is still difficult. To overcome this hurdle, Xuanbin Peng at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have developed an artificial intelligence system called ExBody2, which lets robots copy and smoothly perform many different human movements in more lifelike ways. Peng and his team first created a database of actions that a humanoid robot might be capable of performing, from simple movements like standing or walking to more complex manoeuvres, such as tricky dance moves.

Self-consistency-based approaches, which involve repeatedly sampling multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent one as the final response, prove to be remarkably effective in improving the factual accuracy of large language models. Nonetheless, existing methods usually have strict constraints on the task format, largely limiting their applicability. In this paper, we present Integrative Decoding (ID), to unlock the potential of self-consistency in open-ended generation tasks. ID operates by constructing a set of inputs, each prepended with a previously sampled response, and then processes them concurrently, with the next token being selected by aggregating of all their corresponding predictions at each decoding step. In essence, this simple approach implicitly incorporates self-consistency in the decoding objective. Extensive evaluation shows that ID consistently enhances factuality over a wide range of language models, with substantial improvements on the TruthfulQA (+11.2%), Biographies (+15.4%) and LongFact (+8.5%) benchmarks. The performance gains amplify progressively as the number of sampled responses increases, indicating the potential of ID to scale up with repeated sampling.

While most prior research into the universe of political discourses is based in the genres of debate and speeches, studies of academic political discourse have been sparse. One of the goals of the project SKILL, from which this paper stems, is to fill this gap. SKILL - A social science lab for research-based learning - is dedicated to building and applying AI technologies to facilitate analysis of argumentation in scholarly articles in political science, especially in the context of teaching International Relations (IR). The ultimate goal of SKILL is to provide students with AI tools which would facilitate comprehension of original articles used as part of teaching syllabi and which would coach them in producing expert argumentation in the field. In order to gain insight into the structure and properties of arguments in the domain of political science theory, we developed an annotation scheme which enables analysis of scholarly IR discourse in terms of interaction between argumentation and types of domain content contributing to arguments. The scheme comprises two orthogonal dimensions: discourse and content domain.

Rep. Mike Waltz and former national security adviser to VP Pence Gen. Keith Kellogg react to the mistaken drone strike killing innocent civilians. "Sunday Night in America" host Trey Gowdy discussed the recent reveal that the drone strike in Kabul touted by the Biden administration struck down civilians including seven children. "When you're looking at a drone strike, those drones could basically read a license plate on a car, that's how good their optics are," Kellogg said. "My concerns are that just a couple of days after the ISIS-K strike that killed 13 great Americans and wounded 20, I think there was a big push to try to get these planners. Remember, we were told these were ISIS-K planners when they weren't. They were tracking a white van for approximately 8 hours, then they said it was a righteous kill. And they were dead wrong about it."

Waltz served as Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) president from 1997 to 1999, was a Fellow of AAAI and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and former chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). Prior to joining CCLS, he was president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984-1993 was director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and a professor of computer science at Brandeis University. A celebration of his life was held in the spring of 2012, and a symposium in his honor was held September 23, 2012, at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. That dissertation created the field of constraint propagation by showing that constraints and a rich but simple descriptive system were sufficient to recover threedimensional information from a two-dimensional projection. Besides an education, Dave picked up a passion for the highenergy atmosphere that propelled the MIT AI Lab to prominence -- an atmosphere that he spent the rest of his life recreating. In 1973, Dave Waltz with Richard P. Gabriel in tow headed west from MIT to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with the goals of starting a first-rate AI program and creating a lab in the image of the MIT AI Lab. All they had were an enthusiastic home in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, some friendly faculty in the Electrical Engineering department, a PDP-10, a shaky connection to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), and a small but eager coterie of misfit graduate students.

AAAI has seen great ups and downs, based largely on the perceived success of AI in business applications. Great early success allowed AAAI to weather the "AI winter" to enjoy the current "thaw." Other challenges to AAAI have resulted from its success in spinning out international conferences, thereby effectively removing several key AI areas from the AAAI National Conference. AAAI leadership continues to look for ways to deal with these challenges. AAI began life intending to be completely different from the established professional societies (such as ACM).

The emergence of terrorist drones flown by ISIS in Iraq has fueled interest in drone-defense technology – while raising questions about whether the U.S. is ready for potential drone terrorist attacks on the homeland. Over the last six months, ISIS has increased its use of weaponized and surveillance drones against Iraqi and U.S. forces. U.S. Central Command told Fox News coalition troops have as many as 30 encounters a week with unmanned aerial vehicles. These drones are inexpensive ones modified to drop grenades or to surveil troop movements. Underscoring the accessibility and affordability of these drones: During the last two months, the U.S. military has destroyed at least five ISIS drone facilities, including one factory and four storage facilities.

The 3-D research was seminal in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence. Known as "constraint propagation," the technique is now used in industry for solving problems like route scheduling, package routing and construction scheduling. At M.I.T., Dr. Waltz was taught by Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Dr. Waltz graduated in 1972, then taught computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, later, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. But it was as a member of a group of researchers at the Thinking Machines Corporation, in Cambridge, Mass., that Dr. Waltz made his breakthrough in information retrieval.