Imagine trying to teach a computer to understand video the way a human does. It’s not just about recognizing objects; it’s about understanding the flow of time, the sequence of events, and the subtle cues that tell us what’s important. Now, a team at Nanyang Technological University and ByteDance Inc. is pushing the boundaries of…
The most futuristic scene in any medical drama is arguably the intubation. A doctor, in a split-second decision, slides a tube down a patient’s throat to save their life. It’s dramatic, essential, and—as a new study reveals—ripe for a robotic upgrade. Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed an autonomous system for…
Gravitational waves have turned the cosmos into a kind of orchestra, where the dirge of collapsing stars and the hush of spacetime murmurs carry stories we can hear only through precise detectors and careful theory. In the latest turn of that story, a team led by Alejandra Gonzalez, with collaborators from across Europe and North…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that magnificent atom-smasher nestled beneath the Franco-Swiss border, has yielded another intriguing clue in the hunt for physics beyond the Standard Model. A new study from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram, led by Arijit Das, Tanumoy Mandal, Subhadip Mitra, and Rachit Sharma, has significantly…
Cities aren’t just collections of streets and buildings; they’re living systems where thousands of tiny decisions ripple into delays, risks, and shared moments of courage or fatigue. For autonomous vehicles, understanding that living city is the key to safety and trust. A new study from Waymo and UT Austin launches a bold bet: build CitySim,…
Black holes are not solitary voids; they live in neighborhoods. In a study led by Ariadna Uxue Palomino Ylla at Nagoya University, with colleagues Yasutaka Koga and Chul-Moon Yoo, researchers treat a black hole as if it wears a cloak—steely, invisible, and moving in step with a steady flow of matter. The work, a collaboration…
Unraveling the Intersections of Spanning Trees Imagine a sprawling network, a complete graph where every node is connected to every other node. Now, picture all the possible spanning trees within this network – each a skeleton of connections, reaching every point without any cycles. A new mathematical result, emerging from the University of Minnesota Duluth,…
A cache-driven twist to speculative decoding Latency is the quiet antagonist of every impressive-sounding AI model. We clamor for smarter, bigger, more capable systems, but the moment we push the button to generate the next word, the clock starts ticking. In autoregressive language models, each token is built on top of a vast neural network,…
A Single Whisper, a Holistic Score: Revolutionizing Language Assessment Imagine taking a language test where your entire speaking performance—across multiple parts, from short answers to extended discussions—is evaluated not by a team of weary human graders but by a single, efficient AI. This isn’t science fiction. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have developed a…
In the quiet, invisible heat of a silicon chip, a tiny spark can ripple into a data flip. Alpha particles—those specks that can ride along from packaging materials into a microprocessor—carry energy that can briefly rearrange the charges inside a memory cell. When that happens in a static random-access memory (SRAM), a stored bit can…
Imagine a world where our Wi-Fi networks also function as radar systems, simultaneously communicating data and sensing their surroundings. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the rapidly approaching reality of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks. The Challenge of Seamless Sensing and Communication Creating truly effective ISAC networks presents significant hurdles. One major challenge is the…
In the grand quest for artificial intelligence that can roam beyond its training data, researchers chase a delicate, almost human trait: curiosity that doesn’t burn out. Open-ended learning is the dream that an AI could keep picking up new tasks, remixing old skills, and solving problems it has never seen before. It’s not just about…
The Rise of the Self-Improving AI Imagine an AI so sophisticated it doesn’t just answer your questions; it also grades its own answers, identifying flaws and refining its responses based on its own self-assessment. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the core principle behind a groundbreaking new framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human…
In a world racing toward smarter devices, the challenge isn’t just collecting data but turning it into quick, trustworthy decisions where they matter most. Imagine autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, or factory robots that must both feel their surroundings and decide what to do in the blink of an eye. A new study from a team…
Why One Database Language Isn’t Enough Anymore In the world of data, variety isn’t just the spice of life—it’s the whole recipe. Modern analytics often juggle a cocktail of data types: neat tables of rows and columns, messy JSON documents, and sprawling multi-dimensional arrays like those used in machine learning. Traditionally, databases have been monolingual,…
Forget monolithic digital sculptures. Researchers at the University of Oxford and Meta AI have unveiled AutoPartGen, a groundbreaking AI model that constructs 3D objects not as seamless wholes, but as meticulously assembled collections of individual parts. Think of it like a digital Lego master builder, capable of generating intricate structures from simple instructions, or even…
Mathematicians sometimes talk about structures that feel almost like language forged in geometry: a place where arrows, squares, and the ways they fit together don’t just exist, they cooperate. The latest work by Aaron David Fairbanks and Michael Shulman steps into one of the most stubborn corners of this landscape. It tackles double categories —…
The Speed of Heat Imagine designing a massive geothermal system, a network of underground pipes snaking hundreds of meters into the earth. To ensure it works efficiently and sustainably, you need incredibly precise computer simulations, predicting heat flow for decades. But these simulations are notoriously slow, a computational bottleneck that has long hampered progress. A…
Every morning, a chorus of voice assistants sits on the edge of our attention, ready to take notes, answer questions, or launch a calendar invite. Yet most systems still feel like a collection of separate apps stitched together by fragile pipes. A CMU team has built AURA, an open-source, speech-native assistant that can carry a…
On the surface, a thin film laced with tiny, highly polarizable inclusions might look like a quiet stage for basic physics. Yet when you shine an electric field perpendicular to that film, the system begins to perform a surprisingly elaborate dance. The lead performers are dipoles—tiny magnetic or electric moments that arise in response to…