【推荐3】A small recording room outside the Congolese capital Kinshasa has become a safe space for homeless teenagers. They sing about their life on the streets and dream of a better future. The homeless sing about their childhood, living conditions, and living experiences at the Mokili Na Poche cultural center. It is a safe space that allows young people and children to wash and eat.

“It really makes me happy when I sing,” said 19-year-old Mavakala. He has slept on the streets for years. There are more than 20,000 homeless children in Kinshasa. Other teenagers looked on with happiness as Mavakala turned on the recording equipment at the center in late August.

Mavakala dreams of bigger goals after having the chance to record in a real recording space. He said, “It stimulates me and I tell myself — ah, life belongs to (属于) brave persons.” He added that U. S. rapper Lil Wayne and Congolese star Fally Ipupa influenced his music.

He has been coming to the center for the past three years, taking part in the music, art, and reading classes it offers throughout the day. Founder Cedrick Tshimbalanga hopes these skills and daily experiences will help the children build a base for their life and their voices.

“With music, young people are able to talk about their daily experience — everything they live through daily: happiness and sadness,” said Tshimbalanga, who plans to release (发行) their music soon.

The classes are also a chance for young people to make up for lost chances in life. While the Democratic Republic of Congo has made progress in education, over 7 million children aged between 5 and 17 still do not have schooling, UNICEF found.

“Break free from the homeless life, my friend. It’s time to see what the future holds for you,” Mavakala sang during an excitement-filled performance at the center in August.

【推荐1】Leamington Spa has been named the happiest place to live in Great Britain: in a study, he asked over 17,000 people across 159 areas of the country how happy they are where they live. Leamington Spa was said by locals to be a friendly place with a strong sense of belonging. There residents feel they can be themselves.

“LESS CROWDED BATH”

Samantha Holton, a town center specialist, described the town “a less crowded version of Bath”. She said, “The town is popular with young professionals due to its excellent transport links and easy commute to city centres such as Coventry, Birminghan and London. And families are attracted to the town due to the range of state, private and grammar schools the town has offered.”

From bars and live music venues to comedy at The Royal Spa Centre, Leamington Spa has a variety of entertainment. There are over 200 restaurants, pubs and coffee shop a in the town centre.

Some famous ones include Coffee Architects, Restaurant 23 and The Star & Garter.

STRONG TKANSPORT LINKS

Leamington Spa offers great access to the surrounding towns, as well as direct trains to London Marylebone in 80 minutes.

Clive Thompson, a local office manager, said that strong local employment is also a major draw, Jaguar Land Rover (a car manufacturer) is continuing to expand. And Aston Martin, National Grid, Warwick University and the computer games industry have all chosen the town as a base.

“Leamington Spa continues to remain a popular place to live and it all residents would agree.” he said. “We simply see lots of buyers move to the area and stay. Having found a town which offers many cultural and leisure facilities with easy access to and from, you can see why many are proud to call Leamington Spa home.”

【推荐3】It seems no one can really agree on the question of “What’s so funny?” So imagine trying to teach a robot how to laugh. But that’s exactly what a team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan are trying to design an AI that takes its cues through a shared laughter system. The scientists describe their innovative approach to building a funny bone for the Japanese android ‘Erica’ in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy(移情，共鸣)，”explained lead author Dr Koji Inoue, an assistant professor at Kyoto University in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology within the Graduate School of Informatics. “One way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter.”

In the shared-laughter model, a human initially laughs and the Al system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. This approach required designing three subsystems-one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh, and a third to choose the type of appropriate laughter. The type of laughter is also important, because in some cases a polite chuckle may be more appropriate than a loud snort of laughter.

The team tested Erica’s new sense of humor by creating four different short dialogues between a person and Erica with her new shared-laughter system. Then they asked more than 130 people in total to listen to each dialogue within the three different conditions- shared-laughter system, no laughter, all laughter- and evaluated the interactions based on human-likeness, naturalness and understanding. The shared-laughter system performed better than either baseline.

“Robots should actually have a distinct character, and we think that they can show this through their conversational behaviors, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style,” Inoue added. “We do not think this is an easy problem at all, and it may well take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.”

【推荐1】Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive (认知的) psychologist and computer scientist. In May 2023, Hinton announced his leaving from Google to be able to “freely speak out about the risks of AI”. Hinton’s work on neural networks—the method that teaches AI to process data in a way similar to the human brain—supports how modern chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard function. But now, he partly regrets making this advancement.

Hinton has been working on neural networks since he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s. Then few researchers believed in the idea. Even Hinton’s PhD advisor had his doubts. “We met once a week,” Hinton said. “Sometimes it ended in a shouting match.”

But Hinton persisted with his work. In the 1980s, he and his colleagues put forward a technique called backpropagation—an algorithm (算法) for training machines. In 2012, he had a big breakthrough: Hinton and two of his students created a neural network that could analyze photos and teach itself to identify objects. The next year, the team’s neural network startup was bought by Google, where Hinton continued to work.

For years, Hinton believed neural networks were not as good as the way human brains function, but he’s recently started thinking differently. He once thought it would take up to 50 years for the technology to outsmart humans, but he now predicts it’ll be just 5 to 20. Hinton’s immediate concerns are that fake text, pictures and videos produced by AI will make regular people unable to distinguish them from reality. Eventually, this technology could be used by humans to influence public opinion. He believes that AI could avoid its limits and begin making people do what it wants by learning how humans control or influence others.

However, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist who won the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton, has a different opinion. “I believe that intelligent machines will lead to a new renaissance (复兴) for humanity, a new era of enlightenment,” LeCun said.

【推荐2】Artificial intelligence-powered medical treatment options are on the rise and have the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, but a new study found that about almost half of participants would choose a human doctor rather than AI for diagnosis and treatment.

“While many patients appear resistant to the use of AI, accuracy of information and a slight push from physicians may help increase acceptance,” Dr. Slepian mentioned the study’s other primary finding: that a human touch can help clinical practices use AI to their advantage and earn patients’ trust. “To ensure the benefits of AI are secured in clinical practice, future research on best methods of physician involvement and patient decision making is required.”

In the study, participants were asked whether they would prefer to have an AI system or a physical doctor for diagnosis and treatment, and under what circumstances. Researchers conducted structured interviews with actual patients, testing their reactions to current and future AI technologies. Then they. polled 2,472 participants across diverse ethnic, racial and socioeconomic groups using a blinded, randomized survey.

Overall, participants were almost evenly split, with more than 52% choosing human doctors as a preference versus approximately 47% choosing an AI diagnostic method. If study participants were informed their primary care physicians felt AI was superior, the acceptance of AI by study participants on re-questioning increased. This signaled the significance of the human physician in guiding a patient’s decision.

Disease severity didn’t affect participants’ trust in AI. Compared to White participants, Black ones selected AI less often and Native Americans more often. Older participants were less likely to choose it, as were those who self-identified as politically conservative. These findings suggest differing groups will need specific attention as to informing them as to the value and usefulness of AI to enhance diagnoses.

“I feel this study will guide many future studies and clinical translational decisions even now,” Dr. Slepian said. “The onus will be on physicians and others in health care to ensure that information in AI systems is accurate, and to continue to maintain and enhance the accuracy of AI systems as they will play an increasing role in the future of health care.”

【推荐3】AI Can Bring Great Benefits to Human Beings

The explosion of progress in AI in recent months has surprised even the scientists and engineers who specialize in applying AI to real-life tasks. Several big companies started amazing new programs in a short time, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard. “A few years ago I never would have imagined we would advance this far this soon,” says Zhe Jiang, a University of Florida researcher who studies applications of AI. Here are some examples of AI applications.

In April, a study published in Nature showed that an AI program was as good as or better than human experts at spotting heart problems in patient ultrasound (超声波) images. That is to say, AI is able to match or go beyond human doctors at catching cancers and other disorders by scanning images and tissue samples.

Some drug companies are already relying heavily on AI to help find promising new drugs. For example, PsychoGenics, a company specializing in drugs for mental disorders, is improving on the inefficient, inexact and costly process of testing new mental drugs on mice, which typically takes five years. By using AI instead of lab staff to observe the effects of new drugs on mice, the company can test more drugs with greater accuracy at a tenth the cost and two years faster.

With 56 million Americans over 65, the high cost and short supply of eldercare workers, eldercare robots have already stepped in. Without using the recent Al advances, robots already watch over seniors with electronic eyes, fetch small items, answer questions. Some of them can already start conversations with seniors, help them recall what happened, and then report the results to family members. Soon, the power of such devices to interact with people will improve greatly. “Caregiving and companion robots equipped with the latest AI can provide ‘empathy’,” says Forrester’s Curran. “They can tell the difference between a senior who is searching through a drawer, and one who is struggling to open a drawer,” he explains.