Links for 2024-02-11
AI:
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds: NYU and TII researchers get robots into the air with fast simulations on a consumer laptop https://spectrum.ieee.org/drone-quadrotor (code: https://github.com/arplaboratory/learning-to-fly)
Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding — Sets a new SotA in long-context video understanding, outperforming methods that benefit from orders of magnitude more parameters https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05861
“How can we recycle specialized PEFT modules to create a generalist MoE-style model? We introduce PHATGOOSE, which learns a post-hoc routing scheme and significantly improves zero-shot generalization.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05859
An Interactive LLM Agent: Trains AI agents across diverse pre-training strategies (visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, next-action prediction); Multimodal & multi-task; Generates contextually relevant outputs in Robotics, Gaming, & Healthcare https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05929
“We instruct GPT to make risk, time, social, and food decisions and measure how rational these decisions are. We show that GPT’s decisions are mostly rational and even score higher than human decisions.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316205120
Huawei just retasked a factory to prioritize AI over its bestselling phone https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/5/24062541/huawei-ascend-chips-ai-mate-phones-pause
Miscellaneous:
Turbocharged CAR-T cells melt tumours in mice — using a trick from cancer cells https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00305-3
A One-and-Done Injection to Slow Aging? New Study in Mice Opens the Possibility — “The shot is made up of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells. These cells are genetically engineered from the body’s T cells—a type of immune cell adept at hunting down particular targets in the body.” https://singularityhub.com/2024/02/05/a-one-and-done-injection-to-slow-aging-new-study-in-mice-opens-the-possibility/
“Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely.” https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600006.3613208
Cornell Engineers Develop New Lithium Battery That Can Charge in Under Five Minutes https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/01/fast-charging-lithium-battery-seeks-eliminate-range-anxiety
“…we demonstrate that when an organism needs to adapt to a multitude of environmental variables, division of labor emerges as the only viable evolutionary strategy.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52028-0
Math:
What I care most about are definitions. For one thing, humans describe mathematics through language, and, as always, we need sharp words in order to articulate our ideas clearly. (For example, for a long time, I had some idea of the concept of diamonds. But only when I came up with a good name could I really start to think about it, let alone communicate it to others. Finding the name took several months (or even a year?). Then it took another two or three years to finally write down the correct definition (among many close variants). The essential difficulty in writing “Étale cohomology of diamonds” was (by far) not giving the proofs, but finding the definitions.) But even beyond mere language, we perceive mathematical nature through the lenses given by definitions, and it is critical that the definitions put the essential points into focus. (Mathematicians without Apologies, June 2, 2018)
— Peter Scholze on definitions (http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20100)
Politics:
Donald Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68266447 (video: https://x.com/clashreport/status/1756445161184260538)
Directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, IDF uncovers top secret Hamas data center https://www.timesofisrael.com/directly-beneath-unrwas-gaza-headquarters-idf-uncovers-top-secret-hamas-data-center/
Ukraine:
Battle for Hostomel Airport - Animated Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ji7KqqEqg
Some details about the air bridge to the Azovstal, during the siege of Mariupol: 16 helicopters conducted 7 sorties; Transported the 72 warriors to reinforce the garrison, and 30 tonnes of cargo; This helped the Azovstal defenders to withstood for another month and pin down the 10,000 Russian soldiers in the city; Flight altitude 3-7 meters; They flew at a maximum speed of 270 km/h. https://youtu.be/O4CCStR8Jzw
“The commander of "Admiral Gorshkov" frigate. In a perfectly calm voice, telling how they hit residential apartment buildings with missiles.”
“One of Russia's most advanced air defense systems (S-350 Vityaz) exploded on impact at... russian mine.” https://x.com/John_A_Ridge/status/1756368435112542529
“Why I’m interviewing Hannibal Barca.” https://x.com/UpdatingOnRome/status/1755353346213335109