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For decades, drug companies have depended on a component in the blood of the horseshoe crab to test injectable medicines, including vaccines, for dangerous bacterial contaminants called endotoxins. Conservationists and some businesses have pushed for wide acceptance of an alternative test, to protect the horseshoe crabs and birds that feed …

Facebook researchers this week introduced Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC), a novel research direction aimed at training AI chatbots that take actions like showing an object and explaining what it’s made of in response to images, memories of previous interactions, and individual requests. In a technical paper, they detail new …

In psychology, there’s a popular model of how people learn that describes how someone progresses from being a complete beginner at a skill to being proficient at it. In the first stage, called unconscious incompetence, you’re stumbling through your first attempts at something. You’re not just bad at it, you …