Tootfinder

Sources: Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick to help fund his acquisition of Pony.ai's US arm; Pony.ai has permits to operate robo taxis in the US and China (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

Uber in Talks With Travis Kalanick to Fund Self-Driving Car Deal
The ride-hailing company is in talks to help Mr. Kalanick, who was forced out in 2017, purchase an autonomous vehicles start-up as robot taxi service Waymo gains momentum.

MADrive: Memory-Augmented Driving Scene Modeling
Polina Karpikova, Daniil Selikhanovych, Kirill Struminsky, Ruslan Musaev, Maria Golitsyna, Dmitry Baranchuk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21520

MADrive: Memory-Augmented Driving Scene Modeling
Recent advances in scene reconstruction have pushed toward highly realistic modeling of autonomous driving (AD) environments using 3D Gaussian splatting. However, the resulting reconstructions remain closely tied to the original observations and struggle to support photorealistic synthesis of significantly altered or novel driving scenarios. This work introduces MADrive, a memory-augmented reconstruction framework designed to extend the capabilities of existing scene reconstruction methods by r…

Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignments
Jiashuo Wang, Kaitao Song, Chunpu Xu, Changhe Song, Yang Xiao, Dongsheng Li, Lili Qiu, Wenjie Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21497

Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignments
Enhancing user engagement through interactions plays an essential role in socially-driven dialogues. While prior works have optimized models to reason over relevant knowledge or plan a dialogue act flow, the relationship between user engagement and knowledge or dialogue acts is subtle and does not guarantee user engagement in socially-driven dialogues. To this end, we enable interactive LLMs to learn user engagement by leveraging signals from the future development of conversations. Specificall…

Sun Jingguo:
"The cost of driving a petrol car is too expensive. I save money driving an electric vehicle,"
Lu Yunfeng: "I drive an electric vehicle because I am poor,"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d5ld8y8pwo

Data-Driven Dynamic Factor Modeling via Manifold Learning
Graeme Baker, Agostino Capponi, J. Antonio Sidaoui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19945 https://

Data-Driven Dynamic Factor Modeling via Manifold Learning
We propose a data-driven dynamic factor framework where a response variable depends on a high-dimensional set of covariates, without imposing any parametric model on the joint dynamics. Leveraging Anisotropic Diffusion Maps, a nonlinear manifold learning technique introduced by Singer and Coifman, our framework uncovers the joint dynamics of the covariates and responses in a purely data-driven way. We approximate the embedding dynamics using linear diffusions, and exploit Kalman filtering to pr…

It’s a vicious cycle:
Pumping for groundwater is dehydrating our world.
And yet, people take more water from underground due to need, when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.
https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-gro…

“Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat
A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

Watching 36 cars with active Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (#ADAS) being tested in real live situations is ... revealing. Huge differences in outcomes (crashes etc.) and paying more money does not guarantee a better outcome. Watch the video with English subtitles switched on, it's hilarious.

#Studie Wohnungswechsel im #Alter
https://www.derbund.ch/best-ager…

«Best Ager»: Ältere suchen laut Studie oft neue Wohnformen – und scheitern
«Best Ager» haben oft mehr Wohnraum als nötig, wenn die Kinder ausziehen. Eine ZHAW-Studie zeigt: Trotz Umzugswillen bei 30 Prozent der Befragten mangelt es an passenden Angeboten für diese Lebensphase.

Tesla stock jumped Friday because Trump's Department of Transportation scrapped some safety regulations that were preventing approval of Tesla's Full Self Driving.
I hope prospective buyers learn this fact and extract its key implication: "Elon admits that Tesla's Full Self Driving is unsafe and unfixable".
#Tesla

Policy-Driven #CostOptimization with #OpenPolicyAgent and #Kubernetes