AI

Opening — Why this matters now The ocean economy has quietly become one of the world’s fastest‑growing industrial frontiers. Oil and gas rigs, offshore wind farms, and artificial islands now populate the seas like metallic archipelagos. Yet, despite their scale and significance, much of this infrastructure remains poorly monitored. Governments and corporations rely on fragmented reports and outdated maps—while satellites see everything, but few know how to interpret the data. ...

Can machines grasp the shades of human sentiment? Traditional opinion-mining systems often fail when language becomes ambiguous — when a review says, “The battery life is okay but could be better,” is that positive or negative? The paper “Opinion Mining Based Entity Ranking using Fuzzy Logic Algorithmic Approach” (Kalamkar & Phakatkar, 2014) offers a compelling answer: use fuzzy logic to interpret the degree of sentiment, not just its direction. At its heart, this study bridges two previously separate efforts: fuzzy-based sentiment granularity (Samaneh Nadali, 2010) and opinion-based entity ranking (Ganesan & Zhai, 2012). The innovation lies in combining fuzzy logic reasoning with conditional random fields (CRFs) to classify reviews at multiple levels of sentiment intensity, then ranking entities accordingly. In essence, it transforms vague human opinions into structured data without flattening their complexity. ...

In the world of quantitative investing, the line between data and story has long been clear. Numbers ruled the models; narratives belonged to the analysts. But the recent paper “Exploring the Synergy of Quantitative Factors and Newsflow Representations from Large Language Models for Stock Return Prediction” from RAM Active Investments argues that this divide is no longer useful—or profitable. Beyond Factors: Why Text Matters Quantitative factors—valuation, momentum, profitability—are the pillars of systematic investing. They measure what can be counted. But markets move on what’s talked about, too. Corporate press releases, analyst notes, executive reshuffles—all carry signals that often precede price action. Historically, this qualitative layer was hard to quantify. Now, LLMs can translate the market’s chatter into vectors of meaning. ...

TL;DR Neuro‑symbolic architecture (LLMs + Prolog) turns tax calculation from vibes to verifiable logic. The paper we analyze shows that adding a symbolic solver, selective refusal, and exemplar‑guided parsing can lower the break‑even cost of an AI tax assistant to a fraction of average U.S. filing costs. Even more interesting: chat‑tuned models often beat reasoning‑tuned models at few‑shot translation into logic — a counterintuitive result with big product implications. Why this matters for operators (not just researchers) Most back‑office finance work is a chain of (1) rules lookup, (2) calculations, and (3) audit trails. Generic LLMs are great at (1), decent at (2), and historically bad at (3). This work shows a practical path to auditable automation: translate rules and facts into Prolog, compute with a trusted engine, and price the risk of being wrong directly into your product economics. ...

The dream of generating a fully realized, minute-long video from a short text prompt has always run aground on three reefs: disjointed narratives, visual glitches, and characters that morph inexplicably between shots. MAViS (Multi-Agent framework for long-sequence Video Storytelling) takes aim at all three by treating video creation not as a single monolithic AI task, but as a disciplined production pipeline staffed by specialized AI “crew members.” The Problem with One-Shot Generators Single-pass text-to-video systems shine in short clips but crumble under the demands of long-form storytelling. They repeat motions, lose scene continuity, and often rely on users to do the heavy lifting—writing scripts, designing shots, and manually training models for character consistency. This is not just a technical shortcoming; it’s a workflow bottleneck that makes creative scaling impossible. ...

Most warnings about algorithmic collusion tell the same story: sellers using AI to set prices end up coordinating—without explicit communication—to keep prices higher than competition would allow. This is what regulators fear: supra-competitive prices, reduced consumer welfare, and harder-to-detect anti-competitive behavior. A new study, however, flips the narrative on its head. By analyzing multi-dimensional decision-making—where reinforcement learning (RL) agents set both prices and advertising bids on a platform like Amazon—the authors uncover a surprising outcome: in markets with high consumer search costs, algorithmic “collusion” can lower prices below competitive benchmarks. ...

In the world of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), most systems still treat document retrieval like a popularity contest — fetch the most relevant-looking text and hope the generator can stitch the answer together. But as any manager who has tried to merge three half-baked reports knows, relevance without completeness is a recipe for failure. A new framework, Compositional Answer Retrieval (CAR), aims to fix that. Instead of asking a retrieval model to find a single “best” set of documents, CAR teaches it to think like a strategist: break the question into its components, retrieve for each, and then assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. ...

A Hidden Cost of AI Efficiency When AI takes over routine tasks, companies often see immediate productivity gains. Senior staff can accomplish more without relying on juniors, costs go down, and short-term profits rise. But beneath these benefits lies a risk that most boardrooms overlook: the erosion of tacit knowledge—the hands-on expertise that only develops through years of guided practice. Tacit skills aren’t in manuals or knowledge bases. They’re the intuition of a surgeon who adapts mid-procedure, the judgment of a lawyer during negotiations, the troubleshooting instincts of an engineer. These skills pass from experts to novices mainly through direct collaboration on real work. Remove the entry-level work, and you cut the ladder that builds tomorrow’s experts. ...

When business leaders ask for a “quick chart,” they rarely expect to become detectives in the aftermath—trying to work out why the AI picked that chart type, grouped the data that way, or left out important categories. Yet that’s exactly the frustration with most Natural Language to Visualization (NL2VIS) tools today: they generate results like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, with no insight into how the trick was done. ...

In AI development, removing humans from the training loop has long been a holy grail — not because people aren’t valuable, but because human labeling is expensive, slow, and fundamentally limited. R-Zero, a new framework from Tencent AI Seattle Lab, takes a decisive step in that direction: no seed dataset, no human annotations, and no external verifier. Just two AI roles — Challenger and Solver — locked in an evolutionary arms race. ...