Published June 15, 2025 10:00am EDT close IPhone users instructed to take immediate action to avoid data breach: 'Urgent threat' Kurt 'The CyberGuy' Knutsson discusses Elon Musk's possible priorities as he exits his role with the White House and explains the urgent warning for iPhone users to update devices after a 'massive security gap.' NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! In the past decade, healthcare data has become one of the most sought-after targets in cybercrime. From insurers to clinics, every player in the ecosystem handles some form of sensitive information. However, breaches do not always originate from hospitals or health apps. Increasingly, patient data is managed by third-party vendors offering digital services such as scheduling, billing and marketing. One such breach at a digital marketing agency serving dental practices recently exposed approximately 2.7 million patient profiles and more than 8.8 million appointment records.Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide — free when you join. Illustration of a hacker at work   (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Massive healthcare data leak exposes millions: What you need to knowCybernews researchers have discovered a misconfigured MongoDB database exposing 2.7 million patient profiles and 8.8 million appointment records. The database was publicly accessible online, unprotected by passwords or authentication protocols. Anyone with basic knowledge of database scanning tools could have accessed it.The exposed data included names, birthdates, addresses, emails, phone numbers, gender, chart IDs, language preferences and billing classifications. Appointment records also contained metadata such as timestamps and institutional identifiers.MASSIVE DATA BREACH EXPOSES 184 MILLION PASSWORDS AND LOGINSClues within the data structure point toward Gargle, a Utah-based company that builds websites and offers marketing tools for dental practices. While not a confirmed source, several internal references and system details suggest a strong connection. Gargle provides appointment scheduling, form submission and patient communication services. These functions require access to patient information, making the firm a likely link in the exposure.After the issue was reported, the database was secured. The duration of the exposure remains unknown, and there is no public evidence indicating whether the data was downloaded by malicious actors before being locked down.We reached out to Gargle for a comment but did not hear back before our deadline. A healthcare professional viewing heath data      (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)How healthcare data breaches lead to identity theft and insurance fraudThe exposed data presents a broad risk profile. On its own, a phone number or billing record might seem limited in scope. Combined, however, the dataset forms a complete profile that could be exploited for identity theft, insurance fraud and targeted phishing campaigns.Medical identity theft allows attackers to impersonate patients and access services under a false identity. Victims often remain unaware until significant damage is done, ranging from incorrect medical records to unpaid bills in their names. The leak also opens the door to insurance fraud, with actors using institutional references and chart data to submit false claims.This type of breach raises questions about compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which mandates strong security protections for entities handling patient data. Although Gargle is not a healthcare provider, its access to patient-facing infrastructure could place it under the scope of that regulation as a business associate. A healthcare professional working on a laptop   (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)5 ways you can stay safe from healthcare data breachesIf your information was part of the healthcare breach or any similar one, it’s worth taking a few steps to protect yourself.1. Consider identity theft protection services: Since the healthcare data breach exposed personal and financial information, it’s crucial to stay proactive against identity theft. Identity theft protection services offer continuous monitoring of your credit reports, Social Security number and even the dark web to detect if your information is being misused. These services send you real-time alerts about suspicious activity, such as new credit inquiries or attempts to open accounts in your name, helping you act quickly before serious damage occurs. Beyond monitoring, many identity theft protection companies provide dedicated recovery specialists who assist you in resolving fraud issues, disputing unauthorized charges and restoring your identity if it’s compromised. See my tips and best picks on how to protect yourself from identity theft.2. Use personal data removal services: The healthcare data breach leaks loads of information about you, and all this could end up in the public domain, which essentially gives anyone an opportunity to scam you.  One proactive step is to consider personal data removal services, which specialize in continuously monitoring and removing your information from various online databases and websites. While no service promises to remove all your data from the internet, having a removal service is great if you want to constantly monitor and automate the process of removing your information from hundreds of sites continuously over a longer period of time. Check out my top picks for data removal services here. GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HEREGet a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web3. Have strong antivirus software: Hackers have people’s email addresses and full names, which makes it easy for them to send you a phishing link that installs malware and steals all your data. These messages are socially engineered to catch them, and catching them is nearly impossible if you’re not careful. However, you’re not without defenses.The best way to safeguard yourself from malicious links that install malware, potentially accessing your private information, is to have strong antivirus software installed on all your devices. This protection can also alert you to phishing emails and ransomware scams, keeping your personal information and digital assets safe. Get my picks for the best 2025 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.4. Enable two-factor authentication: While passwords weren’t part of the data breach, you still need to enable two-factor authentication (2FA). It gives you an extra layer of security on all your important accounts, including email, banking and social media. 2FA requires you to provide a second piece of information, such as a code sent to your phone, in addition to your password when logging in. This makes it significantly harder for hackers to access your accounts, even if they have your password. Enabling 2FA can greatly reduce the risk of unauthorized access and protect your sensitive data.5. Be wary of mailbox communications: Bad actors may also try to scam you through snail mail. The data leak gives them access to your address. They may impersonate people or brands you know and use themes that require urgent attention, such as missed deliveries, account suspensions and security alerts. Kurt’s key takeawayIf nothing else, this latest leak shows just how poorly patient data is being handled today. More and more, non-medical vendors are getting access to sensitive information without facing the same rules or oversight as hospitals and clinics. These third-party services are now a regular part of how patients book appointments, pay bills or fill out forms. But when something goes wrong, the fallout is just as serious. Even though the database was taken offline, the bigger problem hasn't gone away. Your data is only as safe as the least careful company that gets access to it.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPDo you think healthcare companies are investing enough in their cybersecurity infrastructure? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/ContactFor more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/NewsletterAsk Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to coverFollow Kurt on his social channelsAnswers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com.  All rights reserved.   Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Sovereignty has mattered since the invention of the nation state—defined by borders, laws, and taxes that apply within and without. While many have tried to define it, the core idea remains: nations or jurisdictions seek to stay in control, usually to the benefit of those within their borders. Digital sovereignty is a relatively new concept, also difficult to define but straightforward to understand. Data and applications don’t understand borders unless they are specified in policy terms, as coded into the infrastructure. The World Wide Web had no such restrictions at its inception. Communitarian groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, service providers and hyperscalers, non-profits and businesses all embraced a model that suggested data would look after itself. But data won’t look after itself, for several reasons. First, data is massively out of control. We generate more of it all the time, and for at least two or three decades (according to historical surveys I’ve run), most organizations haven’t fully understood their data assets. This creates inefficiency and risk—not least, widespread vulnerability to cyberattack. Risk is probability times impact—and right now, the probabilities have shot up. Invasions, tariffs, political tensions, and more have brought new urgency. This time last year, the idea of switching off another country’s IT systems was not on the radar. Now we’re seeing it happen—including the U.S. government blocking access to services overseas. Digital sovereignty isn’t just a European concern, though it is often framed as such. In South America for example, I am told that sovereignty is leading conversations with hyperscalers; in African countries, it is being stipulated in supplier agreements. Many jurisdictions are watching, assessing, and reviewing their stance on digital sovereignty. As the adage goes: a crisis is a problem with no time left to solve it. Digital sovereignty was a problem in waiting—but now it’s urgent. It’s gone from being an abstract ‘right to sovereignty’ to becoming a clear and present issue, in government thinking, corporate risk and how we architect and operate our computer systems. What does the digital sovereignty landscape look like today? Much has changed since this time last year. Unknowns remain, but much of what was unclear this time last year is now starting to solidify. Terminology is clearer – for example talking about classification and localisation rather than generic concepts. We’re seeing a shift from theory to practice. Governments and organizations are putting policies in place that simply didn’t exist before. For example, some countries are seeing “in-country” as a primary goal, whereas others (the UK included) are adopting a risk-based approach based on trusted locales. We’re also seeing a shift in risk priorities. From a risk standpoint, the classic triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability are at the heart of the digital sovereignty conversation. Historically, the focus has been much more on confidentiality, driven by concerns about the US Cloud Act: essentially, can foreign governments see my data? This year however, availability is rising in prominence, due to geopolitics and very real concerns about data accessibility in third countries. Integrity is being talked about less from a sovereignty perspective, but is no less important as a cybercrime target—ransomware and fraud being two clear and present risks. Thinking more broadly, digital sovereignty is not just about data, or even intellectual property, but also the brain drain. Countries don’t want all their brightest young technologists leaving university only to end up in California or some other, more attractive country. They want to keep talent at home and innovate locally, to the benefit of their own GDP. How Are Cloud Providers Responding? Hyperscalers are playing catch-up, still looking for ways to satisfy the letter of the law whilst ignoring (in the French sense) its spirit. It’s not enough for Microsoft or AWS to say they will do everything they can to protect a jurisdiction’s data, if they are already legally obliged to do the opposite. Legislation, in this case US legislation, calls the shots—and we all know just how fragile this is right now. We see hyperscaler progress where they offer technology to be locally managed by a third party, rather than themselves. For example, Google’s partnership with Thales, or Microsoft with Orange, both in France (Microsoft has similar in Germany). However, these are point solutions, not part of a general standard. Meanwhile, AWS’ recent announcement about creating a local entity doesn’t solve for the problem of US over-reach, which remains a core issue. Non-hyperscaler providers and software vendors have an increasingly significant play: Oracle and HPE offer solutions that can be deployed and managed locally for example; Broadcom/VMware and Red Hat provide technologies that locally situated, private cloud providers can host. Digital sovereignty is thus a catalyst for a redistribution of “cloud spend” across a broader pool of players. What Can Enterprise Organizations Do About It? First, see digital sovereignty as a core element of data and application strategy. For a nation, sovereignty means having solid borders, control over IP, GDP, and so on. That’s the goal for corporations as well—control, self-determination, and resilience. If sovereignty isn’t seen as an element of strategy, it gets pushed down into the implementation layer, leading to inefficient architectures and duplicated effort. Far better to decide up front what data, applications and processes need to be treated as sovereign, and defining an architecture to support that. This sets the scene for making informed provisioning decisions. Your organization may have made some big bets on key vendors or hyperscalers, but multi-platform thinking increasingly dominates: multiple public and private cloud providers, with integrated operations and management. Sovereign cloud becomes one element of a well-structured multi-platform architecture. It is not cost-neutral to deliver on sovereignty, but the overall business value should be tangible. A sovereignty initiative should bring clear advantages, not just for itself, but through the benefits that come with better control, visibility, and efficiency. Knowing where your data is, understanding which data matters, managing it efficiently so you’re not duplicating or fragmenting it across systems—these are valuable outcomes. In addition, ignoring these questions can lead to non-compliance or be outright illegal. Even if we don’t use terms like ‘sovereignty’, organizations need a handle on their information estate. Organizations shouldn’t be thinking everything cloud-based needs to be sovereign, but should be building strategies and policies based on data classification, prioritization and risk. Build that picture and you can solve for the highest-priority items first—the data with the strongest classification and greatest risk. That process alone takes care of 80–90% of the problem space, avoiding making sovereignty another problem whilst solving nothing. Where to start? Look after your own organization first Sovereignty and systems thinking go hand in hand: it’s all about scope. In enterprise architecture or business design, the biggest mistake is boiling the ocean—trying to solve everything at once. Instead, focus on your own sovereignty. Worry about your own organization, your own jurisdiction. Know where your own borders are. Understand who your customers are, and what their requirements are. For example, if you’re a manufacturer selling into specific countries—what do those countries require? Solve for that, not for everything else. Don’t try to plan for every possible future scenario. Focus on what you have, what you’re responsible for, and what you need to address right now. Classify and prioritise your data assets based on real-world risk. Do that, and you’re already more than halfway toward solving digital sovereignty—with all the efficiency, control, and compliance benefits that come with it. Digital sovereignty isn’t just regulatory, but strategic. Organizations that act now can reduce risk, improve operational clarity, and prepare for a future based on trust, compliance, and resilience. The post Reclaiming Control: Digital Sovereignty in 2025 appeared first on Gigaom.

Text embedding and reranking are foundational to modern information retrieval systems, powering applications such as semantic search, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, current approaches often face key challenges—particularly in achieving both high multilingual fidelity and task adaptability without relying on proprietary APIs. Existing models frequently fall short in scenarios requiring nuanced semantic understanding across multiple languages or domain-specific tasks like code retrieval and instruction following. Moreover, most open-source models either lack scale or flexibility, while commercial APIs remain costly and closed. Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker: A New Standard for Open-Source Embedding Alibaba’s Qwen Team has unveiled the Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker Series—models that set a new benchmark in multilingual text embedding and relevance ranking. Built on the Qwen3 foundation models, the series includes variants in 0.6B, 4B, and 8B parameter sizes and supports a wide range of languages (119 in total), making it one of the most versatile and performant open-source offerings to date. These models are now open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, GitHub, and ModelScope, and are also accessible via Alibaba Cloud APIs. These models are optimized for use cases such as semantic retrieval, classification, RAG, sentiment analysis, and code search—providing a strong alternative to existing solutions like Gemini Embedding and OpenAI’s embedding APIs. Technical Architecture Qwen3-Embedding models adopt a dense transformer-based architecture with causal attention, producing embeddings by extracting the hidden state corresponding to the [EOS] token. Instruction-awareness is a key feature: input queries are formatted as {instruction} {query}<|endoftext|>, enabling task-conditioned embeddings. The reranker models are trained with a binary classification format, judging document-query relevance in an instruction-guided manner using a token likelihood-based scoring function. The models are trained using a robust multi-stage training pipeline: Large-scale weak supervision: 150M synthetic training pairs generated using Qwen3-32B, covering retrieval, classification, STS, and bitext mining across languages and tasks. Supervised fine-tuning: 12M high-quality data pairs are selected using cosine similarity (>0.7), fine-tuning performance in downstream applications. Model merging: Spherical linear interpolation (SLERP) of multiple fine-tuned checkpoints ensures robustness and generalization. This synthetic data generation pipeline enables control over data quality, language diversity, task difficulty, and more—resulting in a high degree of coverage and relevance in low-resource settings. Performance Benchmarks and Insights The Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker series demonstrate strong empirical performance across several multilingual benchmarks. On MMTEB (216 tasks across 250+ languages), Qwen3-Embedding-8B achieves a mean task score of 70.58, surpassing Gemini and GTE-Qwen2 series. On MTEB (English v2): Qwen3-Embedding-8B reaches 75.22, outperforming other open models including NV-Embed-v2 and GritLM-7B. On MTEB-Code: Qwen3-Embedding-8B leads with 80.68, excelling in applications like code retrieval and Stack Overflow QA. For reranking: Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B already outperforms Jina and BGE rerankers. Qwen3-Reranker-8B achieves 81.22 on MTEB-Code and 72.94 on MMTEB-R, marking state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of each training stage. Removing synthetic pretraining or model merging led to significant performance drops (up to 6 points on MMTEB), emphasizing their contributions. Conclusion Alibaba’s Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker Series present a robust, open, and scalable solution to multilingual and instruction-aware semantic representation. With strong empirical results across MTEB, MMTEB, and MTEB-Code, these models bridge the gap between proprietary APIs and open-source accessibility. Their thoughtful training design—leveraging high-quality synthetic data, instruction-tuning, and model merging—positions them as ideal candidates for enterprise applications in search, retrieval, and RAG pipelines. By open-sourcing these models, the Qwen team not only pushes the boundaries of language understanding but also empowers the broader community to innovate on top of a solid foundation. Check out the Paper, Technical details, Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. Asif RazzaqWebsite |  + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Step-by-Step Coding Guide to Building an Iterative AI Workflow Agent Using LangGraph and GeminiAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/From Clicking to Reasoning: WebChoreArena Benchmark Challenges Agents with Memory-Heavy and Multi-Page TasksAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Mistral AI Introduces Mistral Code: A Customizable AI Coding Assistant for Enterprise WorkflowsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/NVIDIA AI Releases Llama Nemotron Nano VL: A Compact Vision-Language Model Optimized for Document Understanding

The Photography Seoul Museum of Art (PhotoSeMA) officially opened its doors in May 2025, marking a significant milestone as South Korea’s first public institution solely dedicated to the art of photography. Situated in the Dobong District of northeastern Seoul, this architectural marvel is the result of a collaboration between Austrian firm Jadric Architektur and Korean studio 1990uao Architects. The museum’s dynamic, twisting facade not only serves as a visual landmark but also symbolizes the fluidity and transformative nature of photography itself. Spanning six levels, four above ground and two below, the museum encompasses a total area of 7,048 square meters. Its design emphasizes the interplay between light and space, with broad concrete surfaces and filtered lighting creating an environment conducive to introspection and artistic appreciation. Designers: Jadric Architektur and 1990uao Architects Interior spaces are thoughtfully punctuated by voids and light wells, allowing natural light to shape the visitor experience throughout the day. The building’s exterior features a twisting monolithic shape that integrates seamlessly with the surrounding public space, inviting visitors to engage with the museum both inside and out. This design choice reflects the architects’ intention to create a “walk-in object” that fosters community interaction and cultural engagement. PhotoSeMA’s opening is marked by two inaugural exhibitions that delve into the history and evolution of Korean photography. The Radiance: Beginnings of Korean Art Photography showcases seminal works by artists such as Jung Haechang, Lim Suk Je, Lee Hyungrok, Cho Hyundu, and Park Youngsook. Drawing from a collection of over 20,000 works and archival materials dating from the 1920s to the 1990s, the exhibition offers a comprehensive look at the medium’s development in Korea. Meanwhile, Storage Story features contemporary artists Dongsin Seo, Won Seoung Won, Jihyun Jung, Joo Yongseong, Melmel Chung, and Oh Jooyoung. This exhibition explores the museum itself as a subject, examining themes of classification, memory, and the evolving role of cultural institutions in society. As part of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) network, PhotoSeMA extends the institution’s reach and reinforces its commitment to diverse artistic expressions. The museum not only provides a dedicated space for photographic art but also contributes to the cultural revitalization of the Dobong District, aligning with the city’s broader efforts to establish a “cultural mile” in the area. With its innovative design and focused curatorial approach, the Photography Seoul Museum of Art stands as a testament to the dynamic intersection of architecture and photography, offering visitors a unique space to explore and appreciate the visual narratives that shape our world. The post South Korea’s first public museum for photography now open first appeared on Yanko Design.

Scientific research across fields like chemistry, biology, and artificial intelligence has long relied on human experts to explore knowledge, generate ideas, design experiments, and refine results. Yet, as problems grow more complex and data-intensive, discovery slows. While AI tools, such as language models and robotics, can handle specific tasks, like literature searches or code analysis, they rarely encompass the entire research cycle. Bridging the gap between idea generation and experimental validation remains a key challenge. For AI to autonomously advance science, it must propose hypotheses, design and execute experiments, analyze outcomes, and refine approaches in an iterative loop. Without this integration, AI risks producing disconnected ideas that depend on human supervision for validation. Before the introduction of a unified system, researchers relied on separate tools for each stage of the process. Large language models could help find relevant scientific papers, but they didn’t directly feed into experiment design or result analysis. Robotics can assist in automating physical experiments, and coding libraries like PyTorch can help build models; however, these tools operate independently of each other. There was no single system capable of handling the entire process, from forming ideas to verifying them through experiments. This led to bottlenecks, where researchers had to connect the dots manually, slowing progress and leaving room for errors or missed opportunities. The need for an integrated system that could handle the entire research cycle became clear. Researchers from the NovelSeek Team at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed NovelSeek, an AI system designed to run the entire scientific discovery process autonomously. NovelSeek comprises four main modules that work in tandem: a system that generates and refines research ideas, a feedback loop where human experts can interact with and refine these ideas, a method for translating ideas into code and experiment plans, and a process for conducting multiple rounds of experiments. What makes NovelSeek stand out is its versatility; it works across 12 scientific research tasks, including predicting chemical reaction yields, understanding molecular dynamics, forecasting time-series data, and handling functions like 2D semantic segmentation and 3D object classification. The team designed NovelSeek to minimize human involvement, expedite discoveries, and deliver consistent, high-quality results. The system behind NovelSeek involves multiple specialized agents, each focused on a specific part of the research workflow. The “Survey Agent” helps the system understand the problem by searching scientific papers and identifying relevant information based on keywords and task definitions. It adapts its search strategy by first doing a broad survey of papers, then going deeper by analyzing full-text documents for detailed insights. This ensures that the system captures both general trends and specific technical knowledge. The “Code Review Agent” examines existing codebases, whether user-uploaded or sourced from public repositories like GitHub, to understand how current methods work and identify areas for improvement. It checks how code is structured, looks for errors, and creates summaries that help the system build on past work. The “Idea Innovation Agent” generates creative research ideas, pushing the system to explore different approaches and refine them by comparing them to related studies and previous results. The system even includes a “Planning and Execution Agent” that turns ideas into detailed experiments, handles errors during the testing process, and ensures smooth execution of multi-step research plans. NovelSeek delivered impressive results across various tasks. In chemical reaction yield prediction, NovelSeek improved performance from a baseline of 24.2% (with a variation of ±4.2) to 34.8% (with a much smaller variation of ±1.1) in just 12 hours, progress that human researchers typically need months to achieve. In enhancer activity prediction, a key task in biology, NovelSeek raised the Pearson correlation coefficient from 0.65 to 0.79 within 4 hours. For 2D semantic segmentation, a task used in computer vision, precision improved from 78.8% to 81.0% in just 30 hours. These performance boosts, achieved in a fraction of the time typically needed, highlight the system’s efficiency. NovelSeek also successfully managed large, complex codebases with multiple files, demonstrating its ability to handle research tasks at a project level, not just in small, isolated tests. The team has made the code open-source, allowing others to use, test, and contribute to its improvement. Several Key Takeaways from the Research on NovelSeek include: NovelSeek supports 12 research tasks, including chemical reaction prediction, molecular dynamics, and 3D object classification. Reaction yield prediction accuracy improved from 24.2% to 34.8% in 12 hours. Enhancer activity prediction performance increased from 0.65 to 0.79 in 4 hours. 2D semantic segmentation precision improved from 78.8% to 81.0% in 30 hours. NovelSeek includes agents for literature search, code analysis, idea generation, and experiment execution. The system is open-source, enabling reproducibility and collaboration across scientific fields. In conclusion, NovelSeek demonstrates how combining AI tools into a single system can accelerate scientific discovery and reduce its dependence on human effort. It ties together the key steps, generating ideas, turning them into methods, and testing them through experiments, into one streamlined process. What once took researchers months or years can now be done in days or even hours. By linking every stage of research into a continuous loop, NovelSeek helps teams move from rough ideas to real-world results more quickly. This system highlights the power of AI not just to assist, but to drive scientific research in a way that could reshape how discoveries are made across many fields. Check out the Paper and GitHub Page . All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. NikhilNikhil is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is pursuing an integrated dual degree in Materials at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Nikhil is an AI/ML enthusiast who is always researching applications in fields like biomaterials and biomedical science. With a strong background in Material Science, he is exploring new advancements and creating opportunities to contribute.Nikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces ARM and Ada-GRPO: Adaptive Reasoning Models for Efficient and Scalable Problem-SolvingNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces WEB-SHEPHERD: A Process Reward Model for Web Agents with 40K Dataset and 10× Cost EfficiencyNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces MMaDA: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion Model for Textual Reasoning, Visual Understanding, and Image GenerationNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces Differentiable MCMC Layers: A New AI Framework for Learning with Inexact Combinatorial Solvers in Neural Networks

This is how to use the attention mechanism in a time series classification framework The post Hands-On Attention Mechanism for Time Series Classification, with Python appeared first on Towards Data Science.

There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don’t know where they came from.Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception.I don’t know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word “Machiavellian” means. It’s someone who’s cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, “the teacher of evil.”But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work?Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince.For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it’s actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government).I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he’s very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What’s incomplete or wrong about that view?What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn’t think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we’ve got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn’t think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn’t see them as devils when they behave badly.But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don’t put yourself above other humans because you’re one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist?I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood?I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It’s a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that’s the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that’s a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he’s a moral writer. Rousseau says, “He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.” If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don’t read them that carefully because they’re kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom.And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it’s like, Wow! It’s about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he’s probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up.So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens?It’s complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He’s absolutely gutted that Florence’s republican experiment has failed and he can’t speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It’s taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can’t be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he’s really writing to expose the ways of tyrants.Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist?He’s a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you’re not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it’s very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words “tyrant” or “tyranny.” So if there’s a guiding political view, whether you call it “ideology” or not, it’s republicanism. And that’s an ideology of shared power. It’s all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone’s got to have a share.Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today?If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He’d totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He’s pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don’t want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics?This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they’re very subtle, you start to see that he’s exposing a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that’s when you’re going to clash. And he says, That’s when you as a leader — and he’s playing like he’s on the leader’s side — that’s when you’ve got to decide if you’re going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit?What would he make of Trump?He would put Trump in two categories. He’s got different classifications of princes. He’s got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he’d also call him this word “astutia” — astuteness, which doesn’t really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people’s weaknesses and dissatisfactions.This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don’t know how to build a solid state. That’s what he would say on a domestic front. I think there’s an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don’t think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that’s not really Machiavellian.Exactly. I wouldn’t say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I’ve often felt like he’s getting advice from people who haven’t really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they’re picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You’re absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You’re going to get pure hate. So if you think it’s ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again.This obviously isn’t an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there’s real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed?This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had “great men” coming up and saying, “I’ll save you,” and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally “saved” them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn’t as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.See More:

Shenzhen-based 3D printer manufacturer Elegoo has introduced a new RFID Ecosystem for its upcoming printer line, including the upcoming Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. This system integrates RFID-tagged resin bottles, an Elegoo-designed scanner, and cloud-connected print profiles. Elegoo has opened a public feedback solicitation on its website and GitHub page to refine the implementation and encourage community input. The company is currently testing several use cases, such as automatic profile loading, material usage tracking, and batch traceability. Elegoo says these features aim to streamline workflow, reduce errors, and assist in quality assurance. However, in a GitHub post, the company emphasized that its RFID system is optional and will not lock users into proprietary materials. An open approach to a closed-loop trend? The Elegoo RFID Ecosystem enters a broader conversation in the additive manufacturing (AM) industry regarding material-locking strategies and proprietary ecosystems. As discussed in a recent 3D Printing Industry analysis, the proliferation of closed systems has triggered renewed debate about interoperability, user autonomy, and long-term value for manufacturers and end-users alike. Elegoo appears to be taking a middle-ground approach: providing automation and traceability features via RFID while maintaining support for third-party materials. In the Elegoo RFID Tag Guide, developers are encouraged to create and test custom tags, with detailed instructions and example code provided to the open-source community. Developer-centric rollout The Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra, which serves as the first testbed for the RFID system, uses a dedicated RFID reader to retrieve data from tags affixed to resin bottles. These tags store encoded information such as resin name, type, batch number, and print profile metadata. The printer’s firmware can automatically sync this information with cloud-hosted slicer settings for optimal prints. According to the company, future updates may include compatibility with other Elegoo printers and additional features like usage history logging, tamper detection, and resin validation for regulatory compliance. Color scheme guide possibly used for tag classification or UI indication in Elegoo’s RFID material system. Image via Elegoo. A call for collaboration In its official blog post, Elegoo invited users, developers, and material manufacturers to contribute feedback and propose new applications. The company has not yet announced a formal launch date for the ecosystem or its associated hardware. Elegoo, known for its budget-friendly resin and FDM printers, has been expanding its R&D efforts in recent years. With the RFID ecosystem, it now joins other AM firms experimenting with embedded metadata and smart materials integration to support traceability, security, and ease of use. Interoperability and user autonomy The debate about open vs closed ecosystems has increasingly intensified in additive manufacturing discussions. For example, Bambu Lab’s controversial firmware update that introduced new authentication protocols, sparking concerns about third-party compatibility and user autonomy. Subsequent coverage highlighted pushback from the open-source community, including Orca Slicer developers, who rejected integration with Bambu Connect over transparency and access concerns. These cases underscore how interoperability is not only a technical issue, but a strategic and ideological one shaping the future of the AM sector.RFID in 3D printing While RFID integration is more common in logistics and supply chain management, researchers and companies are beginning to explore its potential in 3D printing. Scientists at Swinburne University developed biosensing RFID tags using 3D printed hybrid liquids, enabling applications in health diagnostics and environmental sensing. Meanwhile, materials firm Supernova unveiled a new resin cartridge system embedded with RFID to improve compatibility and process control in high-viscosity 3D printing platforms. These developments suggest that RFID could play a growing role in material authentication, traceability, and automated workflow management within additive manufacturing ecosystems.Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us onLinkedIn and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry YouTube channel to access more exclusive content. At 3DPI, our mission is to deliver high-quality journalism, technical insight, and industry intelligence to professionals across the AM ecosystem.Help us shape the future of 3D printing industry news with our2025 reader survey. Featured image shows Elegoo RFID system displayed on a resin bottle, designed to communicate encoded material data to the printer. Image via Elegoo.

Care management platform DexCare is applying artificial intelligence (AI) in an innovative way to fix health care access issues. Its AI-driven platform helps health systems overcome rising costs, limited capacity, and fragmented digital infrastructure. As Americans face worsening health outcomes and soaring costs, DexCare Co-founder Derek Streat sees opportunity in the crisis and is leading a push to apply AI and machine learning (ML) to health care’s toughest operational challenges — from overcrowded emergency rooms to disconnected digital systems. No stranger to using AI to solve health care issues, Streat is guiding DexCare as it leverages AI and ML to confront the industry’s most persistent pain points: spiraling costs, resource constraints, and the impossible task of doing more with less. Its platform helps liberate data silos to orchestrate care better and deliver a “shoppable” experience. The combination unlocks patient access to care and optimizes health care resources. DexCare enables health systems to see 40% more patients with existing clinical resources. Streat readily admits that some advanced companies use AI to enhance clinical and medical research. However, advanced AI tools such as conversational generative AI are less common in the health care access space. DexCare addresses that service gap. “Access is broken, and our fundamental belief is that there haven’t been enough solutions to balance patient, provider, and health system needs and objectives,” he told TechNewsWorld. Improving Patient Access With Predictive AI Achieving that balance depends on the underlying information drawn from health care providers’ neural networks, ML models, classification systems, and advancements in generative AI. These elements build on one another. Derek Streat, Co-founder of DexCare With the goal of a better customer experience (CX), DexCare’s platform helps care providers optimize the algorithm so everyone benefits. The focus is on ensuring patients get what matches their intent and motivations while respecting the providers’ capacity and needs, explained Streat. He describes the platform’s technology as a foundational pyramid based on data that AI optimizes and manages. Those components ensure high-fidelity outcome predictions for recommended care options. “It could be a doctor in a clinic or a nurse in a virtual care system,” he suggested. “I’m not talking about clinical outcomes. I’m talking about what you’re looking for.” Ultimately, that managed balance will not burn out all your providers. It will make this a sustainable business line for the health system. From Providence Prototype to Scalable Solution Streat defined DexCare as an access optimization company. He shared that the platform originated from a ground-floor build within the Providence Health System. After four years of development and validation, he launched the technology for broader use across the health care industry. “It’s well tested and very effective in what it does. That allowed us to have something scalable across organizations as well. Our expansion makes health care more discoverable to consumers and patients and more sustainable for medical providers and the health systems we serve,” he said. Digital Marquee for Consumers, Service Management for Providers DexCare’s AI works on multiple levels. It provides health care system or medical facility services as a contact center. That part attracts and curates audiences, consumers, and patients. Its digital assets could be websites, landing pages, or screening kiosks. Another part of the platform intelligently navigates patients to the safest and best care option. This process engages the accumulated data and automatically allocates the health system’s resources. “It manages schedules and available staff and facilities and automatically allocates them when and where they can be most productively employed,” explained Streat. The platform excels at load balancing. It uses AI to rationalize all those components. The decision engine uses AI to ensure that the selected resources and needed services match so the medical treatment can be done most efficiently and effectively to accommodate the patient and the organization. How DexCare Integrates With CRM Platforms According to Streat, DexCare is not customer relationship management software. Instead, the platform is a tie-in that infuses its AI tools and data services that blend with other platforms such as Salesforce and Oracle. “We make it as flexible as we can. It is pretty scalable to the point where now we can touch about 20% of the U.S. population through our health system partners,” he offered. Patients do not realize they are interacting with the DexCare-powered experience console under the brands Kaiser, Providence, and SSM Health, some of the DexCare platform’s health systems users. The platform is flexible and adapts to the needs of various health agencies. For instance, fulfillment technologies book appointments and supply synchronous virtual solutions. “Whatever the modality or setting is, we can either connect with whatever you’re using as a health system, or you can use your own underlying pieces as well,” said Streat. He noted that the intelligent data acquisition built into the DexCare platform accesses the electronic medical record (EMR), which includes patients’ demographics, medical history, diagnoses, medications, allergies, immunization records, lab results, and treatment plans. “The application programming interface [API] gives us real-time availability, allows us to predict a certain provider’s capacity, and maintains EMR as a source of truth,” said Streat. AI’s Long-Term Role in Health Care Access Health care management by conversational generative AI provides insights into where organizations struggle, need to adjust their operations, or reassign staff to manage patient flow. That all takes place on the platform’s back end. According to Streat, the front-end value proposition is pretty simple. It helps get 20% to 30% more patients into the health system. Organizations generate nine times the initial visit value in downstream revenue for additional services, Streat said. He assured that the other part of the value proposition is a lower marginal cost of delivering each visit. That results from matching resources with patients in a way that allows balancing the load across the organization’s network. “That depends on the specific use case, but we find up to a 40% additional capacity within the health system without hiring additional resources,” he said. How? That is where the underlying AI data comes into play. It helps practitioners make more informed decisions about which patients should be matched with which providers. “Not everybody needs to see an expensive doctor in a clinic,” Streat contended. “Sometimes, a nurse in a virtual visit or educational information will be just fine.” Despite all the financial metrics, patients want medical treatment and to move on, which is really what the game is here, he surmised. Why Generative AI Lags in Health Care Streat lamented the rapidly developing sophistication of generative AI, which includes conversational interfaces, analytical capability, and predictive mastery. These technologies are being applied throughout other industries and businesses, but are not yet widely adopted in health care systems. He indicated that part of that lag is that health care access needs are different and not as suited for conversational AI solutions hastily layered onto legacy systems. Ultimately, changing health care requires delivering things at scale. “Within a health system, its infrastructure, and the plumbing required to respect the systems of records, it’s just a different world,” he said. Streat sees AI making it possible for us to move away from searching through a long list of doctors online to booking through a robot operator with a pleasant accent. “We will focus on the back-end intelligence and continue to apply it to these lower-friction ways for people to interact with the health system. That’s incredibly exciting to me,” he concluded.