Science & technology | Digital archaeologyThe decoding of ancient Roman scrolls is speeding upMore data, and a more powerful particle accelerator, should pay dividendsPhotograph: ESRF/Vuedici May 28th 2025|HerculaneumIF YOU WANTED to read an ancient Roman scroll, you might reach for a dictionary, and perhaps a magnifying glass. You would probably not think of using a particle accelerator. But that is what is required to unravel the papyrus scrolls found in Herculaneum, a Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. Even then, success is far from guaranteed: since 2023 researchers attempting to unravel the scrolls have been stuck on the first few. Now, armed with more data and a more powerful particle accelerator, they expect to make more rapid headway.Explore moreScience & technologyThis article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Hitting the accelerator”From the May 31st 2025 editionDiscover stories from this section and more in the list of contents⇒Explore the editionReuse this content

In Brief Posted: 12:21 PM PDT · May 22, 2025 Image Credits:Match Group Tinder CEO to step down in July Faye Iosotaluno, the CEO of Tinder, will step down from her role in July, according to a post she published on LinkedIn.  Iosotaluno served less than a year in the role and spent nearly eight years overall at the company, which is owned by Match Group. In her post, she said she was “especially proud to build and work alongside an exceptional team.” She said what is next for her is “deeply personal.” “The consumer tech landscape is evolving in exciting, unpredictable ways — and so are my own ambitions,” she wrote. “Building upon the headway and lessons I’ve learned at Tinder where diverse voices around the table make better and more impactful decisions, I’m drawn to replicating that progress by supporting and building alongside the next generation of women leaders, founders, and investors.” Meanwhile, in a separate post, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff said he would step in to lead the Tinder team.  “I’m grateful for the time we’ve spent together over the past few months preparing for this news to ensure a smooth transition,” he wrote. “As I step in to lead the team, I’m energized by the momentum you’ve helped create and excited to continue building with the exceptional leaders in place.” Match Group is trying to find ways to boost Tinder’s growth, Bloomberg reports. Earlier this month, Match Group announced a 13% reduction in staff to cut costs and streamline decision-making. A chunk of those cuts were at Tinder, Bloomberg reported. Topics

pixel_dreams - Fotolia News Security tests reveal serious vulnerability in government’s One Login digital ID system A ‘red teaming’ exercise to simulate cyber attacks on the government’s flagship digital identity system has found that One Login can be compromised without detection By Bryan Glick, Editor in chief Published: 16 May 2025 12:37 External security tests on the government’s flagship digital identity system, Gov.uk One Login, have found serious vulnerabilities in the live service, Computer Weekly has learned. A “red teaming” exercise conducted in March by IT security consultancy Cyberis discovered that privileged access to One Login can be compromised without detection by security monitoring tools. According to Cyberis, red teaming tests the resilience of systems by simulating the tactics, techniques and procedures of cyber attackers to show how well an organisation can detect and respond to an incident. Computer Weekly has been asked by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) not to reveal further details of the vulnerability while the Government Digital Service (GDS) seeks to fix the problem. Compromising the highest levels of access to a system risks exposing personal data and software code to any cyber attackers able to exploit the vulnerability. A government spokesperson said: “Delivering best practice, we routinely conduct red teaming exercises to test security infrastructure. Where issues are found, we work urgently to resolve them.” The existence of a serious current vulnerability will raise further concerns over the security of One Login, which is intended to be the way that citizens prove their identity and log in to most online government services. There are already six million users of the system, and it is used to access more than 50 online services. Last month, Computer Weekly revealed that GDS was warned by the Cabinet Office in November 2022 and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in September 2023, that One Login had “serious data protection failings” and “significant shortcomings” in information security that could increase the risk of data breaches and identity theft. GDS said the concerns were “outdated” and arose “when the technology was in its infancy in 2023”, despite One Login being used at that time to support live services. “We have worked to address all these concerns as evidenced by multiple external independent assessments. Any suggestion otherwise is unfounded,” said a spokesperson, at the time. A whistleblower first raised security concerns about One Login within GDS as long ago as July 2022. The issues identified included system administration being performed through non-compliant devices with a risk of transmitting security vulnerabilities, such as malware or phishing attacks, that could compromise the live system. The NCSC recommends that system administration for key government services should be conducted from a dedicated device used only for that purpose, known as a privileged access workstation (PAW), or alternatively to use only “browse down” devices, where the security level of the device is always the same or greater than the system being managed. The whistleblower warned that a lack of PAWs and use of browse-up administration were significant risks. Computer Weekly subsequently revealed that the One Login team has yet to fully meet NCSC guidelines – the system only complies with 21 of the 39 outcomes detailed in the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) – an improvement on the five outcomes it successfully followed a year ago. The One Login development team is also yet to fully implement the government’s Secure by Design practices, although GDS said the system “meets these principles”. Earlier this week, we further revealed that One Login had lost its certification against the government’s own trust framework for digital identity systems, after a key technology supplier allowed its certification to lapse and, as a result, One Login was removed from the official accreditation scheme. In a meeting with private sector digital identity providers this week (Wednesday 14 May), DSIT secretary of state Peter Kyle explained how One Login will underpin the forthcoming Gov.uk Wallet, which will be used to deliver digital versions of key government documents, such as driving licences. Kyle talked about the “rapid journey” he hopes the government will take in delivering digital identity services for citizens and stressed the importance that such systems are “delivered safely [and] securely”. The government spokesperson added: “Gov.uk One Login follows the highest security standards for government and private sector services – including dedicated 24/7 eyes-on monitoring and incident response. As the public rightly expects, protecting the security of government services and the data and privacy of users to keep pace with the changing cyber threat landscape is paramount.” Questions are also being asked in Parliament about the security of One Login. In recent weeks, Liberal Democrat peer and digital spokesman Tim Clement-Jones and Conservative peer Simone Finn have separately submitted Parliamentary questions to DSIT asking for reassurances about the system. Finn asked whether the government has “quantified the likelihood and potential impact of insider threats, unauthorised privileged access, and production environment compromise within One Login”. In response, DSIT minister for the future digital economy and online safety, peer Maggie Jones, said: “The Gov.uk One Login team collaborates closely with the NCSC to assess and mitigate risks associated with insider threats, unauthorised privileged access, and production environment compromise, aligning with the Cyber Assessment Framework outlined in the Government Cyber Security Strategy 2022-2030. “While assessments of insider threats have been made, copies of these assessments will not be placed in the Library of the House, as they are part of ongoing security measures and internal governance processes.” Clement-Jones asked: “What steps [the government is] taking to address security issues in the One Login digital identification system?” Jones replied: “One Login follows the highest security standards for government and private sector services. As the public rightly expects, protecting the security of government services and the data and privacy of users to keep pace with the changing cyber threat landscape is paramount. “Security best practice is followed with a number of layered security controls which include: Security clearances for staff with ‘Security Check’ clearance required for all developers with production access; identity and access management controls that block staff from viewing or altering personal information; a secure by design and compartmentalised system architecture; technical controls around building and deployments; logging and monitoring to alert on access to environments that contain personally identifiable information; and robust procedures for addressing any unauthorised or unaccounted for access.” Speaking to Computer Weekly about the security concerns, Clement-Jones said: “How is the government’s flagship digital identity system failing to meet standards so badly, given that it is expected to shortly form an essential part of our immigration controls? We need answers and quickly.”  Read more about One Login Companies House goes live with One Login ID verification – People can verify their identity with Companies House using Gov.uk One Login as the central government body becomes the 36th service to start using the digital identity system. GDS goes serverless to bring personalisation to online government services with One Login – GDS has opened up about the reasons why it’s opted for a serverless infrastructure to underpin One Login, and how it hopes the system will provide UK citizens with a more personalised experience. One Login digital identity project makes headway – Government services are lining up to work with the GDS on its One Login digital identity system, according to its director of digital identity, Natalie Jones. In The Current Issue: UK MoJ crime prediction algorithms raise serious concerns Interview: Markus Schümmelfeder, CIO, Boehringer Ingelheim Download Current Issue GraphQL as an ‘essential protocol’ for AI-API orchestration – CW Developer Network Mind the insight-to-impact gap, Qlik captures analytics ‘in the moment’ – CW Developer Network View All Blogs

Identifying the exact location of a software issue—such as a bug or feature request—remains one of the most labor-intensive tasks in the development lifecycle. Despite advances in automated patch generation and code assistants, the process of pinpointing where in the codebase a change is needed often consumes more time than determining how to fix it. Agent-based approaches powered by large language models (LLMs) have made headway by simulating developer workflows through iterative tool use and reasoning. However, these systems are typically slow, brittle, and expensive to operate, especially when built on closed-source models. In parallel, existing code retrieval models—while faster—are not optimized for the verbosity and behavioral focus of real-world issue descriptions. This misalignment between natural language inputs and code search capability presents a fundamental challenge for scalable automated debugging. SWERank — A Practical Framework for Precise Localization To address these limitations, Salesforce AI has introduced SWERank, a lightweight and effective retrieve-and-rerank framework tailored for software issue localization. SWERank is designed to bridge the gap between efficiency and precision by reframing localization as a code ranking task. The framework consists of two key components: SWERankEmbed, a bi-encoder retrieval model that encodes GitHub issues and code snippets into a shared embedding space for efficient similarity-based retrieval. SWERankLLM, a listwise reranker built on instruction-tuned LLMs that refines the ranking of retrieved candidates using contextual understanding. To train this system, the research team curated SWELOC, a large-scale dataset extracted from public GitHub repositories, linking real-world issue reports with corresponding code changes. SWELOC introduces contrastive training examples using consistency filtering and hard-negative mining to ensure data quality and relevance. Architecture and Methodological Contributions At its core, SWERank follows a two-stage pipeline. First, SWERankEmbed maps a given issue description and candidate functions into dense vector representations. Using a contrastive InfoNCE loss, the retriever is trained to increase the similarity between an issue and its true associated function while reducing its similarity to unrelated code snippets. Notably, the model benefits from carefully mined hard negatives—code functions that are semantically similar but not relevant—which improve the model’s discriminative capability. The reranking stage leverages SWERankLLM, a listwise LLM-based reranker that processes an issue description along with top-k code candidates and generates a ranked list where the relevant code appears at the top. Importantly, the training objective is adapted to settings where only the true positive is known. The model is trained to output the identifier of the relevant code snippet, maintaining compatibility with listwise inference while simplifying the supervision process. Together, these components allow SWERank to offer high performance without requiring multiple rounds of interaction or costly agent orchestration. Insights Evaluations on SWE-Bench-Lite and LocBench—two standard benchmarks for software localization—demonstrate that SWERank achieves state-of-the-art results across file, module, and function levels. On SWE-Bench-Lite, SWERankEmbed-Large (7B) attained a function-level accuracy@10 of 82.12%, outperforming even LocAgent running with Claude-3.5. When coupled with SWERankLLM-Large (32B), performance further improved to 88.69%, establishing a new benchmark for this task. In addition to performance gains, SWERank offers substantial cost benefits. Compared to Claude-powered agents, which average around $0.66 per example, SWERankLLM’s inference cost is $0.011 for the 7B model and $0.015 for the 32B variant—delivering up to 6x better accuracy-to-cost ratio. Moreover, the 137M parameter SWERankEmbed-Small model achieves competitive results, demonstrating the framework’s scalability and efficiency even on lightweight architectures. Beyond benchmark performance, experiments also show that SWELOC data improves a broad class of embedding and reranking models. Models pre-trained for general-purpose retrieval exhibited significant accuracy gains when fine-tuned with SWELOC, validating its utility as a training resource for issue localization tasks. Conclusion SWERank introduces a compelling alternative to traditional agent-based localization approaches by modeling software issue localization as a ranking problem. Through its retrieve-and-rerank architecture, SWERank delivers state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining low inference cost and minimal latency. The accompanying SWELOC dataset provides a high-quality training foundation, enabling robust generalization across various codebases and issue types. By decoupling localization from agentic multi-step reasoning and grounding it in efficient neural retrieval, Salesforce AI demonstrates that practical, scalable solutions for debugging and code maintenance are not only possible—but well within reach using open-source tools. SWERank sets a new bar for accuracy, efficiency, and deployability in automated software engineering. Check out the Paper and Project 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 90k+ ML SubReddit. Here’s a brief overview of what we’re building at Marktechpost: ML News Community – r/machinelearningnews (92k+ members) Newsletter– airesearchinsights.com/(30k+ subscribers) miniCON AI Events – minicon.marktechpost.com AI Reports & Magazines – magazine.marktechpost.com AI Dev & Research News – marktechpost.com (1M+ monthly readers) Partner with us 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 Guide to Build a Fast Semantic Search and RAG QA Engine on Web-Scraped Data Using Together AI Embeddings, FAISS Retrieval, and LangChainAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Step-by-Step Guide to Deploy a Fully Integrated Firecrawl-Powered MCP Server on Claude Desktop with Smithery and VeryaXAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/OpenAI Releases HealthBench: An Open-Source Benchmark for Measuring the Performance and Safety of Large Language Models in HealthcareAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/PrimeIntellect Releases INTELLECT-2: A 32B Reasoning Model Trained via Distributed Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

U.S. President Donald Trump opened his four-day Middle East trip on Tuesday by paying a visit to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for talks on U.S. efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, end the war in Gaza, hold down oil prices and more.Prince Mohammed warmly greeted Trump as he stepped off Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital and kicked off his Middle East tour.The two leaders then retreated to a grand hall at the Riyadh airport, where Trump and his aides were served traditional Arabic coffee by waiting attendants wearing ceremonial gun-belts. Fighter jet escort The pomp began before Trump even landed. Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s provided an honorary escort for Air Force One as it approached the kingdom’s capital.Trump and Prince Mohammed also took part in a lunch at the Royal Court, gathering with guests and aides in an ornate room with blue accents and massive crystal chandeliers.As he greeted business titans with Trump by his side, Prince Mohammed was animated and smiling.It was a stark contrast to his awkward fist bump with then-President Joe Biden, who looked to avoid being seen on camera shaking hands with the prince during a 2022 visit to the kingdom.Biden had decided to pay a visit to Saudi Arabia as he looked to alleviate soaring prices at the pump for motorists at home and around the globe.At the time, Prince Mohammed’s reputation had been badly damaged by a U.S. intelligence determination that found he had ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.But that dark moment appeared to be distant memory for the prince as he rubbed elbows with high-profile business executives — including Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — in front of the cameras and with Trump by his side.Later, the crown prince will fete Trump with a formal dinner. Trump is also slated to take part Tuesday in a U.S.-Saudi investment conference.“When Saudis and Americans join forces, very good things happen — more often than not, great things happen,” Saudi Investment Minister Khalid al-Falih said. Oil production Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC+ nations have already helped their cause with Trump early in his second term by stepping up oil production. Trump sees cheap energy as a key component to lowering costs and stemming inflation for Americans. The Republican president has also made the case that lower oil prices will hasten an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.But Saudi Arabia’s economy remains heavily dependent on oil, and the kingdom needs a fiscal break-even oil price of $96 to $98 a barrel to balance its budget. It’s questionable how long OPEC+, of which Saudi Arabia is the leading member, is willing to keep production elevated. The price of a barrel of Brent crude closed Monday at $64.77.“One of the challenges for the Gulf states of lower oil prices is it doesn’t necessarily imperil economic diversification programs, but it certainly makes them harder,” said Jon Alterman, a senior Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Qatar and UAE next Trump picked the kingdom for his first stop, because it has pledged to make big investments in the U.S., but Trump ended up traveling to Italy last month for Pope Francis’ funeral. Riyadh was the first overseas stop of his first term.The three countries on the president’s itinerary — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — are all places where the Trump Organization, run by Trump’s two elder sons, is developing major real estate projects. They include a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Trump is trying to demonstrate that his transactional strategy for international politics is paying dividends as he faces criticism from Democrats who say his global tariff war and approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine are isolating the United States from allies.He’s expected to announce deals with the three wealthy countries that will touch on artificial intelligence, expanding energy cooperation and perhaps new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration earlier this month announced initial approval to sell $3.5 billion worth of air-to-air missiles for Saudi Arabia’s fighter jets.But Trump arrived in the Middle East at a moment when his top regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are far from neatly aligned with his approach. Trump’s decision to skip Israel remarkable, expert says Before the trip, Trump announced that Washington was halting a nearly two-month U.S. airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, saying the Iran-backed rebels have pledged to stop attacking ships along a vital global trade route.The administration didn’t notify Israel — which the Houthis continue to target — of the agreement before Trump publicly announced it. It was the latest example of Trump leaving the Israelis in the dark about his administration’s negotiations with common adversaries.In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t notified by the administration until after talks began with Hamas about the war in Gaza. And Netanyahu found out about the ongoing U.S. nuclear talks with Iran only when Trump announced them during an Oval Office visit by the Israeli leader last month.“Israel will defend itself by itself,” Netanyahu said last week following Trump’s Houthi truce announcement. “If others join us — our American friends — all the better.”William Wechsler, senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s decision to skip Israel on his first Middle East visit is remarkable.“The main message coming out of this, at least as the itinerary stands today, is that the governments of the Gulf … are in fact stronger friends to President Trump than the current government of Israel at this moment,” Wechsler said. Restarting efforts to normalize Israel-Saudi ties Trump, meanwhile, hopes to restart his first-term effort to normalize relations between the Middle East’s major powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s Abraham Accords effort led to Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco agreeing to normalize relations with Israel.But Riyadh has made clear that in exchange for normalization it wants U.S. security guarantees, assistance with the kingdom’s nuclear program and progress on a pathway to Palestinian statehood. There seems to be scant hope for making headway on a Palestinian state with the Israel-Hamas war raging and the Israelis threatening to flatten and occupy Gaza.Prince Mohammed last week notably hosted Palestinian Vice President Hussein Sheikh in Jeddah on the sheikh’s first foreign visit since assuming office in April.Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the crown prince appeared to be subtly signaling to Trump that the kingdom needs to see progress on Palestinian statehood for the Saudis to begin seriously moving on a normalization deal with the Israelis.“Knowing how the Saudis telegraph their intentions, that’s a preemptive, ‘Don’t even think of asking us to show any goodwill toward normalization,'” Abdul-Hussain said. Madhani reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. —Zeke Miller, Aamer Madhani and Jon Gambrell, Associated Press