Central Government Capex To Surge By 25% YoY In Second Half Of FY25: JefferiesAlbo lashed over new anti-Semitic attack
UN Resolution 1701 is at the heart of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal. What is it?TORONTO — When Geoffrey Hinton strode across the Stockholm Concert Hall stage Tuesday to receive his Nobel Prize for physics from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, he was beaming. It has taken decades for many beyond the science community to realize the British Canadian computer scientist's life's work was so significant it eventually formed the foundation of artificial intelligence. But on Tuesday, as he accepted the Nobel diploma and its accompanying gold medal with co-laureate John Hopfield, there was no question about the importance of Hinton's discoveries nor how he has shaped history. Instead, there was only pride for the affable 77-year-old, often called the godfather of AI — and that pride stretched from Stockholm to Toronto. A crowd of about 100 students and colleagues at the University of Toronto, where Hinton is a professor emeritus, gathered at the school's downtown campus to watch the Nobel ceremony. Two other watch parties took over the school's Mississauga and Scarborough campuses. Any mention of physics or a sighting of Hinton, clad in a dark suit and white bow tie, generated rousing applause at the Toronto gathering. When the man of the hour headed to retrieve his accolade from the King, a few former students and colleagues wiped tears from their eyes. "There is, at least for me, this sense that Prof. Hinton created the whole ecosystem here, where there are thousands of people who are working on his ideas," Michael Guerzhoy, one of Hinton's former students who went on to teach a course Hinton had once led at the university, said before the ceremony began. The idea that earned Hinton the Nobel dates back to the 1980s, when he was working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and AI was far from the buzzy technology it is today. It was then that Hinton developed the Boltzmann machine, which learns from examples, rather than instructions, and when trained, can recognize familiar characteristics in information, even if it has not seen that data before. "It was a lot of fun doing the research but it was slightly annoying that many people — in fact, most people in the field of AI — said that neural networks would never work," Hinton recalled during a press conference on the October day he was named as a Nobel laureate. "They were very confident that these things were just a waste of time and we would never be able to learn complicated things like, for example, understanding natural language using neural networks — and they were wrong." Neural networks are computational models that resemble the human brain's structure and functions. When Nobel physics committee chair Ellen Moons presented Hinton to receive his award, she said these networks are good at sorting and interpreting large amounts of data and self-improve based on the accuracy of the results they generate. "Today, artificial neural networks are powerful tools in research fields spanning physics, chemistry and medicine, as well as in daily life," she said. John DiMarco wasn't surprised that Hinton's work paved the way for such possibilities, but the IT director for U of T's computer science department was taken aback that Hinton's Nobel came in the unlikely physics category. DiMarco met Hinton roughly 35 years ago in a job interview and quickly took note of his proclivity for humour and the quirks in how his mind works. "He is quite insightful and he goes straight to the core of things," DiMarco said. "He would sometimes come out of his office and share some new idea. We didn't always understand what he was sharing, but he was very excited about it." Many of those ideas required lots of computing power the school's systems didn't have, so DiMarco's team patched together a solution with graphics processing units from video game consoles. DiMarco brought one of Hinton's GPUs to the watch party, which was also attended by Joseph Jay Williams, the director of U of T's Intelligent Adaptive Interventions Lab. Williams took one of Hinton's classes and said the Nobel winner "changed the course of my life" by encouraging him to go to grad school, which then led him to win the XPRIZE Digital Learning Challenge, a global competition aimed at rewarding people who modernize learning tools and processes. Other notable mentees and alumni of Hinton's classes include OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Cohere co-founders Nick Frosst and Aidan Gomez. With his Nobel win and so many esteemed protege, Williams said Hinton has become a "reluctant celebrity" who is hounded for photos every time he's on campus. Hinton, however, has taken a much more humble approach to his recent win, which he learned of on a trip to California. He initially thought the call from the academy that gives out the Nobel was "a spoof," but later realized it had to be real because it was placed from Sweden and the speaker had a "strong Swedish accent." The award the academy gave him comes with 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.4 million) from a bequest arranged by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Hinton and Hopfield will split the money, with some of Hinton's share going to Water First, an Ontario organization working to boost Indigenous access to water, and another unnamed charity supporting neurodiverse young adults. Hinton has said he doesn't plan to do much more "frontier research." "I believe I'm going to spend my time advocating for people to work on safety," he said in October. Last year, Hinton left a role he held at Google to more freely speak about the dangers of AI, which he has said include bias and discrimination, fake news, joblessness, lethal autonomous weapons and even the end of humanity. At a Stockholm press conference over the weekend, he said he doesn’t regret the work he did to lay the foundations of artificial intelligence, but wishes he thought of safety sooner. “In the same circumstances, I would do the same again,” he said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 10, 2024. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian PressThe Minnesota Vikings are looking to improve their record to 10-2 in week 13 when they host the Arizona Cardinals. They will be doing so without both tight end Josh Oliver and safety Jay Ward, as they will miss the game due to injury. To fortify the roster on Sunday, the Vikings made two elevations by elevating tight end Nick Muse and cornerback Nahshon Wright from the practice squad. Both moves are being made to mainly help with special teams, especially in the case of Wright, who was mainly used in that role during his three seasons with the Dallas Cowboys . Muse will play plenty of special teams, as he usually does, but he will likely see some snaps on offense like he did against the Chicago Bears. The Vikings have made a habit of using the practice squad to fortify their gameday roster so they can keep young players on the active roster without having to play them. It's a smart strategy for the Vikings and they continue to take advantage. This article first appeared on A to Z Sports and was syndicated with permission.
WASHINGTON (AP) — One year after the , U.S. Capitol attack, Attorney General Merrick Garland the Justice Department was committed to holding accountable all perpetrators “at any level” for “the assault on our democracy.” That bold declaration won’t apply to at least one person: Donald Trump. Special counsel Jack Smith’s move on Monday to abandon the against Trump means jurors will likely never decide whether the president-elect is criminally responsible for his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 campaign. The decision to walk away from the election charges and the separate against Trump marks an abrupt end of the Justice Department’s unprecedented legal effort that once threatened his liberty but appears only to have galvanized his supporters. The abandonment of the cases accusing Trump of endangering American democracy and national security does away with the most serious legal threats he was facing as he returns to the White House. It was the culmination of a monthslong defense effort to delay the proceedings at every step and use the criminal allegations to Trump’s political advantage, putting the final word in the hands of voters instead of jurors. “We always knew that the rich and powerful had an advantage, but I don’t think we would have ever believed that somebody could walk away from everything,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department official. “If there ever was a Teflon defendant, that’s Donald Trump.” While prosecutors left the door open to the possibility that federal charges could be re-filed against Trump after he leaves office, that seems unlikely. Meanwhile, Trump’s presidential victory has thrown into question the future of the two state criminal cases against him in New York and Georgia. Trump was supposed to be sentenced on Tuesday after his , but it’s possible the sentencing could be delayed until after Trump leaves office, and the defense is pushing to dismiss the case altogether. Smith’s team stressed that their decision to abandon the federal cases was not a reflection of the merit of the charges, but an acknowledgement that they could not move forward under longstanding Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot face Trump’s presidential victory set “at odds two fundamental and compelling national interests: On the one hand, the Constitution’s requirement that the President must not be unduly encumbered in fulfilling his weighty responsibilities . . . and on the other hand, the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law,” prosecutors wrote in court papers. The move just weeks after Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris underscores the immense personal stake Trump had in the campaign in which he turned his legal woes into a political rallying cry. Trump accused prosecutors of bringing the charges in a bid to keep him out of the White House, and he promised revenge on his perceived enemies if he won a second term. “If Donald J. Trump had lost an election, he may very well have spent the rest of his life in prison,” Vice President-elect JD Vance, wrote in a social media post on Monday. “These prosecutions were always political. Now it’s time to ensure what happened to President Trump never happens in this country again.” After the Jan. 6 attack by Trump supporters that left more than 100 police officers injured, Republican leader Mitch McConnell and several other Republicans said it was up to the justice system to hold Trump accountable. The Jan. 6 case brought last year in Washington alleged an increasingly desperate criminal conspiracy to subvert the will of voters after Trump’s 2020 loss, accusing Trump of using the angry mob of supporters that attacked the Capitol as “a tool” in his campaign to pressure then-Vice President and obstruct the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters — many of whom have said they felt called to Washington by Trump — have pleaded guilty or been convicted by juries of federal charges at the same courthouse where Trump was supposed to stand trial last year. As the trial date neared, officials at the courthouse that sits within view of the Capitol were busy making plans for the crush of reporters expected to cover the historic case. But Trump’s argument that he from prosecution quickly tied up the case in appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. The high court ruled in July that , and sent the case back to the trial court to decide which allegations could move forward. But the case was dismissed before the trial court could get a chance to do so. Related Articles The other indictment brought in Florida accused Trump of at his Mar-a-Lago estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, enlisting aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showing off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map. But U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon . Smith appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but abandoned that appeal on Monday. Smith’s team said it would continue its fight in the appeals court to revive charges against Trump’s two co-defendants because “no principle of temporary immunity applies to them.” In New York, jurors spent weeks last spring hearing evidence in a state case alleging a Trump scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through who said the two had sex. New York prosecutors recently expressed openness to delaying sentencing until after Trump’s second term, while Trump’s lawyers are fighting to have the conviction dismissed altogether. In Georgia, a trial while Trump is in office seems unlikely in a state case charging him and more than a dozen others with conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. The case has been on hold since an appeals court agreed to review whether to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over her with the special prosecutor she had hired to lead the case.