Alex Nichol
- Freelance Journalist, Kyiv Independent
United Kingdom
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Articles by Alex Nichol
Russia ‘helping people smugglers flood Europe and UK with migrants’
Watch the moment Latvian State Police uncover 40,000 SIM cards linked to a five million euro cyber scam across Europe during their "SIMcartel" operation. The force said: “The platform was designed to facilitate anonymous communication and payments, offering access to mobile phone numbers from more than 80 countries.” Estimates suggest that the service helped create around 50 million online accounts, which, according to Latvian State Police, could be used for online fraud.
From crisis to prevention: the urgent role of employers in upstreaming health
Britain is sick and facing a deepening health crisis, with an alarming rise in long-term illness and economic inactivity due to health-related issues. But the health crisis is not just a medical issue, it is a serious societal and economic challenge, with implications for public health, the economy and the future of the NHS. Without action, the country will face economic stagnation, an overwhelmed healthcare system and an unsustainable welfare burden.
The AI safety revolution: augmentation, not elimination
If there’s one alarming trend growing steadily in the occupational health and safety space – regardless of the industry or sector you work in – it’s the ever-increasing pressure on EHS and OSH leaders to manage greater levels of risk, compliance and sustainability with fewer and fewer resources. Organisations expect more rigour, more insight and more resilience than ever – and they want it faster, cheaper and with the same headcount (or often, less). And that pressure is only intensifying.
Safety in numbers
“For most of the world you can’t track this kind of trend on safety,” says Ed Morrow, Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s head of evidence communications. “In developed countries, yes – perhaps – because you have the official data, you have statistics, things are reported. But for a lot of the world, it was a complete mystery.
How digital transformation is changing EHSQ operations
For safety and sustainability professionals, the desire to drive real change has never wavered. But outdated tools have trapped them in reactive, time-consuming work that is focused more on managing paperwork than driving change. It’s a reality that both Scott Gaddis, vice president of health and safety at Interlex Technologies, and Charlie Knapp, senior product marketing manager, know first-hand.
Can AI be trusted with worker safety?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly become an indispensable tool across many industries, leaving no area untouched, including worker safety. One of the most recent areas where AI has started to make an impact is in worker safety. But what type of functions for worker safety can AI deliver, and in this highly regulated area, is this something we can trust?
Pro-Ukraine supporters protest at US embassy
Under a sea of blue and yellow flags, anti-Trump placards and comic-Putin banners, Londoners and the capital’s Ukrainian community expressed their anger at recent actions from the US President. Yesterday it was revealed that the United States would be halting aid to Ukraine, and cease sharing intelligence. City London News talked to several of the protesters – President Zelensky’s viral clash with Trump and Vice President J D Vance was a recurring theme throughout the conversations.
Life after death, the green way
A funeral service based in Forest Hill has become the first in the UK to offer “living coffins.” The mycelium based biodegradable cocoons offer a fully natural burial. At her office in south London, director and founder of Poetic Endings Louise Wintour showed City London News an example of the world’s first living coffin. Designed by Dutch company ‘The Loop’, the all-natural casket is the first of its kind and new to the UK.
Council's plans for replacing landmark Peckham Arch revealed
For over 30 years this landmark steel canopy has stood at an important junction in one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Now Peckham Arch will controversially be torn down as part of the council’s plans to improve the area. Situated at the north end of Rye Lane, it was originally designed by architects Troughton McAslan as a symbol of regeneration in a borough which had suffered from years of decline.
Children charged after stores ransacked
The robberies are said to have taken place over the space of two-and-a-half weeks. The first reported raid happened on December 19, 2024, at Battersea Power Station. At the Brent Cross shopping mall a gang of masked individuals raided the store as bystanders fled the scene. Security personnel tried to fend off the thieves.
The City of London Corporation has voted to withdraw its support for both Billingsgate and Smithfield markets. This signals the end of the historic trading sites, which have been part of the capital’s mercantile scenery for over 800 years. The corporation, which owns the markets, made the decision after a lengthy debate surrounding the feasibility of the sites. The idea has been proposed a number of times over the past century. Now the decision is final, closure could come as early as 2028.
Five hurt in stabbings near Asda in Croydon
Five people have been wounded in stabbings near to an Asda supermarket in South London. Police were called to Marlowe Way in Beddington on Thursday morning after reports of stabbings at a warehouse. A man has been arrested. A 54-year-old victim has been taken to a major trauma centre, while four others are in hospital. People living and working nearby have been told to stay away from the scene. Follow CityNewsBreak on to receive breaking news alerts.
Londoners on relief and anxiety over Gaza ceasefire
Londoners are celebrating a much-anticipated ceasefire between Hamas and Israel after 474 days of near-continuous fighting. On Monday, the first three Israeli hostages were returned as part of the agreement. British-Israeli national Emily Damari, who was taken from her home in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, was one of those released. She belongs to a larger group of 33 hostages who will be exchanged for about 1,900 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire.
Shap-E: Generating Conditional 3D Implicit Functions
arXiv:2305.02463 (cs) Download a PDF of the paper titled Shap-E: Generating Conditional 3D Implicit Functions, by Heewoo Jun and 1 other authors Download PDF Submission history From: Alex Nichol [ view email] [v1] Wed, 3 May 2023 23:59:13 UTC (6,666 KB) Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer () Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)...
London South Bank
I travelled down from Newcastle to the big smoke to catch up with an old friend, taking the opportunity while I was down there to wander...
DALL·E 2 Pre-Training Mitigations
In order to share the magic of DALL·E 2 with a broad audience, we needed to reduce the risks associated with powerful image generation models. To this end, we put various guardrails in place to prevent generated images from violating our content policy. This post focuses on pre-training mitigations, a subset of these guardrails which directly modify the data that DALL·E 2 learns from.
The State of Machine Learning in 8 Papers-February, 2022
A monthly selection of ML papers by Zeta Alpha: Reinforcement Learning, Multimodality, Language Models as a service, Computer Vision, Information Retrieval and more. Image by Zeta Alpha. The world of AI research has gone into 2022 at full speed, and the amount of relevant publications in the past weeks can attest to this.
Retro Contest: Results
The first run of our Retro Contest—exploring the development of algorithms that can generalize from previous experience—is now complete. Though many approaches were tried, top results all came from tuning or extending existing algorithms such as PPO and Rainbow. There's a long way to go: top performance was 4,692 after training while the theoretical max is 10,000.
Gym Retro
We're releasing the full version of Gym Retro, a platform for reinforcement learning research on games. This brings our publicly-released game count from around 70 Atari games and 30 Sega games to over 1,000 games across a variety of backing emulators. We're also releasing the tool we use to add new games to the platform. We use Gym Retro to conduct research on RL algorithms and study generalization. Prior research in RL has mostly focused on optimizing agents to solve single tasks.
Retro Contest
We're launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm's ability to generalize from previous experience. In typical RL research, algorithms are tested in the same environment where they were trained, which favors algorithms which are good at memorization and have many hyperparameters. Instead, our contest tests an algorithm on previously unseen video game levels.
Reptile: A Scalable Meta-Learning Algorithm
We've developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task.
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