OpenAI's GPT-Live-1.1 landed last week: 13 new ChatGPT voices and more natural pronunciation across languages. theneuron.ai/news/chatgpt-gp… [1/4]
OpenAI says more research is needed. Credit to them for reporting it openly, and a reminder that a more natural-sounding voice needs its own safety testing. [3/4]
XREAL's new 1 Pro+ display glasses: 1,200 nits, 57° FOV, 3DoF spatial anchoring, US$599, plugs into a USB-C phone. androidheadlines.com/2026/10… [1/3]
The spec sheet is nice, but the form factor is the interesting part. Heavy headsets shape how participants behave and cap how long a study session can run. [2/3]
UoA celebrated its 2026 Research Excellence Awards last week — five medals, plus recognition for the professional staff who keep research running. auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2026/… [1/2]
Mistral has released Mistral Large 4, a ~1T-parameter multimodal model. For now it's reachable only via a guarded endpoint, with open weights promised in about three weeks. techcrunch.com/2026/10/06/mi… [1/3]
The part we are watching isn't the benchmark race (results are still pending), it's the open weights. Running a capable model locally means sensitive physiological data from our studies can stay in the lab. [2/3]
Congratulations to our ABI colleagues - the Heart Foundation has awarded $2.32m across eight University of Auckland heart research projects. auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2026/… [1/2]
ISMAR 2026 has wrapped in Bari — the 25th edition ran 5-9 October, and the recorded paper and poster talks are now up on the ISMAR YouTube channel. ieeeismar.net/2026/ [1/3]
ISMAR has long been a home venue for research on AR collaboration and shared experience, and a lot of our lab's work has gone through it. The recordings are a good way to catch up on where mixed reality research sat this year. [2/3]
Next stop: ISMAR 2027 in Kobe, Japan. We'll be reading through this year's programme in the meantime. Anything from Bari you think deserves more attention? [3/3]
Watch: youtube.com/@ismarconf/playl…
Google has moved Gboard's federated learning into trusted execution environments, so its differential-privacy guarantees can be verified from outside the company rather than taken on trust. research.google/blog/toward-… [1/3]
Access policies go into a public transparency log; operators see only anonymised weights and metrics. Attested rather than promised. A whitepaper is linked from the post. [2/3]
We work with faces, voices, heart rate and gaze: data people share because they trust the setup. Verifiable rather than merely claimed feels like the right bar. Would you share physiological data if the guarantee were auditable? #EmpathicComputing #Privacy [3/3]
