Latest news with #Emu
Canberra Times
15-05-2025
- General
- Canberra Times
Superb Fairy-wren: why it's our favourite of Australia's 'feathered jewels'
One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI assistant startup Yutori raises $15m in seed funding
Yutori, a US-based AI assistant startup founded by two former Meta executives, has raised $15m in seed funding. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and saw participation from Felicis and more than a dozen angel investors, including Fei-Fei Li and Jeff Dean. Investors namely Elad Gil, Sarah Guo from Conviction, and Sandhya Venkatachalam from Axiom also took part. Yutori is co-founded by AI researchers Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, and Dhruv Batra. Devi Parikh was previously a senior director at Meta, where she led research in multimodal generative AI, contributing to projects like Llama 3, Make-A-Scene, Make-A-Video, and Emu. Dhruv Batra also worked as a senior director at Meta, focusing on research related to embodied agents, which supported the multimodal assistant in the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and demos from Boston Dynamics through Meta's FAIR division. Das' PhD thesis, Building Agents that can See, Talk, and Act, was a finalist for the AAAI/ACM SIGAI doctoral dissertation award in 2020. The startup focuses on developing personal AI assistants to automate digital tasks. It uses an agent-first approach for building such personal AI assistants to ensure accuracy and reliability across the web. The funds will be utilised to expedite the development of Yutori's agent-first approach, expand its engineering and design teams, and prepare for the product launch. Yutori said it plans to offer early adopters the opportunity to participate in a closed beta version of its first product offerings later in 2025. Yutori co-CEO and co-founder Devi Parikh said: 'Productivity isn't about cramming more into your day — it's about reclaiming your attention for what truly matters, and amplifying the outcomes of the time you give something. 'Yutori's mission is to build the best AI assistants to make space for the meaningful things in life. The company refines foundation models after training to enhance their autonomy, using a multi-agent system capable of handling multiple tasks and sub-tasks in parallel for high efficiency. Yutori chief scientist and co-founder Dhruv Batra said: 'What differentiates chatbots from agents is an external environment. The web is the ultimate digital environment — if a task can be done digitally, it can be done via the web. 'But the web is dynamic, non-deterministic, and noisy; which means mistakes are inevitable and the key agentic skill is resilience. Yutori's agent-first approach will unlock superhuman performance on this grand challenge.' "AI assistant startup Yutori raises $15m in seed funding" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
