Today's Summary
AEye teaming up with Blue-Band to sprinkle Apollo lidar into traffic infrastructure is a solid move towards smarter cities. Itâs like taking lidar out of the car and using it to make intersections smarter â a shift that could really enrich real-time data for city systems and autonomous vehicles. Meanwhile, MITâs new benchmark for measuring AIâs âemotional intelligenceâ is a fascinating pivot towards understanding the social impact of AI, which could really change how we evaluate these systems in the future.
On the hardware side, Cearvolâs Wave Lite hearing aid is another step in AIâs journey into consumer healthcare, packing some serious tech to make life a bit easier for those with hearing loss. And in the software world, Microsoftâs Project Ire is quietly making waves by leveraging AI to hunt down malware, potentially reshaping the way security teams handle threats. Together, these stories highlight how AI is weaving into both our cities and our personal tech, quietly reshaping the landscape.
Stories
AEye inks partnership with BlueâBand to embed Apollo lidar into AI traffic infrastructure
AEye announced a strategic partnership with BlueâBand to integrate its Apollo longârange lidar and OPTIS⢠perception stack with BlueâBandâs IntegratorâAI⢠traffic orchestration platform. The tie-up aims to deploy combined sensing + AI capabilities for traffic monitoring, incident detection and realâtime intersection controls â a push to move lidar from vehicle perception into city infrastructure. Why it matters: the deal shows lidar vendors shifting toward smartâcity and infrastructure use cases (not just vehicles), and could accelerate deployments that feed richer, realâtime data to municipal systems and autonomous fleets.
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Business Wire
Cearvol launches Wave Lite â an AIâpowered inâear hearing aid with 40dB gain
Cearvol announced Wave Lite, a new inâtheâear hearing aid that uses onâdevice AI for acoustic management (noise reduction, feedback cancellation, ownâvoice reduction) and delivers up to 40dB gain. The device includes Bluetooth streaming, four scene modes, fast charging and IPX5 resistance, and is being sold initially via Cearvolâs website. Why it matters: itâs another example of AI being embedded into consumer healthcare devices to improve accessibility and realâworld performance â an increasingly crowded market where software differentiation matters as much as hardware.
MIT Researchers Propose a Benchmark to Measure AI 'Emotional Intelligence'
WIRED reports (based on a paper circulated by MIT Media Lab) that researchers have proposed a new benchmark to evaluate the emotional and social impact of large language models. The benchmark focuses on how models influence users â e.g., encouraging healthy social habits, fostering critical thinking and creativity, and avoiding emotional dependence or manipulation. This marks a shift in research evaluation from purely taskâperformance metrics toward human-centered measures that capture psychological effects of AI systems. If adopted, such benchmarks could reshape model evaluation and safety practices across industry and academia, and influence vendor modelâposttraining and deployment choices (e.g., personality tuning, safeguards for vulnerable users).
AINLâEval 2025: Shared Task and 52kâsample Dataset to Detect AIâGenerated Scientific Abstracts (Russian)
An arXiv preprint (AINLâEval 2025) describes a shared task and public dataset for detecting AIâgenerated scientific abstracts in Russian. The dataset contains 52,305 samples (human abstracts across 12 scientific domains plus AIâgenerated counterparts from five stateâofâtheâart LLMs). The task was run in two phases with participating teams and aims to test detectorsâ robustness to unseen domains and unseen generator models. By releasing a multilingual, large-scale benchmark and continuous sharedâtask platform, the work directly addresses academicâintegrity and modelâdetection research gaps and should spur new detection techniques and evaluation standards for multilingual scientific content.
Thoma Bravo to buy Verint in $2B deal â a privateâequity play on AIâpowered customer experience
Privateâequity firm Thoma Bravo announced an agreement to acquire customerâexperience automation vendor Verint for about $2 billion (including debt). The deal highlights PEâs continued appetite for software assets that can be reâengineered around AI and cloud subscription models. For the AI industry this signals further consolidation in contactâcenter/CX software, potential acceleration of Verintâs shift to AIânative and cloud offerings, and heightened competitive pressure on rivals that supply enterprise AI agents and CX automation.
Pintarnya nets $16.7M Series A to scale AI jobâmatching and fintech services for Indonesiaâs blueâcollar workforce
Indonesian startup Pintarnya raised a $16.7M Series A to expand an AIâdriven employment marketplace that also offers tailored financial services (secured loans, upskilling, sideâgigs) for informal and blueâcollar workers. The round â led by Square Peg â underscores investor interest in regionally focused AI applications that combine marketplace dynamics with embedded fintech. The funding should let Pintarnya scale its matching algorithms, deepen lender partnerships, and push toward profitability while illustrating how generative/ML tools are diffusing into emergingâmarket labor and fintech stacks.
Microsoftâs Copilot app for Windows 11 gets a fresh UI and practical modules
Microsoft rolled out a major Copilot for Windows 11 update (rolling since Aug 20, 2025) that redesigns the app home and adds practical modules â Recent Files, Copilot Pages (persistent research projects), an app-launcher with Copilot Vision overlays, and conversation history. The update tightens OS integration (file access, vision-backed guided help, memory prompts) to make Copilot a more useful day-to-day assistant for productivity and coding workflows. Impact: improves developer and knowledge-worker productivity by making AI assistance quicker to access and act on local files and apps, and signals Microsoftâs push to bake Copilot deeper into Windows UX.
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Windows Central
Microsoftâs 'Project Ire' AI agent can reverseâengineer and detect malware
Microsoft quietly launched Project Ire, an autonomous AI agent (announced in tests published Aug 22, 2025) that reverse-engineers software files to detect and classify malware. By combining LLM reasoning with tools like angr and Ghidra and a builtâin validator, Project Ire produced high precision in tests and even produced evidence strong enough for Windows Defender to auto-block an APT strain. Impact: this is a practical, high-value AI tool for security teams â it can accelerate threat triage, reduce analyst burnout, and change how enterprises scale malware detection and response.