Open-sourcing AstaBrief, the fast report-generation model in Asta

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  The arXiv, a repository of research papers, has been capped at two submissions per person per month to address the significant increase in submissions, from 20,000 in 2024 to over 40,000 in September 2026. This growth rate is unsustainable, and the moderation of the repository relies on volunteers. Google discontinued its bug reporting program due to the influx of reports, indicating a trend towards complexity and difficulty for humans to manage.

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• Computational tools for society’s most complex challenges

  ### Briefing Cathy Wu, Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, discusses her journey from designing safe, efficient transportation systems to applying artificial intelligence to solve complex challenges.** Cathy Wu, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has dedicated her career to using machine learning and reinforcement learning (RL) to…

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• What does en passant mean in chess?

  En passant is a unique pawn move in chess that allows capturing an enemy pawn diagonally without landing on the square it moved into. This move is called "in passing" because the move can be executed after an enemy pawn has moved two squares forward on its first move. The rule was not officially accepted until 1880 and was introduced to prevent pawns from easily evading capture by moving two squares forward. En passant can be beneficial to capture pawns that are in a passed position, which is when a pawn has advan…

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