President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday presented the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar to 17 children, recognising their exceptional courage and outstanding achievements across diverse fields, including art, culture, sports and innovation. Giving out at the awards to seven boys and 10 girls selected from 14 states and Union territories, the President also underlined the importance of nurturing and celebrating young talents. “Providing opportunities and recognising children’s talents has always been a part of our tradition. This tradition should be further strengthened to ensure that every child realises their full potential,” she said. The award celebrates extraordinary accomplishments in seven categories: art and culture, bravery, innovation, science and technology, social service, sports and environment. The honourees were presented with a medal, certificate and citation booklet at the ceremony which was held on Veer Bal Diwas instead of a conferring ceremony during Republic Day celebrations in January as the government wanted a ceremony dedicated to the children. President Murmu highlighted the importance of honouring such talents, saying, “The tradition of recognising and nurturing children’s potential has always been part of our culture. Their contributions will lead India to the pinnacle of progress.” She further emphasised the ministry of women and child development’s role in sharing these stories of inspiration with the wider public. The President also paid homage to the unparalleled sacrifices of Guru Gobind Singh’s sons, commemorated as “Veer Bal Diwas” on December 26, saying, “Their sacrifices for faith and self-respect continue to inspire countless generations. On this day, the nation bows in reverence to their bravery and spirit.” Bal Puraskar is given for seven categories — Art and Culture, Bravery, Innovation, Science and Technology, Social Work, Sports and Environment. Among the awardees this year was Keya Hatkar, a 14-year-old author and disability advocate, recognized for her excellence in art and culture. Despite living with spinal muscular atrophy, she founded initiatives like “IM POSSIBLE” and “SMA-ART,” promoting inclusivity and disability awareness. Among the other awardees was Ayaan Sajad, a 12-year-old Sufi singer from Kashmir, honoured for his soulful contributions to Kashmiri music, while 17-year-old Vyas Om Jignesh, who has cerebral palsy, was lauded for his dedication to Sanskrit literature, having memorised over 5,000 shlokas and performed in over 500 shows. In bravery, Saurav Kumar (9) was recognised for saving three girls from drowning, and 17-year-old Ioanna Thapa was honoured for rescuing 36 residents from a fire. “Examples of courage and patriotism in children strengthen the nation’s confidence in its future. Such acts are truly commendable,” President Murmu remarked as she presented the award to the two children. In the innovation category, 15-year-old Sindhoora Raja was awarded for creating self-stabilising devices for Parkinson’s patients, and cybersecurity entrepreneur Risheek Kumar (17) was honoured for launching Kashmir’s first cybersecurity firm. “Contributions to science, technology, and innovation by children like these show their unparalleled potential to transform lives,” the President observed. Hembati Nag, a judo player from a Naxal-affected area was awarded in the sports category. She overcame numerous challenges to win a silver medal at the Khelo India National Games. Mentioning Nag’s story, President Murmu said, “Hembati’s resilience amidst adversity is an example of unmatched courage and determination.” Chess prodigy Anish Sarkar, the youngest FIDE-ranked player at just three years old, was also honoured. The President envisioned a bright future for the awardees, adding, “In 2047, when we celebrate the centenary of our independence, these award winners will be enlightened citizens of the country. Such talented boys and girls will become the builders of a developed India, shaping its destiny through their talent and efforts.” “May every child of this nation have a bright and prosperous future, for in their success lies the future of India,” she said. Addressing the event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about the role of youth in shaping India’s future. “Veer Bal Diwas fills us with inspiration and motivates us to make new resolutions. I had also said from the Red Fort that now the best should be our standard. Our youth should strive for the best in whatever sector they are in,” he said. “From history to the present, youth energy has always played a big role in India’s progress. From the freedom struggle to the mass movements of the 21st century, India’s youth has contributed to every revolution,” the PM said. He also acknowledged the changing times, stressing that the world is moving beyond machines to machine learning, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming more prevalent. “The use of AI is increasing, which is replacing normal software. We are facing new challenges in every field. Therefore, we have to tell our youth what the future holds,” he said. In line with this, the Prime Minister also spoke about the awards which honours children who have demonstrated extraordinary achievements in various fields. Established in 1996 by the ministry of women and child development, the award is given to children between the ages of 5 and 18. Awardees must be Indian citizens residing in India. Each recipient of the Prime Minister National Bal Puraskar is awarded a medal, a certificate, and a cash prize of ₹ 1 lakh. In 2023, 11 children were honored with the prestigious award.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — Once-promising seasons hit new lows for the Chicago Bears and San Francisco 49ers last week. Another late-game meltdown sent the Bears to their sixth straight loss and led to the firing of coach Matt Eberflus. The 49ers suffered their second straight blowout loss and more crushing injuries to go from Super Bowl contenders to outside the playoff picture in a matter of weeks. The two reeling teams will try to get back on track on Sunday when the Bears (4-8) visit the 49ers (5-7) in Chicago's first game under interim coach Thomas Brown . “I told them a minute ago after practice there is no confidence loss at all as far as what I think about them,” Brown said Wednesday. “I don’t care what anybody else thinks about them. I think we have a very talented football team. It’s about just putting the work in every single day to give us an opportunity to win.” The Bears are hoping to get an emotional boost from the first in-season firing of a head coach in franchise history. Over the last 10 seasons, teams with interim coaches are 13-11 in their first game with the new coach. Those teams had a .284 winning percentage at the time they fired their coaches. “I wouldn’t say a new voice was needed. I would say there was change that was needed," rookie quarterback Caleb Williams said, pointing to a need for more accountability and better communication. The Niners came into the season as the favorites to get back to the Super Bowl from the NFC after losing the title game to Kansas City last season. But a series of key injuries, bad losses and spotty play have left them in last place in the NFC West with only slim hopes of even reaching the postseason. San Francisco lost 38-10 to Green Bay and 35-10 to Buffalo in back-to-back weeks and lost star running back Christian McCaffrey to a knee injury last week that will sideline him for at least the rest of the regular season. The Niners already lost key players Brandon Aiyuk and Javon Hargrave to season-ending injuries and are preparing to be without stars Nick Bosa and Trent Williams for a third straight week. “It’s just been a rocky mountain for real with the injuries and other stuff we’ve had to go through this season,” receiver Deebo Samuel said. “Our record don’t show how really good we are as a team. We're still believing in this locker room.” Chaotic education Williams described Eberflus’ firing as “interesting” and “tough” and vowed to “roll with the punches” while insisting the chaos and turnover of the past few weeks could help him handle similar situations in the future. Just 12 games into his NFL career, the prized quarterback is on his second head coach and third offensive coordinator, though Brown will continue to call plays. How does he keep the faith that his career is in good hands with this organization? “The first part is understanding I can’t control,” Williams said. “Even if I understand or don’t understand, that doesn’t matter. I have to roll with the punches like I said before. I don’t control everything.” Guerendo's chance With McCaffrey and Jordan Mason injured, the Niners running game will turn to rookie Isaac Guerendo . The fourth-round pick has 42 carries for 246 yards and two TDs this season and will be making his second start in either college or the pros. Coach Kyle Shanahan said the progress Guerendo has made since training camp makes him ready for his new role as he sees him running with more “urgency.” “I think it takes guys some time,” Shanahan said. “You start to get a feel for it the more, if you’ve got the right stuff, the more you get reps, the more you can adjust to it. How hard you’ve got to hit stuff, how quick those holes close, how when there is a hole how you have to hit it full-speed and can’t hesitate at all or it closes like that. We’ve seen that stuff get better in practice and we’ve seen it carry over into games.” Stop the run San Francisco's usually stout run defense has been anything but that this season. The Niners have struggled to slow down the opposition on the ground all year with the problem getting worse recently. The 49ers allowed 389 yards rushing the past two weeks. “It’s been so frustrating because I know what is supposed to look like,” linebacker Fred Warner said. “That’s not it.” Stopping the run also continues to be a sore spot for Chicago. The Bears rank 25th overall against the run and 29th in yards allowed per rush after another difficult outing last week. They gave up 194 yards, including 144 in the first half as the Lions grabbed a 16-0 lead. Losing veteran defensive tackle Andrew Billings to a torn pectoral muscle last month did not help. He was injured in a Week 9 loss at Arizona and is expected to miss the remainder of the season after having surgery. ___ AP Sports Writer Andrew Seligman contributed to this report. ___ AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL Josh Dubow, The Associated Press2025 calendar detail is freaking everyone out
In 2018, Google DeepMind's AlphaZero program taught itself the games of chess, shogi, and Go using machine learning and a special algorithm to determine the best moves to win a game within a defined grid. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has developed an analogous algorithm for autonomous robots—a planning and decision-making control system that helps freely moving robots determine the best movements to make as they navigate the real world. "Our algorithm actually strategizes and then explores all the possible and important motions and chooses the best one through dynamic simulation, like playing many simulated games involving moving robots," says Soon-Jo Chung, Caltech's Bren Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. "The breakthrough innovation here is that we have derived a very efficient way of finding that optimal safe motion that typical optimization-based methods would never find." The team describes the technique, which they call Spectral Expansion Tree Search (SETS), in the December of the journal . Many robots can move quite freely and in any direction. Consider, for example, a designed to assist an elderly person in a home. Such a robot should be able to move in many different ways and, essentially, in any direction within the space as it encounters obstacles or unexpected events while completing its tasks. That robot's set of movements, obstacles, and challenges will be very different from those of a self-driving car, for example. How, then, can a single algorithm guide different robotic systems to make the best decisions to move through their surroundings? "You don't want a designer to have to go in and handcraft these motions and say, 'This is the discrete set of moves the robot should be able to do,'" says John Lathrop, a graduate student in control and dynamical systems at Caltech and co-lead author of the new paper. "To overcome this, we came up with SETS." SETS uses control theory and linear algebra to find natural motions that use a robotic platform's capabilities to its fullest extent in a physical setting. The basic underlying concept is based on a Monte Carlo Tree Search, a decision-making algorithm also used by Google's AlphaZero. Here, Monte Carlo essentially means something random, and tree search refers to navigating a branching structure that represents the relationships of data in a system. In such a tree, a root branches off to so-called child nodes that are connected by edges. Using Monte Carlo Tree Search for a game like Go, possible moves are represented as new nodes, and the tree grows larger as more random samples of possible trajectories are attempted. The algorithm plays out the possible moves to see the final outcomes of the different nodes and then selects the one that offers the best outcome based on a point valuation. The problem, Lathrop explains, is that when using this branching tree structure for continuous dynamical systems such as robots operating in the physical world, the total number of trajectories in the tree grows exponentially. "For some problems, trying to simulate every single possibility and then figure out which one is best would take years, maybe hundreds of years," he says. To overcome this, SETS takes advantage of an exploration/exploitation trade-off. "We want to try simulating trajectories that we haven't investigated before—that's exploration," Lathrop says. "And we want to continue looking down paths that have previously yielded high reward—that's exploitation. By balancing the exploration and the exploitation, the algorithm is able to quickly converge on the optimal solution among all possible trajectories." For example, if a robot starts out calculating a couple of possible actions that it determines would cause it to smash into a wall, there is no need for it to investigate any of the other nodes on that branch of the tree. "This exploration/exploitation tradeoff and search over the robot's natural motions enables our robots to think, move, and adapt to new information in ," says Benjamin Rivière, a postdoctoral scholar research associate in mechanical and civil engineering at Caltech and co-lead author of the paper. SETS can run an entire tree search in about a tenth of a second. During that time, it can simulate thousands to tens of thousands of possible trajectories, select the best one, and then act. The loop continues over and over, giving the robotic system the ability to make many decisions each second. A key feature of the SETS algorithm is that it can be applied to essentially any robotic platform. The features and capabilities do not have to be programmed individually. In the new paper, Chung and his colleagues demonstrate the algorithm's successful utility in three completely different experimental settings—something that is very rare in robotics papers. In the first, a quadrotor drone was able to observe four hovering white balls while avoiding four orange balls, all while navigating an airfield rife with randomly occurring, dangerous air currents, or thermals. The drone experiment was conducted at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST). In the second, the algorithm augmented a human driver of a tracked ground vehicle to navigate a narrow and winding track without hitting the siderails. And in the final setup, SETS helped a pair of tethered spacecraft capture and redirect a third agent, which could represent another spacecraft, an asteroid or another object. A team of Caltech students and researchers are currently applying a version of the SETS algorithm to an Indy car that will participate in the Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 9.'This can be our Sputnik moment': Vivek Ramaswamy says cultural shift needed in US for better competition in tech