Netherlands Pauses Move to Seize Chinese-Owned Chipmaker Nexperia

The Netherlands has returned control of the Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia to its original owners after a period of uncertainty regarding its future. This decision follows a suspension of a seizure that had been imposed on the company, reflecting the complexities of international business relations in the semiconductor industry.

The European Union has proposed updates to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which include simplifying cookie permission pop-ups. Additionally, there are plans to dilute the AI Act in response to pressure from the United States and major technology companies. This shift marks a significant change in the EU's regulatory stance towards tech giants, raising concerns about the protection of user data and the integrity of AI governance.

A new mega data center is set to be constructed in eastern Germany, aimed at establishing a foundation for a competitive European AI sector against the United States and China. This initiative is part of Germany's broader strategy to achieve digital sovereignty.

Microsoft has unveiled a comprehensive vision for the AI lifecycle at Ignite 2025, highlighting advancements that aim to transform how organizations conceptualize, develop, deploy, and manage AI systems.

The Dutch government has returned control of chipmaker Nexperia to its Chinese owner, ending a standoff that had begun to disrupt global automotive production. This decision comes after the government suspended its powers over the company, indicating a shift in regulatory stance towards foreign ownership in the technology sector.

Rice is a vital staple food globally, significantly impacting international trade, economic growth, and nutrition. Major Asian countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, contribute to rice cultivation and utilize various rice types, such as basmati and jasmine. Ensuring the quality of rice grains is crucial for trade and reputation, but manual classification is labor-intensive and error-prone. This article explores the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and explainable AI methods like LIME and SHAP to automate rice grain classification effectively.

The article discusses the safety approval process for driverless trains in the EU, highlighting the simplified approach for computer vision systems that mimic human driver functions. It notes that while only certain cognitive functions are replaced, measuring performance in critical areas like obstacle detection remains challenging due to a lack of data. To address this, the article introduces a new dataset containing 711 performance measurements from controlled experiments, which vary by speed, obstacle size, and other factors.

MajinBook is an open catalogue aimed at enhancing the use of shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Z-Library for computational social science and cultural analytics. It combines metadata from these extensive archives with structured bibliographic data from Goodreads, resulting in a high-precision corpus of over 539,000 references to English-language books from the past three centuries. The project emphasizes machine-readable quality through native EPUB files and addresses biases found in traditional datasets, while also including secondary datasets for French, German, and Spanish literatur…