Babak's Daily Briefing

Sunday, March 29, 2026

Sources: 13 | Total Articles: 49

• 1.b-com’s Open XG Hub targets one of telecom’s biggest gaps: turning experimentation into deployment

  In an interview with Peter Pietrzyk, Managing Director of 6GWorld, Patrick Savell, Head of Connectivity at b-com, said platforms such as Open XG Hub are designed to help bridge one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: moving promising ideas from research environments into deployable network systems. The bigger point is that, as telecom becomes more software-driven and AI-native, the bottleneck is increasingly less about invention and more about validation, integration, and operational readiness.

• 2.ODC’s $45M raise signals a bigger shift in AI-RAN, from network optimization to edge intelligence

  ORAN Development Company said it has closed a $45 million Series A backed by Booz Allen, Cisco Investments, Nokia, NVIDIA, AT&T, MTN and Telecom Italia to scale its U.S.-based Odyssey platform, which it positions as an AI-native RAN architecture combining communications, sensing and edge intelligence. The company said it plans to accelerate commercial deployment through 2026.

• 3.Lockheed Martin’s NetSense points to a bigger shift: 5G as drone-detection infrastructure

  Lockheed Martin’s latest NetSense prototype suggests that commercial 5G infrastructure could play a growing role in drone detection, adding momentum to the broader move toward sensing-enabled wireless networks.

• 4.Orange Drone Guardian signals a new phase for telecom-enabled counter-drone services

  With Orange Drone Guardian, Orange Business is not just launching a counter-drone offer. It is also testing how far telecom infrastructure, sovereign cloud, AI, and eventually 5G radio sensing can be packaged into a scalable security service.

• 5.ODC launches RANIQ and pushes AI-RAN beyond automation

  ODC has launched RANIQ, a new edge intelligence platform for AI-native RAN that the company says runs directly on the DU/CU compute node, exposing structured real-time signal intelligence to applications without adding new RF hardware or affecting live RAN operations.

• 1.From Rich Text to Video: RCS Universal Profile 4.0 has arrived

  Summary available at source link.

• 2.Mobile Money accounted for $2 trillion in  transactions in 2025, doubling since 2021 as active accounts continue to grow

  Summary available at source link.

• 3.Strengthening the Global Fight Against Fraud and Scams – Takeaways from the Global Fraud Summit in Vienna

  Summary available at source link.

• 4.GSMA MWC26 Barcelona closes 20th anniversary edition

  Summary available at source link.

• 5.From Ambition to Execution: How Open Gateway Is Scaling the Global API Economy

  Summary available at source link.

• 1.Less Gaussians, Texture More: 4K Feed-Forward Textured Splatting

  Existing feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods predict pixel-aligned primitives, leading to a quadratic growth in primitive count as resolution increases. This fundamentally limits their scalability, making high-resolution synthesis such as 4K intractable. We introduce LGTM (Less Gaussians, Texture More), a feed-forward framework that overcomes this resolution scaling barrier. By predicting compact Gaussian primitives coupled with per-primitive textures, LGTM decouples geometric complexity from rendering resolution. This approach enables high-fidelity 4K novel view synthesis without per-scene optimization, a capability previously out of reach for feed-forward methods, all while using significantly fewer Gaussian primitives. Project page: https://yxlao.github.io/lgtm/

• 2.MuRF: Unlocking the Multi-Scale Potential of Vision Foundation Models

  Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have become the cornerstone of modern computer vision, offering robust representations across a wide array of tasks. While recent advances allow these models to handle varying input sizes during training, inference typically remains restricted to a single, fixed scale. This prevalent single-scale paradigm overlooks a fundamental property of visual perception: varying resolutions offer complementary inductive biases, where low-resolution views excel at global semantic recognition and high-resolution views are essential for fine-grained refinement. In this work, we propose Multi-Resolution Fusion (MuRF), a simple yet universally effective strategy to harness this synergy at inference time. Instead of relying on a single view, MuRF constructs a unified representation by processing an image at multiple resoluti...

• 3.Measuring What Matters -- or What's Convenient?: Robustness of LLM-Based Scoring Systems to Construct-Irrelevant Factors

  Automated systems have been widely adopted across the educational testing industry for open-response assessment and essay scoring. These systems commonly achieve performance levels comparable to or superior than trained human raters, but have frequently been demonstrated to be vulnerable to the influence of construct-irrelevant factors (i.e., features of responses that are unrelated to the construct assessed) and adversarial conditions. Given the rising usage of large language models in automated scoring systems, there is a renewed focus on ``hallucinations'' and the robustness of these LLM-based automated scoring approaches to construct-irrelevant factors. This study investigates the effects of construct-irrelevant factors on a dual-architecture LLM-based scoring system designed to score short essay-like open-response items in a situatio...

• 4.Visual or Textual: Effects of Explanation Format and Personal Characteristics on the Perception of Explanations in an Educational Recommender System

  Explanations are central to improving transparency, trust, and user satisfaction in recommender systems (RS), yet it remains unclear how different explanation formats (visual vs. textual) are suited to users with different personal characteristics (PCs). To this end, we report a within-subject user study (n=54) comparing visual and textual explanations and examine how explanation format and PCs jointly influence perceived control, transparency, trust, and satisfaction in an educational recommender system (ERS). Using robust mixed-effects models, we analyze the moderating effects of a wide range of PCs, including Big Five traits, need for cognition, decision making style, visualization familiarity, and technical expertise. Our results show that a well-designed visual, simple, interactive, selective, easy to understand visualization that cl...

• 5.UNIC: Neural Garment Deformation Field for Real-time Clothed Character Animation

  Simulating physically realistic garment deformations is an essential task for virtual immersive experience, which is often achieved by physics simulation methods. However, these methods are typically time-consuming, computationally demanding, and require costly hardware, which is not suitable for real-time applications. Recent learning-based methods tried to resolve this problem by training graph neural networks to learn the garment deformation on vertices, which, however, fail to capture the intricate deformation of complex garment meshes with complex topologies. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural deformation field-based method, named UNIC, to animate the garments of an avatar in real time, given the motion sequences. Our key idea is to learn the instance-specific neural deformation field to animate the garment meshes. Such an in...

• 1.Why Are Large Language Models so Terrible at Video Games?

  Large language models (LLMs) have improved so quickly that the benchmarks themselves have evolved, adding more complex problems in an effort to challenge the latest models. Yet LLMs haven’t improved across all domains, and one task remains far outside their grasp: They have no idea how to play video games. While a few have managed to beat a few games (for example, Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokemon Blue in May of 2025), these exceptions prove the rule. The eventually victorious AI completed games far more slowly than a typical human player, made bizarre and often repetitive mistakes, and required custom software to guide their interactions with the game. Julian Togelius , the director of New York University’s Game Innovation Lab and co-founder of AI game testing company Modl.ai, explored the implications of LLMs’ limitations in video games in a ...

• 2.How NYU’s Quantum Institute Bridges Science and Application

  This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering . Within a 6 mile radius of New York University’s (NYU) campus, there are more than 500 tech industry giants, banks, and hospitals. This isn’t just a fact about real estate, it’s the foundation for advancing quantum discovery and application. While the world races to harness quantum technology, NYU is betting that the ultimate advantage lies not solely in a lab, but in the dense, demanding, and hyper-connected urban ecosystem that surrounds it. With the launch of its NYU Quantum Institute (NYUQI), NYU is positioning itself as the central node in this network; a “full stack” powerhouse built on the conviction that it has found the right place, and the right time, to turn quantum science into tangible reality. Proximity advantage is essential because quantum scienc...

• 3.Training Driving AI at 50,000× Real Time

  This is a sponsored article brought to you by General Motors. Visit their new Engineering Blog for more insights. Autonomous driving is one of the most demanding problems in physical AI. An automated system must interpret a chaotic, ever-changing world in real time—navigating uncertainty, predicting human behavior, and operating safely across an immense range of environments and edge cases. At General Motors, we approach this problem from a simple premise: while most moments on the road are predictable, the rare, ambiguous, and unexpected events — the long tail — are what ultimately defines whether an autonomous system is safe, reliable, and ready for deployment at scale. (Note: While here we discuss research and emerging technologies to solve the long tail required for full general autonomy, we also discuss our current approach or solvin...

• 4.What Happens When You Host an AI Café

  “Can I get an interview?” “Can I get a job when I graduate?” Those questions came from students during a candid discussion about artificial intelligence, capturing the anxiety many young people feel today. As companies adopt AI-driven interview screeners, restructure their workforces, and redirect billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure , students are increasingly unsure of what the future of work will look like. We had gathered people together at a coffee shop in Auburn, Alabama, for what we called an AI Café. The event was designed to confront concerns about AI directly, demystifying the technology while pushing back against the growing narrative of technological doom. AI is reshaping society at breathtaking speed. Yet the trajectory of this transformation is being charted primarily by for-profit tech companies, whose priorities re...

• 5.These AI Workstations Look Like PCs but Pack a Stronger Punch

  The rise of generative AI has spurred demand for AI workstations that can run or train models on local hardware. Yet modern PCs have proven inadequate for this task . A typical laptop has only enough memory to load a large language model (LLM) with 8 billion to 13 billion parameters—much smaller, and much less intelligent, than frontier models that are presumed to have over a trillion parameters. Even the most capable workstation PCs struggle to serve LLMs with more than 70 billion parameters. Tenstorrent’s QuietBox 2 is an attempt to fill that gap. Though it looks like a PC workstation, the QuietBox 2 contains four of the company’s custom Blackhole AI accelerators, 128 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory—specialized memory used in GPUs—and 256 GB of DDR5 system memory (for a total of 384 GB). This configuration provides enough memory to load OpenA...

• 1.How Morningstar’s CEO Drives Relentless Execution

  Aleksandar Savic Many investors rely on Morningstar for independent financial analysis and insights, but few people are familiar with the company behind the ratings. From Morningstar’s origins rating mutual funds, the company has expanded its product line, customer base, and global footprint and realized a tenfold increase in revenues and profits between 2005 and 2025. […]

• 2.An AI Reckoning for HR: Transform or Fade Away

  Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images For decades, human resource leaders have talked about the need to shift their focus from having responsibility for compliance to acting as architects of talent strategy. And for decades, the pattern of HR being stuck in age-old roles has persisted. But there is new pressure to redefine the role. […]

• 3.Shifting AI From Fear to Optimism: U.S. Department of Labor’s Taylor Stockton

  In this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, host Sam Ransbotham speaks with Taylor Stockton, chief innovation officer at the U.S. Department of Labor, about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the workforce. Taylor emphasizes that AI is having an economywide impact, transforming tasks within nearly every job rather than affecting only certain industries […]

• 4.Why Leaders Lose the Room in High-Stakes Meetings

  Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Most advice about leadership communication focuses on presentation skills: Be concise, be clear, tell better stories. But the most consequential leadership communication happens in meetings where tough issues are being discussed and real decisions are being made. Even some of the most skilled leaders find themselves in moments where […]

• 5.How Goldman Sachs Stays Agile: HR Leader Jacqueline Arthur

  Aleksandar Savic After World War II, Goldman Sachs ranked 10th among the top 30 U.S. investment banks. Twenty-seven of those once-mighty Wall Street rivals, including Salomon, Lehman, and First Boston, have been relegated to the annals of business history. Goldman, in contrast, is a global powerhouse, employing more than 46,000 people, operating in more than […]

• 1.Medicaid Coverage for Obesity Medications: Utilization and Net-of-Rebate Spending -- by Coady Wing, Wei-Lun Lo, Maddie Potter, Tarik Yuce, Alberto Ortega, John Cawley, Thuy D. Nguyen, Kosali I. Simon

  We document state variation in Medicaid coverage for obesity-indicated GLP-1 medications over time, and use a stacked difference-in-differences design to estimate the effects of coverage on utilization and net-of-rebate spending. Nine quarters out, coverage increases prescriptions for obesity-indicated GLP-1 medications by 0.82 per 100 enrollee-months (SE = 0.10). Coverage had no effect on GLP-1 prescribing for diabetes or cardiovascular indications, suggesting that off-label prescribing of diabetes formulations for obesity is not very common in the Medicaid program. The expansions do not appear to affect consumer spending at major online GLP-1 compounding firms, which suggests that the utilization response in our main analysis reflects new utilization rather than crowd-out. We find that coverage increases net-of-rebate Medicaid spending ...

• 2.Reserve Demand Estimation with Minimal Theory -- by Ricardo Lagos, Gastón Navarro

  We propose a new reserve-demand estimation strategy---a middle ground between atheoretical reduced-form econometric approaches and fully structural quantitative-theoretic approaches. The strategy consists of an econometric specification that satisfies core restrictions implied by theory and controls for changes in administered-rate spreads that induce rotations and shifts in reserve demand. The resulting approach is as user-friendly as existing reduced-form econometric methods but improves upon them by incorporating a minimal set of theoretical restrictions that any reserve demand must satisfy. We apply this approach to U.S. data and obtain reserve-demand estimates that are broadly consistent with the structural estimates.

• 3.Identifying Uncertainty, Learning about Productivity, and Human Capital Acquisition: A Reassessment of Labor Market Sorting and Firm Monopsony Power -- by Cristina Gualdani, Elena Pastorino, Áureo de Paula, Sergio Salgado

  We examine the empirical content of a large class of dynamic matching models of the labor market with ex-ante heterogeneous firms and workers, symmetric uncertainty and learning about workers’ productivity, and firms’ monopsony power. We allow workers’ human capital, acquired before and after entry into the labor market, to be general across firms to varying degrees. Such a framework nests and extends known models of worker turnover across firms, occupational choice, wage growth, wage differentials across occupations, firms, and industries, and wage dispersion across workers and over the life cycle. We establish intuitive conditions under which the model primitives are semiparametrically identified solely from data on workers’ wages and jobs, despite the dynamics of these models giving rise to complex patterns of selection based on endoge...

• 4.Financial Conditions Targeting in a Multi-Asset Open Economy -- by Ricardo J. Caballero, Alp Simsek

  We analyze monetary policy responses to noisy financial conditions in an open economy where exchange rates and domestic asset prices affect aggregate demand. Noise traders operate in both markets, and specialized arbitrageurs have limited risk-bearing capacity. Monetary policy creates cross-market spillovers: by adjusting the interest rate to stabilize one market, the central bank influences volatility in the other. We show that targeting a financial conditions index (FCI)—a weighted average of exchange rates and domestic asset prices—delivers substantial macroeconomic benefits. FCI targeting commits the central bank to respond to unexpected movements in financial conditions beyond what discretionary monetary policy implies. These stronger responses improve diversification across markets: each market becomes more exposed to external shock...

• 5.Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at a Public University System -- by Theodore J. Joyce, Mina Afrouzi Khosroshahi, Sarah Truelsch, Kerstin Gentsch, Kyle Du

  Recent studies of Ivy-Plus institutions suggest that standardized test scores (SAT/ACT) are far better predictors of college success than high school grade point average (HS-GPA), prompting a return to the requirement that test scores be submitted for admission at elite colleges. We ask whether re-establishing the SAT requirement for admission at a large urban public university system would improve the predictability of academic outcomes. Using administrative data for the 2010-2019 first-year cohorts, we update earlier work of students from public universities as to the relative predictive power of HSGPA and SAT scores on first-year outcomes and graduation rates. Contrary to findings at elite private institutions, we find that HSGPA is the dominant predictor of academic success in this public system. A one-standard-deviation increase in H...

• 1.Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports

  Since 2018, more than thirty states have legalized mobile sports betting, leading to more than a half trillion dollars in wagers. In our recent Staff Report, we examine how legalized sports betting affects household financial health by comparing betting activity and consumer credit outcomes between states that legalized to those that have not. We find that legalization increases spending at online sportsbooks roughly tenfold, but betting does not stop at state boundaries. Nearby areas where betting is not legal still experience roughly 15 percent the increase of counties where it is legal. At the same time, consumer financial health suffers. Our analysis finds rising delinquencies in participating states,...

• 2.China’s Electric Trade

  China has spent considerable government resources to develop advanced electric technology industries, such as those that produce electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels. These efforts have spilled over to international trade as improvements in price and quality have increased the global demand for these goods. One consequence is that passenger cars and batteries have been disproportionately large contributors to the rise in the country’s trade surplus in recent years. This has not been the case, though, for solar panels, as falling prices due to a supply glut pulled down export revenues despite higher volumes.

• 3.The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—March 2026

  This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since December 2025. To summarize, growth in 2026 is expected to be more robust, and inflation more persistent, than predicted in December. Stronger investment is the main driver for higher growth, while cost-push shocks, possibly capturing the effects of tariffs, are the key factors behind higher inflation. Projections for the short-run real natural rate of interest (r*) are the same as in December.

• 4.Firms’ Inflation Expectations Return to 2024 Levels

  Businesses experienced substantial cost pressures in 2025 as the cost of insurance and utilities rose sharply, while an increase in tariffs contributed to rising goods and materials costs. This post examines how firms in the New York-Northern New Jersey region adjusted their prices in response to these cost pressures and describes their expectations for future price increases and inflation. Survey results show an acceleration in firms’ price increases in 2025, with an especially sharp increase in the manufacturing sector. While both cost and price increases intensified last year, our surveys re...

• 5.Are Rising Employee Health Insurance Costs Dampening Wage Growth?

  Employer-sponsored health insurance represents a substantial component of total compensation paid by firms to many workers in the United States. Such costs have climbed by close to 20 percent over the past five years. Indeed, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was about $27,000 in 2025—roughly equivalent to the wage of a full-time worker paid $15 per hour. Our February regional business surveys asked firms whether their wage setting decisions were influenced by the rising cost of employee health insurance. As we showed in our

  Project Syndicate

RCR Wireless

Semantic Scholar – Machine Learning

arXiv Quantitative Finance

arXiv – 6G & Networking

arXiv – Network Architecture (6G/Slicing)