Latest news with #Northridge
CBS News
5 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Northridge electric forklift fire prompts nearby evacuations
Los Angeles Fire Department crews are working to control the fire of a smaller battery-powered forklift inside a commercial equipment yard in Northridge. The fire broke out around 7:30 a.m. at the Sunbelt Rentals property on W. Napa Street. LAFD HAZMAT crews are performing air monitoring and evacuating the surrounding area as a precaution. Aerial footage showed plumes of smoke around 9 a.m., as crews safely let the forklift burn itself out, according to LAFD. No injuries have been reported.
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
EF1 tornado tears roof off home, narrowly missing family
A tornado struck the Northridge community in Clark County on Saturday night, narrowly missing a family as it damaged their home. [DOWNLOAD: Free WHIO-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] The tornado caused significant damage to Steve Agee's home, tearing off part of the roof. Despite the destruction, no one was hurt. 'A lot of racket in the back. So I was like, 'Oh, I need to put my awnings down on my gazebo,'' Agee said. Agee and his wife were listening to the rain when they heard a strange noise. 'Here comes something flying through the air. Realized later it was a trampoline,' he said. TRENDING STORIES: Local high school band director accused of inappropriate relationship with student placed on leave 3-year-old taken from parent found over a month later with dyed hair Pregnant woman, unborn child dead after being hit by car in Ohio, police say After closing the door, the family heard a boom and lost power as they headed to the basement for safety. 'Got to the first step, it was completely quiet, just like dead silence,' Agee said. 'I was like 'well, that's passed.'' When he opened his front door, Agee saw that part of his roof was missing. The wind lifted it and caused damage to the ceilings in three rooms. He said in the 13 years he had never experienced a tornado here. He was surprised by the help they received. 'I had never seen that much of a reach out that quick in any community,' Agee said. Agee said he is hoping to get a metal roof put on to prevent this from happening again. We will continue to follow this story. [SIGN UP: WHIO-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
Forbes
18-07-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
NSF-Backed ‘MaVila' AI Brings Factory Floors Into The LLM Era
AI models on the factory floor The manufacturing sector generates $2.3 trillion in annual U.S. GDP, yet most shop floors still rely on decades-old automation and paper manuals. That challenge is precisely what MaVila, short for 'Manufacturing, Vision and Language', was built to address. Developed with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by California State University, Northridge professor Bing Bing Lee, the vision-language model can 'see' a machine, identify defects, and suggest optimal process parameters in plain English, all in real time. 'Mavila is an advanced vision and language model specifically designed for the smart manufacturing domain as we have been working in this domain for almost ten years,' said Lee in an NSF interview. What MaVila Does Best Most industrial AI still relies on rule-based vision systems that choke on new part geometries or glare from workshop lights. MaVila's novelty is its domain-specific training: thousands of annotated images, manuals and sensor logs from CNC mills, wire-EDM cells and 3-D printers. Shown a titanium bracket fresh off a powder-bed printer, the model can label a micro-crack and immediately suggest new laser power settings. That task would normally require a process engineer on-site. MaVila can look at a milling machine, spot a flaw and suggest a better cutting speed, all before a human engineer reaches for the stop button. 'Large language models are designed to process to generate the textual context,' Lee explained. 'Where the [MaVila] In early lab tests MaVila flagged seeded defects on 3-D-printed parts and generated new print parameters in seconds. The team then mounted the model on a mobile robot that photographed a milling operation, pulled the proper torque spec from a PDF manual and suggested a tool-path tweak, while operating live. Lee argues that whoever owns specialized data will own the next wave of industrial AI. 'The core of the AI industry, I believe, will be the AI algorithm, the model you have,' he said. 'Another big core value is the data. [Whoever] has the data will be the most valuable.' His group has built one of the first public benchmarks for smart-manufacturing imagery, then fine-tuned MaVila with a retrieval-augmented pipeline so it can pull the right snippet from a user manual in mid-conversation. Because public datasets rarely cover machine-shop edge cases, Lee's group has spent years capturing high-resolution images of cutting tools, gathering sensor streams from 3-D printers and scanning operator manuals into a searchable corpus. The result is a retrieval-augmented pipeline that lets MaVila pull the right output while a machine is still running. AI Increasingly Making Its Way onto the Factory Floor Siemens is already commercializing a similar product. Its Industrial Copilot, connected to the company's TIA Portal, can draft PLC code and HMI screens, trimming engineering hours and cutting error rates. The tool goes live this summer. NVIDIA is helping Foxconn, Pegatron and others build full digital twins of their factories. By simulating layouts before steel is cut, those firms claim faster launches and safer lines. Similarly, BMW says its Virtual Factory now reduces planning costs by up to 30 percent after testing every robot move in a photorealistic model. Together, these moves show big manufacturers warming to AI copilots, but they also raise the bar for smaller suppliers that lack deep pockets, or data. Policy Tailwinds, Talent Headwinds Federal money is flowing to US manufacturing. This spring the NSF earmarked $25.5 million for 'future manufacturing' grants spanning digital twins and 'recyclofacturing', a closed-loop approach that turns post-industrial metal scrap straight back into fresh products, eliminating most down-cycling and cutting embodied carbon. Yet a Deloitte study warns of a 2.1 million-worker shortfall in U.S. factories by 2030, one reason Siemens pitches its copilot as a fix for skilled-labor gaps. However some caution that no amount of clever modeling removes the need for fresh, proprietary data. Mid-size suppliers will have to decide how much of their know-how they're willing to share with an academic group, or pay to keep private. Lee concedes the point. His next milestone is signing pilot partnerships with at least three small-to-medium manufacturers. Without real production data, the model could stall in academia. Whether MaVila scales now hinges on whether factories will share enough images and logs to keep the model sharp, and the deployment ease of the model. If those hurdles fall, American plants might trade bulky binders for an AI assistant that sees a problem, talks it through and fixes it on the fly. That would turn today's static automation into living, learning production lines , and perhaps give U.S. manufacturing the edge it has been chasing for years.
CBS News
26-06-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Trader Joe's or Trader Joe's, Sherman Oaks store opens across the street from existing one
Can't get enough of Trader Joe's? For those in the Sherman Oaks area, there's the option to pick which side of the street on Riverside Drive to visit the grocer on. The OG Sherman Oaks Trader Joe's opened in 1973, at a stand-alone building on Riverside Drive. The new Sherman Oaks Trader Joe's opened at the beginning of June and is directly across the street from the other store. "We've had a great relationship with our customers in Sherman Oaks for 52 years, and we plan to keep both stores open," Nakia Rohde, Trader Joe's public relations manager, said. The new store, referred to as "Sherman Oaks too" on the grocer's website, is in the mixed-use Citrus Commons building, with parking available in an underground garage. Trader Joe's first opened on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena in 1967. It's now a national chain of grocery stores, with 205 stores in California alone, and 11 of those are in Los Angeles. The next new Los Angeles area store to open will be in Northridge on Reseda Boulevard, according to the Trader Joe's website. Trader Joe's doesn't have sales or offer coupons, and there are no loyalty programs or membership cards. The company wrote on its website that the goal is to make the customer's shopping experience "rewarding, eventful and fun." "Simply put, every time a customer shops with us, we want them to be able to say, 'Wow! That was enjoyable, and I got a great deal. I look forward to coming back,'" the company wrote on its website.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The history of National Guard deployments in LA: What to know
The National Guard has been deployed to Los Angeles several times in response to civil disorder and natural disasters. In previous years, the National Guard was sent at the request of state and local officials. In January, California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a request from Los Angeles County to deploy the state National Guard to support law enforcement during the wildfires. Thousands of Guard members were sent to the region to assist in firefighting efforts and to help local law enforcement with checkpoints and patrols in the evacuation areas. While Vice President J.D. Vance has referred to the protesters as "insurrectionists" and senior White House aide Stephen Miller described the protests as a "violent insurrection," President Donald Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Under the 1807 law, the president may have the legal authority to dispatch the military or federalize the Guard in states that cannot control insurrections under or are defying federal law. In June 2020, USA TODAY reported that Trump had considered invoking the Insurrection Act over protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a former Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck on a street corner in May 2020. Protestors clashed with police across the country, including in Los Angeles, which prompted then-Mayor Eric Garcetti to ask Newsom for members of the Guard to be sent to the city. At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and others urged against deploying domestic troops to quell civil unrest. In 1994, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake ‒ known as the Northridge earthquake – shook the San Fernando Valley, which is about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The earthquake caused an estimated $20 billion in residential damages, according to the California Earthquake Authority. The Guard was sent as part of the disaster assistance operation. The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992 by former President George H.W. Bush, when the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King sparked civil unrest in Los Angeles, which left more than 60 people dead and 2,300 injured, according to the Bill of Rights Institute. Thousands of members of the Guard, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps were deployed in the city. In 1965, nearly 14,000 Guard troops were sent to Los Angeles amid the Watts riots at the request of the California lieutenant governor, according to Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Contributing: Reuters This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Past National Guard deployments in LA: What to know
