To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.

This study presents a lightweight, domain-informed AI model for predicting indoor temperatures in naturally ventilated schools and homes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The model extends the Temp-AI-Estimator framework, trained on Tanzanian school data, and evaluated on Nigerian schools and Gambian homes. It achieves robust cross-country performance using only minimal accessible inputs, with mean absolute errors of 1.45°C for Nigerian schools and 0.65°C for Gambian homes. These findings highlight AI's potential for thermal comfort management in resource-constrained environments.

In this study, we develop Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Transformer-based transfer learning models for English-to-Igbo translation - a low-resource African language spoken by over 40 million people across Nigeria and West Africa. Our models are trained on a curated and benchmarked dataset compiled from Bible corpora, local news, Wikipedia articles, and Common Crawl, all verified by native language experts. We leverage Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), enhanced with attention mechanisms to improve translation accuracy. To further enhance performance, we apply transfer learning using MarianNMT pre-trained models within the SimpleTransformers framework. Our RNN-based system achieves competitive results, closely matching existing English-Igbo benchmarks. With transfer learning, we observe a performance gain of +4.83 BLEU points, reaching an estimated translation accuracy of 70%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining RNNs with transfer learning to address the performance gap in low-resource language translation tasks.

Assessing the effects of the energy transition and liberalization of energy markets on resource adequacy is an increasingly important and demanding task. The rising complexity in energy systems requires adequate methods for energy system modeling leading to increased computational requirements. Furthermore, with complexity, uncertainty increases likewise calling for probabilistic assessments and scenario analyses. To adequately and efficiently address these various requirements, new methods from the field of data science are needed to accelerate current methods. With our systematic literature review, we want to close the gap between the three disciplines (1) assessment of security of electricity supply, (2) artificial intelligence, and (3) design of experiments. For this, we conduct a large-scale quantitative review on selected fields of application and methods and make a synthesis that relates the different disciplines to each other. Among other findings, we identify metamodeling of complex security of electricity supply models using AI methods and applications of AI-based methods for forecasts of storage dispatch and (non-)availabilities as promising fields of application that have not sufficiently been covered, yet. We end with deriving a new methodological pipeline for adequately and efficiently addressing the present and upcoming challenges in the assessment of security of electricity supply.

Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed in a written or spoken way, it ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more low-resourced languages in NLP research, African languages have recently been a major subject of research in machine translation, and other text-based areas of NLP. However, there is still very little comparable research in speech recognition for African languages. Interestingly, some of the unique properties of African languages affecting NLP, like their diacritical and tonal complexities, have a major root in their speech, suggesting that careful speech interpretation could provide more intuition on how to deal with the linguistic complexities of African languages for text-based NLP. OkwuGb\'e is a step towards building speech recognition systems for African low-resourced languages. Using Fon and Igbo as our case study, we conduct a comprehensive linguistic analysis of each language and describe the creation of end-to-end, deep neural network-based speech recognition models for both languages. We present a state-of-art ASR model for Fon, as well as benchmark ASR model results for Igbo. Our linguistic analyses (for Fon and Igbo) provide valuable insights and guidance into the creation of speech recognition models for other African low-resourced languages, as well as guide future NLP research for Fon and Igbo. The Fon and Igbo models source code have been made publicly available.

For effective recognition, we developed a recognition component, combining kinematic vessel streams with library of maritime patterns in close collaboration with domain contextual (geographical) knowledge for real-time vessel activity experts. We present a thorough evaluation of the system and the detection. To improve the accuracy of the system, we collaborated, patterns both in terms of predictive accuracy and computational in the context of this paper, with domain experts in order to construct efficiency, using real-world datasets of vessel position streams and effective patterns of maritime activity. Thus, we present a contextual geographical information.