Sumatra
Rare rotting-flesh smelling flower blooming at a Massachusetts college
Are corpse flowers like'Pangy' dangerous? More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A blooming'Amorphophallus titanum,' also known as corpse flower, in Gunung Leuser National Park, North Sumatra Province, Indonesia in January 2025. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. What's big, rare, and smells like literal death?
Indonesia sues six companies over environmental harm in flood zones
Indonesia's government has filed multiple lawsuits seeking more than $200m in damages against six firms, after deadly floods wreaked havoc across Sumatra, killing more than 1,000 people last year, although environmentalists criticised the moves as inadequate. Environmentalists, experts and the government pointed the finger at deforestation for its role in last year's disaster that washed torrents of mud and wooden logs into villages across the northwestern part of the island. The sum represents both fines for damage and the proposed monetary value of recovery efforts. The suits were filed to courts on Thursday in Jakarta and North Sumatra's Medan, the ministry added. "We firmly uphold the principle of polluter pays," Environment Minister Hanif Faisol Nurofiq said in a statement.
Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra
Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra NewsFeed Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra Drone video shows widespread destruction in part of Sumatra in Indonesia, where more than 440 people have died in flooding and landslides across the country. Hundreds of others are still missing. Pope Leo says two-state is'only solution' for Israel-Palestine Netanyahu requests Israel's president grant a pardon in corruption cases
From Handwriting to Feedback: Evaluating VLMs and LLMs for AI-Powered Assessment in Indonesian Classrooms
Aisyah, Nurul, Kautsar, Muhammad Dehan Al, Hidayat, Arif, Chowdhury, Raqib, Koto, Fajri
Despite rapid progress in vision-language and large language models (VLMs and LLMs), their effectiveness for AI-driven educational assessment in real-world, underrepresented classrooms remains largely unexplored. We evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs on over 14K handwritten answers from grade-4 classrooms in Indonesia, covering Mathematics and English aligned with the local national curriculum. Unlike prior work on clean digital text, our dataset features naturally curly, diverse handwriting from real classrooms, posing realistic visual and linguistic challenges. Assessment tasks include grading and generating personalized Indonesian feedback guided by rubric-based evaluation. Results show that the VLM struggles with handwriting recognition, causing error propagation in LLM grading, yet LLM feedback remains pedagogically useful despite imperfect visual inputs, revealing limits in personalization and contextual relevance.
LoraxBench: A Multitask, Multilingual Benchmark Suite for 20 Indonesian Languages
Aji, Alham Fikri, Cohn, Trevor
As one of the world's most populous countries, with 700 languages spoken, Indonesia is behind in terms of NLP progress. We introduce LoraxBench, a benchmark that focuses on low-resource languages of Indonesia and covers 6 diverse tasks: reading comprehension, open-domain QA, language inference, causal reasoning, translation, and cultural QA. Our dataset covers 20 languages, with the addition of two formality registers for three languages. We evaluate a diverse set of multilingual and region-focused LLMs and found that this benchmark is challenging. We note a visible discrepancy between performance in Indonesian and other languages, especially the low-resource ones. There is no clear lead when using a region-specific model as opposed to the general multilingual model. Lastly, we show that a change in register affects model performance, especially with registers not commonly found in social media, such as high-level politeness `Krama' Javanese.
Tool-to-Tool Matching Analysis Based Difference Score Computation Methods for Semiconductor Manufacturing
H., Sameera Bharadwaja, Jandial, Siddhrath, Agashe, Shashank S., Moore, Rajesh Kumar Reddy, Kim, Youngkwan
We consider the problem of tool-to-tool matching (TTTM), also called, chamber matching in the context of a semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Traditional TTTM approaches utilize static configuration data or depend on a golden reference which are difficult to obtain in a commercial manufacturing line. Further, existing methods do not extend very well to a heterogeneous setting, where equipment are of different make-and-model, sourced from different equipment vendors. We propose novel TTTM analysis pipelines to overcome these issues. We hypothesize that a mismatched equipment would have higher variance and/or higher number of modes in the data. Our best univariate method achieves a correlation coefficient >0.95 and >0.5 with the variance and number of modes, respectively showing that the proposed methods are effective. Also, the best multivariate method achieves a correlation coefficient >0.75 with the top-performing univariate methods, showing its effectiveness. Finally, we analyze the sensitivity of the multivariate algorithms to the algorithm hyper-parameters.
What Makes Treatment Effects Identifiable? Characterizations and Estimators Beyond Unconfoundedness
Cai, Yang, Kalavasis, Alkis, Mamali, Katerina, Mehrotra, Anay, Zampetakis, Manolis
Most of the widely used estimators of the average treatment effect (ATE) in causal inference rely on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap. Unconfoundedness requires that the observed covariates account for all correlations between the outcome and treatment. Overlap requires the existence of randomness in treatment decisions for all individuals. Nevertheless, many types of studies frequently violate unconfoundedness or overlap, for instance, observational studies with deterministic treatment decisions - popularly known as Regression Discontinuity designs - violate overlap. In this paper, we initiate the study of general conditions that enable the identification of the average treatment effect, extending beyond unconfoundedness and overlap. In particular, following the paradigm of statistical learning theory, we provide an interpretable condition that is sufficient and necessary for the identification of ATE. Moreover, this condition also characterizes the identification of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) and can be used to characterize other treatment effects as well. To illustrate the utility of our condition, we present several well-studied scenarios where our condition is satisfied and, hence, we prove that ATE can be identified in regimes that prior works could not capture. For example, under mild assumptions on the data distributions, this holds for the models proposed by Tan (2006) and Rosenbaum (2002), and the Regression Discontinuity design model introduced by Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). For each of these scenarios, we also show that, under natural additional assumptions, ATE can be estimated from finite samples. We believe these findings open new avenues for bridging learning-theoretic insights and causal inference methodologies, particularly in observational studies with complex treatment mechanisms.
P2P-Insole: Human Pose Estimation Using Foot Pressure Distribution and Motion Sensors
Watanabe, Atsuya, Aisuwarya, Ratna, Jing, Lei
This work presents P2P-Insole, a low-cost approach for estimating and visualizing 3D human skeletal data using insole-type sensors integrated with IMUs. Each insole, fabricated with e-textile garment techniques, costs under USD 1, making it significantly cheaper than commercial alternatives and ideal for large-scale production. Our approach uses foot pressure distribution, acceleration, and rotation data to overcome limitations, providing a lightweight, minimally intrusive, and privacy-aware solution. The system employs a Transformer model for efficient temporal feature extraction, enriched by first and second derivatives in the input stream. Including multimodal information, such as accelerometers and rotational measurements, improves the accuracy of complex motion pattern recognition. These facts are demonstrated experimentally, while error metrics show the robustness of the approach in various posture estimation tasks. This work could be the foundation for a low-cost, practical application in rehabilitation, injury prevention, and health monitoring while enabling further development through sensor optimization and expanded datasets.