Neanderthals bred with our human ancestors 100,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study. Experts have discovered that a five–year–old child who lived 140,000 years ago had parents from both species. Their fossil – likely a female – was first unearthed 90 years ago in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel in what is now northern Israel. A team from Tel Aviv University and the French Centre for Scientific Research conducted a series of advanced tests on the remaining bones, including a CT scan of the skull. 'Genetic studies over the past decade have shown that these two groups exchanged genes,' said lead author Professor Israel Hershkovitz.

Arguments evoke emotions, influencing the effect of the argument itself. Not only the emotional intensity but also the category influence the argument's effects, for instance, the willingness to adapt stances. While binary emotionality has been studied in arguments, there is no work on discrete emotion categories (e.g., "Anger") in such data. To fill this gap, we crowdsource subjective annotations of emotion categories in a German argument corpus and evaluate automatic LLM-based labeling methods. Specifically, we compare three prompting strategies (zero-shot, one-shot, chain-of-thought) on three large instruction-tuned language models (Falcon-7b-instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-instruct, GPT-4o-mini). We further vary the definition of the output space to be binary (is there emotionality in the argument?), closed-domain (which emotion from a given label set is in the argument?), or open-domain (which emotion is in the argument?). We find that emotion categories enhance the prediction of emotionality in arguments, emphasizing the need for discrete emotion annotations in arguments. Across all prompt settings and models, automatic predictions show a high recall but low precision for predicting anger and fear, indicating a strong bias toward negative emotions.

The RVL-CDIP benchmark is widely used for measuring performance on the task of document classification. Despite its widespread use, we reveal several undesirable characteristics of the RVL-CDIP benchmark. These include (1) substantial amounts of label noise, which we estimate to be 8.1% (ranging between 1.6% to 16.9% per document category); (2) presence of many ambiguous or multi-label documents; (3) a large overlap between test and train splits, which can inflate model performance metrics; and (4) presence of sensitive personally-identifiable information like US Social Security numbers (SSNs). We argue that there is a risk in using RVL-CDIP for benchmarking document classifiers, as its limited scope, presence of errors (state-of-the-art models now achieve accuracy error rates that are within our estimated label error rate), and lack of diversity make it less than ideal for benchmarking. We further advocate for the creation of a new document classification benchmark, and provide recommendations for what characteristics such a resource should include.

The problem considered in this paper is the online diagnosis of Automated Production Systems with sensors and actuators delivering discrete binary signals that can be modeled as Discrete Event Systems. Even though there are numerous diagnosis methods, none of them can meet all the criteria of implementing an efficient diagnosis system (such as an intelligent solution, an average effort, a reasonable cost, an online diagnosis, fewer false alarms, etc.). In addition, these techniques require either a correct, robust, and representative model of the system or relevant data or experts' knowledge that require continuous updates. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning-based approach of a diagnostic system. It is considered as a multi-class classifier that predicts the plant state: normal or faulty and what fault that has arisen in the case of failing behavior.

Gifted students have a higher capabilities of understanding and learning. They are characterized by a high level of attention and a high performance in the classroom. Gifted children are defined in this paper as children who have a performance higher than the average group (59.64%). In order to predict gifted students from normal students, we conducted an experiment where 17 pupils have voluntarily participated in this study. We collected different types of data (gender, age, performance, initial average in math and EEG mental states) in a web platform to learn mathematics called NetMath. Participants were invited to respond to top-level exercises on the four basic operations in decimals. We trained different machine learning algorithms to predict gifted students. Our first results show that the decision tree could predict gifted students with an accuracy of 76.88%. Using J48 trees, we noticed also that two relevant features could determine gifted children: the relaxation extracted from EEG headset and the characteristic of strong student. A strong student is defined as a student who obtained a mean higher than the group’s mean in the first step evaluation in class.