As the field of healthcare increasingly adopts artificial intelligence, it becomes important to understand which types of explanations increase transparency and empower users to develop confidence and trust in the predictions made by machine learning (ML) systems. In shared decision-making scenarios where doctors cooperate with ML systems to reach an appropriate decision, establishing mutual trust is crucial. In this paper, we explore different approaches to generating explanations in eXplainable AI (XAI) and make their underlying arguments explicit so that they can be evaluated by medical experts. In particular, we present the findings of a user study conducted with physicians to investigate their perceptions of various types of AI-generated explanations in the context of diagnostic decision support. The study aims to identify the most effective and useful explanations that enhance the diagnostic process. In the study, medical doctors filled out a survey to assess different types of explanations. Further, an interview was carried out post-survey to gain qualitative insights on the requirements of explanations incorporated in diagnostic decision support. Overall, the insights gained from this study contribute to understanding the types of explanations that are most effective.

Network pruning is used to reduce inference latency and power consumption in large neural networks. However, most existing methods struggle to accurately assess the importance of individual weights due to their inherent interrelatedness, leading to poor performance, especially at extreme sparsity levels. We introduce Hyperflows, a dynamic pruning approach that estimates each weight's importance by observing the network's gradient response to the weight's removal. A global pressure term continuously drives all weights toward pruning, with those critical for accuracy being automatically regrown based on their flow, the aggregated gradient signal when they are absent. We explore the relationship between final sparsity and pressure, deriving power-law equations similar to those found in neural scaling laws. Empirically, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results with ResNet-50 and VGG-19 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.

The paper presents a novel modular hybrid parallel robot for pancreatic surgery and its higher-order kinematics derived based on various formalisms. The classical vector, homogeneous transformation matrices and dual quaternion approaches are studied for the kinematic functions using both classical differentiation and multidual algebra. The algorithms for inverse kinematics for all three studied formalisms are presented for both differentiation and multidual algebra approaches. Furthermore, these algorithms are compared based on numerical stability, execution times and number and type of mathematical functions and operators contained in each algorithm. A statistical analysis shows that there is significant improvement in execution time for the algorithms implemented using multidual algebra, while the numerical stability is appropriate for all algorithms derived based on differentiation and multidual algebra. While the implementation of the kinematic algorithms using multidual algebra shows positive results when benchmarked on a standard PC, further work is required to evaluate the multidual algorithms on hardware/software used for the modular parallel robot command and control.

The rapid growth of the global population and the continuous decline in cultivable land pose significant threats to food security. This challenge worsens as climate change further reduces the availability of farmland. Soilless agriculture, such as hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, offers a sustainable solution by enabling efficient crop cultivation in controlled environments. The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with smart precision farming improves resource efficiency, automates environmental control, and ensures stable and high-yield crop production. IoT-enabled smart farming systems utilize real-time monitoring, data-driven decision-making, and automation to optimize water and nutrient usage while minimizing human intervention. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of IoT-based soilless farming, highlighting its role in sustainable agriculture, urban farming, and global food security. These advanced farming methods ensure greater productivity, resource conservation, and year-round cultivation. However, they also face challenges such as high initial investment, technological dependency, and energy consumption. Through a comprehensive study, bibliometric analysis, and comparative analysis, this research highlights current trends and research gaps. It also outlines future directions for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders to drive innovation and scalability in IoT-driven soilless agriculture. By emphasizing the benefits of vertical farming and Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)-enabled soilless techniques, this paper supports informed decision-making to address food security challenges and promote sustainable agricultural innovations.

Islands are diversity hotspots and vulnerable to environmental degradation, climate variations, land use changes and societal crises. These factors can exhibit interactive impacts on ecosystem services. The study reviewed a large number of papers on the climate change-islands-ecosystem services topic worldwide. Potential inclusion of land use changes and other drivers of impacts on ecosystem services were sequentially also recorded. The study sought to investigate the impacts of climate change, land use change, and other non-climatic driver changes on island ecosystem services. Explanatory variables examined were divided into two categories: environmental variables and methodological ones. Environmental variables include sea zone geographic location, ecosystem, ecosystem services, climate, land use, other driver variables, Methodological variables include consideration of policy interventions, uncertainty assessment, cumulative effects of climate change, synergistic effects of climate change with land use change and other anthropogenic and environmental drivers, and the diversity of variables used in the analysis. Machine learning and statistical methods were used to analyze their effects on island ecosystem services. Negative climate change impacts on ecosystem services are better quantified by land use change or other non-climatic driver variables than by climate variables. The synergy of land use together with climate changes is modulating the impact outcome and critical for a better impact assessment. Analyzed together, there is little evidence of more pronounced for a specific sea zone, ecosystem, or ecosystem service. Climate change impacts may be underestimated due to the use of a single climate variable deployed in most studies. Policy interventions exhibit low classification accuracy in quantifying impacts indicating insufficient efficacy or integration in the studies.

Deepfakes - manipulated or forged audio and video media - pose significant security risks to individuals, organizations, and society at large. To address these challenges, machine learning-based classifiers are commonly employed to detect deepfake content. In this paper, we assess the robustness of such classifiers through a systematic penetration testing methodology, which we introduce as DeePen. Our approach operates without prior knowledge of or access to the target deepfake detection models. Instead, it leverages a set of carefully selected signal processing modifications - referred to as attacks - to evaluate model vulnerabilities. Using DeePen, we analyze both real-world production systems and publicly available academic model checkpoints, demonstrating that all tested systems exhibit weaknesses and can be reliably deceived by simple manipulations such as time-stretching or echo addition. Furthermore, our findings reveal that while some attacks can be mitigated by retraining detection systems with knowledge of the specific attack, others remain persistently effective. We release all associated code.

The issue of failed weaning is a critical concern in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting. This scenario occurs when a patient experiences difficulty maintaining spontaneous breathing and ensuring a patent airway within the first 48 hours after the withdrawal of mechanical ventilation. Approximately 20 of ICU patients experience this phenomenon, which has severe repercussions on their health. It also has a substantial impact on clinical evolution and mortality, which can increase by 25 to 50. To address this issue, we propose a medical support system that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to assess a patients suitability for disconnection from a mechanical ventilator after a spontaneous breathing test (SBT). During SBT, respiratory flow and electrocardiographic activity were recorded and after processed using time-frequency analysis (TFA) techniques. Two CNN architectures were evaluated in this study: one based on ResNet50, with parameters tuned using a Bayesian optimization algorithm, and another CNN designed from scratch, with its structure also adapted using a Bayesian optimization algorithm. The WEANDB database was used to train and evaluate both models. The results showed remarkable performance, with an average accuracy 98 when using CNN from scratch. This model has significant implications for the ICU because it provides a reliable tool to enhance patient care by assisting clinicians in making timely and accurate decisions regarding weaning. This can potentially reduce the adverse outcomes associated with failed weaning events.

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives--Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google's Sundar Pichai--aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-"woke" cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura's primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. "These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government," Mimura told me.

We introduce MorphNLI, a modular step-by-step approach to natural language inference (NLI). When classifying the premise-hypothesis pairs into {entailment, contradiction, neutral}, we use a language model to generate the necessary edits to incrementally transform (i.e., morph) the premise into the hypothesis. Then, using an off-the-shelf NLI model we track how the entailment progresses with these atomic changes, aggregating these intermediate labels into a final output. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method particularly in realistic cross-domain settings, where our method always outperforms strong baselines with improvements up to 12.6% (relative). Further, our proposed approach is explainable as the atomic edits can be used to understand the overall NLI label.

Deep Learning became an ubiquitous paradigm due to its extraordinary effectiveness and applicability in numerous domains. However, the approach suffers from the high demand of data required to achieve the potential of this type of model. An ever-increasing sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, Image Synthesis, aims to address this limitation through the design of intelligent models capable of creating original and realistic images, endeavour which could drastically reduce the need for real data. The Stable Diffusion generation paradigm recently propelled state-of-the-art approaches to exceed all previous benchmarks. In this work, we propose the ContRail framework based on the novel Stable Diffusion model ControlNet, which we empower through a multi-modal conditioning method. We experiment with the task of synthetic railway image generation, where we improve the performance in rail-specific tasks, such as rail semantic segmentation by enriching the dataset with realistic synthetic images.