Understanding the real-world effects of recreational drug use remains a critical challenge in public health and biomedical research, especially as traditional surveillance systems often underrepresent user experiences. In this study, we leverage social media (specifically Twitter) as a rich and unfiltered source of user-reported effects associated with three emerging psychoactive substances: ecstasy, GHB, and 2C-B. By combining a curated list of slang terms with biomedical concept extraction via MetaMap, we identified and weakly annotated over 92,000 tweets mentioning these substances. Each tweet was labeled with a polarity reflecting whether it reported a positive or negative effect, following an expert-guided heuristic process. We then performed descriptive and comparative analyses of the reported phenotypic outcomes across substances and trained multiple machine learning classifiers to predict polarity from tweet content, accounting for strong class imbalance using techniques such as cost-sensitive learning and synthetic oversampling. The top performance on the test set was obtained from eXtreme Gradient Boosting with cost-sensitive learning (F1 = 0.885, AUPRC = 0.934). Our findings reveal that Twitter enables the detection of substance-specific phenotypic effects, and that polarity classification models can support real-time pharmacovigilance and drug effect characterization with high accuracy.

The Auto'Mate technologies were tested on several DT-25 target drones, and during almost six hours of flight testing, the four successively launched receivers were sequentially controlled and commanded without human interaction. These cutting-edge technologies demonstrate a significant breakthrough for future aerial operations involving manned and unmanned assets, and could reduce crew fatigue, minimize crew-training costs, and provide more effective operations. A second campaign is planned towards the end of 2023, which will explore the use of navigation sensors based on artificial intelligence and enhanced algorithms for autonomous formation flight. This groundbreaking achievement is a significant step towards autonomous formation flight and autonomous air-to-air refueling (A4R), and holds great potential for future aerial operations involving both manned and unmanned assets. "The success of this first flight-test campaign paves the way for developing autonomous and unmanned air-to-air refuelling technologies," said Jean Brice Dumont, Head of Military Air Systems at Airbus Defence and Space.

Sky-image-based solar forecasting using deep learning has been recognized as a promising approach in reducing the uncertainty in solar power generation. However, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of massive and diversified sky image samples. In this study, we present a comprehensive survey of open-source ground-based sky image datasets for very short-term solar forecasting (i.e., forecasting horizon less than 30 minutes), as well as related research areas which can potentially help improve solar forecasting methods, including cloud segmentation, cloud classification and cloud motion prediction. We first identify 72 open-source sky image datasets that satisfy the needs of machine/deep learning. Then a database of information about various aspects of the identified datasets is constructed. To evaluate each surveyed datasets, we further develop a multi-criteria ranking system based on 8 dimensions of the datasets which could have important impacts on usage of the data. Finally, we provide insights on the usage of these datasets for different applications. We hope this paper can provide an overview for researchers who are looking for datasets for very short-term solar forecasting and related areas.

Most representative decision tree ensemble methods have been used to examine the variable importance of Treasury term spreads to predict US economic recessions with a balance of generating rules for US economic recession detection. A strategy is proposed for training the classifiers with Treasury term spreads data and the results are compared in order to select the best model for interpretability. We also discuss the use of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) framework to understand US recession forecasts by analyzing feature importance. Consistently with the existing literature we find the most relevant Treasury term spreads for predicting US economic recession and a methodology for detecting relevant rules for economic recession detection. In this case, the most relevant term spread found is 3 month to 6 month, which is proposed to be monitored by economic authorities. Finally, the methodology detected rules with high lift on predicting economic recession that can be used by these entities for this propose. This latter result stands in contrast to a growing body of literature demonstrating that machine learning methods are useful for interpretation comparing many alternative algorithms and we discuss the interpretation for our result and propose further research lines aligned with this work.

In this paper it is reconsidered the prediction problem in time series framework by using a new non-parametric approach. Through this reconsideration, the prediction is obtained by a weighted sum of past observed data. These weights are obtained by solving a constrained linear optimization problem that minimizes an outer bound of the prediction error. The innovation is to consider both deterministic and stochastic assumptions in order to obtain the upper bound of the prediction error, a tuning parameter is used to balance these deterministic-stochastic assumptions in order to improve the predictor performance. A benchmark is included to illustrate that the proposed predictor can obtain suitable results in a prediction scheme, and can be an interesting alternative method to the classical non-parametric methods. Besides, it is shown how this model can outperform the preexisting ones in a short term forecast.

We present a survey on multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT), which has gained a lot of traction in the recent years. MNMT has been useful in improving translation quality as a result of translation knowledge transfer (transfer learning). MNMT is more promising and interesting than its statistical machine translation counterpart because end-to-end modeling and distributed representations open new avenues for research on machine translation. Many approaches have been proposed in order to exploit multilingual parallel corpora for improving translation quality. However, the lack of a comprehensive survey makes it difficult to determine which approaches are promising and hence deserve further exploration. In this paper, we present an in-depth survey of existing literature on MNMT. We first categorize various approaches based on their central use-case and then further categorize them based on resource scenarios, underlying modeling principles, core-issues and challenges. Wherever possible we address the strengths and weaknesses of several techniques by comparing them with each other. We also discuss the future directions that MNMT research might take. This paper is aimed towards both, beginners and experts in NMT. We hope this paper will serve as a starting point as well as a source of new ideas for researchers and engineers interested in MNMT.

Octopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables. And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Robotic milking machines, in which cows queue up to milk themselves, are now mainstream, while systems tat automatically feed or track the health of livestock are on the rise.

In order to address complex systems, apply pattern recongnition on their evolution could play an key role to understand their dynamics. Global patterns are required to detect emergent concepts and trends, some of them with qualitative nature. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a theory whose goal is to discover and to extract Knowledge from qualitative data. It provides tools for reasoning with implication basis (and association rules). Implications and association rules are usefull to reasoning on previously selected attributes, providing a formal foundation for logical reasoning. In this paper we analyse how to apply FCA reasoning to increase confidence in sports betting, by means of detecting temporal regularities from data. It is applied to build a Knowledge Based system for confidence reasoning.