NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gives insight on the talks between President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, security guarantees for Ukraine and more on'The Ingraham Angle.' Two German warplanes were scrambled overnight from Romania after Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack in Ukraine less than a mile from the NATO borderline. Romania's Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday that two German Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, stationed at Romania's Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base as part of NATO's Enhanced Air Policing mission, were deployed "to monitor the air situation," but noted that this time no Russian aircraft or projectiles crossed the NATO border. Despite last week's talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, Moscow has continued its aerial bombardment of Ukraine, including in an overnight attack that targeted oil and port facilities in the Odesa region on and near the Danube River, which separates the Ukrainian border with the allied NATO nation of Romania. The Eurofighter EF-2000 Typhoon of the German Air Force takes off from Los Llanos military air base during the Tactical Leadership Program in Albacete, Spain, on Nov. 21, 2024. The deployment of NATO jets comes after numerous incidents in recent weeks have increasingly threatened, and even crossed, NATO borders as the U.S. and Europe continue to push for Russia to end its war.

This paper presents the Greedy Min-Cut Bayesian Consensus (GMCBC) algorithm for the structural fusion of Bayesian Networks (BNs). The method is designed to preserve essential dependencies while controlling network complexity. It addresses the limitations of traditional fusion approaches, which often lead to excessively complex models that are impractical for inference, reasoning, or real-world applications. As the number and size of input networks increase, this issue becomes even more pronounced. GMCBC integrates principles from flow network theory into BN fusion, adapting the Backward Equivalence Search (BES) phase of the Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) algorithm and applying the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for minimum cut analysis. This approach removes non-essential edges, ensuring that the fused network retains key dependencies while minimizing unnecessary complexity. Experimental results on synthetic Bayesian Networks demonstrate that GMCBC achieves near-optimal network structures. In federated learning simulations, GMCBC produces a consensus network that improves structural accuracy and dependency preservation compared to the average of the input networks, resulting in a structure that better captures the real underlying (in)dependence relationships. This consensus network also maintains a similar size to the original networks, unlike unrestricted fusion methods, where network size grows exponentially.

Millions of people around the world are infected with mosquito-borne diseases each year. One of the most dangerous species is Aedes aegypti, the main vector of viruses such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika, among others. Mosquito prevention and eradication campaigns are essential to avoid major public health consequences. In this respect, entomological surveillance is an important tool. At present, this traditional monitoring tool is executed manually and requires digital transformation to help authorities make better decisions, improve their planning efforts, speed up execution, and better manage available resources. Therefore, new technological tools based on proven techniques need to be designed and developed. However, such tools should also be cost-effective, autonomous, reliable, and easy to implement, and should be enabled by connectivity and multi-platform software applications. This paper presents the design, development, and testing of an innovative system named MosquIoT. It is based on traditional ovitraps with embedded Internet of Things (IoT) and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) technologies, which enable the detection and quantification of Ae. aegypti eggs. This innovative and promising solution may help dynamically understand the behavior of Ae. aegypti populations in cities, shifting from the current reactive entomological monitoring model to a proactive and predictive digital one.

This research paper presents an experimental approach to using the Reptile algorithm for reinforcement learning to train a neural network to play Super Mario Bros. We implement the Reptile algorithm using the Super Mario Bros Gym library and TensorFlow in Python, creating a neural network model with a single convolutional layer, a flatten layer, and a dense layer. We define the optimizer and use the Reptile class to create an instance of the Reptile meta-learning algorithm. We train the model using multiple tasks and episodes, choosing actions using the current weights of the neural network model, taking those actions in the environment, and updating the model weights using the Reptile algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm by printing the total reward for each episode. In addition, we compare the performance of the Reptile algorithm approach to two other popular reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Q-Network (DQN), applied to the same Super Mario Bros task. Our results demonstrate that the Reptile algorithm provides a promising approach to few-shot learning in video game AI, with comparable or even better performance than the other two algorithms, particularly in terms of moves vs distance that agent performs for 1M episodes of training. The results shows that best total distance for world 1-2 in the game environment were ~1732 (PPO), ~1840 (DQN) and ~2300 (RAMario). Full code is available at https://github.com/s4nyam/RAMario.

The growing use of automated decision-making in critical applications, such as crime prediction and college admission, has raised questions about fairness in machine learning. How can we decide whether different treatments are reasonable or discriminatory? In this paper, we investigate discrimination in machine learning from a visual analytics perspective and propose an interactive visualization tool, DiscriLens, to support a more comprehensive analysis. To reveal detailed information on algorithmic discrimination, DiscriLens identifies a collection of potentially discriminatory itemsets based on causal modeling and classification rules mining. By combining an extended Euler diagram with a matrix-based visualization, we develop a novel set visualization to facilitate the exploration and interpretation of discriminatory itemsets. A user study shows that users can interpret the visually encoded information in DiscriLens quickly and accurately. Use cases demonstrate that DiscriLens provides informative guidance in understanding and reducing algorithmic discrimination.

Recent research in machine teaching has explored the instruction of any concept expressed in a universal language. In this compositional context, new experimental results have shown that there exist data teaching sets surprisingly shorter than the concept description itself. However, there exists a bound for those remarkable experimental findings through teaching size and concept complexity that we further explore here. As concepts are rarely taught in isolation we investigate the best configuration of concepts to teach a given set of concepts, where those that have been acquired first can be reused for the description of new ones. This new notion of conditional teaching size uncovers new insights, such as the interposition phenomenon: certain prior knowledge generates simpler compatible concepts that increase the teaching size of the concept that we want to teach. This does not happen for conditional Kolmogorov complexity. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm that constructs optimal curricula based on interposition avoidance. This paper presents a series of theoretical results, including their proofs, and some directions for future work. New research possibilities in curriculum teaching in compositional scenarios are now wide open to exploration.

Automation and computer intelligence to support complex human decisions becomes essential to manage large and distributed systems in the Cloud and IoT era. Understanding the root cause of an observed symptom in a complex system has been a major problem for decades. As industry dives into the IoT world and the amount of data generated per year grows at an amazing speed, an important question is how to find appropriate mechanisms to determine root causes that can handle huge amounts of data or may provide valuable feedback in real-time. While many survey papers aim at summarizing the landscape of techniques for modelling system behavior and infering the root cause of a problem based in the resulting models, none of those focuses on analyzing how the different techniques in the literature fit growing requirements in terms of performance and scalability. In this survey, we provide a review of root-cause analysis, focusing on these particular aspects. We also provide guidance to choose the best root-cause analysis strategy depending on the requirements of a particular system and application.

Chairs and committees of the FLAIRS-25 conference.