Are we living in a simulation? The idea that we might be living in a simulated reality has worried us for centuries. Thomas Anderson - otherwise known as Neo - is walking up a flight of stairs when he sees a black cat shake itself and walk past a doorway. Then the moment seems to replay before his eyes. Just a touch of déjà vu, he thinks.

A flotilla of uncrewed wolf pack drone boats has successfully been used to escort warships in a Royal Navy and Army trial. The Navy said it was a milestone demonstration of how it could utilise such technology in a real-life scenario. With camera and sensor data being fed back to Patrick Blackett, five 7.2m autonomous Rattler boats safely escorted the two ships playing the role of foreign warships during the 72-hour milestone training exercise, it said. The demonstration was a culmination of months of trials by the Navy's Disruptive Capabilities and Technology Office (DCTO) and the Fleet Experimentation Squadron (FXS). Each of the Rattler boats were operated by a two-person team, with one responsible for piloting the drone and the other monitoring and operating onboard systems, as well as helping to manage live data streams.

--Skeleton-based T emporal Action Segmentation (ST AS) aims to segment and recognize various actions from long, untrimmed sequences of human skeletal movements. Current ST AS methods typically employ spatio-temporal modeling to establish dependencies among joints as well as frames, and utilize one-hot encoding with cross-entropy loss for frame-wise classification supervision. However, these methods overlook the intrinsic correlations among joints and actions within skeletal features, leading to a limited understanding of human movements. T o address this, we propose a T ext-Derived Relational Graph-Enhanced Network (TRG-Net) that leverages prior graphs generated by Large Language Models (LLM) to enhance both modeling and supervision. For modeling, the Dynamic Spatio-T emporal Fusion Modeling (DSFM) method incorporates T ext-Derived Joint Graphs (TJG) with channel-and frame-level dynamic adaptation to effectively model spatial relations, while integrating spatio-temporal core features during temporal modeling. For supervision, the Absolute-Relative Inter-Class Supervision (ARIS) method employs contrastive learning between action features and text embeddings to regularize the absolute class distributions, and utilizes T ext-Derived Action Graphs (T AG) to capture the relative inter-class relationships among action features. Additionally, we propose a Spatial-A ware Enhancement Processing (SAEP) method, which incorporates random joint occlusion and axial rotation to enhance spatial generalization. Performance evaluations on four public datasets demonstrate that TRG-Net achieves state-of-the-art results. EMPORAL Action Segmentation (T AS), an advanced task in video understanding, aims to segment and recognize each action within long, untrimmed video sequences of human activities [1]. Similar to how semantic segmentation predicts labels for each pixel in an image, T AS predicts action labels for each frame in a video. As a significant task in computer vision, T AS finds applications in various domains such as medical rehabilitation, [2], industrial monitoring [3], and activity analysis [4]. Haoyu Ji, Bowen Chen, Weihong Ren, Wenze Huang, Zhihao Y ang, Zhiyong Wang, and Honghai Liu are with the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, Shenzhen 518055, China (e-mail: jihaoyu1224@gmail.com, The code is available at https://github.com/HaoyuJi/TRG-Net. The text embeddings and relational graphs generated by large language models can serve as priors for enhancing modeling and supervision of action segmentation. Specifically, the text-derived joint graph effectively captures spatial correlations, while the text-derived action graph and action embeddings supervise the relationships and distributions of action classes. Existing T AS methods can be broadly categorized into two types based on input modality: Video-based T AS (VT AS) and Skeleton-based T AS (ST AS) [5]-[7].

While cloud environments and auto-scaling solutions have been widely applied to traditional monolithic applications, they face significant limitations when it comes to microservices-based architectures. Microservices introduce additional challenges due to their dynamic and spatiotemporal characteristics, which require more efficient and specialized auto-scaling strategies. Centralized auto-scaling for the entire microservice application is insufficient, as each service within a chain has distinct specifications and performance requirements. Therefore, each service requires its own dedicated auto-scaler to address its unique scaling needs effectively, while also considering the dependencies with other services in the chain and the overall application. This paper presents a combination of control theory, machine learning, and heuristics to address these challenges. We propose an adaptive auto-scaling framework, STaleX, for microservices that integrates spatiotemporal features, enabling real-time resource adjustments to minimize SLO violations. STaleX employs a set of weighted Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers for each service, where weights are dynamically adjusted based on a supervisory unit that integrates spatiotemporal features. This supervisory unit continuously monitors and adjusts both the weights and the resources allocated to each service. Our framework accounts for spatial features, including service specifications and dependencies among services, as well as temporal variations in workload, ensuring that resource allocation is continuously optimized. Through experiments on a microservice-based demo application deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving performance and reducing costs compared to traditional scaling methods like Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) with a 26.9% reduction in resource usage.

Teleoperation can transfer human perception and cognition to a slave robot to cope with some complex tasks, in which the agility and flexibility of the interface play an important role in mapping human intention to the robot. In this paper, we developed an agile large-workspace teleoperation interface by estimating human arm behavior. Using the wearable sensor, namely the inertial measurement unit and surface electromyography armband, we can capture the human arm motion and force information, thereby intuitively controlling the manipulation of the robot. The control principle of our wearable interface includes two parts: (1) the arm incremental kinematics and (2) the grasping recognition. Moreover, we developed a teleoperation framework with a time synchronization mechanism for the real-time application. We conducted experimental comparisons with a versatile haptic device (Omega 7) to verify the effectiveness of our interface and framework. Seven subjects are invited to complete three different tasks: free motion, handover, and pick-and-place action (each task ten times), and the total number of tests is 420. Objectively, we used the task completion time and success rate to compare the performance of the two interfaces quantitatively. In addition, to quantify the operator experience, we used the NASA Task Load Index to assess their subjective feelings. The results showed that the proposed interface achieved a competitive performance with a better operating experience.

Many incurable diseases prevalent across global societies stem from various influences, including lifestyle choices, economic conditions, social factors, and genetics. Research predominantly focuses on these diseases due to their widespread nature, aiming to decrease mortality, enhance treatment options, and improve healthcare standards. Among these, kidney disease stands out as a particularly severe condition affecting men and women worldwide. Nonetheless, there is a pressing need for continued research into innovative, early diagnostic methods to develop more effective treatments for such diseases. Recently, automatic diagnosis of Kidney Cancer has become an important challenge especially when using deep learning (DL) due to the importance of training medical datasets, which in most cases are difficult and expensive to obtain. Furthermore, in most cases, algorithms require data from the same domain and a powerful computer with efficient storage capacity. To overcome this issue, a new type of learning known as transfer learning (TL) has been proposed that can produce impressive results based on other different pre-trained data. This paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first comprehensive survey of DL-based TL frameworks for kidney cancer diagnosis. This is a strong contribution to help researchers understand the current challenges and perspectives of this topic. Hence, the main limitations and advantages of each framework are identified and detailed critical analyses are provided. Looking ahead, the article identifies promising directions for future research. Moving on, the discussion is concluded by reflecting on the pivotal role of TL in the development of precision medicine and its effects on clinical practice and research in oncology.

The classification of statements provided by individuals during police interviews is a complex and significant task within the domain of natural language processing (NLP) and legal informatics. The lack of extensive domain-specific datasets raises challenges to the advancement of NLP methods in the field. This paper aims to address some of the present challenges by introducing a novel dataset tailored for classification of statements made during police interviews, prior to court proceedings. Utilising the curated dataset for training and evaluation, we introduce a fine-tuned DistilBERT model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in distinguishing truthful from deceptive statements. To enhance interpretability, we employ explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to offer explainability through saliency maps, that interpret the model's decision-making process. Lastly, we present an XAI interface that empowers both legal professionals and non-specialists to interact with and benefit from our system. Our model achieves an accuracy of 86%, and is shown to outperform a custom transformer architecture in a comparative study. This holistic approach advances the accessibility, transparency, and effectiveness of statement analysis, with promising implications for both legal practice and research.

Soft growing vine robots show great potential for navigation and decontamination tasks in the nuclear industry. This paper introduces a novel hybrid continuum-eversion robot designed to address certain challenges in relation to navigating and operating within pipe networks and enclosed remote vessels. The hybrid robot combines the flexibility of a soft eversion robot with the precision of a continuum robot at its tip, allowing for controlled steering and movement in hard to access and/or complex environments. The design enables the delivery of sensors, liquids, and aerosols to remote areas, supporting remote decontamination activities. This paper outlines the design and construction of the robot and the methods by which it achieves selective steering. We also include a comprehensive review of current related work in eversion robotics, as well as other steering devices and actuators currently under research, which underpin this novel active steering approach. This is followed by an experimental evaluation that demonstrates the robot's real-world capabilities in delivering liquids and aerosols to remote locations. The experiments reveal successful outcomes, with over 95% success in precision spraying tests. The paper concludes by discussing future work alongside limitations in the current design, ultimately showcasing its potential as a solution for remote decontamination operations in the nuclear industry.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning (ML) approach that enables multiple decentralized devices or edge servers to collaboratively train a shared model without exchanging raw data. During the training and sharing of model updates between clients and servers, data and models are susceptible to different data-poisoning attacks. In this study, our motivation is to explore the severity of data poisoning attacks in the computer network domain because they are easy to implement but difficult to detect. We considered two types of data-poisoning attacks, label flipping (LF) and feature poisoning (FP), and applied them with a novel approach. In LF, we randomly flipped the labels of benign data and trained the model on the manipulated data. For FP, we randomly manipulated the highly contributing features determined using the Random Forest algorithm. The datasets used in this experiment were CIC and UNSW related to computer networks. We generated adversarial samples using the two attacks mentioned above, which were applied to a small percentage of datasets. Subsequently, we trained and tested the accuracy of the model on adversarial datasets. We recorded the results for both benign and manipulated datasets and observed significant differences between the accuracy of the models on different datasets. From the experimental results, it is evident that the LF attack failed, whereas the FP attack showed effective results, which proved its significance in fooling a server. With a 1% LF attack on the CIC, the accuracy was approximately 0.0428 and the ASR was 0.9564; hence, the attack is easily detectable, while with a 1% FP attack, the accuracy and ASR were both approximately 0.9600, hence, FP attacks are difficult to detect. We repeated the experiment with different poisoning percentages.