We present a gamified explainable AI (XAI) system for ethically aware consumer decision-making in the coffee domain. Each session comprises six rounds with three options per round. Two symbolic engines provide real-time reasons: a Kantian module flags rule violations (e.g., child labor, deforestation risk without shade certification, opaque supply chains, unsafe decaf), and a utilitarian module scores options via multi-criteria aggregation over normalized attributes (price, carbon, water, transparency, farmer income share, taste/freshness, packaging, convenience). A meta-explainer with a regret bound (0.2) highlights Kantian--utilitarian (mis)alignment and switches to a deontically clean, near-parity option when welfare loss is small. We release a structured configuration (attribute schema, certification map, weights, rule set), a policy trace for auditability, and an interactive UI.

Abstract--Rule-Based Moral Principles for Explaining Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes applications, the challenge of explaining uncertainty in natural language generation has become both a technical and moral imperative. Traditional approaches rely on probabilistic methods that are often opaque, difficult to interpret, and misaligned with human expectations of transparency and accountability. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces a novel framework based on rule-based moral principles--simple, human-inspired ethical guidelines--for responding to uncertainty in LLM-generated text. Drawing on insights from experimental moral psychology and virtue ethics, we define a set of symbolic behavioral rules such as precaution, deference, and responsibility to guide system responses under conditions of epistemic or aleatoric uncertainty. These rules are implemented declaratively and are designed to generate adaptive, context-sensitive explanations even in the absence of precise confidence metrics. The moral principles are encoded as symbolic rules within a lightweight Prolog-based engine, where each uncertainty tag (low, medium, high) activates an ethically aligned system action along with an automatically generated, plain-language rationale. We evaluate the framework through scenario-based simulations that benchmark rule coverage, assess fairness implications, and analyze trust calibration. An interpretive explanation module is integrated to reveal both the assigned uncertainty level and its underlying justification in a transparent and accessible way. We illustrate the framework through hypothetical yet plausible use cases in clinical and legal domains, demonstrating how rule-based moral reasoning can enhance user trust, promote fairness, and improve the interpretability of AI-generated language. By offering a lightweight, philosophically grounded alternative to probabilistic uncertainty modeling, our approach paves the way for more ethical, human-aligned, and socially responsible natural language generation.

Radiation Detection Systems (RDSs) play a vital role in ensuring public safety across various settings, from nuclear facilities to medical environments. However, these systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as data injection, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, ICMP floods, bot-net attacks, privilege escalation, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Such threats could compromise the integrity and reliability of radiation measurements, posing significant public health and safety risks. This paper presents a new synthetic radiation dataset and an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) tailored for resource-constrained environments, bringing Machine Learning (ML) predictive capabilities closer to the sensing edge layer of critical infrastructure. Leveraging TinyML techniques, the proposed IDS employs an optimized XGBoost model enhanced with pruning, quantization, feature selection, and sampling. These TinyML techniques significantly reduce the size of the model and computational demands, enabling real-time intrusion detection on low-resource devices while maintaining a reasonable balance between efficiency and accuracy.

--In the user-centric cell-free massive MIMO (UC-mMIMO) network scheme, user mobility necessitates updating the set of serving access points to maintain the user-centric clustering. Such updates are typically performed through handoff (HO) operations; however, frequent HOs lead to overheads associated with the allocation and release of resources. This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based solution to predict and manage these connections for mobile users. Our solution employs the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm, with continuous action space representation, to train a deep neural network to serve as the HO policy. We present a novel proposition for a reward function that integrates a HO penalty in order to balance the attainable rate and the associated overhead related to HOs. We develop two variants of our system; the first one uses mobility direction-assisted (DA) observations that are based on the user movement pattern, while the second one uses history-assisted (HA) observations that are based on the history of the large-scale fading (LSF). Simulation results show that our DRL-based continuous action space approach is more scalable than discrete space counterpart, and that our derived HO policy automatically learns to gather HOs in specific time slots to minimize the overhead of initiating HOs. Our solution can also operate in real time with a response time less than 0 . Index T erms --Mobility, handoff, handover, user-centric, cell-free massive MIMO, distributed MIMO, deep-reinforcement learning, soft actor critic, machine learning, channel aging. User-centric cell-free massive MIMO (UC-mMIMO) is a wireless network architecture where each user is served by a custom group of neighboring access points (APs) which are connected to a central unit (CU) via fronthaul links [1]. Unlike the current cellular system that is based on macro base stations, UC-mMIMO deploys cooperative APs that jointly serve users without relying on a traditional cellular boundaries. UC-mMIMO helps to achieve reliable wireless connectivity and provides uniform performance throughout the network [1], [2]. However, this beyond-5G mobile wireless network architecture introduces the key challenge of determining the connections between the APs and the users when moving through the network [3].

Planar four-bar mechanisms are widely used in mechanical systems due to their simplicity and versatility. In designing a mechanism to achieve a desired task, accurately calculating its dimensions--a process known as dimensional synthesis--is essential. However, even for four-bar mechanisms, this synthesis presents considerable challenges. Unlike kinematic analysis, which determines output motion from given dimensions, dimensional synthesis is an inverse problem: given a desired output motion, typically expressed as precision points, the objective is to determine the corresponding mechanism dimensions. Extensive research has been conducted on dimensional synthesis since Freudenstein [1] introduced his foundational analytical approach for four-bar mechanisms. Contemporary studies in this field follow two major approaches: exact synthesis, also known as the precision point approach, which aims to find mechanism dimensions that satisfy desired characteristics exactly only at a finite number of discrete precision points, and the approximate approach, which focuses on obtaining solutions that minimize structural error over the entire range of motion. In this study, a novel data-driven approach is proposed to solve the dimensional synthesis problem of multi-type four-bar function generation mechanisms, leveraging machine learning to bypass the need to solve complex systems of equations and conduct optimization tasks. A supervised learning framework consisting of three key components is proposed: 1) a large synthetic dataset, 2) a deep neural network model, and 3) effective training methods.

Fine-tuning multilingual sequence-to-sequence large language models (msLLMs) has shown promise in developing neural machine translation (NMT) systems for low-resource languages (LRLs). However, conventional single-stage fine-tuning methods struggle in extremely low-resource NMT settings, where training data is very limited. This paper contributes to artificial intelligence by proposing two approaches for adapting msLLMs in these challenging scenarios: (1) continual pre-training (CPT), where the msLLM is further trained with domain-specific monolingual data to compensate for the under-representation of LRLs, and (2) intermediate task transfer learning (ITTL), a method that fine-tunes the msLLM with both in-domain and out-of-domain parallel data to enhance its translation capabilities across various domains and tasks. As an application in engineering, these methods are implemented in NMT systems for Sinhala, Tamil, and English (six language pairs) in domain-specific, extremely low-resource settings (datasets containing fewer than 100,000 samples). Our experiments reveal that these approaches enhance translation performance by an average of +1.47 bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score compared to the standard single-stage fine-tuning baseline across all translation directions. Additionally, a multi-model ensemble further improves performance by an additional BLEU score.

This study evaluated self-reported response certainty across several large language models (GPT, Claude, Llama, Phi, Mistral, Gemini, Gemma, and Qwen) using 300 gastroenterology board-style questions. The highest-performing models (GPT-o1 preview, GPT-4o, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet) achieved Brier scores of 0.15-0.2 and AUROC of 0.6. Although newer models demonstrated improved performance, all exhibited a consistent tendency towards overconfidence. Uncertainty estimation presents a significant challenge to the safe use of LLMs in healthcare. Keywords: Large Language Models; Confidence Elicitation; Artificial Intelligence; Gastroenterology; Uncertainty Quantification

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled diverse devices to communicate over the Internet, yet the fragmentation of IoT systems limits seamless data sharing and coordinated management. We have recently introduced SensorsConnect, a unified framework to enable seamless content and sensor data sharing in collaborative IoT systems, inspired by how the World Wide Web (WWW) enabled a shared and accessible space for information among humans. This paper presents the IoT Agentic Search Engine (IoT-ASE), a real-time search engine tailored for IoT environments. IoT-ASE leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to address the challenge of searching vast, real-time IoT data, enabling it to handle complex queries and deliver accurate, contextually relevant results. We implemented a use-case scenario in Toronto to demonstrate how IoT-ASE can improve service quality recommendations by leveraging real-time IoT data. Our evaluation shows that IoT-ASE achieves a 92\% accuracy in retrieving intent-based services and produces responses that are concise, relevant, and context-aware, outperforming generalized responses from systems like Gemini. These findings highlight the potential IoT-ASE to make real-time IoT data accessible and support effective, real-time decision-making.

The modern power grids are integrated with digital technologies and automation systems. The inclusion of digital technologies has made the smart grids vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Cyberattacks on smart grids can compromise data integrity and jeopardize the reliability of the power supply. Traditional intrusion detection systems often need help to effectively detect novel and sophisticated attacks due to their reliance on labeled training data, which may only encompass part of the spectrum of potential threats. This work proposes a semi-supervised method for cyber-attack detection in smart grids by leveraging the labeled and unlabeled measurement data. We implement consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling to identify deviations from expected behavior and predict the attack classes. We use a curriculum learning approach to improve pseudo-labeling performance, capturing the model uncertainty. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in detecting different types of cyberattacks, minimizing the false positives by implementing them on publicly available datasets. The method proposes a promising solution by improving the detection accuracy to 99% in the presence of unknown samples and significantly reducing false positives.

Zero-Touch Networks (ZTNs) represent a state-of-the-art paradigm shift towards fully automated and intelligent network management, enabling the automation and intelligence required to manage the complexity, scale, and dynamic nature of next-generation (6G) networks. ZTNs leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to enhance operational efficiency, support intelligent decision-making, and ensure effective resource allocation. However, the implementation of ZTNs is subject to security challenges that need to be resolved to achieve their full potential. In particular, two critical challenges arise: the need for human expertise in developing AI/ML-based security mechanisms, and the threat of adversarial attacks targeting AI/ML models. In this survey paper, we provide a comprehensive review of current security issues in ZTNs, emphasizing the need for advanced AI/ML-based security mechanisms that require minimal human intervention and protect AI/ML models themselves. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Automated ML (AutoML) technologies in developing robust security solutions for ZTNs. Through case studies, we illustrate practical approaches to securing ZTNs against both conventional and AI/ML-specific threats, including the development of autonomous intrusion detection systems and strategies to combat Adversarial ML (AML) attacks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future research directions for the development of ZTN security approaches.