"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with two varieties of computer voices: text-to-speech (TTS) and game character voices. We found kawaii "sweet spots" through manipulation of fundamental and formant frequencies, but only for certain voices and to a certain extent. Findings also suggest a ceiling effect for the kawaii vocalics of certain voices. We offer empirical validation of the preliminary kawaii vocalics model and an elementary method for manipulating kawaii perceptions of computer voice.

The co creativity community is making significant progress in developing more sophisticated and tailored systems to support and enhance human creativity. Design considerations from prior work can serve as a valuable and efficient foundation for future systems. To support this effort, we conducted a systematic literature review of 62 papers on co-creative systems. These papers cover a diverse range of applications, including visual arts, design, and writing, where the AI acts not just as a tool but as an active collaborator in the creative process. From this review, we identified several key dimensions relevant to system design: phase of the creative process, creative task, proactive behavior of the system, user control, system embodiment, and AI model type. Our findings suggest that systems offering high user control lead to greater satisfaction, trust, and a stronger sense of ownership over creative outcomes. Furthermore, proactive systems, when adaptive and context sensitive, can enhance collaboration. We also extracted 24 design considerations, highlighting the value of encouraging users to externalize their thoughts and of increasing the system's social presence and transparency to foster trust. Despite recent advancements, important gaps remain, such as limited support for early creative phases like problem clarification, and challenges related to user adaptation to AI systems.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has changed decision-making in many fields. But, it has also raised major privacy and ethical concerns. However, many AI incidents taxonomies and guidelines for academia, industry, and government lack grounding in real-world incidents. We analyzed 202 real-world AI privacy and ethical incidents. This produced a taxonomy that classifies incident types across AI lifecycle stages. It accounts for contextual factors such as causes, responsible entities, disclosure sources, and impacts. Our findings show insufficient incident reporting from AI developers and users. Many incidents are caused by poor organizational decisions and legal non-compliance. Only a few legal actions and corrective measures exist, while risk-mitigation efforts are limited. Our taxonomy contributes a structured approach in reporting of future AI incidents. Our findings demonstrate that current AI governance frameworks are inadequate. We urgently need child-specific protections and AI policies on social media. They must moderate and reduce the spread of harmful AI-generated content. Our research provides insights for policymakers and practitioners, which lets them design ethical AI. It also support AI incident detection and risk management. Finally, it guides AI policy development. Improved policies will protect people from harmful AI applications and support innovation in AI systems.

Using 286 research papers collected from Web of Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, arXiv, and Google Scholar databases, a systematic review methodology was adopted to review and summarize the current challenges and potential future developments in data, algorithms, and evaluation aspects of RSs. It was found that RSs involve five major research topics, namely algorithmic improvement, domain applications, user behavior & cognition, data processing & modeling, and social impact & ethics. Collaborative filtering and hybrid recommendation techniques are mainstream. The performance of RSs is jointly limited by four types of eight data issues, two types of twelve algorithmic issues, and two evaluation issues. Notably, data-related issues such as cold start, data sparsity, and data poisoning, algorithmic issues like interest drift, device-cloud collaboration, non-causal driven, and multitask conflicts, along with evaluation issues such as offline data leakage and multi-objective balancing, have prominent impacts. Fusing physiological signals for multimodal modeling, defending against data poisoning through user information behavior, evaluating generative recommendations via social experiments, fine-tuning pre-trained large models to schedule device-cloud resource, enhancing causal inference with deep reinforcement learning, training multi-task models based on probability distributions, using cross-temporal dataset partitioning, and evaluating recommendation objectives across the full lifecycle are feasible solutions to address the aforementioned prominent challenges and unlock the power and value of RSs.The collected literature is mainly based on major international databases, and future research will further expand upon it.

The Order of Canada marks its 50th anniversary this year with 99 new appointments on its Canada Day honours list, including renowned figures from the fields of law, government, entertainment and sport, as well as Canadians whose contributions are less widely known. The list includes soccer star Christine Sinclair, television host Alex Trebek, actor Catherine O'Hara and Globe and Mail editorial cartoonist Brian Gable. Three people were named to the highest rank, Companion of the Order of Canada: former Supreme Court Justice Marshall Rothstein, National Arts Centre president Peter Herrndorf and The Prince of Wales. Nineeteen people were named Officers of the Order of Canada, including former spymaster Richard Fadden, hockey player Mark Messier and actor Michael Myers. There were 77 people named as members of the Order, including opera singer Tracy Dahl, historian Bill Waiser, public health nurse Cathy Crowe and Indigenous leader Terrance Paul.