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UAB softball coach under investigation amid shocking allegations of punching player, racist comments and abuse

FOX News

President Trump on $1,000 World Cup ticket prices: 'I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest' Pirates vs. Diamondbacks betting preview targets the under as both offenses go cold in series Former LSU coach Brian Kelly uses AI to prepare for job interviews, proving he's just like the rest of us Newsom office source responds to planned protest against trans athlete at state playoff girls' track meet Framber Valdez gets what he deserves for punk move, suspended six games after drilling Boston's Trevor Story'Project Freedom' could soon resume: Report Iranian people are not citizens, but'subjects' of the regime: Middle East expert Vice Admiral Robert Harward weighs in on restarting'Project Freedom' in Strait of Hormuz Largest teachers' union accused of antisemitism in federal civil rights complaint McEnany's URGENT plea: 'Be Spencer Pratt!' WHO doesn't expect large Hantavirus outbreak US blockade keeps stranglehold on Iran's economy The UAB athletic department is investigating allegations of mental and physical abuse of players by head softball coach Taylor Smartt. Entering her second season with the Blazers in Birmingham, Alabama, Smartt had hoped to turn her first stint as a head coach into a success story. But there had been discussions around her coaching philosophy just months after she set foot on campus. Now, nearly two years later, the school finds itself in a terrible spot, as accusations of serious misconduct arise and an investigation by the athletic department heats up. On April 25, Taylor stepped away from the UAB softball team as the team was headed to Florida for a three-game series with USF in the American Conference.


Windshield wipers' overlooked female inventor

Popular Science

Windshield wipers' overlooked female inventor On November 10, 1903, Birmingham businesswoman Mary Anderson was issued U.S. Patent No. 743,801 for her "Window-Cleaning Device." We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Before cars and buses became ubiquitous features of the modern cityscape, many cities installed streetcars to shuttle residents from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the summer months, the journey was a sweltering one, with dozens of sticky, sweaty passengers crammed together in the heat. The biggest problem wasn't that trolleys were unheated--that advancement came with their electrification in the 1890s--it was that sleet and snow made it impossible for streetcar drivers to see.


AI Deepfakes Are Impersonating Pastors to Try to Scam Their Congregations

WIRED

Religious communities around the US are getting hit with AI depictions of their leaders sharing incendiary sermons and asking for donations. Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest and podcaster, addressed his congregation of more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers in November with an unusual kind of homily. You couldn't always trust the words coming out of his mouth, Schmitz said, because sometimes they weren't really his words--or his mouth. Schmitz had become the target of AI-generated impersonation scams . "You're being watched by a demonic human," said the fake Schmitz in one video that the real Schmitz, wearing an L.L. Bean jacket over his clerical suit, included in his public service announcement as an example.


Scientists Thought Parkinson's Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water

WIRED

Scientists Thought Parkinson's Was in Our Genes. New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously. Amy Lindberg spent 26 years in the Navy and she still walked like it--with intention, like her chin had someplace to be. But around 2017, her right foot stopped following orders. Lindberg and her husband Brad were five years into their retirement. After moving 10 times for Uncle Sam, they'd bought their dream house near the North Carolina coast. They had a backyard that spilled out onto wetlands. From the kitchen, you could see cranes hunting. They kept bees and played pickleball and watched their children grow. But now Lindberg's right foot was out of rhythm. She worked hard to ignore it, but she couldn't disregard the tremors.


Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations

The Guardian

In less than a year-and-a-half, Frankie Johnson, a man incarcerated at the William E Donaldson prison outside Birmingham, Alabama, says he was stabbed around 20 times. In December of 2019, Johnson says, he was stabbed "at least nine times" in his housing unit. In March of 2020, an officer handcuffed him to a desk following a group therapy meeting, and left the unit, after which another prisoner came in and stabbed him five times. In November of the same year, Johnson says, he was handcuffed by an officer and brought to the prison yard, where another prisoner attacked him with an ice pick, stabbing him "five to six times", as two correctional officers looked on. According to Johnson, one of the officers had actually encouraged his attacker to carry out the assault in retaliation for a previous argument between Johnson and the officer.


EquiHGNN: Scalable Rotationally Equivariant Hypergraph Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Molecular interactions often involve high-order relationships that cannot be fully captured by traditional graph-based models limited to pairwise connections. Hypergraphs naturally extend graphs by enabling multi-way interactions, making them well-suited for modeling complex molecular systems. In this work, we introduce EquiHGNN, an Equivariant HyperGraph Neural Network framework that integrates symmetry-aware representations to improve molecular modeling. By enforcing the equivariance under relevant transformation groups, our approach preserves geometric and topological properties, leading to more robust and physically meaningful representations. We examine a range of equivariant architectures and demonstrate that integrating symmetry constraints leads to notable performance gains on large-scale molecular datasets. Experiments on both small and large molecules show that high-order interactions offer limited benefits for small molecules but consistently outperform 2D graphs on larger ones. Adding geometric features to these high-order structures further improves the performance, emphasizing the value of spatial information in molecular learning. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HySonLab/EquiHGNN/


The study of short texts in digital politics: Document aggregation for topic modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Statistical topic modeling is widely used in political science to study text. Researchers examine documents of varying lengths, from tweets to speeches. There is ongoing debate on how document length affects the interpretability of topic models. We investigate the effects of aggregating short documents into larger ones based on natural units that partition the corpus. In our study, we analyze one million tweets by U.S. state legislators from April 2016 to September 2020. We find that for documents aggregated at the account level, topics are more associated with individual states than when using individual tweets. This finding is replicated with Wikipedia pages aggregated by birth cities, showing how document definitions can impact topic modeling results.


Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Machine Learning Interpretability and Predictive Performance: A Case Study on Emergency Department Returns for Mental Health Patients

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Importance: Emergency department (ED) returns for mental health conditions pose a major healthcare burden, with 24-27% of patients returning within 30 days. Traditional machine learning models for predicting these returns often lack interpretability for clinical use. Objective: To assess whether integrating large language models (LLMs) with machine learning improves predictive accuracy and clinical interpretability of ED mental health return risk models. Methods: This retrospective cohort study analyzed 42,464 ED visits for 27,904 unique mental health patients at an academic medical center in the Deep South from January 2018 to December 2022. Main Outcomes and Measures: Two primary outcomes were evaluated: (1) 30-day ED return prediction accuracy and (2) model interpretability using a novel LLM-enhanced framework integrating SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values with clinical knowledge. Results: For chief complaint classification, LLaMA 3 (8B) with 10-shot learning outperformed traditional models (accuracy: 0.882, F1-score: 0.86). In SDoH classification, LLM-based models achieved 0.95 accuracy and 0.96 F1-score, with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Substance Abuse performing best (F1: 0.96-0.89), while Exercise and Home Environment showed lower performance (F1: 0.70-0.67). The LLM-based interpretability framework achieved 99% accuracy in translating model predictions into clinically relevant explanations. LLM-extracted features improved XGBoost AUC from 0.74 to 0.76 and AUC-PR from 0.58 to 0.61. Conclusions and Relevance: Integrating LLMs with machine learning models yielded modest but consistent accuracy gains while significantly enhancing interpretability through automated, clinically relevant explanations. This approach provides a framework for translating predictive analytics into actionable clinical insights.


Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning in Augmented Biomedical Knowledge Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Biomedical Knowledge Graphs (BKGs) integrate diverse datasets to elucidate complex relationships within the biomedical field. Effective link prediction on these graphs can uncover valuable connections, such as potential novel drug-disease relations. We introduce a novel multimodal approach that unifies embeddings from specialized Language Models (LMs) with Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) to enhance intra-entity relationships while employing a Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) model to capture inter-entity relationships for effective link prediction. To address limitations in existing BKGs, we present PrimeKG++, an enriched knowledge graph incorporating multimodal data, including biological sequences and textual descriptions for each entity type. By combining semantic and relational information in a unified representation, our approach demonstrates strong generalizability, enabling accurate link predictions even for unseen nodes. Experimental results on PrimeKG++ and the DrugBank drug-target interaction dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method across diverse biomedical datasets. Our source code, pre-trained models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/BioMedKG


Hybridising Reinforcement Learning and Heuristics for Hierarchical Directed Arc Routing Problems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Hierarchical Directed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (HDCARP) is an extension of the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP), where the arcs of a graph are divided into classes based on their priority. The traversal of these classes is determined by either precedence constraints or a hierarchical objective, resulting in two distinct HDCARP variants. To the best of our knowledge, only one matheuristic has been proposed for these variants, but it performs relatively slowly, particularly for large-scale instances (Ha et al., 2024). In this paper, we propose a fast heuristic to efficiently address the computational challenges of HDCARP. Furthermore, we incorporate Reinforcement Learning (RL) into our heuristic to effectively guide the selection of local search operators, resulting in a hybrid algorithm. We name this hybrid algorithm as the Hybrid Reinforcement Learning and Heuristic Algorithm for Directed Arc Routing (HRDA). The hybrid algorithm adapts to changes in the problem dynamically, using real-time feedback to improve routing strategies and solution's quality by integrating heuristic methods. Extensive computational experiments on artificial instances demonstrate that this hybrid approach significantly improves the speed of the heuristic without deteriorating the solution quality. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/HySonLab/ArcRoute