The misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer emotions from text for malicious purposes, known as emotion inference attacks, poses a significant threat to user privacy. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Apple Intelligence's writing tools, integrated across iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, to mitigate these risks through text modifications such as rewriting and tone adjustment. By developing early novel datasets specifically for this purpose, we empirically assess how different text modifications influence LLM-based detection. This capability suggests strong potential for Apple Intelligence's writing tools as privacy-preserving mechanisms. Our findings lay the groundwork for future adaptive rewriting systems capable of dynamically neutralizing sensitive emotional content to enhance user privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this research provides the first empirical analysis of Apple Intelligence's text-modification tools within a privacy-preservation context with the broader goal of developing on-device, user-centric privacy-preserving mechanisms to protect against LLMs-based advanced inference attacks on deployed systems.

Recent advancements in semi-supervised deep learning have introduced effective strategies for leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data to improve classification performance. This work proposes a semi-supervised framework that utilizes a distance-based weighting mechanism to prioritize critical training samples based on their proximity to test data. By focusing on the most informative examples, the method enhances model generalization and robustness, particularly in challenging scenarios with noisy or imbalanced datasets. Building on techniques such as uncertainty consistency and graph-based representations, the approach addresses key challenges of limited labeled data while maintaining scalability. Experiments on twelve benchmark datasets demonstrate significant improvements across key metrics, including accuracy, precision, and recall, consistently outperforming existing methods. This framework provides a robust and practical solution for semi-supervised learning, with potential applications in domains such as healthcare and security where data limitations pose significant challenges.

Language models (LMs) are machine learning models designed to predict linguistic patterns by estimating the probability of word sequences based on large-scale datasets, such as text. LMs have a wide range of applications in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including autocomplete and machine translation. Although larger datasets typically enhance LM performance, scalability remains a challenge due to constraints in computational power and resources. Distributed computing strategies offer essential solutions for improving scalability and managing the growing computational demand. Further, the use of sensitive datasets in training and deployment raises significant privacy concerns. Recent research has focused on developing decentralized techniques to enable distributed training and inference while utilizing diverse computational resources and enabling edge AI. This paper presents a survey on distributed solutions for various LMs, including large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), and small language models (SLMs). While LLMs focus on processing and generating text, MLLMs are designed to handle multiple modalities of data (e.g., text, images, and audio) and to integrate them for broader applications. To this end, this paper reviews key advancements across the MLLM pipeline, including distributed training, inference, fine-tuning, and deployment, while also identifying the contributions, limitations, and future areas of improvement. Further, it categorizes the literature based on six primary focus areas of decentralization. Our analysis describes gaps in current methodologies for enabling distributed solutions for LMs and outline future research directions, emphasizing the need for novel solutions to enhance the robustness and applicability of distributed LMs.

Edge computing systems struggle to efficiently manage multiple concurrent deep neural network (DNN) workloads while meeting strict latency requirements, minimizing power consumption, and maintaining environmental sustainability. This paper introduces Ecomap, a sustainability-driven framework that dynamically adjusts the maximum power threshold of edge devices based on real-time carbon intensity. Ecomap incorporates the innovative use of mixed-quality models, allowing it to dynamically replace computationally heavy DNNs with lighter alternatives when latency constraints are violated, ensuring service responsiveness with minimal accuracy loss. Additionally, it employs a transformer-based estimator to guide efficient workload mappings. Experimental results using NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier demonstrate that Ecomap reduces carbon emissions by an average of 30% and achieves a 25% lower carbon delay product (CDP) compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining comparable or better latency and power efficiency.

Accordingly, education researchers and practitioners have increasingly turned to AI literacy as an important learning objective. However, the definition of AI literacy remains vague. Researchers have used the term to describe learning interventions that differ by in school contexts, learning objectives, and types of AI technologies they use. Furthermore, the research of AI literacy is shifting significantly in the wake of generative AI. Thus, it is crucial to review the field and develop a conceptual framework that captures the diverse conceptualizations of AI literacy. The concept of AI literacy and recognition of its potential significance are well-established [75, 127]. One of the pioneering works by Touretzky et al. in 2019 laid out "five big ideas" for the AI4K12 initiative: "computers perceive the world using sensors", "agents maintain models/representations of the world and use them for reasoning", "computers can learn from data", "making agents interact with humans is a substantial challenge for AI developers", and "AI applications can impact society in both positive and negative ways" [127]. This paper had a major influence on subsequent AI literacy curriculum design. The next year, another prominent work by Long and Magerko defined AI literacy as "a set

The rapid proliferation of speech-enabled technologies, including virtual assistants, video conferencing platforms, and wearable devices, has raised significant privacy concerns, particularly regarding the inference of sensitive emotional information from audio data. Existing privacy-preserving methods often compromise usability and security, limiting their adoption in practical scenarios. This paper introduces a novel, user-centric approach that leverages familiar audio editing techniques, specifically pitch and tempo manipulation, to protect emotional privacy without sacrificing usability. By analyzing popular audio editing applications on Android and iOS platforms, we identified these features as both widely available and usable. We rigorously evaluated their effectiveness against a threat model, considering adversarial attacks from diverse sources, including Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and and reversibility testing. Our experiments, conducted on three distinct datasets, demonstrate that pitch and tempo manipulation effectively obfuscates emotional data. Additionally, we explore the design principles for lightweight, on-device implementation to ensure broad applicability across various devices and platforms.

We present GeoLLM-Squad, a geospatial Copilot that introduces the novel multi-agent paradigm to remote sensing (RS) workflows. Unlike existing single-agent approaches that rely on monolithic large language models (LLM), GeoLLM-Squad separates agentic orchestration from geospatial task-solving, by delegating RS tasks to specialized sub-agents. Built on the open-source AutoGen and GeoLLM-Engine frameworks, our work enables the modular integration of diverse applications, spanning urban monitoring, forestry protection, climate analysis, and agriculture studies. Our results demonstrate that while single-agent systems struggle to scale with increasing RS task complexity, GeoLLM-Squad maintains robust performance, achieving a 17% improvement in agentic correctness over state-of-the-art baselines. Our findings highlight the potential of multi-agent AI in advancing RS workflows.

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.

Modern edge data centers simultaneously handle multiple Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), leading to significant challenges in workload management. Thus, current management systems must leverage the architectural heterogeneity of new embedded systems to efficiently handle multi-DNN workloads. This paper introduces RankMap, a priority-aware manager specifically designed for multi-DNN tasks on heterogeneous embedded devices. RankMap addresses the extensive solution space of multi-DNN mapping through stochastic space exploration combined with a performance estimator. Experimental results show that RankMap achieves x3.6 higher average throughput compared to existing methods, while preventing DNN starvation under heavy workloads and improving the prioritization of specified DNNs by x57.5.

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) directly collected from cancer patients being treated with radiation therapy play a vital role in assisting clinicians in counseling patients regarding likely toxicities. Precise prediction and evaluation of symptoms or health status associated with PROs are fundamental to enhancing decision-making and planning for the required services and support as patients transition into survivorship. However, the raw PRO data collected from hospitals exhibits some intrinsic challenges such as incomplete item reports and imbalance patient toxicities. To the end, in this study, we explore various machine learning techniques to predict patient outcomes related to health status such as pain levels and sleep discomfort using PRO datasets from a cancer photon/proton therapy center. Specifically, we deploy six advanced machine learning classifiers -- Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multi-Layer Perceptron with Bagging (MLP-Bagging), and Logistic Regression (LR) -- to tackle a multi-class imbalance classification problem across three prevalent cancer types: head and neck, prostate, and breast cancers. To address the class imbalance issue, we employ an oversampling strategy, adjusting the training set sample sizes through interpolations of in-class neighboring samples, thereby augmenting minority classes without deviating from the original skewed class distribution. Our experimental findings across multiple PRO datasets indicate that the RF and XGB methods achieve robust generalization performance, evidenced by weighted AUC and detailed confusion matrices, in categorizing outcomes as mild, intermediate, and severe post-radiation therapy. These results underscore the models' effectiveness and potential utility in clinical settings.