Traditional data sources on bushfire evacuation behaviour, such as quantitative surveys and manual observations have severe limitations. Mining social media data related to bushfire evacuations promises to close this gap by allowing the collection and processing of a large amount of behavioural data, which are low-cost, accurate, possibly including location information and rich contextual information. However, social media data have many limitations, such as being scattered, incomplete, informal, etc. Together, these limitations represent several challenges to their usefulness to better understand bushfire evacuation. To overcome these challenges and provide guidance on which and how social media data can be used, this scoping review of the literature reports on recent advances in relevant data mining techniques. In addition, future applications and open problems are discussed. We envision future applications such as evacuation model calibration and validation, emergency communication, personalised evacuation training, and resource allocation for evacuation preparedness. We identify open problems such as data quality, bias and representativeness, geolocation accuracy, contextual understanding, crisis-specific lexicon and semantics, and multimodal data interpretation.

Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is critical - scenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360-degree videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating transformation-invariant recognition. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty. The dataset is available at: https://uofi.box.com/v/fire360dataset.

Building fires pose a persistent threat to life, property, and infrastructure, emphasizing the need for advanced risk mitigation strategies. This study presents a data-driven framework analyzing U.S. fire risks by integrating over one million fire incident reports with diverse fire-relevant datasets, including social determinants, building inventories, weather conditions, and incident-specific factors. By adapting machine learning models, we identify key risk factors influencing fire occurrence and consequences. Our findings show that vulnerable communities, characterized by socioeconomic disparities or the prevalence of outdated or vacant buildings, face higher fire risks. Incident-specific factors, such as fire origins and safety features, strongly influence fire consequences. Buildings equipped with fire detectors and automatic extinguishing systems experience significantly lower fire spread and injury risks. By pinpointing high-risk areas and populations, this research supports targeted interventions, including mandating fire safety systems and providing subsidies for disadvantaged communities. These measures can enhance fire prevention, protect vulnerable groups, and promote safer, more equitable communities.

This study proposes the IoT-Enhanced Pose Optimization Network (IE-PONet) for high-precision 3D pose estimation and motion optimization of track and field athletes. IE-PONet integrates C3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, OpenPose for real-time keypoint detection, and Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results on NTURGB+D and FineGYM datasets demonstrate superior performance, with AP\(^p50\) scores of 90.5 and 91.0, and mAP scores of 74.3 and 74.0, respectively. Ablation studies confirm the essential roles of each module in enhancing model accuracy. IE-PONet provides a robust tool for athletic performance analysis and optimization, offering precise technical insights for training and injury prevention. Future work will focus on further model optimization, multimodal data integration, and developing real-time feedback mechanisms to enhance practical applications.

"What does it mean to have children see themselves as being builders of AI technologies and not just users?" says Shruti. The program starts out by using a pair of dice to demonstrate probabilistic thinking, a system of decision-making that accounts for uncertainty. Probabilistic thinking underlies the LLMs of today, which predict the most likely next word in a sentence. By teaching a concept like it, the program can help to demystify the workings of LLMs for kids and assist them in understanding that sometimes the model's choices are not perfect but the result of a series of probabilities. Students can modify each side of the dice to whatever variable they want.

Integrating IoT technology into basketball action recognition enhances sports analytics, providing crucial insights into player performance and game strategy. However, existing methods often fall short in terms of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in complex, real-time environments where player movements are frequently occluded or involve intricate interactions. To overcome these challenges, we propose the EITNet model, a deep learning framework that combines EfficientDet for object detection, I3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, and TimeSformer for temporal analysis, all integrated with IoT technology for seamless real-time data collection and processing. Our contributions include developing a robust architecture that improves recognition accuracy to 92\%, surpassing the baseline EfficientDet model's 87\%, and reducing loss to below 5.0 compared to EfficientDet's 9.0 over 50 epochs. Furthermore, the integration of IoT technology enhances real-time data processing, providing adaptive insights into player performance and strategy. The paper details the design and implementation of EITNet, experimental validation, and a comprehensive evaluation against existing models. The results demonstrate EITNet's potential to significantly advance automated sports analysis and optimize data utilization for player performance and strategy improvement.

Reconstructing natural language from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) holds great promise as a language decoding technology for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, EEG-based language decoding is still in its nascent stages, facing several technical issues such as: 1) Absence of a hybrid strategy that can effectively integrate cross-modality (between EEG and text) self-learning with intra-modality self-reconstruction of EEG features or textual sequences; 2) Under-utilization of large language models (LLMs) to enhance EEG-based language decoding. To address above issues, we propose the Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder (CET-MAE), a novel model that orchestrates compound self-supervised learning across and within EEG and text through a dedicated multi-stream encoder. Furthermore, we develop a framework called E2T-PTR (EEG-to-Text decoding using Pretrained Transferable Representations), which leverages pre-trained modules alongside the EEG stream from CET-MAE and further enables an LLM (specifically BART) to decode text from EEG sequences. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the popular text-evoked EEG database, ZuCo, demonstrate the superiority of E2T-PTR, which outperforms the state-of-the-art in ROUGE-1 F1 and BLEU-4 scores by 8.34% and 32.21%, respectively. These results indicate significant advancements in the field and underscores the proposed framework's potential to enable more powerful and widespread BCI applications.

Traditional drug discovery programs are being transformed by the advent of machine learning methods. Among these, Generative AI methods (GM) have gained attention due to their ability to design new molecules and enhance specific properties of existing ones. However, current GM methods have limitations, such as low affinity towards the target, unknown ADME/PK properties, or the lack of synthetic tractability. To improve the applicability domain of GM methods, we have developed a workflow based on a variational autoencoder coupled with active learning steps. The designed GM workflow iteratively learns from molecular metrics, including drug likeliness, synthesizability, similarity, and docking scores. In addition, we also included a hierarchical set of criteria based on advanced molecular modeling simulations during a final selection step. We tested our GM workflow on two model systems, CDK2 and KRAS. In both cases, our model generated chemically viable molecules with a high predicted affinity toward the targets. Particularly, the proportion of high-affinity molecules inferred by our GM workflow was significantly greater than that in the training data. Notably, we also uncovered novel scaffolds significantly dissimilar to those known for each target. These results highlight the potential of our GM workflow to explore novel chemical space for specific targets, thereby opening up new possibilities for drug discovery endeavors.

IntelyCare, a Quincy, MA-based tech-enabled nurse staffing platform for healthcare organizations announced it has secured $115M in a Series C financing round led by Janus Henderson Investors with participation from new and existing investors Longitude Capital, Leeds Illuminate, Endeavour Vision, Revelation Partners, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. That latest round of funding brings IntelyCare's valuation to $1.1 billion. With nurse shortages expected to surpass 1 million this year, technologies like IntelyCare's are essential to protect the health of the nation. The post-acute space is poised to grow tremendously as providers strive to increase hospital throughput to reduce costs and drive better patient outcomes. Post-acute care will be increasingly distributed in the future, most notably in the home setting, which will require technology to efficiently bring together care providers and patients.

Businesses keep finding new ways to generate value with HPE's real-time global collaboration solution. HPE Pointnext Services can help your organization do the same. Most people are familiar with some type of virtual reality experience from the consumer space, perhaps from trying out some gaming equipment – even if it's borrowed from the kids! If you've ever found yourself immersed in one of those engaging virtual worlds, you'll understand why so many organizations are craving ways to translate augmented reality into the business world. Use cases range from training and education to performing maintenance on facilities and equipment.