Melbourne
American tennis star Danielle Collins accuses cameraman of 'wildly inappropriate' behavior
PongBot is an artificial intelligence-powered tennis robot. American tennis player Danielle Collins had some choice words for the cameraman during her Internationaux de Strasbourg match against Emma Raducanu on Wednesday afternoon. Collins was in the middle of a changeover when she felt the cameraman's hovering was a bit too close for comfort in the middle of the third and defining set. She got off the bench and made the point clear. Danielle Collins celebrates during her match against Madison Keys in the third round of the women's singles at the 2025 Australian Open at Melbourne Park in Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 18, 2025.
Domain Generalization via Entropy Regularization Mingming Gong The University of Sydney University of Melbourne Australia Huan Fu The University of Sydney
Domain generalization aims to learn from multiple source domains a predictive model that can generalize to unseen target domains. One essential problem in domain generalization is to learn discriminative domain-invariant features. To arrive at this, some methods introduce a domain discriminator through adversarial learning to match the feature distributions in multiple source domains. However, adversarial training can only guarantee that the learned features have invariant marginal distributions, while the invariance of conditional distributions is more important for prediction in new domains. To ensure the conditional invariance of learned features, we propose an entropy regularization term that measures the dependency between the learned features and the class labels. Combined with the typical task-related loss, e.g., cross-entropy loss for classification, and adversarial loss for domain discrimination, our overall objective is guaranteed to learn conditional-invariant features across all source domains and thus can learn classifiers with better generalization capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through comparison with state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real-world datasets.
Synchron's Brain-Computer Interface Now Has Nvidia's AI
Neurotech company Synchron has unveiled the latest version of its brain-computer interface, which uses Nvidia technology and the Apple Vision Pro to enable individuals with paralysis to control digital and physical environments with their thoughts. In a video demonstration at the Nvidia GTC conference this week in San Jose, California, Synchron showed off how its system allows one of its trial participants, Rodney Gorham, who is paralyzed, to control multiple devices in his home. From his sun-filled living room in Melbourne, Australia, Gorham is able to play music from a smart speaker, adjust the lighting, turn on a fan, activate an automatic pet feeder, and run a robotic vacuum. Gorham has lost the use of his voice and much of his body due to having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The degenerative disease weakens muscles over time and eventually leads to paralysis.
SHIP: A Shapelet-based Approach for Interpretable Patient-Ventilator Asynchrony Detection
Le, Xuan-May, Luo, Ling, Aickelin, Uwe, Tran, Minh-Tuan, Berlowitz, David, Howard, Mark
Patient-ventilator asynchrony (PVA) is a common and critical issue during mechanical ventilation, affecting up to 85% of patients. PVA can result in clinical complications such as discomfort, sleep disruption, and potentially more severe conditions like ventilator-induced lung injury and diaphragm dysfunction. Traditional PVA management, which relies on manual adjustments by healthcare providers, is often inadequate due to delays and errors. While various computational methods, including rule-based, statistical, and deep learning approaches, have been developed to detect PVA events, they face challenges related to dataset imbalances and lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a shapelet-based approach SHIP for PVA detection, utilizing shapelets -- discriminative subsequences in time-series data -- to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. Our method addresses dataset imbalances through shapelet-based data augmentation and constructs a shapelet pool to transform the dataset for more effective classification. The combined shapelet and statistical features are then used in a classifier to identify PVA events. Experimental results on medical datasets show that SHIP significantly improves PVA detection while providing interpretable insights into model decisions.
Auto-ADMET: An Effective and Interpretable AutoML Method for Chemical ADMET Property Prediction
de Sรก, Alex G. C., Ascher, David B.
Machine learning (ML) has been playing important roles in drug discovery in the past years by providing (pre-)screening tools for prioritising chemical compounds to pass through wet lab experiments. One of the main ML tasks in drug discovery is to build quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models, associating the molecular structure of chemical compounds with an activity or property. These properties -- including absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) -- are essential to model compound behaviour, activity and interactions in the organism. Although several methods exist, the majority of them do not provide an appropriate model's personalisation, yielding to bias and lack of generalisation to new data since the chemical space usually shifts from application to application. This fact leads to low predictive performance when completely new data is being tested by the model. The area of Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) emerged aiming to solve this issue, outputting tailored ML algorithms to the data at hand. Although an important task, AutoML has not been practically used to assist cheminformatics and computational chemistry researchers often, with just a few works related to the field. To address these challenges, this work introduces Auto-ADMET, an interpretable evolutionary-based AutoML method for chemical ADMET property prediction. Auto-ADMET employs a Grammar-based Genetic Programming (GGP) method with a Bayesian Network Model to achieve comparable or better predictive performance against three alternative methods -- standard GGP method, pkCSM and XGBOOST model -- on 12 benchmark chemical ADMET property prediction datasets. The use of a Bayesian Network model on Auto-ADMET's evolutionary process assisted in both shaping the search procedure and interpreting the causes of its AutoML performance.
MONSTER: Monash Scalable Time Series Evaluation Repository
Dempster, Angus, Foumani, Navid Mohammadi, Tan, Chang Wei, Miller, Lynn, Mishra, Amish, Salehi, Mahsa, Pelletier, Charlotte, Schmidt, Daniel F., Webb, Geoffrey I.
We introduce Monster--the MONash Scalable Time Series E valuation R epository--a collection of large datasets for time series classification. The field of time series classification has benefitted from common benchmarks set by the UCR and UEA time series classification repositories. However, the datasets in these benchmarks are small, with median sizes of 217 and 255 examples, respectively. In consequence they favour a narrow subspace of models that are optimised to achieve low classification error on a wide variety of smaller datasets, that is, models that minimise variance, and give little weight to computational issues such as scalability. Our hope is to diversify the field by introducing benchmarks using larger datasets. We believe that there is enormous potential for new progress in the field by engaging with the theoretical and practical challenges of learning effectively from larger quantities of data.
Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection: Vision and Challenges
Ren, Jing, Tang, Tao, Jia, Hong, Fayek, Haytham, Li, Xiaodong, Ma, Suyu, Xu, Xiwei, Xia, Feng
Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection: Vision and Challenges Jing Ren 1, T ao T ang 2, Hong Jia 3, Haytham Fayek 1, Xiaodong Li 1, Suyu Ma 4, Xiwei Xu 4, and Feng Xia 1 1 RMIT University, Australia 2 University of South Australia, Australia 3 University of Melbourne, Australia 4 CSIRO's Data61, Australia {jing.ren, tao.tang }@ieee.org, Abstract As data continues to grow in volume and complexity across domains such as finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, effective anomaly detection is essential for identifying irregular patterns that may signal critical issues. Recently, foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for advancing anomaly detection. They have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in enhancing anomaly identification, generating detailed data descriptions, and providing visual explanations. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of recent advancements in FM-based anomaly detection. We propose a novel taxonomy that classifies FMs into three categories based on their roles in anomaly detection tasks, i.e., as encoders, detectors, or interpreters. We provide a systematic analysis of state-of-the-art methods and discuss key challenges in leveraging FMs for improved anomaly detection. We also outline future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. 1 Introduction Anomaly detection, also known as outlier detection, is the process of identifying patterns or events in data that significantly deviate from expected behavior [ Chandola et al., 2009] .
RegD: Hierarchical Embeddings via Distances over Geometric Regions
Hierarchical data are common in many domains like life sciences and e-commerce, and their embeddings often play a critical role. Although hyperbolic embeddings offer a grounded approach to representing hierarchical structures in low-dimensional spaces, their utility is hindered by optimization difficulties in hyperbolic space and dependence on handcrafted structural constraints. We propose RegD, a novel Euclidean framework that addresses these limitations by representing hierarchical data as geometric regions with two new metrics: (1) depth distance, which preserves the representational power of hyperbolic spaces for hierarchical data, and (2) boundary distance, which explicitly encodes set-inclusion relationships between regions in a general way. Our empirical evaluation on diverse real-world datasets shows consistent performance gains over state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates RegD's potential for broader applications beyond hierarchy alone tasks.
Tennis pro Erin Routliffe explodes over lack of 'robots' at Australian Open
Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Erin Routliffe may be the only person unhappy that robots haven't taken over the world. The tennis pro from New Zealand and her partner, Gabriela Dabrowski of Canada, were competing in the third round of women's doubles at the Australian Open Sunday when Routliffe exploded into a brief tirade after she believed her opponent's serve skimmed the net. Erin Routliffe of New Zealand and Gabriela Dabrowski of Canada in action against Laura Siegemund of Germany and Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil in the third round of women's doubles at the 2025 Australian Open at Melbourne Park Jan. 20, 2025, in Melbourne, Australia. The contentious point came during a tiebreak in the first set with Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil serving.
How Do Programming Students Use Generative AI?
Rahe, Christian, Maalej, Walid
Programming students have a widespread access to powerful Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. While this can help understand the learning material and assist with exercises, educators are voicing more and more concerns about an over-reliance on generated outputs and lack of critical thinking skills. It is thus important to understand how students actually use generative AI and what impact this could have on their learning behavior. To this end, we conducted a study including an exploratory experiment with 37 programming students, giving them monitored access to ChatGPT while solving a code understanding and improving exercise. While only 23 of the students actually opted to use the chatbot, the majority of those eventually prompted it to simply generate a full solution. We observed two prevalent usage strategies: to seek knowledge about general concepts and to directly generate solutions. Instead of using the bot to comprehend the code and their own mistakes, students often got trapped in a vicious cycle of submitting wrong generated code and then asking the bot for a fix. Those who self-reported using generative AI regularly were more likely to prompt the bot to generate a solution. Our findings indicate that concerns about potential decrease in programmers' agency and productivity with Generative AI are justified. We discuss how researchers and educators can respond to the potential risk of students uncritically over-relying on generative AI. We also discuss potential modifications to our study design for large-scale replications.