Police say at least 25 kids used e-bikes and scooters to evade arrest and intimidate drivers. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Australian police are cracking down on groups of unruly teenagers who they say are using deceptively speedy e-bikes and scooters to engage in "antisocial riding behavior." Their solution: confiscate the popular micromobility devices and crush them. The roundup, dubbed Operation Moorhead, began last week in the suburbs of Perth in southwestern Australia.

Funding and support: The Generative AI Challenge is funded by grants from the Future Health Research and Innovation Fund (FHRIF), Grant ID IC2023-GAIA/11. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Abstract This exploratory pilot study investigated the potential of combining a domain-specific model, BERN2, with large language models (LLMs) to enhance automated disease phenotyping from research survey data. Motivated by the need for efficient and accurate methods to harmonize the growing volume of survey data with standardized disease ontologies, we employed BERN2, a biomedical named entity recognition and normalization model, to extract disease information from the ORIGINS birth cohort survey data. After rigorously evaluating BERN2's performance against a manually curated ground truth dataset, we integrated various LLMs using prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Instructional Fine-Tuning (IFT) to refine the model's outputs. BERN2 demonstrated high performance in extracting and normalizing disease mentions, and the integration of LLMs, particularly with Few Shot Inference and RAG orchestration, further improved accuracy. This approach, especially when incorporating structured examples, logical reasoning prompts, and detailed context, offers a promising avenue for developing tools to enable efficient cohort profiling and data harmonization across large, heterogeneous research datasets. Introduction The increasing availability of research survey data from cohort studies and clinical trials offers unprecedented opportunities to advance biomedical research and improve healthcare (1).

Despite being the most popular privacy-enhancing network, Tor is increasingly adopted by cybercriminals to obfuscate malicious traffic, hindering the identification of malware-related communications between compromised devices and Command and Control (C&C) servers. This malicious traffic can induce congestion and reduce Tor's performance, while encouraging network administrators to block Tor traffic. Recent research, however, demonstrates the potential for accurately classifying captured Tor traffic as malicious or benign. While existing efforts have addressed malware class identification, their performance remains limited, with micro-average precision and recall values around 70%. Accurately classifying specific malware classes is crucial for effective attack prevention and mitigation. Furthermore, understanding the unique patterns and attack vectors employed by different malware classes helps the development of robust and adaptable defence mechanisms. We utilise a multi-label classification technique based on Message-Passing Neural Networks, demonstrating its superiority over previous approaches such as Binary Relevance, Classifier Chains, and Label Powerset, by achieving micro-average precision (MAP) and recall (MAR) exceeding 90%. Compared to previous work, we significantly improve performance by 19.98%, 10.15%, and 59.21% in MAP, MAR, and Hamming Loss, respectively. Next, we employ Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques to interpret the decision-making process within these models. Finally, we assess the robustness of all techniques by crafting adversarial perturbations capable of manipulating classifier predictions and generating false positives and negatives.

Embodied navigation requires robots to understand and interact with the environment based on given tasks. Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is an embodied navigation task, where a robot navigates within a previously seen and unseen environment, based on linguistic instruction and visual inputs. VLN agents need access to both local and global action spaces; former for immediate decision making and the latter for recovering from navigational mistakes. Prior VLN agents rely only on instruction-viewpoint alignment for local and global decision making and back-track to a previously visited viewpoint, if the instruction and its current viewpoint mismatches. These methods are prone to mistakes, due to the complexity of the instruction and partial observability of the environment. We posit that, back-tracking is sub-optimal and agent that is aware of its mistakes can recover efficiently. For optimal recovery, exploration should be extended to unexplored viewpoints (or frontiers). The optimal frontier is a recently observed but unexplored viewpoint that aligns with the instruction and is novel. We introduce a memory-based and mistake-aware path planning strategy for VLN agents, called \textit{StratXplore}, that presents global and local action planning to select the optimal frontier for path correction. The proposed method collects all past actions and viewpoint features during navigation and then selects the optimal frontier suitable for recovery. Experimental results show this simple yet effective strategy improves the success rate on two VLN datasets with different task complexities.

Embodied AI aims to develop robots that can \textit{understand} and execute human language instructions, as well as communicate in natural languages. On this front, we study the task of generating highly detailed navigational instructions for the embodied robots to follow. Although recent studies have demonstrated significant leaps in the generation of step-by-step instructions from sequences of images, the generated instructions lack variety in terms of their referral to objects and landmarks. Existing speaker models learn strategies to evade the evaluation metrics and obtain higher scores even for low-quality sentences. In this work, we propose SAS (Spatially-Aware Speaker), an instruction generator or \textit{Speaker} model that utilises both structural and semantic knowledge of the environment to produce richer instructions. For training, we employ a reward learning method in an adversarial setting to avoid systematic bias introduced by language evaluation metrics. Empirically, our method outperforms existing instruction generation models, evaluated using standard metrics. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/gmuraleekrishna/SAS}.

Approximately 30% of all traffic fatalities in the United States are attributed to alcohol-impaired driving. This means that, despite stringent laws against this offense in every state, the frequency of drunk driving accidents is alarming, resulting in approximately one person being killed every 45 minutes. The process of charging individuals with Driving Under the Influence (DUI) is intricate and can sometimes be subjective, involving multiple stages such as observing the vehicle in motion, interacting with the driver, and conducting Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFSTs). Biases have been observed through racial profiling, leading to some groups and geographical areas facing fewer DUI tests, resulting in many actual DUI incidents going undetected, ultimately leading to a higher number of fatalities. To tackle this issue, our research introduces an Artificial Intelligence-based predictor that is both fairness-aware and incorporates domain knowledge to analyze DUI-related fatalities in different geographic locations. Through this model, we gain intriguing insights into the interplay between various demographic groups, including age, race, and income. By utilizing the provided information to allocate policing resources in a more equitable and efficient manner, there is potential to reduce DUI-related fatalities and have a significant impact on road safety.

The term "digital twin" (DT) has become a key theme of the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) area, while remaining vaguely defined as a virtual replica of an entity. This article identifies DT characteristics essential for enhancing CPS security and discusses indicators to evaluate them.

Annotating medical images for disease detection is often tedious and expensive. Moreover, the available training samples for a given task are generally scarce and imbalanced. These conditions are not conducive for learning effective deep neural models. Hence, it is common to 'transfer' neural networks trained on natural images to the medical image domain. However, this paradigm lacks in performance due to the large domain gap between the natural and medical image data. To address that, we propose a novel concept of Pre-text Representation Transfer (PRT). In contrast to the conventional transfer learning, which fine-tunes a source model after replacing its classification layers, PRT retains the original classification layers and updates the representation layers through an unsupervised pre-text task. The task is performed with (original, not synthetic) medical images, without utilizing any annotations. This enables representation transfer with a large amount of training data. This high-fidelity representation transfer allows us to use the resulting model as a more effective feature extractor. Moreover, we can also subsequently perform the traditional transfer learning with this model. We devise a collaborative representation based classification layer for the case when we leverage the model as a feature extractor. We fuse the output of this layer with the predictions of a model induced with the traditional transfer learning performed over our pre-text transferred model. The utility of our technique for limited and imbalanced data classification problem is demonstrated with an extensive five-fold evaluation for three large-scale models, tested for five different class-imbalance ratios for CT based COVID-19 detection. Our results show a consistent gain over the conventional transfer learning with the proposed method.

Patients are often encouraged to make use of wearable devices for remote collection and monitoring of health data. This adoption of wearables results in a significant increase in the volume of data collected and transmitted. The battery life of the devices is then quickly diminished due to the high processing requirements of the devices. Given the importance attached to medical data, it is imperative that all transmitted data adhere to strict integrity and availability requirements. Reducing the volume of healthcare data for network transmission may improve sensor battery life without compromising accuracy. There is a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy which can be controlled by adjusting the sampling and transmission rates. This paper demonstrates that machine learning can be used to analyse complex health data metrics such as the accuracy and efficiency of data transmission to overcome the trade-off problem. The study uses time series nonlinear autoregressive neural network algorithms to enhance both data metrics by taking fewer samples to transmit. The algorithms were tested with a standard heart rate dataset to compare their accuracy and efficiency. The result showed that the Levenbery-Marquardt algorithm was the best performer with an efficiency of 3.33 and accuracy of 79.17%, which is similar to other algorithms accuracy but demonstrates improved efficiency. This proves that machine learning can improve without sacrificing a metric over the other compared to the existing methods with high efficiency.

Deep learning is gaining instant popularity in computer aided diagnosis of COVID-19. Due to the high sensitivity of Computed Tomography (CT) to this disease, CT-based COVID-19 detection with visual models is currently at the forefront of medical imaging research. Outcomes published in this direction are frequently claiming highly accurate detection under deep transfer learning. This is leading medical technologists to believe that deep transfer learning is the mainstream solution for the problem. However, our critical analysis of the literature reveals an alarming performance disparity between different published results. Hence, we conduct a systematic thorough investigation to analyze the effectiveness of deep transfer learning for COVID-19 detection with CT images. Exploring 14 state-of-the-art visual models with over 200 model training sessions, we conclusively establish that the published literature is frequently overestimating transfer learning performance for the problem, even in the prestigious scientific sources. The roots of overestimation trace back to inappropriate data curation. We also provide case studies that consider more realistic scenarios, and establish transparent baselines for the problem. We hope that our reproducible investigation will help in curbing hype-driven claims for the critical problem of COVID-19 diagnosis, and pave the way for a more transparent performance evaluation of techniques for CT-based COVID-19 detection.