Welcome to the special section highlighting cutting-edge research and innovation emerging from East Asia and Oceania. Our region encompasses Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Asia-Pacific countries, including Japan and Korea. The articles in this section--designated as "Hot Topics" and "Big Trends"--aim to not only showcase technological advancements from this region, but also to strengthen research collaboration and communication with regions worldwide. This special section brings together some of the most innovative research in computer science and technology from this flourishing region. The articles cover a wide range of topics, from state-of-the-art developments in learning analytics, AI and machine learning, education, Big Data, neuromorphic computing, and blockchain technology, to applications in disease prediction and assistive devices.

Assistive or enabling technologies aim to create more accessible and inclusive solutions for people living with disabilities. This is critical, since many such users rely on technology for daily activities such as mobility and communication. While the problems are global, there are unique challenges that exist in the Asia Pacific region when it comes to developing assistive technologies, particularly assistive devices. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) estimates that 650 million people in the Asia-Pacific region live with a disability.4 It is also well understood that disability statistics in the region could be significantly underreported.

This study aims to compare multiple deep learning-based forecasters for the task of predicting volatility using multivariate data. The paper evaluates a range of models, starting from simpler and shallower ones and progressing to deeper and more complex architectures. Additionally, the performance of these models is compared against naive predictions and variations of classical GARCH models. The prediction of volatility for five assets, namely S&P500, NASDAQ100, gold, silver, and oil, is specifically addressed using GARCH models, Multi-Layer Perceptrons, Recurrent Neural Networks, Temporal Convolutional Networks, and the Temporal Fusion Transformer. In the majority of cases, the Temporal Fusion Transformer, followed by variants of the Temporal Convolutional Network, outperformed classical approaches and shallow networks. These experiments were repeated, and the differences observed between the competing models were found to be statistically significant, thus providing strong encouragement for their practical application.

The rise of large-scale socio-technical systems in which humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems (including assistants and recommenders, in short AIs) multiplies the opportunity for the emergence of collective phenomena and tipping points, with unexpected, possibly unintended, consequences. For example, navigation systems' suggestions may create chaos if too many drivers are directed on the same route, and personalised recommendations on social media may amplify polarisation, filter bubbles, and radicalisation. On the other hand, we may learn how to foster the "wisdom of crowds" and collective action effects to face social and environmental challenges. In order to understand the impact of AI on socio-technical systems and design next-generation AIs that team with humans to help overcome societal problems rather than exacerbate them, we propose to build the foundations of Social AI at the intersection of Complex Systems, Network Science and AI. In this perspective paper, we discuss the main open questions in Social AI, outlining possible technical and scientific challenges and suggesting research avenues.

We present the Minigrid and Miniworld libraries which provide a suite of goal-oriented 2D and 3D environments. The libraries were explicitly created with a minimalistic design paradigm to allow users to rapidly develop new environments for a wide range of research-specific needs. As a result, both have received widescale adoption by the RL community, facilitating research in a wide range of areas. In this paper, we outline the design philosophy, environment details, and their world generation API. We also showcase the additional capabilities brought by the unified API between Minigrid and Miniworld through case studies on transfer learning (for both RL agents and humans) between the different observation spaces. The source code of Minigrid and Miniworld can be found at https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/{Minigrid, Miniworld} along with their documentation at https://{minigrid, miniworld}.farama.org/.

Reliable estimates of Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), crucial for evaluating climate change initiatives, are currently only available from sparsely distributed eddy covariance tower sites. This limitation hampers access to reliable GPP quantification at regional to global scales. Prior machine learning studies on upscaling \textit{in situ} GPP to global wall-to-wall maps at sub-daily time steps faced limitations such as lack of input features at higher temporal resolutions and significant missing values. This research explored a novel upscaling solution using Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) without relying on past GPP time series. Model development was supplemented by Random Forest Regressor (RFR) and XGBoost, followed by the hybrid model of TFT and tree algorithms. The best preforming model yielded to model performance of 0.704 NSE and 3.54 RMSE. Another contribution of the study was the breakdown analysis of encoder feature importance based on time and flux tower sites. Such analysis enhanced the interpretability of the multi-head attention layer as well as the visual understanding of temporal dynamics of influential features.

Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic had fear and uncertainty about vaccines which has been well expressed on social media platforms such as Twitter. We analyse Twitter sentiments from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and study the public behaviour during the planning, development and deployment of vaccines expressed in tweets worldwide using a sentiment analysis framework via deep learning models. In this way, we provide visualisation and analysis of anti-vaccine sentiments over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show a link between the number of tweets, the number of cases, and the change in sentiment polarity scores during major waves of COVID-19 cases. We also found that the first half of the pandemic had drastic changes in the sentiment polarity scores that later stabilised which implies that the vaccine rollout had an impact on the nature of discussions on social media.

As mathematical, statistical, and machine learning algorithms leverage increasingly powerful computational hardware to perform elaborate tasks, simulation has grown to play a key role in fields such as materials science, operations research, industrial engineering, aerodynamics, pharmaceuticals, image processing, and many others. In particular, a key use of these simulations is to serve as a surrogate for the eventual implementation and/or manufacturing during the design optimization; running a computational simulation is likely much cheaper than actually conducting a physical experiment or fabrication (Forrester et al. 2008; Negoescu et al. 2011; Molesky et al. 2018; Haghanifar et al. 2020). Computational simulations can, however, easily run for hours or days, making simulation itself an often costly proposition. The high cost of a single simulation is compounded by the frequent need to simulate many different systems to search for a set of desirable outcomes. This is the motivating force behind simulation optimization, which seeks to identify suitable system parameters to achieve a satisfactory system or effective simulation in a sample-efficient fashion, i.e., with as few simulations conducted as possible. In practical situations, simulations almost always have multiple competing objectives which define success, and thus it is important for users to understand trade-offs between these competing objectives in order to make an informed design decision. Multiobjective optimization tackles this problem by identifying the Pareto frontier, which is the manifold in objective space such that improving one objective cannot occur without harming another. Unfortunately, using the Pareto frontier as the measurement of success may be limiting in engineering and design applications.

The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was recently introduced in the literature as a novel machine learning method for training generative models. It has many applications in statistics such as nonparametric clustering and nonparametric conditional independence tests. However, training the GAN is notoriously difficult due to the issue of mode collapse, which refers to the lack of diversity among generated data. In this paper, we identify the reasons why the GAN suffers from this issue, and to address it, we propose a new formulation for the GAN based on randomized decision rules. In the new formulation, the discriminator converges to a fixed point while the generator converges to a distribution at the Nash equilibrium. We propose to train the GAN by an empirical Bayes-like method by treating the discriminator as a hyper-parameter of the posterior distribution of the generator. Specifically, we simulate generators from its posterior distribution conditioned on the discriminator using a stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, and update the discriminator using stochastic gradient descent along with simulations of the generators. We establish convergence of the proposed method to the Nash equilibrium. Apart from image generation, we apply the proposed method to nonparametric clustering and nonparametric conditional independence tests. A portion of the numerical results is presented in the supplementary material.

The capabilities and adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) grow at an exhilarating pace: Vision models accurately classify human actions in videos and identify cancerous tissue in medical scans as precisely than human experts; large language models answer wide-ranging questions, generate code, and write prose, becoming the topic of everyday dinner-table conversations. Even though their uses are exhilarating, the continually increasing model sizes and computational complexities have a dark side. The economic cost and negative environmental externalities of training and serving models is in evident disharmony with financial viability and climate action goals. Instead of pursuing yet another increase in predictive performance, this dissertation is dedicated to the improvement of neural network efficiency. Specifically, a core contribution addresses the efficiency aspects during online inference. Here, the concept of Continual Inference Networks (CINs) is proposed and explored across four publications. CINs extend prior state-of-the-art methods developed for offline processing of spatio-temporal data and reuse their pre-trained weights, improving their online processing efficiency by an order of magnitude. These advances are attained through a bottom-up computational reorganization and judicious architectural modifications. The benefit to online inference is demonstrated by reformulating several widely used network architectures into CINs, including 3D CNNs, ST-GCNs, and Transformer Encoders. An orthogonal contribution tackles the concurrent adaptation and computational acceleration of a large source model into multiple lightweight derived models. Drawing on fusible adapter networks and structured pruning, Structured Pruning Adapters achieve superior predictive accuracy under aggressive pruning using significantly fewer learned weights compared to fine-tuning with pruning.