Our Women in Robotics list turns 10 this year and we are delighted to introduce you to another amazing "50 women in robotics you need to know about" as we also celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. We have now profiled more than 300 women AND non-binary people making important contributions to robotics since the list began in 2013. This year our 50 come from robotics companies (small and large), self-driving car companies, governments, research organizations and the media. The list covers the globe, with the chosen ones having nationalities from the EU, UK, USA, Australia, China, Turkey, India and Kenya. A number of women come from influential companies that are household names such as NASA, ABB, GE, Toyota and the Wall Street Journal.

We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings. It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources. Human annotators prefer the model's outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning.

Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system's adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.

Since photovoltaic (PV) plants require periodic maintenance, using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for inspections can help reduce costs. The thermal and visual inspection of PV installations is currently based on UAV photogrammetry. A UAV equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver is assigned a flight zone: the UAV will cover it back and forth to collect images to be later composed in an orthomosaic. The UAV typically flies at a height above the ground that is appropriate to ensure that images overlap even in the presence of GPS positioning errors. However, this approach has two limitations. Firstly, it requires to cover the whole flight zone, including "empty" areas between PV module rows. Secondly, flying high above the ground limits the resolution of the images to be later inspected. The article proposes a novel approach using an autonomous UAV equipped with an RGB and a thermal camera for PV module tracking. The UAV moves along PV module rows at a lower height than usual and inspects them back and forth in a boustrophedon way by ignoring "empty" areas with no PV modules. Experimental tests performed in simulation and an actual PV plant are reported.

Multilingual transformer-based models demonstrate remarkable zero and few-shot transfer across languages by learning and reusing language-agnostic features. However, as a fixed-size model acquires more languages, its performance across all languages degrades, a phenomenon termed interference. Often attributed to limited model capacity, interference is commonly addressed by adding additional parameters despite evidence that transformer-based models are overparameterized. In this work, we show that it is possible to reduce interference by instead identifying and pruning language-specific parameters. First, we use Shapley Values, a credit allocation metric from coalitional game theory, to identify attention heads that introduce interference. Then, we show that removing identified attention heads from a fixed model improves performance for a target language on both sentence classification and structural prediction, seeing gains as large as 24.7\%. Finally, we provide insights on language-agnostic and language-specific attention heads using attention visualization.

This document provides extensive guidelines and examples for Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) annotation in Mandarin Chinese. The guideline is divided into three sections. We first introduce preprocessing steps to prepare data for RST annotation. Secondly, we discuss syntactic criteria to segment texts into Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs). Lastly, we provide examples to define and distinguish discourse relations in different genres. We hope that this reference manual can facilitate RST annotations in Chinese and accelerate the development of the RST framework across languages.

IceCube, a cubic-kilometer array of optical sensors built to detect atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos between 1 GeV and 1 PeV, is deployed 1.45 km to 2.45 km below the surface of the ice sheet at the South Pole. The classification and reconstruction of events from the in-ice detectors play a central role in the analysis of data from IceCube. Reconstructing and classifying events is a challenge due to the irregular detector geometry, inhomogeneous scattering and absorption of light in the ice and, below 100 GeV, the relatively low number of signal photons produced per event. To address this challenge, it is possible to represent IceCube events as point cloud graphs and use a Graph Neural Network (GNN) as the classification and reconstruction method. The GNN is capable of distinguishing neutrino events from cosmic-ray backgrounds, classifying different neutrino event types, and reconstructing the deposited energy, direction and interaction vertex. Based on simulation, we provide a comparison in the 1-100 GeV energy range to the current state-of-the-art maximum likelihood techniques used in current IceCube analyses, including the effects of known systematic uncertainties. For neutrino event classification, the GNN increases the signal efficiency by 18% at a fixed false positive rate (FPR), compared to current IceCube methods. Alternatively, the GNN offers a reduction of the FPR by over a factor 8 (to below half a percent) at a fixed signal efficiency. For the reconstruction of energy, direction, and interaction vertex, the resolution improves by an average of 13%-20% compared to current maximum likelihood techniques in the energy range of 1-30 GeV. The GNN, when run on a GPU, is capable of processing IceCube events at a rate nearly double of the median IceCube trigger rate of 2.7 kHz, which opens the possibility of using low energy neutrinos in online searches for transient events.

There has been a recent surge in single-step adversarial training as it shows robustness and efficiency. However, a phenomenon referred to as ``catastrophic overfitting" has been observed, which is prevalent in single-step defenses and may frustrate attempts to use FGSM adversarial training. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, Stable and Efficient Adversarial Training (SEAT), which mitigates catastrophic overfitting by harnessing on local properties that distinguish a robust model from that of a catastrophic overfitted model. The proposed SEAT has strong theoretical justifications, in that minimizing the SEAT loss can be shown to favour smooth empirical risk, thereby leading to robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully mitigates catastrophic overfitting, yielding superior performance amongst efficient defenses. Our single-step method can reach 51% robust accuracy for CIFAR-10 with $l_\infty$ perturbations of radius $8/255$ under a strong PGD-50 attack, matching the performance of a 10-step iterative adversarial training at merely 3% computational cost.

In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of more than 200 papers, technical reports, and GitHub repositories published over the last 10 years on the recent developments of deep learning techniques for iris recognition, covering broad topics on algorithm designs, open-source tools, open challenges, and emerging research. First, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of deep learning techniques developed for two main sub-tasks in iris biometrics: segmentation and recognition. Second, we focus on deep learning techniques for the robustness of iris recognition systems against presentation attacks and via human-machine pairing. Third, we delve deep into deep learning techniques for forensic application, especially in post-mortem iris recognition. Fourth, we review open-source resources and tools in deep learning techniques for iris recognition. Finally, we highlight the technical challenges, emerging research trends, and outlook for the future of deep learning in iris recognition.

The use of interactive advice in reinforcement learning scenarios allows for speeding up the learning process for autonomous agents. Current interactive reinforcement learning research has been limited to real-time interactions that offer relevant user advice to the current state only. Moreover, the information provided by each interaction is not retained and instead discarded by the agent after a single use. In this paper, we present a method for retaining and reusing provided knowledge, allowing trainers to give general advice relevant to more than just the current state. Results obtained show that the use of broad-persistent advice substantially improves the performance of the agent while reducing the number of interactions required for the trainer.