That's Harder Than It Sounds Proposed regulations in China would mean the end of flush handles on car doors, with precious little time to roll out the changes. Car door handles seem innocuous. Tesla's electronic, retractable ones--since imitated by plenty of global automakers--have become a symbol of the automaker's willingness to work from design-first principles, reimagining what the car of the future might look like, electric-style. But in September, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into the Tesla 2021 Model Y's door handles. More than 140 consumers have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about the door handles, according to a Bloomberg report published last month.

Accurate semantic segmentation of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds is limited by costly manual annotation. We propose a semi-automated, uncertainty-aware pipeline that integrates spherical projection, feature enrichment, ensemble learning, and targeted annotation to reduce labeling effort, while sustaining high accuracy. Our approach projects 3D points to a 2D spherical grid, enriches pixels with multi-source features, and trains an ensemble of segmentation networks to produce pseudo-labels and uncertainty maps, the latter guiding annotation of ambiguous regions. The 2D outputs are back-projected to 3D, yielding densely annotated point clouds supported by a three-tier visualization suite (2D feature maps, 3D colorized point clouds, and compact virtual spheres) for rapid triage and reviewer guidance. Using this pipeline, we build Mangrove3D, a semantic segmentation TLS dataset for mangrove forests. We further evaluate data efficiency and feature importance to address two key questions: (1) how much annotated data are needed and (2) which features matter most. Results show that performance saturates after ~12 annotated scans, geometric features contribute the most, and compact nine-channel stacks capture nearly all discriminative power, with the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) plateauing at around 0.76. Finally, we confirm the generalization of our feature-enrichment strategy through cross-dataset tests on ForestSemantic and Semantic3D. Our contributions include: (i) a robust, uncertainty-aware TLS annotation pipeline with visualization tools; (ii) the Mangrove3D dataset; and (iii) empirical guidance on data efficiency and feature importance, thus enabling scalable, high-quality segmentation of TLS point clouds for ecological monitoring and beyond. The dataset and processing scripts are publicly available at https://fz-rit.github.io/through-the-lidars-eye/.

There has been extensive prior work exploring how psychological factors such as anthropomorphism affect the adoption of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs). However, limited research has been conducted on how prompt strategies in large language models (LLM)-powered conversational SAV agents affect users' perceptions, experiences, and intentions to adopt such technology. In this work, we investigate how conversational SAV agents powered by LLMs drive these psychological factors, such as psychological ownership, the sense of possession a user may come to feel towards an entity or object they may not legally own. We designed four SAV agents with varying levels of anthropomorphic characteristics and psychological ownership triggers. Quantitative measures of psychological ownership, anthropomorphism, quality of service, disclosure tendency, sentiment of SAV responses, and overall acceptance were collected after participants interacted with each SAV. Qualitative feedback was also gathered regarding the experience of psychological ownership during the interactions. The results indicate that an SAV designed to be more anthropomorphic and to induce psychological ownership improved users' perceptions of the SAV's human-like qualities, and its responses were perceived as more positive but also more subjective compared to the control conditions. Qualitative findings support established routes to psychological ownership in the SAV context and suggest that the conversational agent's perceived performance may also influence psychological ownership. Both quantitative and qualitative outcomes highlight the importance of personalization in designing effective SAV interactions. These findings provide practical guidance for designing conversational SAV agents that enhance user experience and adoption.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform healthcare by supporting more accurate diagnoses and personalized treatments. However, its adoption in practice remains constrained by fragmented data sources, strict privacy rules, and the technical complexity of building reliable clinical systems. To address these challenges, we introduce a model driven engineering (MDE) framework designed specifically for healthcare AI. The framework relies on formal metamodels, domain-specific languages (DSLs), and automated transformations to move from high level specifications to running software. At its core is the Medical Interoperability Language (MILA), a graphical DSL that enables clinicians and data scientists to define queries and machine learning pipelines using shared ontologies. When combined with a federated learning architecture, MILA allows institutions to collaborate without exchanging raw patient data, ensuring semantic consistency across sites while preserving privacy. We evaluate this approach in a multi center cancer immunotherapy study. The generated pipelines delivered strong predictive performance, with support vector machines achieving up to 98.5 percent and 98.3 percent accuracy in key tasks, while substantially reducing manual coding effort. These findings suggest that MDE principles metamodeling, semantic integration, and automated code generation can provide a practical path toward interoperable, reproducible, and trustworthy digital health platforms.

Connected health is a multidisciplinary approach focused on health management, prioritizing pa-tient needs in the creation of tools, services, and treatments. This paradigm ensures proactive and efficient care by facilitating the timely exchange of accurate patient information among all stake-holders in the care continuum. The rise of digital technologies and process innovations promises to enhance connected health by integrating various healthcare data sources. This integration aims to personalize care, predict health outcomes, and streamline patient management, though challeng-es remain, particularly in data architecture, application interoperability, and security. Data analytics can provide critical insights for informed decision-making and health co-creation, but solutions must prioritize end-users, including patients and healthcare professionals. This perspective was explored through an agile System Development Lifecycle in an EU-funded project aimed at developing an integrated AI-generated solution for managing cancer patients undergoing immunotherapy. This paper contributes with a collaborative digital framework integrating stakeholders across the care continuum, leveraging federated big data analytics and artificial intelligence for improved decision-making while ensuring privacy. Analytical capabilities, such as treatment recommendations and adverse event predictions, were validated using real-life data, achieving 70%-90% accuracy in a pilot study with the medical partners, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness.

Accurate recognition and re-identification of individual animals is essential for successful wildlife population monitoring. Traditional methods, such as leg banding of birds, are time consuming and invasive. Recent progress in artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision, offers encouraging solutions for smart conservation and efficient automation. This study presents a unique pipeline for extracting high-quality key frames from videos of kākā (Nestor meridionalis), a threatened forest-dwelling parrot in New Zealand. Key frame extraction is well-studied in person re-identification, however, its application to wildlife is limited. Using video recordings at a custom-built feeder, we extract key frames and evaluate the re-identification performance of our pipeline. Our unsupervised methodology combines object detection using YOLO and Grounding DINO, optical flow blur detection, image encoding with DINOv2, and clustering methods to identify representative key frames. The results indicate that our proposed key frame selection methods yield image collections which achieve high accuracy in kākā re-identification, providing a foundation for future research using media collected in more diverse and challenging environments. Through the use of artificial intelligence and computer vision, our non-invasive and efficient approach provides a valuable alternative to traditional physical tagging methods for recognising kākā individuals and therefore improving the monitoring of populations. This research contributes to developing fresh approaches in wildlife monitoring, with applications in ecology and conservation biology.

Naturalistic fMRI encoding must handle multimodal inputs, shifting fusion styles, and pronounced inter-subject variability. We introduce AFIRE (Agnostic Framework for Multimodal fMRI Response Encoding), an agnostic interface that standardizes time-aligned post-fusion tokens from varied encoders, and MIND, a plug-and-play Mixture-of-Experts decoder with a subject-aware dynamic gating. Trained end-to-end for whole-brain prediction, AFIRE decouples the decoder from upstream fusion, while MIND combines token-dependent Top-K sparse routing with a subject prior to personalize expert usage without sacrificing generality. Experiments across multiple multimodal backbones and subjects show consistent improvements over strong baselines, enhanced cross-subject generalization, and interpretable expert patterns that correlate with content type. The framework offers a simple attachment point for new encoders and datasets, enabling robust, plug-and-improve performance for naturalistic neuroimaging studies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a range of vulnerabilities that allow malicious users to solicit undesirable responses through manipulation of the input text. These so-called jailbreak prompts are designed to trick the LLM into circumventing the safety guardrails put in place to keep responses acceptable to the developer's policies. In this study, we analyse the ability of different machine learning models to distinguish jailbreak prompts from genuine uses, including looking at our ability to identify jailbreaks that use previously unseen strategies. Our results indicate that using current datasets the best performance is achieved by fine tuning a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model end-to-end for identifying jailbreaks. We visualise the keywords that distinguish jailbreak from genuine prompts and conclude that explicit reflexivity in prompt structure could be a signal of jailbreak intention.

Gabriela Cibils is on a mission - to help turn Paraguay into the Silicon Valley of South America. When she was growing up in the landlocked country, nestled between Brazil and Argentina, she says the nation wasn't super tech focused. But it was different for Ms Cibils, as her parents worked in the technology sector. And she was inspired to study in the US, where she got a degree in computing and neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating she spent eight years working in Silicon Valley, near San Francisco, with roles at various American start-ups.

Robby Starbuck speaks in an interview in New York in March. Robby Starbuck speaks in an interview in New York in March. Critics condemn Robby Starbuck, appointed in lawsuit settlement, for'peddling lies and pushing extremism' A prominent anti-DEI campaigner appointed by Meta in August as an adviser on AI bias has spent the weeks since his appointment spreading disinformation about shootings, transgender people, vaccines, crime, and protests. Robby Starbuck, 36, of Nashville, was appointed in August as an adviser by Meta - owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other tech platforms - in an August lawsuit settlement. Since his appointment, Starbuck has baselessly claimed that individual shooters in the US were motivated by leftist ideology, described faith-based protest groups as communists, and without evidence tied Democratic lawmakers to murders.