Background. Dengue outbreaks are a major public health issue, with Brazil reporting 71% of global cases in 2024. Purpose. This study aims to describe the profile of severe dengue patients admitted to Brazilian Intensive Care units (ICUs) (2012-2024), assess trends over time, describe new onset complications while in ICU and determine the risk factors at admission to develop complications during ICU stay. Methods. We performed a prospective study of dengue patients from 253 ICUs across 56 hospitals. We used descriptive statistics to describe the dengue ICU population, logistic regression to identify risk factors for complications during the ICU stay, and a machine learning framework to predict the risk of evolving to complications. Visualisations were generated using ISARIC VERTEX. Results. Of 11,047 admissions, 1,117 admissions (10.1%) evolved to complications, including non-invasive (437 admissions) and invasive ventilation (166), vasopressor (364), blood transfusion (353) and renal replacement therapy (103). Age>80 (OR: 3.10, 95% CI: 2.02-4.92), chronic kidney disease (OR: 2.94, 2.22-3.89), liver cirrhosis (OR: 3.65, 1.82-7.04), low platelets (<50,000 cells/mm3; OR: OR: 2.25, 1.89-2.68), and high leukocytes (>7,000 cells/mm3; OR: 2.47, 2.02-3.03) were significant risk factors for complications. A machine learning tool for predicting complications was proposed, showing accurate discrimination and calibration. Conclusion. We described a large cohort of dengue patients admitted to ICUs and identified key risk factors for severe dengue complications, such as advanced age, presence of comorbidities, higher level of leukocytes and lower level of platelets. The proposed prediction tool can be used for early identification and targeted interventions to improve outcomes in dengue-endemic regions.

In this paper, a consensus algorithm is proposed for interacting multi-agents, which can be modeled as simple Mechanical Control Systems (MCS) evolving on a general Lie group. The standard Laplacian flow consensus algorithm for double integrator systems evolving on Euclidean spaces is extended to a general Lie group. A tracking error function is defined on a general smooth manifold for measuring the error between the configurations of two interacting agents. The stability of the desired consensus equilibrium is proved using a generalized version of Lyapunov theory and LaSalle's invariance principle applicable for systems evolving on a smooth manifold. The proposed consensus control input requires only the configuration information of the neighboring agents and does not require their velocities and inertia tensors. The design of tracking error function and consensus control inputs are demonstrated through an application of attitude consensus problem for multiple communicating rigid bodies. The consensus algorithm is numerically validated by demonstrating the attitude consensus problem.

We present a Julia-based interface to the precompiled HALLaR and cuHALLaR binaries for large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs). Both solvers are established as fast and numerically stable, and accept problem data in formats compatible with SDPA and a new enhanced data format taking advantage of Hybrid Sparse Low-Rank (HSLR) structure. The interface allows users to load custom data files, configure solver options, and execute experiments directly from Julia. A collection of example problems is included, including the SDP relaxations of the Matrix Completion and Maximum Stable Set problems.

Entity linking is a fundamental task in knowledge graph (KG) construction Hofer et al. (2024), aiming to link mentions to their corresponding entities in a target knowledge base (KB). It is widely applied in downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as Question & Answering Systems Sequeda et al. (2024) and intelligent recommendation systems Chaudhari et al. (2017). Recently, the explosive growth of multimodal data on the Internet has raised challenges, as the quality of online information is often inconsistent, many mentions are ambiguous, and contextual information is frequently incomplete. Under such conditions, relying solely on a single modality (such as pure text) is often insufficient to accurately resolve reference ambiguity Gan et al. (2021). Integrating textual and visual modalities can significantly improve the precision and efficiency of disambiguation Gella et al. (2017). Consequently, multimodal entity linking, which involves combining textual and visual information to link real-world mentions to corresponding entities in a multimodal knowledge graph (MMKG), has become a critical research task. For example, as shown in Figure 1, the mention of "Apple" may be difficult to disambiguate, as it could refer to various entities, such as Apple Inc. or the apple (fruit). However, by considering both textual and visual information, it becomes easier and clearer to accurately link the mention of "Apple" to the entity "apple (fruit of the apple tree)." Currently, multimodal entity linking models are primarily based on deep learning frameworks, utilizing cross-attention mechanisms Lu and Elhamifar (2024) and visual feature encoding techniques Mokssit et al. (2023) to achieve the fusion of textual mentions and visual information.

Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) models face significant performance limitations due to insufficient training data availability. In this article, we address the challenge of limited data in SLR by introducing a novel and lightweight sign generation model based on CMLPe. This model, coupled with a synthetic data pretraining approach, consistently improves recognition accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art results for the LSFB and DiSPLaY datasets using our Mamba-SL and Transformer-SL classifiers. Our findings reveal that synthetic data pretraining outperforms traditional augmentation methods in some cases and yields complementary benefits when implemented alongside them. Our approach democratizes sign generation and synthetic data pretraining for SLR by providing computationally efficient methods that achieve significant performance improvements across diverse datasets.

First, they showed the world how easy it is to add facial recognition to Meta's smart glasses. Former Harvard students Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen this week announced Halo, a startup of roughly 11 people working to develop always-recording smart glasses. The pair dropped out of Harvard to develop Halo X, smart glasses with a display on the lens that can answer any question someone asks. Powered by a combination of Google's Gemini and Perplexity large language models, the idea is that these glasses will always be listening to the world around you via the built-in microphones (there won't be a camera in this first model.) If someone asks, "What's the capital of Peru?" just look at the display on the glasses, and you'll be able to see the answer.

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent robots, AI and automation. The annual RoboCup event, where teams gather from across the globe to take part in competitions across a number of leagues, this year took place in Salvador, Brazil from 15-21 July. In a series of interviews, we've been meeting some of the RoboCup trustees, committee members, and participants, to find out more about their respective leagues. Christoph Steup is an Executive Committee member and oversees the @Work League. Ahead of the event in Brazil, we spoke to Christoph to find out more about the @Work League, the tasks that teams need to complete, and future plans for the League.

At least 18 people have been killed and dozens injured in two attacks in Colombia attributed to dissident factions of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group. In Cali, the country's third most populated city, a vehicle packed with explosives detonated on Thursday near a military aviation school, in an incident that left six people dead and 71 injured, according to the mayor's office. Hours earlier, a National Police Black Hawk helicopter participating in a coca leaf crop eradication operation was downed by a drone in the municipality of Amalfi, in the department of Antioquia, killing 12 police officers. Colombian President Gustavo Petro blamed the attacks on dissident factions of the now-defunct FARC group that have rejected a 2016 peace agreement to end a prolonged internal conflict that has left more than 450,000 dead in the country. Petro said on X that the attack on the police helicopter occurred as the aircraft was transporting personnel to an area in Antioquia, in northern Colombia, to eradicate coca leaf crops, the raw material for cocaine.