Instructional Material
Slide2Text: Leveraging LLMs for Personalized Textbook Generation from PowerPoint Presentations
The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized educational technology, enabling innovative approaches to automated and personalized content creation. This paper introduces Slide2Text, a system that leverages LLMs to transform PowerPoint presentations into customized textbooks. By extracting slide content using OCR, organizing it into a coherent structure, and generating tailored materials such as explanations, exercises, and references, Slide2Text streamlines the textbook creation process. Flexible customization options further enhance its adaptability to diverse educational needs. The system highlights the potential of LLMs in modernizing textbook creation and improving educational accessibility. Future developments will explore multimedia inputs and advanced user customization features.
Data to Decisions: A Computational Framework to Identify skill requirements from Advertorial Data
Singh, Aakash, Kanaujia, Anurag, Singh, Vivek Kumar
Among the factors of production, human capital or skilled manpower is the one that keeps evolving and adapts to changing conditions and resources. This adaptability makes human capital the most crucial factor in ensuring a sustainable growth of industry/sector. As new technologies are developed and adopted, the new generations are required to acquire skills in newer technologies in order to be employable. At the same time professionals are required to upskill and reskill themselves to remain relevant in the industry. There is however no straightforward method to identify the skill needs of the industry at a given point of time. Therefore, this paper proposes a data to decision framework that can successfully identify the desired skill set in a given area by analysing the advertorial data collected from popular online job portals and supplied as input to the framework. The proposed framework uses techniques of statistical analysis, data mining and natural language processing for the purpose. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated on CS&IT job advertisement data from India. The analytical results not only provide useful insights about current state of skill needs in CS&IT industry but also provide practical implications to prospective job applicants, training agencies, and institutions of higher education & professional training.
Advanced Deep Learning Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Design
Wang, Tianyang, Zhang, Yichao, Deng, Ningyuan, Song, Xinyuan, Bi, Ziqian, Yao, Zheyu, Chen, Keyu, Li, Ming, Niu, Qian, Liu, Junyu, Peng, Benji, Zhang, Sen, Liu, Ming, Zhang, Li, Pan, Xuanhe, Wang, Jinlang, Feng, Pohsun, Wen, Yizhu, Yan, Lawrence KQ, Tseng, Hongming, Zhong, Yan, Wang, Yunze, Qin, Ziyuan, Jing, Bowen, Yang, Junjie, Zhou, Jun, Liang, Chia Xin, Song, Junhao
After AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize, protein prediction with deep learning once again became a hot topic. We comprehensively explore advanced deep learning methods applied to protein structure prediction and design. It begins by examining recent innovations in prediction architectures, with detailed discussions on improvements such as diffusion based frameworks and novel pairwise attention modules. The text analyses key components including structure generation, evaluation metrics, multiple sequence alignment processing, and network architecture, thereby illustrating the current state of the art in computational protein modelling. Subsequent chapters focus on practical applications, presenting case studies that range from individual protein predictions to complex biomolecular interactions. Strategies for enhancing prediction accuracy and integrating deep learning techniques with experimental validation are thoroughly explored. The later sections review the industry landscape of protein design, highlighting the transformative role of artificial intelligence in biotechnology and discussing emerging market trends and future challenges. Supplementary appendices provide essential resources such as databases and open source tools, making this volume a valuable reference for researchers and students.
A Guide to Bayesian Networks Software Packages for Structure and Parameter Learning -- 2025 Edition
Gaudillo, Joverlyn, Astrologo, Nicole, Stella, Fabio, Acerbi, Enzo, Canonaco, Francesco
A representation of the cause-effect mechanism is needed to enable artificial intelligence to represent how the world works. Bayesian Networks (BNs) have proven to be an effective and versatile tool for this task. BNs require constructing a structure of dependencies among variables and learning the parameters that govern these relationships. These tasks, referred to as structural learning and parameter learning, are actively investigated by the research community, with several algorithms proposed and no single method having established itself as standard. A wide range of software, tools, and packages have been developed for BNs analysis and made available to academic researchers and industry practitioners. As a consequence of having no one-size-fits-all solution, moving the first practical steps and getting oriented into this field is proving to be challenging to outsiders and beginners. In this paper, we review the most relevant tools and software for BNs structural and parameter learning to date, providing our subjective recommendations directed to an audience of beginners. In addition, we provide an extensive easy-to-consult overview table summarizing all software packages and their main features. By improving the reader understanding of which available software might best suit their needs, we improve accessibility to the field and make it easier for beginners to take their first step into it.
Speeding up design and making to reduce time-to-project and time-to-market: an AI-Enhanced approach in engineering education
Adorni, Giovanni, Grosso, Daniele
This paper explores the integration of AI tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, in the Software Architecture for Embedded Systems course. AI-supported workflows enabled students to rapidly prototype complex projects, emphasizing real-world applications like SLAM robotics. Results demon-started enhanced problem-solving, faster development, and more sophisticated outcomes, with AI augmenting but not replacing human decision-making.
Online Imitation Learning for Manipulation via Decaying Relative Correction through Teleoperation
Pan, Cheng, Cheng, Hung Hon, Hughes, Josie
Teleoperated robotic manipulators enable the collection of demonstration data, which can be used to train control policies through imitation learning. However, such methods can require significant amounts of training data to develop robust policies or adapt them to new and unseen tasks. While expert feedback can significantly enhance policy performance, providing continuous feedback can be cognitively demanding and time-consuming for experts. To address this challenge, we propose to use a cable-driven teleoperation system which can provide spatial corrections with 6 degree of freedom to the trajectories generated by a policy model. Specifically, we propose a correction method termed Decaying Relative Correction (DRC) which is based upon the spatial offset vector provided by the expert and exists temporarily, and which reduces the intervention steps required by an expert. Our results demonstrate that DRC reduces the required expert intervention rate by 30\% compared to a standard absolute corrective method. Furthermore, we show that integrating DRC within an online imitation learning framework rapidly increases the success rate of manipulation tasks such as raspberry harvesting and cloth wiping.
Challenges and Trends in Egocentric Vision: A Survey
Li, Xiang, Qiu, Heqian, Wang, Lanxiao, Zhang, Hanwen, Qi, Chenghao, Han, Linfeng, Xiong, Huiyu, Li, Hongliang
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies and wearable devices, egocentric vision understanding has emerged as a new and challenging research direction, gradually attracting widespread attention from both academia and industry. Egocentric vision captures visual and multimodal data through cameras or sensors worn on the human body, offering a unique perspective that simulates human visual experiences. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the research on egocentric vision understanding, systematically analyzing the components of egocentric scenes and categorizing the tasks into four main areas: subject understanding, object understanding, environment understanding, and hybrid understanding. We explore in detail the sub-tasks within each category. We also summarize the main challenges and trends currently existing in the field. Furthermore, this paper presents an overview of high-quality egocentric vision datasets, offering valuable resources for future research. By summarizing the latest advancements, we anticipate the broad applications of egocentric vision technologies in fields such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and embodied intelligence, and propose future research directions based on the latest developments in the field.
Advancing Problem-Based Learning in Biomedical Engineering in the Era of Generative AI
Nnamdi, Micky C., Tamo, J. Ben, Shi, Wenqi, Wang, May D.
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has significantly impacted biomedical engineering (BME) education since its introduction in the early 2000s, effectively enhancing critical thinking and real-world knowledge application among students. With biomedical engineering rapidly converging with artificial intelligence (AI), integrating effective AI education into established curricula has become challenging yet increasingly necessary. Recent advancements, including AI's recognition by the 2024 Nobel Prize, have highlighted the importance of training students comprehensively in biomedical AI. However, effective biomedical AI education faces substantial obstacles, such as diverse student backgrounds, limited personalized mentoring, constrained computational resources, and difficulties in safely scaling hands-on practical experiments due to privacy and ethical concerns associated with biomedical data. To overcome these issues, we conducted a three-year (2021-2023) case study implementing an advanced PBL framework tailored specifically for biomedical AI education, involving 92 undergraduate and 156 graduate students from the joint Biomedical Engineering program of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Our approach emphasizes collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving through authentic biomedical AI challenges. The implementation led to measurable improvements in learning outcomes, evidenced by high research productivity (16 student-authored publications), consistently positive peer evaluations, and successful development of innovative computational methods addressing real biomedical challenges. Additionally, we examined the role of generative AI both as a teaching subject and an educational support tool within the PBL framework. Our study presents a practical and scalable roadmap for biomedical engineering departments aiming to integrate robust AI education into their curricula.
Using machine learning to measure evidence of students' sensemaking in physics courses
Gili, Kaitlin, Heuton, Kyle, Shah, Astha, Hughes, Michael C.
Teaching and instruction in undergraduate physics courses has largely relied on problem-solving as the standard method to measure student performance [1-6]. Common practice is for "real-time" performance to be measured via multiple-choice or single-solution problems, where canonically correct answers determine the student's knowledge of the core material. Accuracy scores across assignments and examinations, typically coupled with letter grades, act as signals of progress throughout the course as well as final verdicts of student success. While engaging in problem-solving is a useful experience for students in a physics classroom, using the problem solution as a measure of student learning assumes a direct correlation that may not always hold. Problem-solving accuracy as a measurand assumes that students will engage in a learning process involving the core material to obtain the problem solution. Often times, there are alternative strategies for obtaining a problem solution such as rote-memorization of the rules or procedures required for solving similar problem types [7]. In this scenario, students would score very high on exams that contain these problem types; however given a previously unseen problem structure where the same core material is to be applied, the students would struggle. Here, a risk of using problem-solving accuracy as the predominant metric is an inflated sense of confidence in both the instructor and the student that the core material has been learned. It could also pose a risk for confounding variables in research studies that aim to investigate how instructional techniques influence student learning [8-12].
VEGGIE: Instructional Editing and Reasoning of Video Concepts with Grounded Generation
Yu, Shoubin, Liu, Difan, Ma, Ziqiao, Hong, Yicong, Zhou, Yang, Tan, Hao, Chai, Joyce, Bansal, Mohit
Recent video diffusion models have enhanced video editing, but it remains challenging to handle instructional editing and diverse tasks (e.g., adding, removing, changing) within a unified framework. In this paper, we introduce VEGGIE, a Video Editor with Grounded Generation from Instructions, a simple end-to-end framework that unifies video concept editing, grounding, and reasoning based on diverse user instructions. Specifically, given a video and text query, VEGGIE first utilizes an MLLM to interpret user intentions in instructions and ground them to the video contexts, generating frame-specific grounded task queries for pixel-space responses. A diffusion model then renders these plans and generates edited videos that align with user intent. To support diverse tasks and complex instructions, we employ a curriculum learning strategy: first aligning the MLLM and video diffusion model with large-scale instructional image editing data, followed by end-to-end fine-tuning on high-quality multitask video data. Additionally, we introduce a novel data synthesis pipeline to generate paired instructional video editing data for model training. It transforms static image data into diverse, high-quality video editing samples by leveraging Image-to-Video models to inject dynamics. VEGGIE shows strong performance in instructional video editing with different editing skills, outperforming the best instructional baseline as a versatile model, while other models struggle with multi-tasking. VEGGIE also excels in video object grounding and reasoning segmentation, where other baselines fail. We further reveal how the multiple tasks help each other and highlight promising applications like zero-shot multimodal instructional and in-context video editing.