Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) have garnered significant interest within the surgical robotics community because of their flexibility, dexterity, and ease of miniaturization. However, mastering the unique kinematics and design principles of CTRs can be challenging for newcomers to the field. In this paper, we present an educational kit aimed at lowering the barriers to entry into concentric tube robot research. Our goal is to provide accessible learning resources for CTRs, bridging the knowledge gap between traditional robotic arms and these specialized devices. The proposed kit includes (1) An open-source design and assembly instructions for an economical (cost of materials $\approx$ 700 USD) modular CTR; (2) A set of self-study materials to learn the basics of CTR modeling and control, including automatically-graded assignments. To evaluate the effectiveness of our educational kit, we conducted a human subjects study involving first-year graduate students in engineering. Over a four-week period, participants -- none of whom had any prior knowledge of concentric tube robots -- successfully built their first CTR using the provided materials, implemented the robot's kinematics in MATLAB, and conducted a tip-tracking experiment with an optical tracking device. Our findings suggest that the proposed kit facilitates learning and hands-on experience with CTRs, and furthermore, it has the potential to help early-stage graduate students get rapidly started with CTR research. By disseminating these resources, we hope to broaden participation in concentric tube robot research to a wider a more diverse group of researchers.

While deep learning approaches represent the state-of-the-art of natural language processing (NLP) today, classical algorithms and approaches still find a place in NLP textbooks and courses of recent years. This paper discusses the perspectives of conveners of two introductory NLP courses taught in Australia and India, and examines how classical and deep learning approaches can be balanced within the lecture plan and assessments of the courses. We also draw parallels with the objects-first and objects-later debate in CS1 education. We observe that teaching classical approaches adds value to student learning by building an intuitive understanding of NLP problems, potential solutions, and even deep learning models themselves. Despite classical approaches not being state-of-the-art, the paper makes a case for their inclusion in NLP courses today.

Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. While deep learning approaches using fundus images have largely improved early diagnosis of glaucoma, variations in images from different devices and locations (known as domain shifts) challenge the use of pre-trained models in real-world settings. To address this, we propose a novel Graph-guided Test-Time Adaptation (GTTA) framework to generalize glaucoma diagnosis models to unseen test environments. GTTA integrates the topological information of fundus images into the model training, enhancing the model's transferability and reducing the risk of learning spurious correlation. During inference, GTTA introduces a novel test-time training objective to make the source-trained classifier progressively adapt to target patterns with reliable class conditional estimation and consistency regularization. Experiments on cross-domain glaucoma diagnosis benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the overall framework and individual components under different backbone networks.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated innovations in different aspects of citizens' lives. Many contexts have already addressed technology-enhanced learning, but educators at different educational levels now need to develop AI literacy and the ability to integrate appropriate AI usage into their teaching. We take into account this objective, along with the creative learning design, to create a formative intervention that enables preservice teachers, in-service teachers, and EdTech specialists to effectively incorporate AI into their teaching practices. We developed the formative intervention with Terra Numerica and Maison de l'Intelligence Artificielle in two phases in order to enhance their understanding of AI and foster its creative application in learning design. Participants reflect on AI's potential in teaching and learning by exploring different activities that can integrate AI literacy in education, including its ethical considerations and potential for innovative pedagogy. The approach emphasises not only acculturating professionals to AI but also empowering them to collaboratively design AI-enhanced educational activities that promote learner engagement and personalised learning experiences. Through this process, participants in the workshops develop the skills and mindset necessary to effectively leverage AI while maintaining a critical awareness of its implications in education.

Generative AI (genAI) is being used in education for different purposes. From the teachers' perspective, genAI can support activities such as learning design. However, there is a need to study the impact of genAI on the teachers' agency. While GenAI can support certain processes of idea generation and co-creation, GenAI has the potential to negatively affect professional agency due to teachers' limited power to (i) act, (ii) affect matters, and (iii) make decisions or choices, as well as the possibility to (iv) take a stance. Agency is identified in the learning sciences studies as being one of the factors in teachers' ability to trust AI. This paper aims to introduce a dual perspective. First, educational technology, as opposed to other computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, has two distinctly different user groups and different user needs, in the form of learners and teachers, to cater for. Second, the design of educational technology often prioritises learner agency and engagement, thereby limiting the opportunities for teachers to influence the technology and take action. This study aims to analyse the way GenAI is influencing teachers' agency. After identifying the current limits of GenAI, a solution based on the combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence through a hybrid intelligence approach is proposed. This combination opens up the discussion of a collaboration between teacher and genAI being able to open up new practices in learning design in which they HI support the extension of the teachers' activity.

In this chapter we share our experience in running ten editions of the Green Lab course at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The course is given in the Software Engineering and Green IT track of the Computer Science Master program of the VU. The course takes place every year over a 2-month period and teaches Computer Science students the fundamentals of Empirical Software Engineering in the context of energy-efficient software. The peculiarity of the course is its research orientation: at the beginning of the course the instructor presents a catalog of scientifically relevant goals, and each team of students signs up for one of them and works together for 2 months on their own experiment for achieving the goal. Each team goes over the classic steps of an empirical study, starting from a precise formulation of the goal and research questions to context definition, selection of experimental subjects and objects, definition of experimental variables, experiment execution, data analysis, and reporting. Over the years, the course became well-known within the Software Engineering community since it led to several scientific studies that have been published at various scientific conferences and journals. Also, students execute their experiments using \textit{open-source tools}, which are developed and maintained by researchers and other students within the program, thus creating a virtuous community of learners where students exchange ideas, help each other, and learn how to collaboratively contribute to open-source projects in a safe environment.

Programming LLM-based knowledge and task assistants that faithfully conform to developer-provided policies is challenging. These agents must retrieve and provide consistent, accurate, and relevant information to address user's queries and needs. Yet such agents generate unfounded responses ("hallucinate"). Traditional dialogue trees can only handle a limited number of conversation flows, making them inherently brittle. To this end, we present KITA - a programmable framework for creating task-oriented conversational agents that are designed to handle complex user interactions. Unlike LLMs, KITA provides reliable grounded responses, with controllable agent policies through its expressive specification, KITA Worksheet. In contrast to dialog trees, it is resilient to diverse user queries, helpful with knowledge sources, and offers ease of programming policies through its declarative paradigm. Through a real-user study involving 62 participants, we show that KITA beats the GPT-4 with function calling baseline by 26.1, 22.5, and 52.4 points on execution accuracy, dialogue act accuracy, and goal completion rate, respectively. We also release 22 real-user conversations with KITA manually corrected to ensure accuracy.

In particular, we focus on neural networks that can dynamically activate or de-activate parts of their computational graph conditionally on their input. Examples include the dynamic selection of, e.g., input tokens, layers (or sets of layers), and sub-modules inside each layer (e.g., channels in a convolutional filter). We first provide a general formalism to describe these techniques in an uniform way. Then, we introduce three notable implementations of these principles: mixture-of-experts (MoEs) networks, token selection mechanisms, and early-exit neural networks. The paper aims to provide a tutorial-like introduction to this growing field. To this end, we analyze the benefits of these modular designs in terms of efficiency, explainability, and transfer learning, with a focus on emerging applicative areas ranging from automated scientific discovery to semantic communication.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots into higher education marks a shift towards a new generation of pedagogical tools, mirroring the arrival of milestones like the internet. With the launch of ChatGPT-4 Turbo in November 2023, we developed a ChatGPT-based teaching application (https://chat.openai.com/g/g-1imx1py4K-chatge-medical-imaging) and integrated it into our undergraduate medical imaging course in the Spring 2024 semester. This study investigates the use of ChatGPT throughout a semester-long trial, providing insights into students' engagement, perception, and the overall educational effectiveness of the technology. We systematically collected and analyzed data concerning students' interaction with ChatGPT, focusing on their attitudes, concerns, and usage patterns. The findings indicate that ChatGPT offers significant advantages such as improved information access and increased interactivity, but its adoption is accompanied by concerns about the accuracy of the information provided and the necessity for well-defined guidelines to optimize its use.

The robustness of supervised deep learning-based medical image classification is significantly undermined by label noise. Although several methods have been proposed to enhance classification performance in the presence of noisy labels, they face some challenges: 1) a struggle with class-imbalanced datasets, leading to the frequent overlooking of minority classes as noisy samples; 2) a singular focus on maximizing performance using noisy datasets, without incorporating experts-in-the-loop for actively cleaning the noisy labels. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a two-phase approach that combines Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) and active learning. This approach not only improves the robustness of medical image classification in the presence of noisy labels, but also iteratively improves the quality of the dataset by relabeling the important incorrect labels, under a limited annotation budget. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Variance of Gradients approach in LNL phase, which complements the loss-based sample selection by also sampling under-represented samples. Using two imbalanced noisy medical classification datasets, we demonstrate that that our proposed technique is superior to its predecessors at handling class imbalance by not misidentifying clean samples from minority classes as mostly noisy samples.