This paper presents the classification of a general quadric into an axisymmetric quadric (AQ) and the solution to the problem of the proximity of a given point to an AQ. The problem of proximity in $R^3$ is reduced to the same in $R^2$, which is not found in the literature. A new method to solve the problem in $R^2$ is used based on the geometrical properties of the conics, such as sub-normal, length of the semi-major axis, eccentricity, slope and radius. Furthermore, the problem in $R^2$ is categorised into two and three more sub-cases for parabola and ellipse/hyperbola, respectively, depending on the location of the point, which is a novel approach as per the authors' knowledge. The proposed method is suitable for implementation in a common programming language, such as C and proved to be faster than a commercial library, namely, Bullet.

Interprofessional education has long relied on case studies and the use of standardized patients to support teamwork, communication, and related collaborative competencies among healthcare professionals. However, traditional approaches are often limited by cost, scalability, and inability to mimic the dynamic complexity of real-world clinical scenarios. To address these challenges, we designed and developed AIMS (AI-Enhanced Immersive Multidisciplinary Simulations), a virtual simulation that integrates a large language model (Gemini-2.5-Flash), a Unity-based virtual environment engine, and a character creation pipeline to support synchronized, multimodal interactions between the user and the virtual patient. AIMS was designed to enhance collaborative clinical reasoning and health promotion competencies among students from pharmacy, medicine, nursing, and social work. A formal usability testing session was conducted which participants assumed professional roles on a healthcare team and engaged in a mix of scripted and unscripted conversations. Participants explored the patient's symptoms, social context, and care needs. Usability issues were identified (e.g., audio routing, response latency) and used to guide subsequent refinements. Findings in general suggest that AIMS supports realistic, profession-specific and contextually appropriate conversations. We discussed both technical and pedagogical innovations of AIMS and concluded with future directions.

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreaking attacks that exploit conversational context to bypass safety constraints gradually. These attacks target different harm categories (like malware generation, harassment, or fraud) through distinct conversational approaches (educational discussions, personal experiences, hypothetical scenarios). Existing multi-turn jailbreaking methods often rely on heuristic or ad hoc exploration strategies, providing limited insight into underlying model weaknesses. The relationship between conversation patterns and model vulnerabilities across harm categories remains poorly understood. We propose Pattern Enhanced Chain of Attack (PE-CoA), a framework of five conversation patterns to construct effective multi-turn jailbreaks through natural dialogue. Evaluating PE-CoA on twelve LLMs spanning ten harm categories, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, uncovering pattern-specific vulnerabilities and LLM behavioral characteristics: models exhibit distinct weakness profiles where robustness to one conversational pattern does not generalize to others, and model families share similar failure modes. These findings highlight limitations of safety training and indicate the need for pattern-aware defenses. Code available on: https://github.com/Ragib-Amin-Nihal/PE-CoA

Surgical video-language pretraining (VLP) faces unique challenges due to the knowledge domain gap and the scarcity of multi-modal data.

Human-centric systems (HCSs), e.g. , used in healthcare facilities [ Given the long testing horizon ( e.g. , several years, or semesters, in healthcare, and IE, respectively) and the high cost of recruiting participants, online testing is considered exceedingly The work was done at North Carolina State University. In this section, we introduce the FPS method, which determines the policy to be deployed to new participants that join an existing cohort, conditioned only on their initial states.

However, practical model deployment often operates in the gap between these two limit cases, as real-world applications demand adaptation to specific subdomains, tasks or concepts -- spread over the entire, varying life cycle of a model.

The lack of interpretability in the field of medical image analysis has significant ethical and legal implications.