We deal with a challenging scheduling problem on parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times and release dates from a real-world application of semiconductor work-shop production. There, jobs can only be processed by dedicated machines, thus few machines can determine the makespan almost regardless of how jobs are scheduled on the remaining ones. This causes problems when machines fail and jobs need to be rescheduled. Instead of optimising only the makespan, we put the individual machine spans in non-ascending order and lexicographically minimise the resulting tuples. This achieves that all machines complete as early as possible and increases the robustness of the schedule. We study the application of Answer-Set Programming (ASP) to solve this problem. While ASP eases modelling, the combination of timing constraints and the considered objective function challenges current solving technology. The former issue is addressed by using an extension of ASP by difference logic. For the latter, we devise different algorithms that use multi-shot solving. To tackle industrial-sized instances, we study different approximations and heuristics. Our experimental results show that ASP is indeed a promising KRR paradigm for this problem and is competitive with state-of-the-art CP and MIP solvers. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can efficiently help humans resolve conflicts or reach beneficial agreements. Although there have been many explorations in negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has to date remained notably absent. To this end, we aim to fill this gap by reviewing contemporary studies in the emerging field of negotiation dialogue systems, covering benchmarks, evaluations, and methodologies. Furthermore, we also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party, and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.

Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack sufficient means to measure viewpoint diversity in conversations. To this end, in this paper, we operationalize two viewpoint metrics proposed for recommender systems and adapt them to the context of social media conversations. This is the first study to apply these two metrics (Representation and Fragmentation) to real world data and to consider the implications for online conversations specifically. We apply these measures to two topics -- daylight savings time (DST), which serves as a control, and the more politically polarized topic of immigration. We find that the diversity scores for both Fragmentation and Representation are lower for immigration than for DST. Further, we find that while pro-immigrant views receive consistent pushback on the platform, anti-immigrant views largely operate within echo chambers. We observe less severe yet similar patterns for DST. Taken together, Representation and Fragmentation paint a meaningful and important new picture of viewpoint diversity.

Protein structure prediction (PSP) is a grand challenge in bioinformatics, drug discovery, and related fields. PSP is computationally challenging because of an astronomically large conformational space to be searched and an unknown very complex energy function to be minimised. To obtain a given protein's structure, template-based PSP approaches adopt a similar protein's known structure, while template-free PSP approaches work when no similar protein's structure is known. Currently, proteins with known structures are greatly outnumbered by proteins with unknown structures. Template-free PSP has obtained significant progress recently via machine learning and search-based optimisation approaches.

User and product information associated with a review is useful for sentiment polarity prediction. Typical approaches incorporating such information focus on modeling users and products as implicitly learned representation vectors. Most do not exploit the potential of historical reviews, or those that currently do require unnecessary modifications to model architecture or do not make full use of user/product associations. The contribution of this work is twofold: i) a method to explicitly employ historical reviews belonging to the same user/product to initialize representations, and ii) efficient incorporation of textual associations between users and products via a user-product cross-context module. Experiments on IMDb, Yelp-2013 and Yelp-2014 benchmarks show that our approach substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art. Since we employ BERT-base as the encoder, we additionally provide experiments in which our approach performs well with Span-BERT and Longformer. Furthermore, experiments where the reviews of each user/product in the training data are downsampled demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach under a low-resource setting.

The development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in space applications is growing quickly as the consensus increases on the potential benefits introduced. As more and more aerospace engineers are becoming aware of new trends in AI, traditional approaches are revisited to consider the applications of emerging AI technologies. Already at the time of writing, the scope of AI-related activities across academia, the aerospace industry and space agencies is so wide that an in-depth review would not fit in these pages. In this chapter we focus instead on two main emerging trends we believe capture the most relevant and exciting activities in the field: differentiable intelligence and on-board machine learning. Differentiable intelligence, in a nutshell, refers to works making extensive use of automatic differentiation frameworks to learn the parameters of machine learning or related models. Onboard machine learning considers the problem of moving inference as well as learning of machine learning models onboard. Within these fields, we discuss a few selected projects originating from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT), giving priority to advanced topics going beyond the transposition of established AI techniques and practices to the space domain, thus necessarily leaving out interesting activities with a possibly higher technology readiness level. We start with the topic of differentiable intelligence by introducing Guidance and Control Networks (G&CNets), Eclipse Networks (EclipseNETs), Neural Density Fields (geodesyNets) as well as the use of implicit representations to learn differentiable models for the shapes of asteroids and comets from LiDAR data.

Open Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures will enable interoperability, openness and programmable data-driven control in next generation cellular networks. However, developing and testing efficient solutions that generalize across heterogeneous cellular deployments and scales, and that optimize network performance in such diverse environments is a complex task that is still largely unexplored. In this paper we present OpenRAN Gym, a unified, open, and O-RAN-compliant experimental toolbox for data collection, design, prototyping and testing of end-to-end data-driven control solutions for next generation Open RAN systems. OpenRAN Gym extends and combines into a unique solution several software frameworks for data collection of RAN statistics and RAN control, and a lightweight O-RAN near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) tailored to run on experimental wireless platforms. We first provide an overview of the various architectural components of OpenRAN Gym and describe how it is used to collect data and design, train and test artificial intelligence and machine learning O-RAN-compliant applications (xApps) at scale. We then describe in detail how to test the developed xApps on softwarized RANs and provide an example of two xApps developed with OpenRAN Gym that are used to control a network with 7 base stations and 42 users deployed on the Colosseum testbed. Finally, we show how solutions developed with OpenRAN Gym on Colosseum can be exported to real-world, heterogeneous wireless platforms, such as the Arena testbed and the POWDER and COSMOS platforms of the PAWR program. OpenRAN Gym and its software components are open-source and publicly-available to the research community. By guiding the readers through running experiments with OpenRAN Gym, we aim at providing a key reference for researchers and practitioners working on experimental Open RAN systems.

Shield AI, a San Diego startup that's building artificial intelligence "pilots" for military aircraft and drones, has pulled in an additional $60 million in venture capital funding. The money is follow-on investment to a financing that Shield AI announced in June. It brings the total amount raised in the Series E round to $225 million -- made up of $150 million in equity and $75 million in debt. The additional capital came from the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund. Founded in 2015, Shield AI has raised just under $575 million since inception.

We present the Verifee Dataset: a novel dataset of news articles with fine-grained trustworthiness annotations. We develop a detailed methodology that assesses the texts based on their parameters encompassing editorial transparency, journalist conventions, and objective reporting while penalizing manipulative techniques. We bring aboard a diverse set of researchers from social, media, and computer sciences to overcome barriers and limited framing of this interdisciplinary problem. We collect over $10,000$ unique articles from almost $60$ Czech online news sources. These are categorized into one of the $4$ classes across the credibility spectrum we propose, raging from entirely trustworthy articles all the way to the manipulative ones. We produce detailed statistics and study trends emerging throughout the set. Lastly, we fine-tune multiple popular sequence-to-sequence language models using our dataset on the trustworthiness classification task and report the best testing F-1 score of $0.52$. We open-source the dataset, annotation methodology, and annotators' instructions in full length at https://verifee.ai/research to enable easy build-up work. We believe similar methods can help prevent disinformation and educate in the realm of media literacy.

Counterfactual explanations have emerged as a popular solution for the eXplainable AI (XAI) problem of elucidating the predictions of black-box deep-learning systems due to their psychological validity, flexibility across problem domains and proposed legal compliance. While over 100 counterfactual methods exist, claiming to generate plausible explanations akin to those preferred by people, few have actually been tested on users ($\sim7\%$). So, the psychological validity of these counterfactual algorithms for effective XAI for image data is not established. This issue is addressed here using a novel methodology that (i) gathers ground truth human-generated counterfactual explanations for misclassified images, in two user studies and, then, (ii) compares these human-generated ground-truth explanations to computationally-generated explanations for the same misclassifications. Results indicate that humans do not "minimally edit" images when generating counterfactual explanations. Instead, they make larger, "meaningful" edits that better approximate prototypes in the counterfactual class.