With the increasing demand of raw materials nowadays, and the decrease in supplies, the industrial sector is suffering. The environment and the society are also indirectly affected. The goal to reach a sustainable development imposes several studies on the economic, environmental and community level. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing body of literature on automated remanufacturing, and its potential impacts on the three pillars of sustainability. A particular interest is given to the growing use of cobots promoted by the principle of industry 4.0. The investigation that covers each part of the remanufacturing process will help in formalizing an approach about the automation of such processes. It highlights the challenges found and aims to improve the remanufacturing sector towards a more sustainable industry.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most promising technologies of the 21. century, with an already noticeable impact on society and the economy. With this work, we provide a short overview of global trends, applications in industry and selected use-cases from our international experience and work in industry and academia. The goal is to present global and regional positive practices and provide an informed opinion on the realistic goals and opportunities for positioning B&H on the global AI scene.

In this meta-ethnography, we explore three different angles of ethical artificial intelligence (AI) design implementation including the philosophical ethical viewpoint, the technical perspective, and framing through a political lens. Our qualitative research includes a literature review which highlights the cross referencing of these angles through discussing the value and drawbacks of contrastive top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches previously published. The novel contribution to this framework is the political angle, which constitutes ethics in AI either being determined by corporations and governments and imposed through policies or law (coming from the top), or ethics being called for by the people (coming from the bottom), as well as top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid technicalities of how AI is developed within a moral construct and in consideration of its users, with expected and unexpected consequences and long-term impact in the world. There is a focus on reinforcement learning as an example of a bottom-up applied technical approach and AI ethics principles as a practical top-down approach. This investigation includes real-world case studies to impart a global perspective, as well as philosophical debate on the ethics of AI and theoretical future thought experimentation based on historical fact, current world circumstances, and possible ensuing realities.

Enabling secure and reliable high-bandwidth lowlatency connectivity between automated vehicles and external servers, intelligent infrastructure, and other road users is a central step in making fully automated driving possible. The availability of data interfaces, which allow this kind of connectivity, has the potential to distinguish artificial agents' capabilities in connected, cooperative, and automated mobility systems from the capabilities of human operators, who do not possess such interfaces. Connected agents can for example share data to build collective environment models, plan collective behavior, and learn collectively from the shared data that is centrally combined. This paper presents multiple solutions that allow connected entities to exchange data. In particular, we propose a new universal communication interface which uses the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to connect agents running the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our work integrates methods to assess the connection quality in the form of various key performance indicators in real-time. We compare a variety of approaches that provide the connectivity necessary for the exemplary use case of edge-cloud lidar object detection in a 5G network. We show that the mean latency between the availability of vehicle-based sensor measurements and the reception of a corresponding object list from the edge-cloud is below 87 ms. All implemented solutions are made open-source and free to use. Source code is available at https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/ros-v2x-benchmarking-suite.

In scientific research, the method is an indispensable means to solve scientific problems and a critical research object. With the advancement of sciences, many scientific methods are being proposed, modified, and used in academic literature. The authors describe details of the method in the abstract and body text, and key entities in academic literature reflecting names of the method are called method entities. Exploring diverse method entities in a tremendous amount of academic literature helps scholars understand existing methods, select the appropriate method for research tasks, and propose new methods. Furthermore, the evolution of method entities can reveal the development of a discipline and facilitate knowledge discovery. Therefore, this article offers a systematic review of methodological and empirical works focusing on extracting method entities from full-text academic literature and efforts to build knowledge services using these extracted method entities. Definitions of key concepts involved in this review were first proposed. Based on these definitions, we systematically reviewed the approaches and indicators to extract and evaluate method entities, with a strong focus on the pros and cons of each approach. We also surveyed how extracted method entities are used to build new applications. Finally, limitations in existing works as well as potential next steps were discussed.

Machine learning methods are increasingly widely used in high-risk settings such as healthcare, transportation, and finance. In these settings, it is important that a model produces calibrated uncertainty to reflect its own confidence and avoid failures. In this paper we survey recent works on uncertainty quantification (UQ) for deep learning, in particular distribution-free Conformal Prediction method for its mathematical properties and wide applicability. We will cover the theoretical guarantees of conformal methods, introduce techniques that improve calibration and efficiency for UQ in the context of spatiotemporal data, and discuss the role of UQ in the context of safe decision making.

Language models pre-trained on biomedical corpora, such as BioBERT, have recently shown promising results on downstream biomedical tasks. Many existing pre-trained models, on the other hand, are resource-intensive and computationally heavy owing to factors such as embedding size, hidden dimension, and number of layers. The natural language processing (NLP) community has developed numerous strategies to compress these models utilising techniques such as pruning, quantisation, and knowledge distillation, resulting in models that are considerably faster, smaller, and subsequently easier to use in practice. By the same token, in this paper we introduce six lightweight models, namely, BioDistilBERT, BioTiny-BERT, BioMobileBERT, DistilBioBERT, TinyBioBERT, and CompactBioBERT which are obtained either by knowledge distillation from a biomedical teacher or continual learning on the Pubmed dataset via the Masked Language Modelling (MLM) objective. We evaluate all of our models on three biomedical tasks and compare them with BioBERT-v1.1 to create efficient lightweight models that perform on par with their larger counterparts. All the models will be publicly available on our Huggingface profile athttps://huggingface.co/nlpie

Sparse representations of images are useful in many computer vision applications. Sparse coding with an $l_1$ penalty and a learned linear dictionary requires regularization of the dictionary to prevent a collapse in the $l_1$ norms of the codes. Typically, this regularization entails bounding the Euclidean norms of the dictionary's elements. In this work, we propose a novel sparse coding protocol which prevents a collapse in the codes without the need to regularize the decoder. Our method regularizes the codes directly so that each latent code component has variance greater than a fixed threshold over a set of sparse representations for a given set of inputs. Furthermore, we explore ways to effectively train sparse coding systems with multi-layer decoders since they can model more complex relationships than linear dictionaries. In our experiments with MNIST and natural image patches, we show that decoders learned with our approach have interpretable features both in the linear and multi-layer case. Moreover, we show that sparse autoencoders with multi-layer decoders trained using our variance regularization method produce higher quality reconstructions with sparser representations when compared to autoencoders with linear dictionaries. Additionally, sparse representations obtained with our variance regularization approach are useful in the downstream tasks of denoising and classification in the low-data regime.

Neural networks (NNs) and decision trees (DTs) are both popular models of machine learning, yet coming with mutually exclusive advantages and limitations. To bring the best of the two worlds, a variety of approaches are proposed to integrate NNs and DTs explicitly or implicitly. In this survey, these approaches are organized in a school which we term as neural trees (NTs). This survey aims to present a comprehensive review of NTs and attempts to identify how they enhance the model interpretability. We first propose a thorough taxonomy of NTs that expresses the gradual integration and co-evolution of NNs and DTs. Afterward, we analyze NTs in terms of their interpretability and performance, and suggest possible solutions to the remaining challenges. Finally, this survey concludes with a discussion about other considerations like conditional computation and promising directions towards this field. A list of papers reviewed in this survey, along with their corresponding codes, is available at: https://github.com/zju-vipa/awesome-neural-trees

Retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) are promising tools for the (early) diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). These non-invasive imaging techniques are cost-effective and more accessible than alternative neuroimaging tools. However, interpreting and classifying multi-slice scans produced by OCT devices is time-consuming and challenging even for trained practitioners. There are surveys on machine learning and deep learning approaches concerning the automated analysis of OCT scans for various diseases such as glaucoma. However, the current literature lacks an extensive survey on the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or cognitive impairment using OCT or OCTA. This has motivated us to do a comprehensive survey aimed at machine/deep learning scientists or practitioners who require an introduction to the problem. The paper contains 1) an introduction to the medical background of Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Impairment and their diagnosis using OCT and OCTA imaging modalities, 2) a review of various technical proposals for the problem and the sub-problems from an automated analysis perspective, 3) a systematic review of the recent deep learning studies and available OCT/OCTA datasets directly aimed at the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Impairment. For the latter, we used Publish or Perish Software to search for the relevant studies from various sources such as Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science. We followed the PRISMA approach to screen an initial pool of 3073 references and determined ten relevant studies (N=10, out of 3073) that directly targeted AD diagnosis. We identified the lack of open OCT/OCTA datasets (about Alzheimer's disease) as the main issue that is impeding the progress in the field.