Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing various fields, including public health surveillance. In Africa, where health systems frequently encounter challenges such as limited resources, inadequate infrastructure, failed health information systems and a shortage of skilled health professionals, AI offers a transformative opportunity. This paper investigates the applications of AI in public health surveillance across the continent, presenting successful case studies and examining the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of implementing AI technologies in African healthcare settings. Our paper highlights AI's potential to enhance disease monitoring and health outcomes, and support effective public health interventions. The findings presented in the paper demonstrate that AI can significantly improve the accuracy and timeliness of disease detection and prediction, optimize resource allocation, and facilitate targeted public health strategies. Additionally, our paper identified key barriers to the widespread adoption of AI in African public health systems and proposed actionable recommendations to overcome these challenges.

Augmented Reality (AR) holds the potential to revolutionize surgical procedures by allowing surgeons to visualize critical structures within the patient's body. This is achieved through superimposing preoperative organ models onto the actual anatomy. Challenges arise from dynamic deformations of organs during surgery, making preoperative models inadequate for faithfully representing intraoperative anatomy. To enable reliable navigation in augmented surgery, modeling of intraoperative deformation to obtain an accurate alignment of the preoperative organ model with the intraoperative anatomy is indispensable. Despite the existence of various methods proposed to model intraoperative organ deformation, there are still few literature reviews that systematically categorize and summarize these approaches. This review aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive and technical-oriented overview of modeling methods for intraoperative organ deformation in augmented reality in surgery. Through a systematic search and screening process, 112 closely relevant papers were included in this review. By presenting the current status of organ deformation modeling methods and their clinical applications, this review seeks to enhance the understanding of organ deformation modeling in AR-guided surgery, and discuss the potential topics for future advancements.

This study analyzes hybrid AI systems' design patterns and their effectiveness in clinical decision-making using the boxology framework. It categorizes and copares various architectures combining machine learning and rule-based reasoning to provide insights into their structural foundations and healthcare applications. Addressing two main questions, how to categorize these systems againts established design patterns and how to extract insights through comparative analysis, the study uses design patterns from software engineering to understand and optimize healthcare AI systems. Boxology helps identify commonalities and create reusable solutions, enhancing these systems' scalability, reliability, and performance. Five primary architectures are examined: REML, MLRB, RBML, RMLT, and PERML. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the need for tailored approaches in clinical tasks. REML excels in high-accuracy prediction for datasets with limited data; MLRB in handling large datasets and complex data integration; RBML in explainability and trustworthiness; RMLT in managing high-dimensional data; and PERML, though limited in analysis, shows promise in urgent care scenarios. The study introduces four new patterns, creates five abstract categorization patterns, and refines those five further to specific systems. These contributions enhance Boxlogy's taxonomical organization and offer novel approaches to integrating expert knowledge with machine learning. Boxology's structured, modular apporach offers significant advantages in developing and analyzing hybrid AI systems, revealing commonalities, and promoting reusable solutions. In conclusion, this study underscores hybrid AI systems' crucial role in advancing healthcare and Boxology's potential to drive further innovation in AI integration, ultimately improving clinical decision support and patient outcomes.

The ever-increasing volume of digital information necessitates efficient methods for users to extract key insights from lengthy documents. Aspect-based summarization offers a targeted approach, generating summaries focused on specific aspects within a document. Despite advancements in aspect-based summarization research, there is a continuous quest for improved model performance. Given that large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to revolutionize diverse tasks within natural language processing, particularly in the problem of summarization, this paper explores the potential of fine-tuning LLMs for the aspect-based summarization task. We evaluate the impact of fine-tuning open-source foundation LLMs, including Llama2, Mistral, Gemma and Aya, on a publicly available domain-specific aspect based summary dataset. We hypothesize that this approach will enable these models to effectively identify and extract aspect-related information, leading to superior quality aspect-based summaries compared to the state-of-the-art. We establish a comprehensive evaluation framework to compare the performance of fine-tuned LLMs against competing aspect-based summarization methods and vanilla counterparts of the fine-tuned LLMs. Our work contributes to the field of aspect-based summarization by demonstrating the efficacy of fine-tuning LLMs for generating high-quality aspect-based summaries. Furthermore, it opens doors for further exploration of using LLMs for targeted information extraction tasks across various NLP domains.

This paper introduces a novel two-stage framework for accurate Egyptian Vehicle License Plate Recognition (EVLPR). The first stage employs image processing techniques to reliably localize license plates, while the second stage utilizes a custom-designed deep learning model for robust Arabic character recognition. The proposed system achieves a remarkable 99.3% accuracy on a diverse dataset, surpassing existing approaches. Its potential applications extend to intelligent traffic management, including traffic violation detection and parking optimization. Future research will focus on enhancing the system's capabilities through architectural refinements, expanded datasets, and addressing system dependencies.

Detecting and localizing leakages is a significant challenge for the efficient and sustainable management of water distribution networks (WDN). Leveraging the inherent graph structure of WDNs, recent approaches have used graph-based data-driven methods. However, these methods often learn shortcuts that work well with in-distribution data but fail to generalize to out-of-distribution data. To address this limitation and inspired by the perfect generalization ability of classical algorithms, we propose an algorithm-informed graph neural network (AIGNN). Recognizing that WDNs function as flow networks, incorporating max-flow information can be beneficial for inferring pressures. In the proposed framework, we first train AIGNN to emulate the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for solving max-flow problems. This algorithmic knowledge is then transferred to address the pressure estimation problem in WDNs. Two AIGNNs are deployed, one to reconstruct pressure based on the current measurements, and another to predict pressure based on previous measurements. Leakages are detected and localized by comparing the outputs of the reconstructor and the predictor. By pretraining AIGNNs to reason like algorithms, they are expected to extract more task-relevant and generalizable features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm-informed approach achieves superior results with better generalization ability compared to GNNs that do not incorporate algorithmic knowledge.

The rapid advancement of AI technology has led to widespread applications of agent systems across various domains. However, the need for detailed architecture design poses significant challenges in designing and operating these systems. This paper introduces a taxonomy focused on the architectures of foundation-model-based agents, addressing critical aspects such as functional capabilities and non-functional qualities. We also discuss the operations involved in both design-time and run-time phases, providing a comprehensive view of architectural design and operational characteristics. By unifying and detailing these classifications, our taxonomy aims to improve the design of foundation-model-based agents. Additionally, the paper establishes a decision model that guides critical design and runtime decisions, offering a structured approach to enhance the development of foundation-model-based agents. Our contributions include providing a structured architecture design option and guiding the development process of foundation-model-based agents, thereby addressing current fragmentation in the field.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a widely developed and adopted technology across entire industry sectors. Integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations with AI investments is crucial for ensuring ethical and sustainable technological advancement. Particularly from an investor perspective, this integration not only mitigates risks but also enhances long-term value creation by aligning AI initiatives with broader societal goals. Yet, this area has been less explored in both academia and industry. To bridge the gap, we introduce a novel ESG-AI framework, which is developed based on insights from engagements with 28 companies and comprises three key components. The framework provides a structured approach to this integration, developed in collaboration with industry practitioners. The ESG-AI framework provides an overview of the environmental and social impacts of AI applications, helping users such as investors assess the materiality of AI use. Moreover, it enables investors to evaluate a company's commitment to responsible AI through structured engagements and thorough assessment of specific risk areas. We have publicly released the framework and toolkit in April 2024, which has received significant attention and positive feedback from the investment community. This paper details each component of the framework, demonstrating its applicability in real-world contexts and its potential to guide ethical AI investments.

This paper presents and evaluates a new retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and large language model (LLM)-based artificial intelligence (AI) technique: rubric enabled generative artificial intelligence (REGAI). REGAI uses rubrics, which can be created manually or automatically by the system, to enhance the performance of LLMs for evaluation purposes. REGAI improves on the performance of both classical LLMs and RAG-based LLM techniques. This paper describes REGAI, presents data regarding its performance and discusses several possible application areas for the technology.

This study presents a novel approach to predicting mechanical properties of Additive Friction Stir Deposited (AFSD) aluminum alloy walled structures using biomimetic machine learning. The research combines numerical modeling of the AFSD process with genetic algorithm-optimized machine learning models to predict von Mises stress and logarithmic strain. Finite element analysis was employed to simulate the AFSD process for five aluminum alloys: AA2024, AA5083, AA5086, AA7075, and AA6061, capturing complex thermal and mechanical interactions. A dataset of 200 samples was generated from these simulations. Subsequently, Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF) regression models, optimized using genetic algorithms, were developed to predict key mechanical properties. The GA-RF model demonstrated superior performance in predicting both von Mises stress (R square = 0.9676) and logarithmic strain (R square = 0.7201). This innovative approach provides a powerful tool for understanding and optimizing the AFSD process across multiple aluminum alloys, offering insights into material behavior under various process parameters.