Epigraphs Stone inscriptions are important artifacts in the field of archaeology. Although several cultures follow different methods as primary forms of writing, for example, palm leaf manuscripts by Dravidians, papyrus manuscripts by Egyptians, and Animal Hide manuscripts by several European civilizations, stone inscriptions remained a robust secondary form of writing across all the civilizations that practiced writing. This is mainly due to the robustness associated with the medium, as it is impossible to manipulate, change the stone inscriptions and very difficult to mutilate them. Therefore, several historically important documents such as treaties, grants, and tombstones are engraved in stones.

In recent years, the integration of federated learning (FL) and recommendation systems (RS), known as Federated Recommendation Systems (FRS), has attracted attention for preserving user privacy by keeping private data on client devices. However, FRS faces inherent limitations such as data heterogeneity and scarcity, due to the privacy requirements of FL and the typical data sparsity issues of RSs. Models like ChatGPT are empowered by the concept of transfer learning and self-supervised learning, so they can be easily applied to the downstream tasks after fine-tuning or prompting. These models, so-called Foundation Models (FM), fouce on understanding the human's intent and perform following their designed roles in the specific tasks, which are widely recognized for producing high-quality content in the image and language domains. Thus, the achievements of FMs inspire the design of FRS and suggest a promising research direction: integrating foundation models to address the above limitations. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive review of FRSs with FMs. Specifically, we: 1) summarise the common approaches of current FRSs and FMs; 2) review the challenges posed by FRSs and FMs; 3) discuss potential future research directions; and 4) introduce some common benchmarks and evaluation metrics in the FRS field. We hope that this position paper provides the necessary background and guidance to explore this interesting and emerging topic.

Graphs play an important role in representing complex relationships in various domains like social networks, knowledge graphs, and molecular discovery. With the advent of deep learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a cornerstone in Graph Machine Learning (Graph ML), facilitating the representation and processing of graph structures. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in language tasks and are widely adopted in a variety of applications such as computer vision and recommender systems. This remarkable success has also attracted interest in applying LLMs to the graph domain. Increasing efforts have been made to explore the potential of LLMs in advancing Graph ML's generalization, transferability, and few-shot learning ability. Meanwhile, graphs, especially knowledge graphs, are rich in reliable factual knowledge, which can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and potentially alleviate their limitations such as hallucinations and the lack of explainability. Given the rapid progress of this research direction, a systematic review summarizing the latest advancements for Graph ML in the era of LLMs is necessary to provide an in-depth understanding to researchers and practitioners. Therefore, in this survey, we first review the recent developments in Graph ML. We then explore how LLMs can be utilized to enhance the quality of graph features, alleviate the reliance on labeled data, and address challenges such as graph heterogeneity and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Afterward, we delve into how graphs can enhance LLMs, highlighting their abilities to enhance LLM pre-training and inference. Furthermore, we investigate various applications and discuss the potential future directions in this promising field.

In the evolving field of Natural Language Processing, understanding the temporal context of text is increasingly crucial. This study investigates methods to incorporate temporal information during pre-training, aiming to achieve effective time-aware language representation for improved performance on time-related tasks. In contrast to common pre-trained models like BERT, which rely on synchronic document collections such as BookCorpus and Wikipedia, our research introduces BiTimeBERT 2.0, a novel language model pre-trained on a temporal news article collection. BiTimeBERT 2.0 utilizes this temporal news collection, focusing on three innovative pre-training objectives: Time-Aware Masked Language Modeling (TAMLM), Document Dating (DD), and Time-Sensitive Entity Replacement (TSER). Each objective targets a unique aspect of temporal information. TAMLM is designed to enhance the understanding of temporal contexts and relations, DD integrates document timestamps as chronological markers, and TSER focuses on the temporal dynamics of "Person" entities, recognizing their inherent temporal significance. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that BiTimeBERT 2.0 outperforms models like BERT and other existing pre-trained models, achieving substantial gains across a variety of downstream NLP tasks and applications where time plays a pivotal role.

The fruit identification process involves analyzing and categorizing different types of fruits based on their visual characteristics. This activity can be achieved using a range of methodologies, encompassing manual examination, conventional computer vision methodologies, and more sophisticated methodologies employing machine learning and deep learning. Our study identified a total of 15 distinct categories of fruit, consisting of class Avocado, Banana, Cherry, Apple Braeburn, Apple golden 1, Apricot, Grape, Kiwi, Mango, Orange, Papaya, Peach, Pineapple, Pomegranate and Strawberry. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a technological advancement employed within the realm of deep learning and artificial intelligence, to automate conceptualizing and refining neural network topologies. NAS aims to identify neural network structures that are highly suitable for tasks, such as the detection of fruits. Our suggested model with 99.98% mAP increased the detection performance of the preceding research study that used Fruit datasets. In addition, after the completion of the study, a comparative analysis was carried out to assess the findings in conjunction with those of another research that is connected to the topic. When compared to the findings of earlier studies, the detector that was proposed exhibited higher performance in terms of both its accuracy and its precision.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent is a software entity that autonomously performs tasks or makes decisions based on pre-defined objectives and data inputs. AI agents, capable of perceiving user inputs, reasoning and planning tasks, and executing actions, have seen remarkable advancements in algorithm development and task performance. However, the security challenges they pose remain under-explored and unresolved. This survey delves into the emerging security threats faced by AI agents, categorizing them into four critical knowledge gaps: unpredictability of multi-step user inputs, complexity in internal executions, variability of operational environments, and interactions with untrusted external entities. By systematically reviewing these threats, this paper highlights both the progress made and the existing limitations in safeguarding AI agents. The insights provided aim to inspire further research into addressing the security threats associated with AI agents, thereby fostering the development of more robust and secure AI agent applications.

The rapid development of cutting-edge technologies, the increasing volume of data and also the availability and processability of new types of data sources has led to a paradigm shift in data-based management and decision-making. Since business processes are at the core of organizational work, these developments heavily impact business process management (BPM) as a crucial success factor for organizations. In view of this emerging potential, data-driven business process management has become a relevant and vibrant research area. Given the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the research field, this position paper therefore presents research insights regarding data-driven BPM.

In the burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), developing a robust safety mechanism, colloquially known as "safeguards" or "guardrails", has become imperative to ensure the ethical use of LLMs within prescribed boundaries. This article provides a systematic literature review on the current status of this critical mechanism. It discusses its major challenges and how it can be enhanced into a comprehensive mechanism dealing with ethical issues in various contexts. First, the paper elucidates the current landscape of safeguarding mechanisms that major LLM service providers and the open-source community employ. This is followed by the techniques to evaluate, analyze, and enhance some (un)desirable properties that a guardrail might want to enforce, such as hallucinations, fairness, privacy, and so on. Based on them, we review techniques to circumvent these controls (i.e., attacks), to defend the attacks, and to reinforce the guardrails. While the techniques mentioned above represent the current status and the active research trends, we also discuss several challenges that cannot be easily dealt with by the methods and present our vision on how to implement a comprehensive guardrail through the full consideration of multi-disciplinary approach, neural-symbolic method, and systems development lifecycle.

This paper surveys evaluation techniques to enhance the trustworthiness and understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs). As reliance on LLMs grows, ensuring their reliability, fairness, and transparency is crucial. We explore algorithmic methods and metrics to assess LLM performance, identify weaknesses, and guide development towards more trustworthy applications. Key evaluation metrics include Perplexity Measurement, NLP metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, BERTScore, GLEU, Word Error Rate, Character Error Rate), Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning Performance, Transfer Learning Evaluation, Adversarial Testing, and Fairness and Bias Evaluation. We introduce innovative approaches like LLMMaps for stratified evaluation, Benchmarking and Leaderboards for competitive assessment, Stratified Analysis for in-depth understanding, Visualization of Blooms Taxonomy for cognitive level accuracy distribution, Hallucination Score for quantifying inaccuracies, Knowledge Stratification Strategy for hierarchical analysis, and Machine Learning Models for Hierarchy Generation. Human Evaluation is highlighted for capturing nuances that automated metrics may miss. These techniques form a framework for evaluating LLMs, aiming to enhance transparency, guide development, and establish user trust. Future papers will describe metric visualization and demonstrate each approach on practical examples.

Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) have been integrated with conventional recommendation models to improve recommendation performance. However, while most of the existing works have focused on improving the model performance, the privacy issue has only received comparatively less attention. In this paper, we review recent advancements in privacy within LLM-based recommendation, categorizing them into privacy attacks and protection mechanisms. Additionally, we highlight several challenges and propose future directions for the community to address these critical problems.