One of the new trends in the development of recommendation algorithms is the dissemination of their capabilities to support the population in managing their health. This article focuses on the problem of improving the effectiveness of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) prevention, since CVD is the leading cause of death worldwide. To address this issue, a knowledge-based recommendation algorithm was proposed to support self-management of CVD risk factors in adults at home. The proposed algorithm is based on the original multidimensional recommendation model and on a new user profile model, which includes predictive assessments of CVD health in addition to its current ones as outlined in official guidelines. The main feature of the proposed algorithm is the combination of rule-based logic with the capabilities of a large language model in generating human-like text for explanatory component of multidimensional recommendation. The verification and evaluation of the proposed algorithm showed the usefulness of the proposed recommendation algorithm for supporting adults in self-management of their CVD risk factors at home. As follows from the comparison with similar knowledge-based recommendation algorithms, the proposed algorithm evaluates a larger number of CVD risk factors and has a greater information and semantic capacity of the generated recommendations.

The detrimental effects of air pollutants on human health have prompted increasing concerns regarding indoor air quality (IAQ). The emergence of digital health interventions and citizen science initiatives has provided new avenues for raising awareness, improving IAQ, and promoting behavioural changes. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) offers a theoretical framework to understand user acceptance and adoption of IAQ technology. This paper presents a case study using the COM-B model and Internet of Things (IoT) technology to design a human-centred digital visualisation platform, leading to behavioural changes and improved IAQ. The study also investigates users' acceptance and adoption of the technology, focusing on their experiences, expectations, and the impact on IAQ. Integrating IAQ sensing, digital health-related interventions, citizen science, and the TAM model offers opportunities to address IAQ challenges, enhance public health, and foster sustainable indoor environments. The analytical results show that factors such as human behaviour, indoor activities, and awareness play crucial roles in shaping IAQ.

This paper presents an analytical framework for conducting academic reviews in the field of Healthcare Systems Engineering, employing ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art tool among recent language models. We utilized 9,809 abstract paragraphs from conference presentations to systematically review the field. The framework comprises distinct analytical processes, each employing tailored prompts and the systematic use of the ChatGPT API. Through this framework, we organized the target field into 11 topic categories and conducted a comprehensive analysis covering quantitative yearly trends and detailed sub-categories. This effort explores the potential for leveraging ChatGPT to alleviate the burden of academic reviews. Furthermore, it provides valuable insights into the dynamic landscape of Healthcare Systems Engineering research.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant progress has been made in multi-agent applications. However, the complexities in coordinating agents' cooperation and LLMs' erratic performance pose notable challenges in developing robust and efficient multi-agent applications. To tackle these challenges, we propose AgentScope, a developer-centric multi-agent platform with message exchange as its core communication mechanism. The abundant syntactic tools, built-in agents and service functions, user-friendly interfaces for application demonstration and utility monitor, zero-code programming workstation, and automatic prompt tuning mechanism significantly lower the barriers to both development and deployment. Towards robust and flexible multi-agent application, AgentScope provides both built-in and customizable fault tolerance mechanisms. At the same time, it is also armed with system-level support for managing and utilizing multi-modal data, tools, and external knowledge. Additionally, we design an actor-based distribution framework, enabling easy conversion between local and distributed deployments and automatic parallel optimization without extra effort. With these features, AgentScope empowers developers to build applications that fully realize the potential of intelligent agents. We have released AgentScope at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope, and hope AgentScope invites wider participation and innovation in this fast-moving field.

Modern named entity recognition systems have steadily improved performance in the age of larger and more powerful neural models. However, over the past several years, the state-of-the-art has seemingly hit another plateau on the benchmark CoNLL-03 English dataset. In this paper, we perform a deep dive into the test outputs of the highest-performing NER models, conducting a fine-grained evaluation of their performance by introducing new document-level annotations on the test set. We go beyond F1 scores by categorizing errors in order to interpret the true state of the art for NER and guide future work. We review previous attempts at correcting the various flaws of the test set and introduce CoNLL#, a new corrected version of the test set that addresses its systematic and most prevalent errors, allowing for low-noise, interpretable error analysis.

The rapid advancement of foundation models (FMs) across language, image, audio, and video domains has shown remarkable capabilities in diverse tasks. However, the proliferation of FMs brings forth a critical challenge: the potential to generate hallucinated outputs, particularly in high-stakes applications. The tendency of foundation models to produce hallucinated content arguably represents the biggest hindrance to their widespread adoption in real-world scenarios, especially in domains where reliability and accuracy are paramount. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of recent developments that aim to identify and mitigate the problem of hallucination in FMs, spanning text, image, video, and audio modalities. By synthesizing recent advancements in detecting and mitigating hallucination across various modalities, the paper aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and practitioners. Essentially, it establishes a clear framework encompassing definition, taxonomy, and detection strategies for addressing hallucination in multimodal foundation models, laying the foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

Training machine learning models for classification tasks often requires labeling numerous samples, which is costly and time-consuming, especially in time series analysis. This research investigates Active Learning (AL) strategies to reduce the amount of labeled data needed for effective time series classification. Traditional AL techniques cannot control the selection of instances per class for labeling, leading to potential bias in classification performance and instance selection, particularly in imbalanced time series datasets. To address this, we propose a novel class-balancing instance selection algorithm integrated with standard AL strategies. Our approach aims to select more instances from classes with fewer labeled examples, thereby addressing imbalance in time series datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our AL framework in selecting informative data samples for two distinct domains of tactile texture recognition and industrial fault detection. In robotics, our method achieves high-performance texture categorization while significantly reducing labeled training data requirements to 70%. We also evaluate the impact of different sliding window time intervals on robotic texture classification using AL strategies. In synthetic fiber manufacturing, we adapt AL techniques to address the challenge of fault classification, aiming to minimize data annotation cost and time for industries. We also address real-life class imbalances in the multiclass industrial anomalous dataset using our class-balancing instance algorithm integrated with AL strategies. Overall, this thesis highlights the potential of our AL framework across these two distinct domains.

Human activity recognition (HAR) using ambient sensors in smart homes has numerous applications for human healthcare and wellness. However, building general-purpose HAR models that can be deployed to new smart home environments requires a significant amount of annotated sensor data and training overhead. Most smart homes vary significantly in their layouts, i.e., floor plans and the specifics of sensors embedded, resulting in low generalizability of HAR models trained for specific homes. We address this limitation by introducing a novel, layout-agnostic modeling approach for HAR systems in smart homes that utilizes the transferrable representational capacity of natural language descriptions of raw sensor data. To this end, we generate Textual Descriptions Of Sensor Triggers (TDOST) that encapsulate the surrounding trigger conditions and provide cues for underlying activities to the activity recognition models. Leveraging textual embeddings, rather than raw sensor data, we create activity recognition systems that predict standard activities across homes without either (re-)training or adaptation on target homes. Through an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TDOST-based models in unseen smart homes through experiments on benchmarked CASAS datasets. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis of how the individual components of our approach affect downstream activity recognition performance.

In recent years, deep learning on graphs has achieved remarkable success in various domains. However, the reliance on annotated graph data remains a significant bottleneck due to its prohibitive cost and time-intensive nature. To address this challenge, self-supervised learning (SSL) on graphs has gained increasing attention and has made significant progress. SSL enables machine learning models to produce informative representations from unlabeled graph data, reducing the reliance on expensive labeled data. While SSL on graphs has witnessed widespread adoption, one critical component, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), has not been thoroughly investigated in the existing literature. Thus, this survey aims to fill this gap by offering a dedicated survey on GCL. We provide a comprehensive overview of the fundamental principles of GCL, including data augmentation strategies, contrastive modes, and contrastive optimization objectives. Furthermore, we explore the extensions of GCL to other aspects of data-efficient graph learning, such as weakly supervised learning, transfer learning, and related scenarios. We also discuss practical applications spanning domains such as drug discovery, genomics analysis, recommender systems, and finally outline the challenges and potential future directions in this field.

From its inception, AI has had a rather ambivalent relationship with humans -- swinging between their augmentation and replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. One critical requirement for such synergistic human-AI interaction is that the AI systems be explainable to the humans in the loop. To do this effectively, AI agents need to go beyond planning with their own models of the world, and take into account the mental model of the human in the loop. Drawing from several years of research in our lab, we will discuss how the AI agent can use these mental models to either conform to human expectations, or change those expectations through explanatory communication. While the main focus of the book is on cooperative scenarios, we will point out how the same mental models can be used for obfuscation and deception. Although the book is primarily driven by our own research in these areas, in every chapter, we will provide ample connections to relevant research from other groups.