The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into corporate strategy has become a pivotal focus for organizations aiming to maintain a competitive advantage in the digital age. As AI reshapes business operations and drives innovation, the need for specialized leadership to effectively manage these changes becomes increasingly apparent. In this paper, I explore the role of the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) within the C-suite, emphasizing the necessity of this position for successful AI strategy, integration, and governance. I analyze future scenarios based on current trends in three key areas: the AI Economy, AI Organization, and Competition in the Age of AI. These explorations lay the foundation for identifying the antecedents (environmental, structural, and strategic factors) that justify the inclusion of a CAIO in top management teams. This sets the stage for a comprehensive examination of the CAIO's role and the broader implications of AI leadership. This paper advances the discussion on AI leadership by providing a rationale for the strategic integration of AI at the executive level and examining the role of the Chief AI Officer within organizations.

The rapid proliferation of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a transformative era of data-driven connectivity across various domains. However, this exponential growth has raised pressing concerns about environmental sustainability and data privacy. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces One-shot Federated Learning (OSFL), an innovative paradigm that harmonizes sustainability and machine learning within IoT ecosystems. OSFL revolutionizes the traditional Federated Learning (FL) workflow by condensing multiple iterative communication rounds into a single operation, thus significantly reducing energy consumption, communication overhead, and latency. This breakthrough is coupled with the strategic integration of generative learning techniques, ensuring robust data privacy while promoting efficient knowledge sharing among IoT devices. By curtailing resource utilization, OSFL aligns seamlessly with the vision of green and sustainable IoT, effectively extending device lifespans and mitigating their environmental footprint. Our research underscores the transformative potential of OSFL, poised to reshape the landscape of IoT applications across domains such as energy-efficient smart cities and groundbreaking healthcare solutions. This contribution marks a pivotal step towards a more responsible, sustainable, and technologically advanced future.

We propose a modal logic in which counting modalities appear in linear inequalities. We show that each formula can be transformed into an equivalent graph neural network (GNN). We also show that a broad class of GNNs can be transformed efficiently into a formula, thus significantly improving upon the literature about the logical expressiveness of GNNs. We also show that the satisfiability problem is PSPACE-complete. These results bring together the promise of using standard logical methods for reasoning about GNNs and their properties, particularly in applications such as GNN querying, equivalence checking, etc. We prove that such natural problems can be solved in polynomial space.

Every year, plant parasitic nematodes, one of the major groups of plant pathogens, cause a significant loss of crops worldwide. To mitigate crop yield losses caused by nematodes, an efficient nematode monitoring method is essential for plant and crop disease management. In other respects, efficient nematode detection contributes to medical research and drug discovery, as nematodes are model organisms. With the rapid development of computer technology, computer vision techniques provide a feasible solution for quantifying nematodes or nematode infections. In this paper, we survey and categorise the studies and available datasets on nematode detection through deep-learning models. To stimulate progress in related research, this survey presents the potential state-of-the-art object detection models, training techniques, optimisation techniques, and evaluation metrics for deep learning beginners. Moreover, seven state-of-the-art object detection models are validated on three public datasets and the AgriNema dataset for plant parasitic nematodes to construct a baseline for nematode detection.

In many practical applications, it is often difficult and expensive to obtain large-scale labeled data to train state-of-the-art deep neural networks. Therefore, transferring the learned knowledge from a separate, labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain becomes an appealing alternative. However, direct transfer often results in significant performance decay due to domain shift. Domain adaptation (DA) aims to address this problem by aligning the distributions between the source and target domains. Multi-source domain adaptation (MDA) is a powerful and practical extension in which the labeled data may be collected from multiple sources with different distributions. In this survey, we first define various MDA strategies. Then we systematically summarize and compare modern MDA methods in the deep learning era from different perspectives, followed by commonly used datasets and a brief benchmark. Finally, we discuss future research directions for MDA that are worth investigating.

Imitation learning is an approach in which an agent learns how to execute a task by trying to mimic how one or more teachers perform it. This learning approach offers a compromise between the time it takes to learn a new task and the effort needed to collect teacher samples for the agent. It achieves this by balancing learning from the teacher, who has some information on how to perform the task, and deviating from their examples when necessary, such as states not present in the teacher samples. Consequently, the field of imitation learning has received much attention from researchers in recent years, resulting in many new methods and applications. However, with this increase in published work and past surveys focusing mainly on methodology, a lack of standardisation became more prominent in the field. This non-standardisation is evident in the use of environments, which appear in no more than two works, and evaluation processes, such as qualitative analysis, that have become rare in current literature. In this survey, we systematically review current imitation learning literature and present our findings by (i) classifying imitation learning techniques, environments and metrics by introducing novel taxonomies; (ii) reflecting on main problems from the literature; and (iii) presenting challenges and future directions for researchers.

Imbuing machines with the ability to talk has been a longtime pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) research. From the very beginning, the community has not only aimed to synthesise high-fidelity speech that accurately conveys the semantic meaning of an utterance, but also to colour it with inflections that cover the same range of affective expressions that humans are capable of. After many years of research, it appears that we are on the cusp of achieving this when it comes to single, isolated utterances. This unveils an abundance of potential avenues to explore when it comes to combining these single utterances with the aim of synthesising more complex, longer-term behaviours. In the present chapter, we outline the methodological advances that brought us so far and sketch out the ongoing efforts to reach that coveted next level of artificial expressivity. We also discuss the societal implications coupled with rapidly advancing expressive speech synthesis (ESS) technology and highlight ways to mitigate those risks and ensure the alignment of ESS capabilities with ethical norms.

Microplastic particle ingestion or inhalation by humans is a problem of growing concern. Unfortunately, current research methods that use machine learning to understand their potential harms are obstructed by a lack of available data. Deep learning techniques in particular are challenged by such domains where only small or imbalanced data sets are available. Overcoming this challenge often involves oversampling underrepresented classes or augmenting the existing data to improve model performance. This paper proposes GANsemble: a two-module framework connecting data augmentation with conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) to generate class-conditioned synthetic data. First, the data chooser module automates augmentation strategy selection by searching for the best data augmentation strategy. Next, the cGAN module uses this strategy to train a cGAN for generating enhanced synthetic data. We experiment with the GANsemble framework on a small and imbalanced microplastics data set. A Microplastic-cGAN (MPcGAN) algorithm is introduced, and baselines for synthetic microplastics (SYMP) data are established in terms of Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Inception Scores (IS). We also provide a synthetic microplastics filter (SYMP-Filter) algorithm to increase the quality of generated SYMP. Additionally, we show the best amount of oversampling with augmentation to fix class imbalance in small microplastics data sets. To our knowledge, this study is the first application of generative AI to synthetically create microplastics data.

Language models have been effective in a wide range of applications, yet the most sophisticated models are often proprietary. For example, GPT-4 by OpenAI and various models by Anthropic are expensive and consume substantial energy. In contrast, the open-source community has produced competitive models, like Llama3. Furthermore, niche-specific smaller language models, such as those tailored for legal, medical or financial tasks, have outperformed their proprietary counterparts. This paper introduces a novel approach that employs \textit{functional tokens} to integrate \textbf{multiple open-source models}, each optimized for particular tasks. Our newly developed Octopus v4 model leverages \textit{functional tokens} to intelligently direct user queries to the most appropriate vertical model and reformat the query to achieve the best performance. Octopus v4, an evolution of the Octopus v1, v2, and v3 models, excels in selection and parameter understanding and reformatting. Additionally, we explore the use of graph as a versatile data structure that effectively coordinates multiple open-source models by harnessing the capabilities of the Octopus model and \textit{functional tokens}. Use our open-sourced GitHub (\url{https://www.nexa4ai.com/}) to try Octopus v4 models (\url{https://huggingface.co/NexaAIDev/Octopus-v4}), and contrite to a larger graph of language models. By activating models less than 10B parameters, we achieved SOTA MMLU score of 74.8 among the same level models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet they encounter challenges such as hallucination and the need for domain-specific knowledge. To mitigate these, recent methodologies have integrated information retrieved from external resources with LLMs, substantially enhancing their performance across NLP tasks. This survey paper addresses the absence of a comprehensive overview on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs), both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Retrieval-Augmented Understanding (RAU), providing an in-depth examination of their paradigm, evolution, taxonomy, and applications. The paper discusses the essential components of RALMs, including Retrievers, Language Models, and Augmentations, and how their interactions lead to diverse model structures and applications. RALMs demonstrate utility in a spectrum of tasks, from translation and dialogue systems to knowledge-intensive applications. The survey includes several evaluation methods of RALMs, emphasizing the importance of robustness, accuracy, and relevance in their assessment. It also acknowledges the limitations of RALMs, particularly in retrieval quality and computational efficiency, offering directions for future research. In conclusion, this survey aims to offer a structured insight into RALMs, their potential, and the avenues for their future development in NLP. The paper is supplemented with a Github Repository containing the surveyed works and resources for further study: https://github.com/2471023025/RALM_Survey.