Among the factors of production, human capital or skilled manpower is the one that keeps evolving and adapts to changing conditions and resources. This adaptability makes human capital the most crucial factor in ensuring a sustainable growth of industry/sector. As new technologies are developed and adopted, the new generations are required to acquire skills in newer technologies in order to be employable. At the same time professionals are required to upskill and reskill themselves to remain relevant in the industry. There is however no straightforward method to identify the skill needs of the industry at a given point of time. Therefore, this paper proposes a data to decision framework that can successfully identify the desired skill set in a given area by analysing the advertorial data collected from popular online job portals and supplied as input to the framework. The proposed framework uses techniques of statistical analysis, data mining and natural language processing for the purpose. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated on CS&IT job advertisement data from India. The analytical results not only provide useful insights about current state of skill needs in CS&IT industry but also provide practical implications to prospective job applicants, training agencies, and institutions of higher education & professional training.

The basic question-answering format of large language models involves inputting a prompt and receiving a response, and the quality of the prompt directly impacts the effectiveness of the response. Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) aims to break free from the cognitive biases of manually designed prompts and explores a broader design space for prompts. However, existing APO methods suffer from limited flexibility of fixed templates and inefficient search in prompt spaces as key issues. To this end, we propose a Multi-Agent framework Incorporating Socratic guidance (MARS), which utilizes multi-agent fusion technology for automatic planning, with gradual continuous optimization and evaluation. Specifically, MARS comprises seven agents, each with distinct functionalities, which autonomously use the Planner to devise an optimization path that ensures flexibility. Additionally, it employs a Teacher-Critic-Student Socratic dialogue pattern to iteratively optimize the prompts while conducting effective search. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method, and perform additional analytical experiments to assess the model's advancement as well as the interpretability.

Neuromorphic Continual Learning (NCL) paradigm leverages Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to enable continual learning (CL) capabilities for AI systems to adapt to dynamically changing environments. Currently, the state-of-the-art employ a memory replay-based method to maintain the old knowledge. However, this technique relies on long timesteps and compression-decompression steps, thereby incurring significant latency and energy overheads, which are not suitable for tightly-constrained embedded AI systems (e.g., mobile agents/robotics). To address this, we propose Replay4NCL, a novel efficient memory replay-based methodology for enabling NCL in embedded AI systems. Specifically, Replay4NCL compresses the latent data (old knowledge), then replays them during the NCL training phase with small timesteps, to minimize the processing latency and energy consumption. To compensate the information loss from reduced spikes, we adjust the neuron threshold potential and learning rate settings. Experimental results on the class-incremental scenario with the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) dataset show that Replay4NCL can preserve old knowledge with Top-1 accuracy of 90.43% compared to 86.22% from the state-of-the-art, while effectively learning new tasks, achieving 4.88x latency speed-up, 20% latent memory saving, and 36.43% energy saving. These results highlight the potential of our Replay4NCL methodology to further advances NCL capabilities for embedded AI systems.

After AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize, protein prediction with deep learning once again became a hot topic. We comprehensively explore advanced deep learning methods applied to protein structure prediction and design. It begins by examining recent innovations in prediction architectures, with detailed discussions on improvements such as diffusion based frameworks and novel pairwise attention modules. The text analyses key components including structure generation, evaluation metrics, multiple sequence alignment processing, and network architecture, thereby illustrating the current state of the art in computational protein modelling. Subsequent chapters focus on practical applications, presenting case studies that range from individual protein predictions to complex biomolecular interactions. Strategies for enhancing prediction accuracy and integrating deep learning techniques with experimental validation are thoroughly explored. The later sections review the industry landscape of protein design, highlighting the transformative role of artificial intelligence in biotechnology and discussing emerging market trends and future challenges. Supplementary appendices provide essential resources such as databases and open source tools, making this volume a valuable reference for researchers and students.

Model customization requires high-quality and diverse datasets, but acquiring such data remains challenging and costly. Although large language models (LLMs) can synthesize training data, current approaches are constrained by limited seed data, model bias and insufficient control over the generation process, resulting in limited diversity and biased distribution with the increase of data scales. To tackle this challenge, we present TreeSynth, a tree-guided subspace-based data synthesis framework that recursively partitions the entire data space into hierar-chical subspaces, enabling comprehensive and diverse scaling of data synthesis. Briefly, given a task-specific description, we construct a data space partitioning tree by iteratively executing criteria determination and subspace coverage steps. This hierarchically divides the whole space (i.e., root node) into mutually exclusive and complementary atomic subspaces (i.e., leaf nodes). By collecting synthesized data according to the attributes of each leaf node, we obtain a diverse dataset that fully covers the data space. Empirically, our extensive experiments demonstrate that TreeSynth surpasses both human-designed datasets and the state-of-the-art data synthesis baselines, achieving maximum improvements of 45.2% in data diversity and 17.6% in downstream task performance across various models and tasks. Hopefully, TreeSynth provides a scalable solution to synthesize diverse and comprehensive datasets from scratch without human intervention.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing; however, they often struggle to accurately capture and reflect cultural nuances. This research addresses this challenge by focusing on Saudi Arabia, a country characterized by diverse dialects and rich cultural traditions. We introduce SaudiCulture, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the cultural competence of LLMs within the distinct geographical and cultural contexts of Saudi Arabia. SaudiCulture is a comprehensive dataset of questions covering five major geographical regions, such as West, East, South, North, and Center, along with general questions applicable across all regions. The dataset encompasses a broad spectrum of cultural domains, including food, clothing, entertainment, celebrations, and crafts. To ensure a rigorous evaluation, SaudiCulture includes questions of varying complexity, such as open-ended, single-choice, and multiple-choice formats, with some requiring multiple correct answers. Additionally, the dataset distinguishes between common cultural knowledge and specialized regional aspects. We conduct extensive evaluations on five LLMs, such as GPT-4, Llama 3.3, FANAR, Jais, and AceGPT, analyzing their performance across different question types and cultural contexts. Our findings reveal that all models experience significant performance declines when faced with highly specialized or region-specific questions, particularly those requiring multiple correct responses. Additionally, certain cultural categories are more easily identifiable than others, further highlighting inconsistencies in LLMs cultural understanding. These results emphasize the importance of incorporating region-specific knowledge into LLMs training to enhance their cultural competence.

Patients are increasingly turning to online health Q&A communities for social support to improve their well-being. However, when this support received does not align with their specific needs, it may prove ineffective or even detrimental. This necessitates a model capable of identifying the social support needs in questions. However, training such a model is challenging due to the scarcity and class imbalance issues of labeled data. To overcome these challenges, we follow the computational design science paradigm to develop a novel framework, Hybrid Approach for SOcial Support need classification (HA-SOS). HA-SOS integrates an answer-enhanced semi-supervised learning approach, a text data augmentation technique leveraging large language models (LLMs) with reliability- and diversity-aware sample selection mechanism, and a unified training process to automatically label social support needs in questions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that HA-SOS significantly outperforms existing question classification models and alternative semi-supervised learning approaches. This research contributes to the literature on social support, question classification, semi-supervised learning, and text data augmentation. In practice, our HA-SOS framework facilitates online Q&A platform managers and answerers to better understand users' social support needs, enabling them to provide timely, personalized answers and interventions.

This study employs the Paul-Elder Critical Thinking Model and Tan's argumentative writing framework to create a structured methodology. This methodology, ChatGPT Guideline for Critical Argumentative Writing (CGCAW) framework, integrates the models with ChatGPT's capabilities to guide L2 learners in utilizing ChatGPT to enhance their critical thinking skills. A quantitative experiment was conducted with 10 participants from a state university, divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group utilized the CGCAW framework, while the control group used ChatGPT without specific guidelines. Participants wrote an argumentative essay within a 40-minute timeframe, and essays were evaluated by three assessors: ChatGPT, Grammarly, and a course instructor. Results indicated that the experimental group showed improvements in clarity, logical coherence, and use of evidence, demonstrating ChatGPT's potential to enhance specific aspects of argumentative writing. However, the control group performed better in overall language mechanics and articulation of main arguments, indicating areas where the CGCAW framework could be further refined. This study highlights the need for further research to optimize the use of AI tools like ChatGPT in L2 learning environments to enhance critical thinking and writing skills.

Deep learning systems are optimized for clusters with homogeneous resources. However, heterogeneity is prevalent in computing infrastructure across edge, cloud and HPC. When training neural networks using stochastic gradient descent techniques on heterogeneous resources, performance degrades due to stragglers and stale updates. In this work, we develop an adaptive batch-scaling framework called OmniLearn to mitigate the effects of heterogeneity in distributed training. Our approach is inspired by proportional controllers to balance computation across heterogeneous servers, and works under varying resource availability. By dynamically adjusting worker mini-batches at runtime, OmniLearn reduces training time by 14-85%. We also investigate asynchronous training, where our techniques improve accuracy by up to 6.9%.

In this paper, we present Speak Ease: an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system to support users' expressivity by integrating multimodal input, including text, voice, and contextual cues (conversational partner and emotional tone), with large language models (LLMs). Speak Ease combines automatic speech recognition (ASR), context-aware LLM-based outputs, and personalized text-to-speech technologies to enable more personalized, natural-sounding, and expressive communication. Through an exploratory feasibility study and focus group evaluation with speech and language pathologists (SLPs), we assessed Speak Ease's potential to enable expressivity in AAC. The findings highlight the priorities and needs of AAC users and the system's ability to enhance user expressivity by supporting more personalized and contextually relevant communication. This work provides insights into the use of multimodal inputs and LLM-driven features to improve AAC systems and support expressivity.