Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potent tools for advancing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the attitudinal disparities between LLMs and humans towards these goals can pose significant challenges. This study conducts a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing literature on the attitudes of LLMs towards the 17 SDGs, emphasizing the comparison between their attitudes and support for each goal and those of humans. We examine the potential disparities, primarily focusing on aspects such as understanding and emotions, cultural and regional differences, task objective variations, and factors considered in the decision-making process. These disparities arise from the underrepresentation and imbalance in LLM training data, historical biases, quality issues, lack of contextual understanding, and skewed ethical values reflected. The study also investigates the risks and harms that may arise from neglecting the attitudes of LLMs towards the SDGs, including the exacerbation of social inequalities, racial discrimination, environmental destruction, and resource wastage. To address these challenges, we propose strategies and recommendations to guide and regulate the application of LLMs, ensuring their alignment with the principles and goals of the SDGs, and therefore creating a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future.

Controller tuning and parameter optimization are crucial in system design to improve closed-loop system performance. Bayesian optimization has been established as an efficient model-free controller tuning and adaptation method. However, Bayesian optimization methods are computationally expensive and therefore difficult to use in real-time critical scenarios. In this work, we propose a real-time purely data-driven, model-free approach for adaptive control, by online tuning low-level controller parameters. We base our algorithm on GoOSE, an algorithm for safe and sample-efficient Bayesian optimization, for handling performance and stability criteria. We introduce multiple computational and algorithmic modifications for computational efficiency and parallelization of optimization steps. We further evaluate the algorithm's performance on a real precision-motion system utilized in semiconductor industry applications by modifying the payload and reference stepsize and comparing it to an interpolated constrained optimization-based baseline approach.

Forecasts inform decision-making in nearly every domain. Forecasts are often produced by experts with rare or hard to acquire skills. In practice, forecasts are often used by domain experts and managers with little forecasting expertise. Our study focuses on how to design forecasting software that empowers non-expert users. We study how users can make use of state-of-the-art forecasting methods, embed their domain knowledge, and how they build understanding and trust towards generated forecasts. To do so, we co-designed a forecasting software prototype using feedback from users and then analyzed their interactions with our prototype. Our results identified three main considerations for non-expert users: (1) a safe stepwise approach facilitating causal understanding and trust; (2) a white box model supporting human-reasoning-friendly components; (3) the inclusion of domain knowledge. This paper contributes insights into how non-expert users interact with forecasting software and by recommending ways to design more accessible forecasting software.

Abstract:The accurate wind speed series forecast is very pivotal to security of grid dispatching and the application of wind power. Nevertheless, on account of their nonlinear and non-stationary nature, their short-term forecast is extremely challenging. Therefore, this dissertation raises one short-term wind speed forecast pattern on the foundation of attention with an improved gated recurrent neural network (AtGRU) and a tactic of error correction. That model uses the AtGRU model as the preliminary predictor and the GRU model as the error corrector. At the beginning, singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is employed in previous wind speed series for lessening the noise. Subsequently, historical wind speed series is going to be used for the predictor training. During this process, the prediction can have certain errors. The sequence of these errors processed by variational modal decomposition (VMD) is used to train the corrector of error. The eventual forecast consequence is just the sum of predictor forecast and error corrector. The proposed SSA-AtGRU-VMD-GRU model outperforms the compared models in three case studies on Woodburn, St. Thomas, and Santa Cruz. It is indicated that the model evidently enhances the correction of the wind speed forecast.

Intelligent machine learning approaches are finding active use for event detection and identification that allow real-time situational awareness. Yet, such machine learning algorithms have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks on the incoming telemetry data. This paper considers a physics-based modal decomposition method to extract features for event classification and focuses on interpretable classifiers including logistic regression and gradient boosting to distinguish two types of events: load loss and generation loss. The resulting classifiers are then tested against an adversarial algorithm to evaluate their robustness. The adversarial attack is tested in two settings: the white box setting, wherein the attacker knows exactly the classification model; and the gray box setting, wherein the attacker has access to historical data from the same network as was used to train the classifier, but does not know the classification model. Thorough experiments on the synthetic South Carolina 500-bus system highlight that a relatively simpler model such as logistic regression is more susceptible to adversarial attacks than gradient boosting.

We have developed the world's first canopy height map of the distribution area of world-level giant trees. This mapping is crucial for discovering more individual and community world-level giant trees, and for analyzing and quantifying the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation measures in the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon (YTGC) National Nature Reserve. We proposed a method to map the canopy height of the primeval forest within the world-level giant tree distribution area by using a spaceborne LiDAR fusion satellite imagery (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), ICESat-2, and Sentinel-2) driven deep learning modeling. And we customized a pyramid receptive fields depth separable CNN (PRFXception). PRFXception, a CNN architecture specifically customized for mapping primeval forest canopy height to infer the canopy height at the footprint level of GEDI and ICESat-2 from Sentinel-2 optical imagery with a 10-meter spatial resolution. We conducted a field survey of 227 permanent plots using a stratified sampling method and measured several giant trees using UAV-LS. The predicted canopy height was compared with ICESat-2 and GEDI validation data (RMSE =7.56 m, MAE=6.07 m, ME=-0.98 m, R^2=0.58 m), UAV-LS point clouds (RMSE =5.75 m, MAE =3.72 m, ME = 0.82 m, R^2= 0.65 m), and ground survey data (RMSE = 6.75 m, MAE = 5.56 m, ME= 2.14 m, R^2=0.60 m). We mapped the potential distribution map of world-level giant trees and discovered two previously undetected giant tree communities with an 89% probability of having trees 80-100 m tall, potentially taller than Asia's tallest tree. This paper provides scientific evidence confirming southeastern Tibet--northwestern Yunnan as the fourth global distribution center of world-level giant trees initiatives and promoting the inclusion of the YTGC giant tree distribution area within the scope of China's national park conservation.

Video-based Question Answering (Video QA) is a challenging task and becomes even more intricate when addressing Socially Intelligent Question Answering (SIQA). SIQA requires context understanding, temporal reasoning, and the integration of multimodal information, but in addition, it requires processing nuanced human behavior. Furthermore, the complexities involved are exacerbated by the dominance of the primary modality (text) over the others. Thus, there is a need to help the task's secondary modalities to work in tandem with the primary modality. In this work, we introduce a cross-modal alignment and subsequent representation fusion approach that achieves state-of-the-art results (82.06\% accuracy) on the Social IQ 2.0 dataset for SIQA. Our approach exhibits an improved ability to leverage the video modality by using the audio modality as a bridge with the language modality. This leads to enhanced performance by reducing the prevalent issue of language overfitting and resultant video modality bypassing encountered by current existing techniques. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/sts-vlcc/sts-vlcc

This paper addresses the problem of controlling multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperating in a formation to carry out a complex task such as surface inspection. We first use the virtual leader-follower model to determine the topology and trajectory of the formation. A double-loop control system combining backstepping and sliding mode control techniques is then designed for the UAVs to track the trajectory. A radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) capable of estimating external disturbances is developed to enhance the robustness of the controller. The stability of the controller is proven by using the Lyapunov theorem. A number of comparisons and software-in-the-loop (SIL) tests have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller. The results show that our controller not only outperforms other state-of-the-art controllers but is also sufficient for complex tasks of UAVs such as collecting surface data for inspection. The source code of our controller can be found at https://github.com/duynamrcv/rbf_bsmc

Corrosion, a naturally occurring process leading to the deterioration of metallic materials, demands diligent detection for quality control and the preservation of metal-based objects, especially within industrial contexts. Traditional techniques for corrosion identification, including ultrasonic testing, radio-graphic testing, and magnetic flux leakage, necessitate the deployment of expensive and bulky equipment on-site for effective data acquisition. An unexplored alternative involves employing lightweight, conventional camera systems, and state-of-the-art computer vision methods for its identification. In this work, we propose a complete system for semi-automated corrosion identification and mapping in industrial environments. We leverage recent advances in LiDAR-based methods for localization and mapping, with vision-based semantic segmentation deep learning techniques, in order to build semantic-geometric maps of industrial environments. Unlike previous corrosion identification systems available in the literature, our designed multi-modal system is low-cost, portable, semi-autonomous and allows collecting large datasets by untrained personnel. A set of experiments in an indoor laboratory environment, demonstrate quantitatively the high accuracy of the employed LiDAR based 3D mapping and localization system, with less then $0.05m$ and 0.02m average absolute and relative pose errors. Also, our data-driven semantic segmentation model, achieves around 70\% precision when trained with our pixel-wise manually annotated dataset.

The thesis develops a view of design in a concept formation framework and outlines a language to describe both the object of the design and the process of designing. The unknown object at the outset of the design work may be seen as an unknown concept that the designer is to define. Throughout the process, she develops a description of this object by relating it to known concepts. The search stops when the designer is satisfied that the design specification is complete enough to satisfy the requirements from it once built. It is then a collection of propositions that all contribute towards defining the design object - a collection of sentences describing relationships between the object and known concepts. Also, the design process itself may be described by relating known concepts - by organizing known abilities into particular patterns of activation, or mobilization. In view of the demands posed to a language to use in this concept formation process, the framework of a Design Process Language (DPL) is developed. The basis for the language are linguistic categories that act as classes of relations used to combine concepts, containing relations used for describing process and object within the same general system, with some relations being process specific, others being object specific, and with the bulk being used both for process and object description. Another outcome is the distinction of modal relations, or relations describing futurity, possibility, willingness, hypothetical events, and the like. The design process almost always includes aspects such as these, and it is thus necessary for a language facilitating design process description to support such relationships to be constructed. The DPL is argued to be a foundation whereupon to build a language that can be used for enabling computers to be more useful - act more intelligently - in the design process.