Integrating Internet of Things (IoT) technology inside the cold supply chain can enhance transparency, efficiency, and quality, optimizing operating procedures and increasing productivity. The integration of IoT in this complicated setting is hindered by specific barriers that need a thorough examination. Prominent barriers to IoT implementation in the cold supply chain are identified using a two-stage model. After reviewing the available literature on the topic of IoT implementation, a total of 13 barriers were found. The survey data was cross-validated for quality, and Cronbach's alpha test was employed to ensure validity. This research applies the interpretative structural modeling technique in the first phase to identify the main barriers. Among those barriers, "regularity compliance" and "cold chain networks" are key drivers for IoT adoption strategies. MICMAC's driving and dependence power element categorization helps evaluate the barrier interactions. In the second phase of this research, a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory methodology was employed to identify causal relationships between barriers and evaluate them according to their relative importance. Each cause is a potential drive, and if its efficiency can be enhanced, the system as a whole benefits. The research findings provide industry stakeholders, governments, and organizations with significant drivers of IoT adoption to overcome these barriers and optimize the utilization of IoT technology to improve the effectiveness and reliability of the cold supply chain.

Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, this technical report details the first release of OLMo, a state-of-the-art, truly Open Language Model and its framework to build and study the science of language modeling. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo and the whole framework, including training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower and strengthen the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.

Facing climate change, the already limited availability of drinking water will decrease in the future rendering drinking water an increasingly scarce resource. Considerable amounts of it are lost through leakages in water transportation and distribution networks. Thus, anomaly detection and localization, in particular for leakages, are crucial but challenging tasks due to the complex interactions and changing demands in water distribution networks. In this work, we analyze the effects of anomalies on the dynamics of critical infrastructure systems by modeling the networks employing Bayesian networks. We then discuss how the problem is connected to and can be considered through the lens of concept drift. In particular, we argue that model-based explanations of concept drift are a promising tool for localizing anomalies given limited information about the network. The methodology is experimentally evaluated using realistic benchmark scenarios. To showcase that our methodology applies to critical infrastructure more generally, in addition to considering leakages and sensor faults in water systems, we showcase the suitability of the derived technique to localize sensor faults in power systems.

Methods for anomaly detection of new physics processes are often limited to low-dimensional spaces due to the difficulty of learning high-dimensional probability densities. Particularly at the constituent level, incorporating desirable properties such as permutation invariance and variable-length inputs becomes difficult within popular density estimation methods. In this work, we introduce a permutation-invariant density estimator for particle physics data based on diffusion models, specifically designed to handle variable-length inputs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology by utilizing the learned density as a permutation-invariant anomaly detection score, effectively identifying jets with low likelihood under the background-only hypothesis. To validate our density estimation method, we investigate the ratio of learned densities and compare to those obtained by a supervised classification algorithm.

The news: An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England's National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. What happened: The new study from the AI company Limbic, examined data from 129,400 people visiting websites to refer themselves to 28 mental health services across England, half of which used the chatbot on their website and half of which did not. The number of referrals from services using the Limbic chatbot rose by 15% during the study's three-month time period, compared with a 6% rise in referrals for the services that weren't using it. We are having the wrong debate about Biden's decision on liquefied natural gas Late last month, the Biden administration announced it's suspending permit applications for exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) as it reevaluates the economic, environmental, and climate impacts of the fuel. LNG is produced by cooling natural gas into a liquid state, making it easier to store and ship to overseas markets.

This paper investigates the collision-free control problem for multi-agent systems. For such multi-agent systems, it is the typical situation where conventional methods using either the usual centralized model predictive control (MPC), or even the distributed counterpart, would suffer from substantial difficulty in balancing optimality and computational efficiency. Additionally, the non-convex characteristics that invariably arise in such collision-free control and optimization problems render it difficult to effectively derive a reliable solution (and also to thoroughly analyze the associated convergence properties). To overcome these challenging issues, this work establishes a suitably novel parallel computation framework through an innovative mathematical problem formulation; and then with this framework and formulation, a parallel algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is presented to solve the sub-problems arising from the resulting parallel structure. Furthermore, an efficient and intuitive initialization procedure is developed to accelerate the optimization process, and the optimum is thus determined with significantly improved computational efficiency. As supported by rigorous proofs, the convergence of the proposed ADMM iterations for this non-convex optimization problem is analyzed and discussed in detail. Finally, a simulation with a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serves as an illustrative example here to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Also, the simulation results verify significant improvements in accuracy and computational efficiency compared to other baselines, including primal quadratic mixed integer programming (PQ-MIP), non-convex quadratic mixed integer programming (NC-MIP), and non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (NC-QCQP).

Transformers play a central role in the inner workings of large language models. We develop a mathematical framework for analyzing Transformers based on their interpretation as interacting particle systems, which reveals that clusters emerge in long time. Our study explores the underlying theory and offers new perspectives for mathematicians as well as computer scientists.

This paper presents SubPipe, an underwater dataset for SLAM, object detection, and image segmentation. SubPipe has been recorded using a \gls{LAUV}, operated by OceanScan MST, and carrying a sensor suite including two cameras, a side-scan sonar, and an inertial navigation system, among other sensors. The AUV has been deployed in a pipeline inspection environment with a submarine pipe partially covered by sand. The AUV's pose ground truth is estimated from the navigation sensors. The side-scan sonar and RGB images include object detection and segmentation annotations, respectively. State-of-the-art segmentation, object detection, and SLAM methods are benchmarked on SubPipe to demonstrate the dataset's challenges and opportunities for leveraging computer vision algorithms. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first annotated underwater dataset providing a real pipeline inspection scenario. The dataset and experiments are publicly available online at https://github.com/remaro-network/SubPipe-dataset

Safety in the face of uncertainty is a key challenge in robotics. We introduce a real-time capable framework to generate safe and task-efficient robot motions for stochastic control problems. We frame this as a chance-constrained optimisation problem constraining the probability of the controlled system to violate a safety constraint to be below a set threshold. To estimate this probability we propose a Monte--Carlo approximation. We suggest several ways to construct the problem given a fixed number of uncertainty samples, such that it is a reliable over-approximation of the original problem, i.e. any solution to the sample-based problem adheres to the original chance-constraint with high confidence. To solve the resulting problem, we integrate it into our motion planner VP-STO and name the enhanced framework Chance-Constrained (CC)-VPSTO. The strengths of our approach lie in i) its generality, without assumptions on the underlying uncertainty distribution, system dynamics, cost function, or the form of inequality constraints; and ii) its applicability to MPC-settings. We demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our approach on both simulation and real-world robot experiments.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach for optimizing complex and expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Its importance is underscored in many applications, notably including hyperparameter tuning, but its efficacy depends on efficiently balancing exploration and exploitation. While there has been substantial progress in BO methods, striking this balance still remains a delicate process. At a high level, we frame the BO problem in natural language terms, enabling LLMs to iteratively propose promising solutions conditioned on historical evaluations. More specifically, we explore how combining contextual understanding, few-shot learning proficiency, and domain knowledge of LLMs can enhance various components of model-based BO. Our findings illustrate that LLAMBO is effective at zero-shot warmstarting, and improves surrogate modeling and candidate sampling, especially in the early stages of search when observations are sparse. Our approach is performed in context and does not require LLM finetuning. Additionally, it is modular by design, allowing individual components to be integrated into existing BO frameworks, or function cohesively as an end-to-end method. Expensive black-box functions are common in many disciplines and applications including robotics (11, 35), experimental design (25), drug discovery (32), interface design (8) and, in machine learning for hyperparameter tuning (6, 34, 49). Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely adopted and efficient model-based approach for globally optimizing these functions (31, 33). BO's effectiveness lies in its ability to operate based on a limited set of observations without the need for direct access to the objective function or its gradients. Broadly, BO uses observed data to construct a surrogate model as an approximation to the objective function, and then iteratively generates potentially good points, from which the acquisition function selects the one with the highest utility. This chosen point undergoes evaluation, and the cycle continues. For BO, the name of the game is efficient search, but the efficiency of this search largely depends on the quality of the surrogate model and its capacity to quickly identify high-potential regions (16).