WEHEAD connects to ChatGPT and displays a face, expressions and voice. China is reportedly working to cognitively merge humans with machines as part of its ongoing efforts to compete in the artificial intelligence race. The communist country is using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology -- systems that allow for communication between the brain and an external device -- to "augment human cognition and human-machine teaming," The Washington Times reported, citing a presentation from Georgetown experts delivered to U.S. officials. These include invasive, minimally-invasive and non-invasive BCIs, according to The Washington Times. Invasive BCIs involve surgery to implant electrodes into the brain, while non-invasive BCIs use sensors on the scalp to monitor brain activity. Meanwhile, minimally-invasive BCIs involve implanting devices, but they do not penetrate brain tissue, according to a report in the National Library of Medicine.

Increasingly large datasets of microscopic images with atomic resolution facilitate the development of machine learning methods to identify and analyze subtle physical phenomena embedded within the images. In this work, microscopic images of honeycomb lattice spin-ice samples serve as datasets from which we automate the calculation of net magnetic moments and directional orientations of spin-ice configurations. In the first stage of our workflow, machine learning models are trained to accurately predict magnetic moments and directions within spin-ice structures. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), an emergent unsupervised deep learning technique, are employed to generate high-quality synthetic magnetic force microscopy (MFM) images and extract latent feature representations, thereby reducing experimental and segmentation errors. The second stage of proposed methodology enables precise identification and prediction of frustrated vertices and nanomagnetic segments, effectively correlating structural and functional aspects of microscopic images. This facilitates the design of optimized spin-ice configurations with controlled frustration patterns, enabling potential on-demand synthesis.

Understanding socio-ecological systems requires insights from diverse stakeholder perspectives, which are often hard to access. To enable alternative, simulation-based exploration of different stakeholder perspectives, we develop the HoPeS (Human-Oriented Perspective Shifting) modelling framework. HoPeS employs agents powered by large language models (LLMs) to represent various stakeholders; users can step into the agent roles to experience perspectival differences. A simulation protocol serves as a "scaffold" to streamline multiple perspective-taking simulations, supporting users in reflecting on, transitioning between, and integrating across perspectives. A prototype system is developed to demonstrate HoPeS in the context of institutional dynamics and land use change, enabling both narrative-driven and numerical experiments. In an illustrative experiment, a user successively adopts the perspectives of a system observer and a researcher - a role that analyses data from the embedded land use model to inform evidence-based decision-making for other LLM agents representing various institutions. Despite the user's effort to recommend technically sound policies, discrepancies persist between the policy recommendation and implementation due to stakeholders' competing advocacies, mirroring real-world misalignment between researcher and policymaker perspectives. The user's reflection highlights the subjective feelings of frustration and disappointment as a researcher, especially due to the challenge of maintaining political neutrality while attempting to gain political influence. Despite this, the user exhibits high motivation to experiment with alternative narrative framing strategies, suggesting the system's potential in exploring different perspectives. Further system and protocol refinement are likely to enable new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration in socio-ecological simulations.

We propose a vision transformer (ViT)-based deep learning framework to refine disaster-affected area segmentation from remote sensing imagery, aiming to support and enhance the Emergent Value Added Product (EVAP) developed by the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA). The process starts with a small set of manually annotated regions. We then apply principal component analysis (PCA)-based feature space analysis and construct a confidence index (CI) to expand these labels, producing a weakly supervised training set. These expanded labels are then used to train ViT-based encoder-decoder models with multi-band inputs from Sentinel-2 and Formosat-5 imagery. Our architecture supports multiple decoder variants and multi-stage loss strategies to improve performance under limited supervision. During the evaluation, model predictions are compared with higher-resolution EVAP output to assess spatial coherence and segmentation consistency. Case studies on the 2022 Poyang Lake drought and the 2023 Rhodes wildfire demonstrate that our framework improves the smoothness and reliability of segmentation results, offering a scalable approach for disaster mapping when accurate ground truth is unavailable.

Recommenders are significantly shaping online information consumption. While effective at personalizing content, these systems increasingly face criticism for propagating irrelevant, unwanted, and even harmful recommendations. Such content degrades user satisfaction and contributes to significant societal issues, including misinformation, radicalization, and erosion of user trust. Although platforms offer mechanisms to mitigate exposure to undesired content, these mechanisms are often insufficiently effective and slow to adapt to users' feedback. This paper introduces an intuitive, model-agnostic, and distribution-free method that uses conformal risk control to provably bound unwanted content in personalized recommendations by leveraging simple binary feedback on items. We also address a limitation of traditional conformal risk control approaches, i.e., the fact that the recommender can provide a smaller set of recommended items, by leveraging implicit feedback on consumed items to expand the recommendation set while ensuring robust risk mitigation. Our experimental evaluation on data coming from a popular online video-sharing platform demonstrates that our approach ensures an effective and controllable reduction of unwanted recommendations with minimal effort. The source code is available here: https://github.com/geektoni/mitigating-harm-recsys.

The "Fake or Real" competition hosted on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/fake-or-real-the-impostor-hunt ) is the second part of a series of follow-up competitions and hackathons related to the "Assurance for Space Domain AI Applications" project funded by the European Space Agency (https://assurance-ai.space-codev.org/ ). The competition idea is based on two real-life AI security threats identified within the project -- data poisoning and overreliance in Large Language Models. The task is to distinguish between the proper output from LLM and the output generated under malicious modification of the LLM. As this problem was not extensively researched, participants are required to develop new techniques to address this issue or adjust already existing ones to this problem's statement.

Large language models (LLMs) turn writing into a live exchange between humans and software. We characterize this new medium as a discursive network that treats people and LLMs as equal nodes and tracks how their statements circulate. We define the generation of erroneous information as invalidation (any factual, logical, or structural breach) and show it follows four hazards: drift from truth, self-repair, fresh fabrication, and external detection. We develop a general mathematical model of discursive networks that shows that a network governed only by drift and self-repair stabilizes at a modest error rate. Giving each false claim even a small chance of peer review shifts the system to a truth-dominant state. We operationalize peer review with the open-source Flaws-of-Others (FOO) algorithm: a configurable loop in which any set of agents critique one another while a harmonizer merges their verdicts. We identify an ethical transgression, epithesis, that occurs when humans fail to engage in the discursive network. The takeaway is practical and cultural: reliability in this new medium comes not from perfecting single models but from connecting imperfect ones into networks that enforce mutual accountability.

Snow is an essential input for various land surface models. Seasonal snow estimates are available as snow water equivalent (SWE) from process-based reanalysis products or locally from in situ measurements. While the reanalysis products are computationally expensive and available at only fixed spatial and temporal resolutions, the in situ measurements are highly localized and sparse. To address these issues and enable the analysis of the effect of a large suite of physical, morphological, and geological conditions on the presence and amount of snow, we build a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is able to estimate the SWE based on time series input of the various physical/meteorological factors as well static spatial/morphological factors. Specifically, this model breaks down the SWE estimation into two separate tasks: (i) a classification task that indicates the presence/absence of snow on a specific day and (ii) a regression task that indicates the height of the SWE on a specific day in the case of snow presence. The model is trained using physical/in situ SWE measurements from the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) snow pillows in the western United States. We will show that trained LSTM models have a classification accuracy of $\geq 93\%$ for the presence of snow and a coefficient of correlation of $\sim 0.9$ concerning their SWE estimates. We will also demonstrate that the models can generalize both spatially and temporally to previously unseen data.

This report provides a detailed comparison between the Safety and Security measures proposed in the EU AI Act's General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice (Third Draft) and the current commitments and practices voluntarily adopted by leading AI companies. As the EU moves toward enforcing binding obligations for GPAI model providers, the Code of Practice will be key for bridging legal requirements with concrete technical commitments. Our analysis focuses on the draft's Safety and Security section (Commitments II.1-II.16), documenting excerpts from current public-facing documents that are relevant to each individual measure. We systematically reviewed different document types, such as companies' frontier safety frameworks and model cards, from over a dozen companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. This report is not meant to be an indication of legal compliance, nor does it take any prescriptive viewpoint about the Code of Practice or companies' policies. Instead, it aims to inform the ongoing dialogue between regulators and General-Purpose AI model providers by surfacing evidence of industry precedent for various measures. Nonetheless, we were able to find relevant quotes from at least 5 companies' documents for the majority of the measures in Commitments II.1-II.16.

-- Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for adaptive traffic signal control. While existing RL-based methods demonstrate effectiveness in reducing vehicular congestion, their predominant focus on vehicle-centric optimization leaves pedestrian mobility needs and safety challenges unaddressed. In this paper, we present a deep RL framework for adaptive control of eight traffic signals along a real-world urban corridor, jointly optimizing both pedestrian and vehicular efficiency. Our single-agent policy is trained using real-world pedestrian and vehicle demand data derived from Wi-Fi logs and video analysis. The results demonstrate significant performance improvements over traditional fixed-time signals, reducing average wait times per pedestrian and per vehicle by up to 67% and 52% respectively, while simultaneously decreasing total wait times for both groups by up to 67 % and 53% . Additionally, our results demonstrate generalization capabilities across varying traffic demands, including conditions entirely unseen during training, validating RL's potential for developing transportation systems that serve all road users.