The present study aims to evaluate the current fuzzy landscape of Trustworthy AI (TAI) within the European Union (EU), with a specific focus on the energy sector. The analysis encompasses legal frameworks, directives, initiatives, and standards like the AI Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI (EGTAI), the Assessment List for Trustworthy AI (ALTAI), the AI act, and relevant CEN-CENELEC standardization efforts, as well as EU-funded projects such as AI4EU and SHERPA. Subsequently, we introduce a new TAI application framework, called E-TAI, tailored for energy applications, including smart grid and smart building systems. This framework draws inspiration from EGTAI but is customized for AI systems in the energy domain. It is designed for stakeholders in electrical power and energy systems (EPES), including researchers, developers, and energy experts linked to transmission system operators, distribution system operators, utilities, and aggregators. These stakeholders can utilize E-TAI to develop and evaluate AI services for the energy sector with a focus on ensuring trustworthiness throughout their development and iterative assessment processes.

Recent advances in Diffusion Models have enabled the generation of images from text, with powerful closed-source models like DALL-E and Midjourney leading the way. However, open-source alternatives, such as StabilityAI's Stable Diffusion, offer comparable capabilities. These open-source models, hosted on Hugging Face, come equipped with ethical filter protections designed to prevent the generation of explicit images. This paper reveals first their limitations and then presents a novel text-based safety filter that outperforms existing solutions. Our research is driven by the critical need to address the misuse of AI-generated content, especially in the context of information warfare. DiffGuard enhances filtering efficacy, achieving a performance that surpasses the best existing filters by over 14%.

Muon Space (Muon) is building a constellation of small satellites, many of which will carry global navigation satellite system-reflectometry (GNSS-R) receivers. In preparation for the launch of this constellation, we have developed a generalized deep learning retrieval pipeline, which now produces operational GNSS-R near-surface soil moisture retrievals using data from NASA's Cyclone GNSS (CYGNSS) mission. In this article, we describe the input datasets, preprocessing methods, model architecture, development methods, and detail the soil moisture products generated from these retrievals. The performance of this product is quantified against in situ measurements and compared to both the target dataset (retrievals from the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite) and the v1.0 soil moisture product from the CYGNSS mission. The Muon Space product achieves improvements in spatial resolution over SMAP with comparable performance in many regions. An ubRMSE of 0.032 cm$^3$ cm$^{-3}$ for in situ soil moisture observations from SMAP core validation sites is shown, though performance is lower than SMAP's when comparing in forests and/or mountainous terrain. The Muon Space product outperforms the v1.0 CYGNSS soil moisture product in almost all aspects. This initial release serves as the foundation of our operational soil moisture product, which soon will additionally include data from Muon Space satellites.

Threat modeling is a crucial component of cybersecurity, particularly for industries such as banking, where the security of financial data is paramount. Traditional threat modeling approaches require expert intervention and manual effort, often leading to inefficiencies and human error. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a promising avenue for automating these processes, enhancing both efficiency and efficacy. However, this transition is not straightforward due to three main challenges: (1) the lack of publicly available, domain-specific datasets, (2) the need for tailored models to handle complex banking system architectures, and (3) the requirement for real-time, adaptive mitigation strategies that align with compliance standards like NIST 800-53. In this paper, we introduce ThreatModeling-LLM, a novel and adaptable framework that automates threat modeling for banking systems using LLMs. ThreatModeling-LLM operates in three stages: 1) dataset creation, 2) prompt engineering and 3) model fine-tuning. We first generate a benchmark dataset using Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool (TMT). Then, we apply Chain of Thought (CoT) and Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO) on the pre-trained LLMs to optimize the initial prompt. Lastly, we fine-tune the LLM using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) based on the benchmark dataset and the optimized prompt to improve the threat identification and mitigation generation capabilities of pre-trained LLMs.

Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires identifying rare but critical failure cases that on-road testing alone cannot discover. High-fidelity simulations provide a scalable alternative, but automatically generating realistic and diverse traffic scenarios that can effectively stress test AV motion planners remains a key challenge. This paper introduces CRASH - Challenging Reinforcement-learning based Adversarial scenarios for Safety Hardening - an adversarial deep reinforcement learning framework to address this issue. First CRASH can control adversarial Non Player Character (NPC) agents in an AV simulator to automatically induce collisions with the Ego vehicle, falsifying its motion planner. We also propose a novel approach, that we term safety hardening, which iteratively refines the motion planner by simulating improvement scenarios against adversarial agents, leveraging the failure cases to strengthen the AV stack. CRASH is evaluated on a simplified two-lane highway scenario, demonstrating its ability to falsify both rule-based and learning-based planners with collision rates exceeding 90%. Additionally, safety hardening reduces the Ego vehicle's collision rate by 26%. While preliminary, these results highlight RL-based safety hardening as a promising approach for scenario-driven simulation testing for autonomous vehicles.

Acoustic emission signals have been shown to accompany avalanche-like events in materials, such as dislocation avalanches in crystalline solids, collapse of voids in porous matter or domain wall movement in ferroics. The data provided by acoustic emission measurements is tremendously rich, but it is rather challenging to precisely connect it to the characteristics of the triggering avalanche. In our work we propose a machine learning based method with which one can infer microscopic details of dislocation avalanches in micropillar compression tests from merely acoustic emission data. As it is demonstrated in the paper, this approach is suitable for the prediction of the force-time response as it can provide outstanding prediction for the temporal location of avalanches and can also predict the magnitude of individual deformation events. Various descriptors (including frequency dependent and independent ones) are utilised in our machine learning approach and their importance in the prediction is analysed. The transferability of the method to other specimen sizes is also demonstrated and the possible application in more generic settings is discussed. Introduction It was shown that at the micron-scale and below crystalline materials (as well as many other heterogeneous materials) exhibit complex deformation behaviour including size-related hardening and significant sample-to-sample variation in the plastic response [1, 2, 3]. In addition, in this regime deformation becomes intermittent and constitutes of a series of random strain bursts that make the details of the deformation process unpredictable both in time and space [4, 5]. This intermittency and stochasticity originates from the sudden rearrangement events of the dislocation network, the so-called dislocation avalanches. In order to experimentally study the underlying physical process, that is, the source of the avalanche, it has to be connected to directly related proxies that are experimentally measurable with sufficient precision. This is usually a rather challenging task, since avalanches are fast and mainly occur inside the material below its surface.

When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to novel constructions that have never been uttered before. Language models are powerful tools that create representations of language by incrementally predicting the next word in a sentence, and they have had a tremendous societal impact in recent years. The central research question of this thesis is whether these models possess a deep understanding of grammatical structure similar to that of humans. This question lies at the intersection of natural language processing, linguistics, and interpretability. To address it, we will develop novel interpretability techniques that enhance our understanding of the complex nature of large-scale language models. We approach our research question from three directions. First, we explore the presence of abstract linguistic information through structural priming, a key paradigm in psycholinguistics for uncovering grammatical structure in human language processing. Next, we examine various linguistic phenomena, such as adjective order and negative polarity items, and connect a model's comprehension of these phenomena to the data distribution on which it was trained. Finally, we introduce a controlled testbed for studying hierarchical structure in language models using various synthetic languages of increasing complexity and examine the role of feature interactions in modelling this structure. Our findings offer a detailed account of the grammatical knowledge embedded in language model representations and provide several directions for investigating fundamental linguistic questions using computational methods.

Android malware detection based on machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models is widely used for mobile device security. Such models offer benefits in terms of detection accuracy and efficiency, but it is often difficult to understand how such learning models make decisions. As a result, these popular malware detection strategies are generally treated as black boxes, which can result in a lack of trust in the decisions made, as well as making adversarial attacks more difficult to detect. The field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) attempts to shed light on such black box models. In this paper, we apply XAI techniques to ML and DL models that have been trained on a challenging Android malware classification problem. Specifically, the classic ML models considered are Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest, and $k$-Nearest Neighbors ($k$-NN), while the DL models we consider are Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The state-of-the-art XAI techniques that we apply to these trained models are Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), PDP plots, ELI5, and Class Activation Mapping (CAM). We obtain global and local explanation results, and we discuss the utility of XAI techniques in this problem domain. We also provide a literature review of XAI work related to Android malware.

The proximity perception of objects in granular materials is significant, especially for applications like minesweeping. However, due to particles' opacity and complex properties, existing proximity sensors suffer from high costs from sophisticated hardware and high user-cost from unintuitive results. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective proximity sensing system for underground stuff based on the haptic feedback of the sensor-granules interaction. We study and employ the unique characteristic of particles -- failure wedge zone, and combine the machine learning method -- Gaussian process regression, to identify the force signal changes induced by the proximity of objects, so as to achieve near-field perception. Furthermore, we design a novel trajectory to control the probe searching in granules for a wide range of perception. Also, our proximity sensing system can adaptively determine optimal parameters for robustness operation in different particles. Experiments demonstrate our system can perceive underground objects over 0.5 to 7 cm in advance among various materials.

Jailbreak prompts pose a significant threat in AI and cybersecurity, as they are crafted to bypass ethical safeguards in large language models, potentially enabling misuse by cybercriminals. This paper analyzes jailbreak prompts from a cyber defense perspective, exploring techniques like prompt injection and context manipulation that allow harmful content generation, content filter evasion, and sensitive information extraction. We assess the impact of successful jailbreaks, from misinformation and automated social engineering to hazardous content creation, including bioweapons and explosives. To address these threats, we propose strategies involving advanced prompt analysis, dynamic safety protocols, and continuous model fine-tuning to strengthen AI resilience. Additionally, we highlight the need for collaboration among AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to set standards for protecting AI systems. Through case studies, we illustrate these cyber defense approaches, promoting responsible AI practices to maintain system integrity and public trust. \textbf{\color{red}Warning: This paper contains content which the reader may find offensive.}