Purpose of Review: This review provides an overview of the state of the art in bioinspired soft robotics with by examining advancements in actuation, functionality, modeling, and control. Recent Findings: Recent research into actuation methods, such as artificial muscles, have expanded the functionality and potential use of bioinspired soft robots. Additionally, the application of finite dimensional models has improved computational efficiency for modeling soft continuum systems, and garnered interest as a basis for controller formulation. Summary: Bioinspiration in the field of soft robotics has led to diverse approaches to problems in a range of task spaces. In particular, new capabilities in system simplification, miniaturization, and untethering have each contributed to the field's growth. There is still significant room for improvement in the streamlining of design and manufacturing for these systems, as well as in their control.

This study aims to address the challenges of futures price prediction in high-frequency trading (HFT) by proposing a continuous learning factor predictor based on graph neural networks. The model integrates multi-factor pricing theories with real-time market dynamics, effectively bypassing the limitations of existing methods that lack financial theory guidance and ignore various trend signals and their interactions. We propose three heterogeneous tasks, including price moving average regression, price gap regression and change-point detection to trace the short-, intermediate-, and long-term trend factors present in the data. In addition, this study also considers the cross-sectional correlation characteristics of future contracts, where prices of different futures often show strong dynamic correlations. Each variable (future contract) depends not only on its historical values (temporal) but also on the observation of other variables (cross-sectional). To capture these dynamic relationships more accurately, we resort to the spatio-temporal graph neural network (STGNN) to enhance the predictive power of the model. The model employs a continuous learning strategy to simultaneously consider these tasks (factors). Additionally, due to the heterogeneity of the tasks, we propose to calculate parameter importance with mutual information between original observations and the extracted features to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem. Empirical tests on 49 commodity futures in China's futures market demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy. Not only does this research promote the integration of financial theory and deep learning, but it also provides a scientific basis for actual trading decisions.

Over the last decade, the Dip-test of unimodality has gained increasing interest in the data mining community as it is a parameter-free statistical test that reliably rates the modality in one-dimensional samples. It returns a so called Dip-value and a corresponding probability for the sample's unimodality (Dip-p-value). These two values share a sigmoidal relationship. However, the specific transformation is dependent on the sample size. Many Dip-based clustering algorithms use bootstrapped look-up tables translating Dip- to Dip-p-values for a certain limited amount of sample sizes. We propose a specifically designed sigmoid function as a substitute for these state-of-the-art look-up tables. This accelerates computation and provides an approximation of the Dip- to Dip-p-value transformation for every single sample size. Further, it is differentiable and can therefore easily be integrated in learning schemes using gradient descent. We showcase this by exploiting our function in a novel subspace clustering algorithm called Dip'n'Sub. We highlight in extensive experiments the various benefits of our proposal.

The fundamental goal of small molecule discovery is to generate chemicals with target functionality. While this often proceeds through structure-based methods, we set out to investigate the practicality of orthogonal methods that leverage the extensive corpus of chemical literature. We hypothesize that a sufficiently large text-derived chemical function dataset would mirror the actual landscape of chemical functionality. Such a landscape would implicitly capture complex physical and biological interactions given that chemical function arises from both a molecule's structure and its interacting partners. To evaluate this hypothesis, we built a Chemical Function (CheF) dataset of patent-derived functional labels. This dataset, comprising 631K molecule-function pairs, was created using an LLM- and embedding-based method to obtain functional labels for approximately 100K molecules from their corresponding 188K unique patents. We carry out a series of analyses demonstrating that the CheF dataset contains a semantically coherent textual representation of the functional landscape congruent with chemical structural relationships, thus approximating the actual chemical function landscape. We then demonstrate that this text-based functional landscape can be leveraged to identify drugs with target functionality using a model able to predict functional profiles from structure alone. We believe that functional label-guided molecular discovery may serve as an orthogonal approach to traditional structure-based methods in the pursuit of designing novel functional molecules.

In recent years, significant achievements have been made in motion planning for intelligent vehicles. However, as a typical unstructured environment, open-pit mining attracts limited attention due to its complex operational conditions and adverse environmental factors. A comprehensive paradigm for unmanned transportation in open-pit mines is proposed in this research. Firstly, we propose a multi-task motion planning algorithm, called FusionPlanner, for autonomous mining trucks by the multi-sensor fusion method to adapt both lateral and longitudinal control tasks for unmanned transportation. Then, we develop a novel benchmark called MiningNav, which offers three validation approaches to evaluate the trustworthiness and robustness of well-trained algorithms in transportation roads of open-pit mines. Finally, we introduce the Parallel Mining Simulator (PMS), a new high-fidelity simulator specifically designed for open-pit mining scenarios. PMS enables the users to manage and control open-pit mine transportation from both the single-truck control and multi-truck scheduling perspectives. The performance of FusionPlanner is tested by MiningNav in PMS, and the empirical results demonstrate a significant reduction in the number of collisions and takeovers of our planner. We anticipate our unmanned transportation paradigm will bring mining trucks one step closer to trustworthiness and robustness in continuous round-the-clock unmanned transportation.

The surface properties of solid-state materials often dictate their functionality, especially for applications where nanoscale effects become important. The relevant surface(s) and their properties are determined, in large part, by the material's synthesis or operating conditions. These conditions dictate thermodynamic driving forces and kinetic rates responsible for yielding the observed surface structure and morphology. Computational surface science methods have long been applied to connect thermochemical conditions to surface phase stability, particularly in the heterogeneous catalysis and thin film growth communities. This review provides a brief introduction to first-principles approaches to compute surface phase diagrams before introducing emerging data-driven approaches. The remainder of the review focuses on the application of machine learning, predominantly in the form of learned interatomic potentials, to study complex surfaces. As machine learning algorithms and large datasets on which to train them become more commonplace in materials science, computational methods are poised to become even more predictive and powerful for modeling the complexities of inorganic surfaces at the nanoscale.

AI companies are attempting to create AI systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. Current AI models are already automating away the livelihoods of some artists, actors, and writers. But there is infighting between those who prioritize current harms and future harms. We construct a game-theoretic model of conflict to study the causes and consequences of this disunity. Our model also helps explain why throughout history, stakeholders sharing a common threat have found it advantageous to unite against it, and why the common threat has in turn found it advantageous to divide and conquer. Under realistic parameter assumptions, our model makes several predictions that find preliminary corroboration in the historical-empirical record. First, current victims of AI-driven disempowerment need the future victims to realize that their interests are also under serious and imminent threat, so that future victims are incentivized to support current victims in solidarity. Second, the movement against AI-driven disempowerment can become more united, and thereby more likely to prevail, if members believe that their efforts will be successful as opposed to futile. Finally, the movement can better unite and prevail if its members are less myopic. Myopic members prioritize their future well-being less than their present well-being, and are thus disinclined to solidarily support current victims today at personal cost, even if this is necessary to counter the shared threat of AI-driven disempowerment.

Real-world planning problems, including autonomous driving and sustainable energy applications like carbon storage and resource exploration, have recently been modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and solved using approximate methods. To solve high-dimensional POMDPs in practice, state-of-the-art methods use online planning with problem-specific heuristics to reduce planning horizons and make the problems tractable. Algorithms that learn approximations to replace heuristics have recently found success in large-scale fully observable domains. The key insight is the combination of online Monte Carlo tree search with offline neural network approximations of the optimal policy and value function. In this work, we bring this insight to partially observed domains and propose BetaZero, a belief-state planning algorithm for high-dimensional POMDPs. BetaZero learns offline approximations that replace heuristics to enable online decision making in long-horizon problems. We address several challenges inherent in large-scale partially observable domains; namely challenges of transitioning in stochastic environments, prioritizing action branching with a limited search budget, and representing beliefs as input to the network. To formalize the use of all limited search information we train against a novel Q-weighted policy vector target. We test BetaZero on various well-established benchmark POMDPs found in the literature and a real-world, high-dimensional problem of critical mineral exploration. Experiments show that BetaZero outperforms state-of-the-art POMDP solvers on a variety of tasks.

Vegetation structure mapping is critical for understanding the global carbon cycle and monitoring nature-based approaches to climate adaptation and mitigation. Repeated measurements of these data allow for the observation of deforestation or degradation of existing forests, natural forest regeneration, and the implementation of sustainable agricultural practices like agroforestry. Assessments of tree canopy height and crown projected area at a high spatial resolution are also important for monitoring carbon fluxes and assessing tree-based land uses, since forest structures can be highly spatially heterogeneous, especially in agroforestry systems. Very high resolution satellite imagery (less than one meter (1m) Ground Sample Distance) makes it possible to extract information at the tree level while allowing monitoring at a very large scale. This paper presents the first high-resolution canopy height map concurrently produced for multiple sub-national jurisdictions. Specifically, we produce very high resolution canopy height maps for the states of California and Sao Paulo, a significant improvement in resolution over the ten meter (10m) resolution of previous Sentinel / GEDI based worldwide maps of canopy height. The maps are generated by the extraction of features from a self-supervised model trained on Maxar imagery from 2017 to 2020, and the training of a dense prediction decoder against aerial lidar maps. We also introduce a post-processing step using a convolutional network trained on GEDI observations. We evaluate the proposed maps with set-aside validation lidar data as well as by comparing with other remotely sensed maps and field-collected data, and find our model produces an average Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.8 meters and Mean Error (ME) of 0.6 meters.

Several sensing techniques have been proposed for silent speech recognition (SSR); however, many of these methods require invasive processes or sensor attachment to the skin using adhesive tape or glue, rendering them unsuitable for frequent use in daily life. By contrast, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar can operate without physical contact with users' articulators and related body parts, offering several advantages for SSR. These advantages include high range resolution, high penetrability, low power consumption, robustness to external light or sound interference, and the ability to be embedded in space-constrained handheld devices. This study demonstrated IR-UWB radar-based contactless SSR using four types of speech stimuli (vowels, consonants, words, and phrases). To achieve this, a novel speech feature extraction algorithm specifically designed for IR-UWB radar-based SSR is proposed. Each speech stimulus is recognized by applying a classification algorithm to the extracted speech features. Two different algorithms, multidimensional dynamic time warping (MD-DTW) and deep neural network-hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM), were compared for the classification task. Additionally, a favorable radar antenna position, either in front of the user's lips or below the user's chin, was determined to achieve higher recognition accuracy. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed speech feature extraction algorithm combined with DNN-HMM for classifying vowels, consonants, words, and phrases. Notably, this study represents the first demonstration of phoneme-level SSR using contactless radar.