Healthcare professionals, particularly nurses, face elevated occupational stress, a concern amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. While wearable sensors offer promising avenues for real-time stress monitoring, existing studies often lack comprehensive datasets and robust analytical frameworks. This study addresses these gaps by introducing a multimodal dataset comprising physiological signals, electrodermal activity, heart rate and skin temperature. A systematic literature review identified limitations in prior stress-detection methodologies, particularly in handling class imbalance and optimizing model generalizability. To overcome these challenges, the dataset underwent preprocessing with the Synthetic Minority Over sampling Technique (SMOTE), ensuring balanced representation of stress states. Advanced machine learning models including Random Forest, XGBoost and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) were evaluated and combined into a Stacking Classifier to leverage their collective predictive strengths. By using a publicly accessible dataset and a reproducible analytical pipeline, this work advances the development of deployable stress-monitoring systems, offering practical implications for safeguarding healthcare workers' mental health. Future research directions include expanding demographic diversity and exploring edge-computing implementations for low latency stress alerts.

This paper presents a novel few-shot cross-domain anomaly detection framework, Nexus Vision Transformer for Anomaly Detection (NexViTAD), based on vision foundation models, which effectively addresses domain-shift challenges in industrial anomaly detection through innovative shared subspace projection mechanisms and multi-task learning (MTL) module. The main innovations include: (1) a hierarchical adapter module that adaptively fuses complementary features from Hiera and DINO-v2 pre-trained models, constructing more robust feature representations; (2) a shared subspace projection strategy that enables effective cross-domain knowledge transfer through bottleneck dimension constraints and skip connection mechanisms; (3) a MTL Decoder architecture supports simultaneous processing of multiple source domains, significantly enhancing model generalization capabilities; (4) an anomaly score inference method based on Sinkhorn-K-means clustering, combined with Gaussian filtering and adaptive threshold processing for precise pixel level. Valuated on the MVTec AD dataset, NexViTAD delivers state-of-the-art performance with an AUC of 97.5%, AP of 70.4%, and PRO of 95.2% in the target domains, surpassing other recent models, marking a transformative advance in cross-domain defect detection.

Anomaly detection (AD) plays a vital role across a wide range of real-world domains by identifying data instances that deviate from expected patterns, potentially signaling critical events such as system failures, fraudulent activities, or rare medical conditions. The demand for real-time AD has surged with the rise of the (Industrial) Internet of Things, where massive volumes of multivariate sensor data must be processed instantaneously. Real-time AD requires methods that not only handle high-dimensional streaming data but also operate in a single-pass manner, without the burden of storing historical instances, thereby ensuring minimal memory usage and fast decision-making. We propose DAD, a novel real-time decorrelation-based anomaly detection method for multivariate time series, based on an online decorrelation learning approach. Unlike traditional proximity-based or reconstruction-based detectors that process entire data or windowed instances, DAD dynamically learns and monitors the correlation structure of data sample by sample in a single pass, enabling efficient and effective detection. To support more realistic benchmarking practices, we also introduce a practical hyperparameter tuning strategy tailored for real-time anomaly detection scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that DAD achieves the most consistent and superior performance across diverse anomaly types compared to state-of-the-art methods. Crucially, its robustness to increasing dimensionality makes it particularly well-suited for real-time, high-dimensional data streams. Ultimately, DAD not only strikes an optimal balance between detection efficacy and computational efficiency but also sets a new standard for real-time, memory-constrained anomaly detection.

Melanoma, one of the deadliest types of skin cancer, accounts for thousands of fatalities globally. The bluish, blue-whitish, or blue-white veil (BWV) is a critical feature for diagnosing melanoma, yet research into detecting BWV in dermatological images is limited. This study utilizes a non-annotated skin lesion dataset, which is converted into an annotated dataset using a proposed imaging algorithm based on color threshold techniques on lesion patches and color palettes. A Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is designed and trained separately on three individual and combined dermoscopic datasets, using custom layers instead of standard activation function layers. The model is developed to categorize skin lesions based on the presence of BWV. The proposed DCNN demonstrates superior performance compared to conventional BWV detection models across different datasets. The model achieves a testing accuracy of 85.71% on the augmented PH2 dataset, 95.00% on the augmented ISIC archive dataset, 95.05% on the combined augmented (PH2+ISIC archive) dataset, and 90.00% on the Derm7pt dataset. An explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithm is subsequently applied to interpret the DCNN's decision-making process regarding BWV detection. The proposed approach, coupled with XAI, significantly improves the detection of BWV in skin lesions, outperforming existing models and providing a robust tool for early melanoma diagnosis.

PU (Positive Unlabeled) learning is a variant of supervised classification learning in which the only labels revealed to the learner are of positively labeled instances. PU learning arises in many real-world applications. Most existing work relies on the simplifying assumptions that the positively labeled training data is drawn from the restriction of the data generating distribution to positively labeled instances and/or that the proportion of positively labeled points (a.k.a. the class prior) is known apriori to the learner. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the statistical complexity of PU learning under a wider range of setups. Unlike most prior work, our study does not assume that the class prior is known to the learner. We prove upper and lower bounds on the required sample sizes (of both the positively labeled and the unlabeled samples).

Decisions about managing patients on the heart transplant waitlist are currently made by committees of doctors who consider multiple factors, but the process remains largely ad-hoc. With the growing volume of longitudinal patient, donor, and organ data collected by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) since 2018, there is increasing interest in analytical approaches to support clinical decision-making at the time of organ availability. In this study, we benchmark machine learning models that leverage longitudinal waitlist history data for time-dependent, time-to-event modeling of waitlist mortality. We train on 23,807 patient records with 77 variables and evaluate both survival prediction and discrimination at a 1-year horizon. Our best model achieves a C-Index of 0.94 and AUROC of 0.89, significantly outperforming previous models. Key predictors align with known risk factors while also revealing novel associations. Our findings can support urgency assessment and policy refinement in heart transplant decision making.

Interruption plays a crucial role in collaborative learning, shaping group interactions and influencing knowledge construction. AI-driven support can assist teachers in monitoring these interactions. However, most previous work on interruption detection and interpretation has been conducted in single-conversation environments with relatively clean audio. AI agents deployed in classrooms for collaborative learning within small groups will need to contend with multiple concurrent conversations -- in this context, overlapping speech will be ubiquitous, and interruptions will need to be identified in other ways. In this work, we analyze interruption detection in single-conversation and multi-group dialogue settings. We then create a state-of-the-art method for interruption identification that is robust to overlapping speech, and thus could be deployed in classrooms. Further, our work highlights meaningful linguistic and prosodic information about how interruptions manifest in collaborative group interactions. Our investigation also paves the way for future works to account for the influence of overlapping speech from multiple groups when tracking group dialog.

Insider threat detection presents unique challenges due to the authorized status of malicious actors and the subtlety of anomalous behaviors. Existing machine learning methods often treat user activity as isolated events, thereby failing to leverage sequential dependencies in user behavior. In this study, we propose a User-Based Sequencing (UBS) methodology, transforming the CERT insider threat dataset into structured temporal sequences suitable for deep sequential modeling. We deploy a Transformer Encoder architecture to model benign user activity and employ its reconstruction errors as anomaly scores. These scores are subsequently evaluated using three unsupervised outlier detection algorithms: One-Class SVM (OCSVM), Local Outlier Factor (LOF), and Isolation Forest (iForest). Across four rigorously designed test sets, including combinations of multiple CERT dataset releases, our UBS-Transformer pipeline consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance - notably 96.61% accuracy, 99.43% recall, 96.38% F1-score, 95.00% AUROC, and exceptionally low false negative (0.0057) and false positive (0.0571) rates. Comparative analyses demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms tabular and conventional autoencoder baselines, underscoring the efficacy of sequential user modeling and advanced anomaly detection in the insider threat domain.

We describe and analyze a computionally efficient refitting procedure for computing high-probability upper bounds on the instance-wise mean-squared prediction error of penalized nonparametric estimates based on least-squares minimization. Requiring only a single dataset and black box access to the prediction method, it consists of three steps: computing suitable residuals, symmetrizing and scaling them with a pre-factor $ρ$, and using them to define and solve a modified prediction problem recentered at the current estimate. We refer to it as wild refitting, since it uses Rademacher residual symmetrization as in a wild bootstrap variant. Under relatively mild conditions allowing for noise heterogeneity, we establish a high probability guarantee on its performance, showing that the wild refit with a suitably chosen wild noise scale $ρ$ gives an upper bound on prediction error. This theoretical analysis provides guidance into the design of such procedures, including how the residuals should be formed, the amount of noise rescaling in the wild sub-problem needed for upper bounds, and the local stability properties of the block-box procedure. We illustrate the applicability of this procedure to various problems, including non-rigid structure-from-motion recovery with structured matrix penalties; plug-and-play image restoration with deep neural network priors; and randomized sketching with kernel methods.

Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word "intelligence" is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline. This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals, and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin. A related issue is that the current view treats the social consequences of technology as an afterthought. The path forward is not merely more data and compute, and not merely more attention paid to cognitive or symbolic representations, but a thorough blending of economic and social concepts with computational and inferential concepts, in the service of system-level designs in which social welfare is a first-class citizen, and with the aspiration that a new human-centric engineering field will emerge.