In recent years, the pen and paper RPG market has experienced significant growth. As a result, companies are increasingly exploring the integration of AI technologies to enhance player experience and gain a competitive edge. One of the key challenges faced by publishers is designing new opponents and estimating their challenge level. Currently, there are no automated methods for determining a monster's level; the only approaches used are based on manual testing and expert evaluation. Although these manual methods can provide reasonably accurate estimates, they are time-consuming and resource-intensive. Level prediction can be approached using ordinal regression techniques. This thesis presents an overview and evaluation of state-of-the-art methods for this task. It also details the construction of a dedicated dataset for level estimation. Furthermore, a human-inspired model was developed to serve as a benchmark, allowing comparison between machine learning algorithms and the approach typically employed by pen and paper RPG publishers. In addition, a specialized evaluation procedure, grounded in domain knowledge, was designed to assess model performance and facilitate meaningful comparisons.

Cycle rickshaw pullers are highly vulnerable to extreme heat, yet little is known about how their physiological biomarkers respond under such conditions. This study collected real-time weather and physiological data using wearable sensors from 100 rickshaw pullers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In addition, interviews with 12 pullers explored their knowledge, perceptions, and experiences related to climate change. We developed a Linear Gaussian Bayesian Network (LGBN) regression model to predict key physiological biomarkers based on activity, weather, and demographic features. The model achieved normalized mean absolute error values of 0.82, 0.47, 0.65, and 0.67 for skin temperature, relative cardiac cost, skin conductance response, and skin conductance level, respectively. Using projections from 18 CMIP6 climate models, we layered the LGBN on future climate forecasts to analyze survivability for current (2023-2025) and future years (2026-2100). Based on thresholds of WBGT above 31.1°C and skin temperature above 35°C, 32% of rickshaw pullers already face high heat exposure risk. By 2026-2030, this percentage may rise to 37% with average exposure lasting nearly 12 minutes, or about two-thirds of the trip duration. A thematic analysis of interviews complements these findings, showing that rickshaw pullers recognize their increasing climate vulnerability and express concern about its effects on health and occupational survivability.

This paper explores a deliberately over-engineered approach to the classical problem of parity detection -- determining whether a number is odd or even -- by combining wavelet-based feature extraction with unsupervised clustering. Instead of relying on modular arithmetic, integers are transformed into wavelet-domain representations, from which multi-scale statistical features are extracted and clustered using the k-means algorithm. The resulting feature space reveals meaningful structural differences between odd and even numbers, achieving a classification accuracy of approximately 69.67% without any label supervision. These results suggest that classical signal-processing techniques, originally designed for continuous data, can uncover latent structure even in purely discrete symbolic domains. Beyond parity detection, the study provides an illustrative perspective on how feature engineering and clustering may be repurposed for unconventional machine learning problems, potentially bridging symbolic reasoning and feature-based learning.

Recent rapid progress in the field of computational pathology has been enabled by foundation models. These models are beginning to move beyond encoding image patches towards whole-slide understanding but their clinical utility remains limited. In this work, we present PRISM2, a multimodal slide-level foundation model trained on data from 700,000 diagnostic specimen-report pairs, the largest vision (2.3 million whole slide images) and language (14M question-answer pairs) histopathology dataset to date. By learning through clinical-dialogue supervision, PRISM2 aligns histomorphologic features with the language of diagnostic reasoning, producing slide-level representations that support both direct diagnostic question-answering and transferable embeddings for downstream tasks. Without additional training, PRISM2 matches or exceeds the cancer-detection performance of clinical-grade products. This is observed without loss of generality on other tasks, where PRISM2 achieves top performance. Finally, using survival prediction as the example, we show that task-specific finetuning with a large dataset can outperform task-specific models, further improving performance. These results demonstrate how language-supervised pretraining provides a scalable, clinically grounded signal for learning generalizable pathology representations, bridging human diagnostic reasoning and foundation-model performance.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) localization delivers centimeter-scale accuracy but is vulnerable to jamming attacks, creating security risks for asset tracking and intrusion detection in smart buildings. Although machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods have improved tag localization, localizing malicious jammers within a single room and across changing indoor layouts remains largely unexplored. Two novel UWB datasets, collected under original and modified room configurations, are introduced to establish comprehensive ML/DL baselines. Performance is rigorously evaluated using a variety of classification and regression metrics. On the source dataset with the collected UWB features, Random Forest achieves the highest F1-macro score of 0.95 and XGBoost achieves the lowest mean Euclidean error of 20.16 cm. However, deploying these source-trained models in the modified room layout led to severe performance degradation, with XGBoost's mean Euclidean error increasing tenfold to 207.99 cm, demonstrating significant domain shift. To mitigate this degradation, a domain-adversarial ConvNeXt autoencoder (A-CNT) is proposed that leverages a gradient-reversal layer to align CIR-derived features across domains. The A-CNT framework restores localization performance by reducing the mean Euclidean error to 34.67 cm. This represents a 77 percent improvement over non-adversarial transfer learning and an 83 percent improvement over the best baseline, restoring the fraction of samples within 30 cm to 0.56. Overall, the results demonstrate that adversarial feature alignment enables robust and transferable indoor jammer localization despite environmental changes. Code and dataset available at https://github.com/afbf4c8996f/Jammer-Loc

Tensor decomposition faces fundamental challenges in analyzing high-dimensional data, where traditional methods based on reconstruction and fixed-rank constraints often fail to capture semantically meaningful structures. This paper introduces a no-rank tensor decomposition framework grounded in metric learning, which replaces reconstruction objectives with a discriminative, similarity-based optimization. The proposed approach learns data-driven embeddings by optimizing a triplet loss with diversity and uniformity regularization, creating a feature space where distance directly reflects semantic similarity. We provide theoretical guarantees for the framework's convergence and establish bounds on its metric properties. Evaluations across diverse domains -- including face recognition (LFW, Olivetti), brain connectivity analysis (ABIDE), and simulated data (galaxy morphology, crystal structures) -- demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline techniques, including PCA, t-SNE, UMAP, and tensor decomposition baselines (CP and Tucker). Results show substantial improvements in clustering metrics (Silhouette Score, Davies-Bouldin Index, Calinski-Harabasz Index, Separation Ratio, Adjusted Rand Index, Normalized Mutual Information) and reveal a fundamental trade-off: while metric learning optimizes global class separation, it deliberately transforms local geometry to align with semantic relationships. Crucially, our approach achieves superior performance with smaller training datasets compared to transformer-based methods, offering an efficient alternative for domains with limited labeled data. This work establishes metric learning as a paradigm for tensor-based analysis, prioritizing semantic relevance over pixel-level fidelity while providing computational advantages in data-scarce scenarios.

Games and puzzles play important pedagogical roles in STEM learning. New AI algorithms that can solve complex problems offer opportunities for scaffolded instruction in puzzle solving. This paper presents the ALLURE system, which uses an AI algorithm (Deep CubeA) to guide students in solving a common first step of the Rubik's Cube (i.e., the white cross). Using data from a pilot study we present preliminary findings about students' behaviors in the system, how these behaviors are associated with STEM skills - including spatial reasoning, critical thinking and algorithmic thinking. We discuss how data from ALLURE can be used in future educational data mining to understand how students benefit from AI assistance and collaboration when solving complex problems.

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have advanced representation learning through self-supervised methods. However, existing training pipelines are often inflexible, domain-specific, or computationally expensive, which limits their usability across different domains and resource settings. DINO-MX is a modular and extensible training framework that combines the core principles of DINO, DINOv2 and DINOv3 within a unified configuration-driven system. It supports a variety of transformer-based architectures and is fully compatible with the Hugging Face ecosystem. The framework includes multiple training strategies such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA), layer freezing, and knowledge distillation, along with support for distributed training through both Distributed Data Parallel (DDP) and Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP). DINO-MX is designed to work with both natural and specialized data types, including single- and multi-channel images. Experimental results on diverse datasets show that DINO-MX achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational costs. Additionally, it offers interpretability tools and a label-guided data augmentation method that improves attention-based localization without the need for extra detection or segmentation heads. DINO-MX provides a reproducible and scalable foundation for developing, adapting, and benchmarking self-supervised vision models across a range of research and real-world applications.

Energy estimation is critical to impact identification on aerospace composites, where low-velocity impacts can induce internal damage that is undetectable at the surface. Current methodologies for energy prediction are often constrained by data sparsity, signal noise, complex feature interdependencies, non-linear dynamics, massive design spaces, and the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. This study introduces a physics-informed framework that embeds domain knowledge into machine learning through a dedicated input space. The approach combines observational biases, which guide the design of physics-motivated features, with targeted feature selection to retain only the most informative indicators. Features are extracted from time, frequency, and time-frequency domains to capture complementary aspects of the structural response. A structured feature selection process integrating statistical significance, correlation filtering, dimensionality reduction, and noise robustness ensures physical relevance and interpretability. Exploratory data analysis further reveals domain-specific trends, yielding a reduced feature set that captures essential dynamic phenomena such as amplitude scaling, spectral redistribution, and transient signal behaviour. Together, these steps produce a compact set of energy-sensitive indicators with both statistical robustness and physical significance, resulting in impact energy predictions that remain interpretable and traceable to measurable structural responses. Using this optimised input space, a fully-connected neural network is trained and validated with experimental data from multiple impact scenarios, including pristine and damaged states. The resulting model demonstrates significantly improved impact energy prediction accuracy, reducing errors by a factor of three compared to conventional time-series techniques and purely data-driven models.

AI systems on edge devices face a critical challenge in open-world environments: adapting when data distributions shift and novel classes emerge. While offline training dominates current paradigms, online continual learning (OCL)--where models learn incrementally from non-stationary streams without catastrophic forgetting--remains challenging in power-constrained settings. We present a neuromorphic solution called CLP-SNN: a spiking neural network architecture for Continually Learning Prototypes and its implementation on Intel's Loihi 2 chip. Our approach introduces three innovations: (1) event-driven and spatiotemporally sparse local learning, (2) a self-normalizing three-factor learning rule maintaining weight normalization, and (3) integrated neurogenesis and metaplasticity for capacity expansion and forgetting mitigation. On OpenLORIS few-shot learning experiments, CLP-SNN achieves accuracy competitive with replay methods while being rehearsal-free. CLP-SNN delivers transformative efficiency gains: 70\times faster (0.33ms vs 23.2ms), and 5,600\times more energy efficient (0.05mJ vs 281mJ) than the best alternative OCL on edge GPU. This demonstrates that co-designed brain-inspired algorithms and neuromorphic hardware can break traditional accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for future edge AI systems.