The utilization of Machine Learning (ML) in contemporary software systems is extensive and continually expanding. However, its usage is energy-intensive, contributing to increased carbon emissions and demanding significant resources. While numerous studies examine the performance and accuracy of ML, only a limited few focus on its environmental aspects, particularly energy consumption. In addition, despite emerging efforts to compare energy consumption across various programming languages for specific algorithms and tasks, there remains a gap specifically in comparing these languages for ML-based tasks. This paper aims to raise awareness of the energy costs associated with employing different programming languages for ML model training and inference. Through this empirical study, we measure and compare the energy consumption along with run-time performance of five regression and five classification tasks implemented in Python and R, the two most popular programming languages in this context. Our study results reveal a statistically significant difference in costs between the two languages in 95% of the cases examined. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the choice of programming language can influence energy efficiency significantly, up to 99.16% during model training and up to 99.8% during inferences, for a given ML task.

These lecture notes evolve around mathematical concepts arising in inverse problems. We start by introducing inverse problems through examples such as differentiation, deconvolution, computed tomography and phase retrieval. This then leads us to the framework of well-posedness and first considerations regarding reconstruction and inversion approaches. The second chapter then first deals with classical regularization theory of inverse problems in Hilbert spaces. After introducing the pseudo-inverse, we review the concept of convergent regularization. Within this chapter we then proceed to ask the question of how to realize practical reconstruction algorithms. Here, we mainly focus on Tikhonov and sparsity promoting regularization in finite dimensional spaces. In the third chapter, we dive into modern deep-learning methods, which allow solving inverse problems in a data-dependent approach. The intersection between inverse problems and machine learning is a rapidly growing field and our exposition here restricts itself to a very limited selection of topics. Among them are learned regularization, fully-learned Bayesian estimation, post-processing strategies and plug-n-play methods.

The ``black-box'' nature of deep learning models presents a significant barrier to their adoption for scientific discovery, where interpretability is paramount. This challenge is especially pronounced in discovering the governing equations of dynamical processes on networks or graphs, since even their topological structure further affects the processes' behavior. This paper provides a rigorous, comparative assessment of state-of-the-art symbolic regression techniques for this task. We evaluate established methods, including sparse regression and MLP-based architectures, and introduce a novel adaptation of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for graphs, designed to exploit their inherent interpretability. Across a suite of synthetic and real-world dynamical systems, our results demonstrate that both MLP and KAN-based architectures can successfully identify the underlying symbolic equations, significantly surpassing existing baselines. Critically, we show that KANs achieve this performance with greater parsimony and transparency, as their learnable activation functions provide a clearer mapping to the true physical dynamics. This study offers a practical guide for researchers, clarifying the trade-offs between model expressivity and interpretability, and establishes the viability of neural-based architectures for robust scientific discovery on complex systems.

This study explores the challenge of improving multiclass image classification through quantum machine-learning techniques. It explores how the discarded qubit states of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) can be leveraged alongside a classical classifier to improve classification performance. Current QCNNs discard qubit states after pooling; yet, unlike classical pooling, these qubits often remain entangled with the retained ones, meaning valuable correlated information is lost. We experiment with recycling this information and combining it with the conventional measurements from the retained qubits. Accordingly, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical architecture that couples a modified QCNN with fully connected classical layers. Two shallow fully connected (FC) heads separately process measurements from retained and discarded qubits, whose outputs are ensembled before a final classification layer. Joint optimisation with a classical cross-entropy loss allows both quantum and classical parameters to adapt coherently. The method outperforms comparable lightweight models on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and OrganAMNIST. These results indicate that reusing discarded qubit information is a promising approach for future hybrid quantum-classical models and may extend to tasks beyond image classification.

The urgent need for renewable energy expansion, particularly wind power, is hindered by conflicts with wildlife conservation. To address this, we developed BirdRecorder, an advanced AI-based anti-collision system to protect endangered birds, especially the red kite ( Milvus milvus). Integrating robotics, telemetry, and high-performance AI algorithms, BirdRecorder aims to detect, track, and classify avian species within a range of 800 m to minimize bird-turbine collisions. BirdRecorder integrates advanced AI methods with optimized hardware and software architectures to enable real-time image processing. Leveraging Single Shot Detector (SSD) [1] for detection, combined with specialized hardware acceleration and tracking algorithms, our system achieves high detection precision while maintaining the speed necessary for real-time decision-making. By combining these components, BirdRecorder outperforms existing approaches in both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we summarize results on field tests and performance of the BirdRecorder system. By bridging the gap between renewable energy expansion and wildlife conservation, BirdRecorder contributes to a more sustainable coexistence of technology and nature.

Imagine decision-makers uploading data and, within minutes, receiving clear, actionable insights delivered straight to their fingertips. That is the promise of the AI Data Scientist, an autonomous Agent powered by large language models (LLMs) that closes the gap between evidence and action. Rather than simply writing code or responding to prompts, it reasons through questions, tests ideas, and delivers end-to-end insights at a pace far beyond traditional workflows. Guided by the scientific tenet of the hypothesis, this Agent uncovers explanatory patterns in data, evaluates their statistical significance, and uses them to inform predictive modeling. It then translates these results into recommendations that are both rigorous and accessible. At the core of the AI Data Scientist is a team of specialized LLM Subagents, each responsible for a distinct task such as data cleaning, statistical testing, validation, and plain-language communication. These Subagents write their own code, reason about causality, and identify when additional data is needed to support sound conclusions. Together, they achieve in minutes what might otherwise take days or weeks, enabling a new kind of interaction that makes deep data science both accessible and actionable.

--Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy by keeping local datasets on-device. In this work, we address FL settings where clients may behave adversarially, exhibiting Byzantine attacks, while the central server is trusted and equipped with a reference dataset. We propose FedGreed, a resilient aggregation strategy for federated learning that does not require any assumptions about the fraction of adversarial participants. FedGreed orders clients' local model updates based on their loss metrics evaluated against a trusted dataset on the server and greedily selects a subset of clients whose models exhibit the minimal evaluation loss. Unlike many existing approaches, our method is designed to operate reliably under heterogeneous (non-IID) data distributions, which are prevalent in real-world deployments. FedGreed exhibits convergence guarantees and bounded optimality gaps under strong adversarial behavior . Experimental evaluations on MNIST, FMNIST, and CIF AR-10 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms standard and robust federated learning baselines, such as Mean, Trimmed Mean, Median, Krum, and Multi-Krum, in the majority of adversarial scenarios considered, including label flipping and Gaussian noise injection attacks. All experiments were conducted using the Flower federated learning framework.

Non-parametric change-point detection in streaming time series data is a long-standing challenge in signal processing. Recent advancements in statistics and machine learning have increasingly addressed this problem for data residing on Riemannian manifolds. One prominent strategy involves monitoring abrupt changes in the center of mass of the time series. Implemented in a streaming fashion, this strategy, however, requires careful step size tuning when computing the updates of the center of mass. In this paper, we propose to leverage robust centroid on manifolds from M-estimation theory to address this issue. Our proposal consists of comparing two centroid estimates: the classical Karcher mean (sensitive to change) versus one defined from Huber's function (robust to change). This comparison leads to the definition of a test statistic whose performance is less sensitive to the underlying estimation method. We propose a stochastic Riemannian optimization algorithm to estimate both robust centroids efficiently. Experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world data across two representative manifolds demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown substantial success in various applications but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This study aims to identify and isolate the components of two different adversarial training techniques that contribute most to increased adversarial robustness, particularly through the lens of margins in the input space -- the minimal distance between data points and decision boundaries. Specifically, we compare two methods that maximize margins: a simple approach which modifies the loss function to increase an approximation of the margin, and a more complex state-of-the-art method (Dynamics-Aware Robust Training) which builds upon this approach. Using a VGG-16 model as our base, we systematically isolate and evaluate individual components from these methods to determine their relative impact on adversarial robustness. We assess the effect of each component on the model's performance under various adversarial attacks, including AutoAttack and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). Our analysis on the CIFAR-10 dataset reveals which elements most effectively enhance adversarial robustness, providing insights for designing more robust DNNs.

Automatic Speech Recognition has advanced with self-supervised learning, enabling feature extraction directly from raw audio. In Wav2Vec, a CNN first transforms audio into feature vectors before the transformer processes them. This study examines CNN-extracted information for monophthong vowels using the TIMIT corpus. We compare MFCCs, MFCCs with formants, and CNN activations by training SVM classifiers for front-back vowel identification, assessing their classification accuracy to evaluate phonetic representation.