Gesture-based control for mobile manipulators faces persistent challenges in reliability, efficiency, and intuitiveness. This paper presents a dual-hand gesture interface that integrates TinyML, spectral analysis, and sensor fusion within a ROS framework to address these limitations. The system uses left-hand tilt and finger flexion, captured using accelerometer and flex sensors, for mobile base navigation, while right-hand IMU signals are processed through spectral analysis and classified by a lightweight neural network. This pipeline enables TinyML-based gesture recognition to control a 7-DOF Kinova Gen3 manipulator. By supporting simultaneous navigation and manipulation, the framework improves efficiency and coordination compared to sequential methods. Key contributions include a bimanual control architecture, real-time low-power gesture recognition, robust multimodal sensor fusion, and a scalable ROS-based implementation. The proposed approach advances Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) for industrial automation, assistive robotics, and hazardous environments, offering a cost-effective, open-source solution with strong potential for real-world deployment and further optimization.

OLAF (Open Life Science Analysis Framework) is an open-source platform that enables researchers to perform bioinformatics analyses using natural language. By combining large language models (LLMs) with a modular agent-pipe-router architecture, OLAF generates and executes bioinformatics code on real scientific data, including formats like .h5ad. The system includes an Angular front end and a Python/Firebase backend, allowing users to run analyses such as single-cell RNA-seq workflows, gene annotation, and data visualization through a simple web interface. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, OLAF integrates code execution, data handling, and scientific libraries in a reproducible, user-friendly environment. It is designed to lower the barrier to computational biology for non-programmers and support transparent, AI-powered life science research.

Driven by recent breakthrough advances in neural representation learning, approximate near-neighbor (ANN) search over vector embeddings has emerged as a critical computational workload. With the introduction of the seminal Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm, graph-based indexes have established themseves as the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm for efficient and scalable ANN search. As the name suggests, HNSW searches a layered hierarchical graph to quickly identify neighborhoods of similar points to a given query vector. But is this hierarchy even necessary? A rigorous experimental analysis to answer this question would provide valuable insights into the nature of algorithm design for ANN search and motivate directions for future work in this increasingly crucial domain. To that end, we conduct an extensive benchmarking study covering more large-scale datasets than prior investigations of this question. We ultimately find that a flat graph retains all of the benefits of HNSW on high-dimensional datasets, with latency and recall performance essentially \emph{identical} to the original algorithm but with less memory overhead. Furthermore, we go a step further and study \emph{why} the hierarchy of HNSW provides no benefit in high dimensions, hypothesizing that navigable small world graphs contain a well-connected, frequently traversed ``highway" of hub nodes that maintain the same purported function as the hierarchical layers. We present compelling empirical evidence that the \emph{Hub Highway Hypothesis} holds for real datasets and investigate the mechanisms by which the highway forms. The implications of this hypothesis may also provide future research directions in developing enhancements to graph-based ANN search.

Self-organizing systems consist of autonomous agents that can perform complex tasks and adapt to dynamic environments without a central controller. Prior research often relies on reinforcement learning to enable agents to gain the skills needed for task completion, such as in the box-pushing environment. However, when agents push from opposing directions during exploration, they tend to exert equal and opposite forces on the box, resulting in minimal displacement and inefficient training. This paper proposes a model called Shared Pool of Information (SPI), which enables information to be accessible to all agents and facilitates coordination, reducing force conflicts among agents and enhancing exploration efficiency. Through computer simulations, we demonstrate that SPI not only expedites the training process but also requires fewer steps per episode, significantly improving the agents' collaborative effectiveness.

Modular addition is, on its face, a simple operation: given $N$ elements in $\mathbb{Z}_q$, compute their sum modulo $q$. Yet, scalable machine learning solutions to this problem remain elusive: prior work trains ML models that sum $N \le 6$ elements mod $q \le 1000$. Promising applications of ML models for cryptanalysis-which often involve modular arithmetic with large $N$ and $q$-motivate reconsideration of this problem. This work proposes three changes to the modular addition model training pipeline: more diverse training data, an angular embedding, and a custom loss function. With these changes, we demonstrate success with our approach for $N = 256, q = 3329$, a case which is interesting for cryptographic applications, and a significant increase in $N$ and $q$ over prior work. These techniques also generalize to other modular arithmetic problems, motivating future work.

This paper considers a compressive multi-spectral light field camera model that utilizes a one-hot spectralcoded mask and a microlens array to capture spatial, angular, and spectral information using a single monochrome sensor. We propose a model that employs compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct the complete multi-spectral light field from undersampled measurements. Unlike previous work where a light field is vectorized to a 1D signal, our method employs a 5D basis and a novel 5D measurement model, hence, matching the intrinsic dimensionality of multispectral light fields. We mathematically and empirically show the equivalence of 5D and 1D sensing models, and most importantly that the 5D framework achieves orders of magnitude faster reconstruction while requiring a small fraction of the memory. Moreover, our new multidimensional sensing model opens new research directions for designing efficient visual data acquisition algorithms and hardware.

Safe and smooth motion control is essential for mobile robots when performing various automation tasks around obstacles, especially in the presence of people and other mobile robots. The total turning and space used by a mobile robot while moving towards a specified goal position play a crucial role in determining the required control effort and complexity. In this paper, we consider a standard unicycle control approach based on angular feedback linearization and provide an explicit analytical measure for determining the total turning effort during unicycle control in terms of unicycle state and control gains. We show that undesired spiral oscillatory motion around the goal position can be avoided by choosing a higher angular control gain compared to the linear control gain. Accordingly, we establish an accurate, explicit triangular motion range bound on the closed-loop unicycle trajectory using the total turning effort. The improved accuracy in motion range prediction results from a stronger dependency on the unicycle state and control parameters. To compare alternative circular, conic, and triangular motion range prediction approaches, we present an application of the proposed unicycle motion control and motion prediction methods for safe unicycle path following around obstacles in numerical simulations.

Automatic code generation has recently attracted large attention and is becoming more significant to the software development process. Solutions based on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are being used to increase human and software efficiency in potent and innovative ways. In this paper, we aim to leverage these developments and introduce a novel approach to generating frontend component code for the popular Angular framework. We propose to do this using behavior-driven development test specifications as input to a transformer-based machine learning model. Our approach aims to drastically reduce the development time needed for web applications while potentially increasing software quality and introducing new research ideas toward automatic code generation.

Developer Journey is a new monthly series to spotlight diverse and global developers sharing relatable challenges, opportunities, and wins in their journey. Every month, we will spotlight developers around the world, the Google tools they leverage, and the kind of products they are building. What Google tools have you used? I usually work as a web frontend developer. My principal tool is JavaScript as a programming language using some frameworks.