Sign language (SL) is an essential communication form for hearing-impaired and deaf people, enabling engagement within the broader society. Despite its significance, limited public awareness of SL often leads to inequitable access to educational and professional opportunities, thereby contributing to social exclusion, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where over 84,000 individuals depend on Saudi Sign Language (SSL) as their primary form of communication. Although certain technological approaches have helped to improve communication for individuals with hearing impairments, there continues to be an urgent requirement for more precise and dependable translation techniques, especially for Arabic sign language variants like SSL. Most state-of-the-art solutions have primarily focused on non-Arabic sign languages, resulting in a considerable absence of resources dedicated to Arabic sign language, specifically SSL. The complexity of the Arabic language and the prevalence of isolated sign language datasets that concentrate on individual words instead of continuous speech contribute to this issue. To address this gap, our research represents an important step in developing SSL resources. To address this, we introduce the first continuous Saudi Sign Language dataset called KAU-CSSL, focusing on complete sentences to facilitate further research and enable sophisticated recognition systems for SSL recognition and translation. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based model, utilizing a pretrained ResNet-18 for spatial feature extraction and a Transformer Encoder with Bidirectional LSTM for temporal dependencies, achieving 99.02\% accuracy at signer dependent mode and 77.71\% accuracy at signer independent mode. This development leads the way to not only improving communication tools for the SSL community but also making a substantial contribution to the wider field of sign language.

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is a fundamental task in network analysis with wide-ranging applications across domains. While deep learning has advanced node influence detection, existing supervised approaches remain constrained by their reliance on labeled data, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where labels are scarce or unavailable. While contrastive learning demonstrates significant potential for performance enhancement, existing approaches predominantly rely on multiple-embedding generation to construct positive/negative sample pairs. To overcome these limitations, we propose ReCC (\textit{r}egular \textit{e}quivalence-based \textit{c}ontrastive \textit{c}lustering), a novel deep unsupervised framework for influential node identification. We first reformalize influential node identification as a label-free deep clustering problem, then develop a contrastive learning mechanism that leverages regular equivalence-based similarity, which captures structural similarities between nodes beyond local neighborhoods, to generate positive and negative samples. This mechanism is integrated into a graph convolutional network to learn node embeddings that are used to differentiate influential from non-influential nodes. ReCC is pre-trained using network reconstruction loss and fine-tuned with a combined contrastive and clustering loss, with both phases being independent of labeled data. Additionally, ReCC enhances node representations by combining structural metrics with regular equivalence-based similarities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCC outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across several benchmarks.

In many biological systems, the developmental processes of individuals play a crucial role in shaping the traits, characteristics, and growth patterns of subsequent generations. Throughout various stages of growth and maturation, organisms undergo significant changes that impact their overall fitness and reproductive success. These developmental stages, ranging from early cellular differentiation to reproductive maturity, each contribute uniquely to the organism's ability to survive and transmit biological information to offspring. Conversely, hereditary processes also influence the developmental stages of subsequent generations, creating a feedback loop where the heritable traits and adaptations of individuals as well as their health statuses such as disease resistance, metabolic efficiency, or physiological robustness can impact the developmental trajectories of future generations. This feedback loop between developmental processes and heredity continually shapes evolutionary trajectories, driving adaptation and resilience in populations over time.

We present a framework for assistive robot manipulation, which focuses on two fundamental challenges: first, efficiently adapting large-scale models to downstream scene affordance understanding tasks, especially in daily living scenarios where gathering multi-task data involving humans requires strenuous effort; second, effectively learning robot trajectories by grounding the visual affordance model. We tackle the first challenge by employing a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method that prepends learnable text prompts to the frozen vision model to predict manipulation affordances in multi-task scenarios. Then we propose to learn robot trajectories guided by affordances in a supervised Flow Matching method. Flow matching represents a robot visuomotor policy as a conditional process of flowing random waypoints to desired robot trajectories. Finally, we introduce a real-world dataset with 10 tasks across Activities of Daily Living to test our framework. Our extensive evaluation highlights that the proposed prompt tuning method for learning manipulation affordance with language prompter achieves competitive performance and even outperforms other finetuning protocols across data scales, while satisfying parameter efficiency. Learning multi-task robot trajectories with a single flow matching policy also leads to consistently better performance than alternative behavior cloning methods, especially given multimodal robot action distributions. Our framework seamlessly unifies affordance model learning and trajectory generation with flow matching for robot manipulation.

Scientific machine learning has seen significant progress with the emergence of operator learning. However, existing methods encounter difficulties when applied to problems on unstructured grids and irregular domains. Spatial graph neural networks utilize local convolution in a neighborhood to potentially address these challenges, yet they often suffer from issues such as over-smoothing and over-squashing in deep architectures. Conversely, spectral graph neural networks leverage global convolution to capture extensive features and long-range dependencies in domain graphs, albeit at a high computational cost due to Eigenvalue decomposition. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, referred to as Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Operator (Sp$^2$GNO) that integrates spatial and spectral GNNs effectively. This framework mitigates the limitations of individual methods and enables the learning of solution operators across arbitrary geometries, thus catering to a wide range of real-world problems. Sp$^2$GNO demonstrates exceptional performance in solving both time-dependent and time-independent partial differential equations on regular and irregular domains. Our approach is validated through comprehensive benchmarks and practical applications drawn from computational mechanics and scientific computing literature.

Real estate appraisal is a complex and important task, that can be made more precise and faster with the help of automated valuation tools. Usually the value of some property is determined by taking into account both structural and geographical characteristics. However, while geographical information is easily found, obtaining significant structural information requires the intervention of a real estate expert, a professional appraiser. In this paper we propose a Web data acquisition methodology, and a Machine Learning model, that can be used to automatically evaluate real estate properties. This method uses data from previous appraisal documents, from the advertised prices of similar properties found via Web crawling, and from open data describing the characteristics of a corresponding geographical area. We describe a case study, applicable to the whole Italian territory, and initially trained on a data set of individual homes located in the city of Turin, and analyze prediction and practical applicability.