Tiny but mighty, honeybees play a crucial role in our ecosystems, pollinating various plants and crops. They also support the economy. These small producers contribute billions of dollars to Canada's agriculture industry, making Canada a major honey producer. However, in the winter of 2024, Canada's honey industry faced a severe collapse. Canada lost more than one-third of its beehives, primarily due to the widespread infestation of Varroa mites.

Data sharding - in which block data is sharded without sharding compute - is at the present the favored approach for scaling Ethereum. A key challenge toward implementing data sharding is verifying whether the entirety of a block's data is available in the network (across its shards). A central technique proposed to conduct this verification uses erasure coded blocks and is called data availability sampling (DAS). While the high-level protocol details of DAS has been well discussed in the community, discussions around how such a protocol will be implemented at the peer-to-peer layer are lacking. We identify random sampling of nodes as a fundamental primitive necessary to carry out DAS and present Honeybee, a decentralized algorithm for sampling node that uses verifiable random walks. Honeybee is secure against attacks even in the presence of a large number of Byzantine nodes (e.g., 50% of the network). We evaluate Honeybee through experiments and show that the quality of sampling achieved by Honeybee is significantly better compared to the state-of-the-art. Our proposed algorithm has implications for DAS functions in both full nodes and light nodes.

In Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a visual projector plays a crucial role in bridging pre-trained vision encoders with LLMs, enabling profound visual understanding while harnessing the LLMs' robust capabilities. Despite the importance of the visual projector, it has been relatively less explored. In this study, we first identify two essential projector properties: (i) flexibility in managing the number of visual tokens, crucial for MLLMs' overall efficiency, and (ii) preservation of local context from visual features, vital for spatial understanding. Based on these findings, we propose a novel projector design that is both flexible and locality-enhanced, effectively satisfying the two desirable properties. Additionally, we present comprehensive strategies to effectively utilize multiple and multifaceted instruction datasets. Through extensive experiments, we examine the impact of individual design choices. Finally, our proposed MLLM, Honeybee, remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, SEED-Bench, and LLaVA-Bench, achieving significantly higher efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/honeybee.

We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials science textual data available in the open literature, and HoneyBee is the first billion-parameter language model specialized to materials science. In MatSci-Instruct we improve the trustworthiness of generated data by prompting multiple commercially available large language models for generation with an Instructor module (e.g. Chat-GPT) and verification from an independent Verifier module (e.g. Claude). Using MatSci-Instruct, we construct a dataset of multiple tasks and measure the quality of our dataset along multiple dimensions, including accuracy against known facts, relevance to materials science, as well as completeness and reasonableness of the data. Moreover, we iteratively generate more targeted instructions and instruction-data in a finetuning-evaluation-feedback loop leading to progressively better performance for our finetuned HoneyBee models. Our evaluation on the MatSci-NLP benchmark shows HoneyBee's outperformance of existing language models on materials science tasks and iterative improvement in successive stages of instruction-data refinement. We study the quality of HoneyBee's language modeling through automatic evaluation and analyze case studies to further understand the model's capabilities and limitations. Our code and relevant datasets are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-HoneyBee}.

Insects as pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystem management and world food production. However, insect populations are declining, calling for efficient methods of insect monitoring. Existing methods analyze video or time-lapse images of insects in nature, but the analysis is challenging since insects are small objects in complex and dynamic scenes of natural vegetation. In this work, we provide a dataset of primary honeybees visiting three different plant species during two months of the summer period. The dataset consists of 107,387 annotated time-lapse images from multiple cameras, including 9,423 annotated insects. We present a method pipeline for detecting insects in time-lapse RGB images. The pipeline consists of a two-step process. Firstly, the time-lapse RGB images are preprocessed to enhance insects in the images. This Motion-Informed-Enhancement technique uses motion and colors to enhance insects in images. Secondly, the enhanced images are subsequently fed into a Convolutional Neural network (CNN) object detector. The method improves the deep learning object detectors You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Faster Region-based CNN (Faster R-CNN). Using Motion-Informed-Enhancement, the YOLO-detector improves the average micro F1-score from 0.49 to 0.71, and the Faster R-CNN-detector improves the average micro F1-score from 0.32 to 0.56 on the dataset. Our dataset and proposed method provide a step forward to automate the time-lapse camera monitoring of flying insects. The dataset is published on: https://vision.eng.au.dk/mie/

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that "learned" to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were "saying"--and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. "There's one set of researchers that's keen on finding out whether animals can engage in symbolic communication and another set that says, 'That is anthropomorphizing. We need to ... understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,'" says Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a new way to track the insect pollinators essential to farming. In a new study, we installed miniature digital cameras and computers inside a greenhouse at a strawberry farm in Victoria, Australia, to track bees and other insects as they flew from plant to plant pollinating flowers. Using custom AI software, we analysed several days' video footage from our system to build a picture of pollination behaviour over a wide area. In the same way that monitoring roads can help traffic run smoothly, our system promises to make pollination more efficient. This will enable better use of resources and increased food production.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a new way to track the insect pollinators essential to farming. In a new study, we installed miniature digital cameras and computers inside a greenhouse at a strawberry farm in Victoria, Australia, to track bees and other insects as they flew from plant to plant pollinating flowers. Using custom AI software, we analysed several days' video footage from our system to build a picture of pollination behaviour over a wide area. In the same way that monitoring roads can help traffic run smoothly, our system promises to make pollination more efficient. This will enable better use of resources and increased food production.

For policymakers wishing to make evidence-based decisions, one of the challenges is how to combine the relevant information and evidence in a coherent and defensible manner in order to formulate and evaluate candidate policies. Policymakers often need to rely on experts with disparate fields of expertise when making policy choices in complex, multi-faceted, dynamic environments such as those dealing with ecosystem services. The pressures affecting the survival and pollination capabilities of honey bees (Apis mellifera), wild bees and other pollinators is well-documented, but incomplete. In order to estimate the potential effectiveness of various candidate policies to support pollination services, there is an urgent need to quantify the effect of various combinations of variables on the pollination ecosystem service, utilising available information, models and expert judgement. In this paper, we present a new application of the integrating decision support system methodology for combining inputs from multiple panels of experts to evaluate policies to support an abundant pollinator population.

Not long ago, the scientific community laughed at the idea that animals might have their own languages. Today, researchers around the globe are using cutting-edge technology to listen in on animal "conversations" and even communicate with them. In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication. "Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world," writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability. She points out that digital listening posts are now being used to continuously record the sounds of ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the bottom of the ocean.