Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at multi-step, tool-augmented tasks. However, smart homes introduce distinct challenges, requiring agents to handle latent user intents, temporal dependencies, device constraints, scheduling, and more. The main bottlenecks for developing smart home agents with such capabilities include the lack of a realistic simulation environment where agents can interact with devices and observe the results, as well as a challenging benchmark to evaluate them. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{SimuHome}$, a time-accelerated home environment that simulates smart devices, supports API calls, and reflects changes in environmental variables. By building the simulator on the Matter protocol, the global industry standard for smart home communication, SimuHome provides a high-fidelity environment, and agents validated in SimuHome can be deployed on real Matter-compliant devices with minimal adaptation. We provide a challenging benchmark of 600 episodes across twelve user query types that require the aforementioned capabilities. Our evaluation of 16 agents under a unified ReAct framework reveals distinct capabilities and limitations across models. Models under 7B parameters exhibited negligible performance across all query types. Even GPT-4.1, the best-performing standard model, struggled with implicit intent inference, state verification, and particularly temporal scheduling. While reasoning models such as GPT-5.1 consistently outperformed standard models on every query type, they required over three times the average inference time, which can be prohibitive for real-time smart home applications. This highlights a critical trade-off between task performance and real-world practicality.

Urban weather station networks (WSNs) are widely used to monitor urban weather and climate patterns and aid urban planning. However, maintaining WSNs is expensive and labor-intensive. Here, we present a step-wise station removal procedure to thin an existing WSN in Freiburg, Germany, and analyze the ability of WSN subsets to reproduce air temperature and humidity patterns of the entire original WSN for a year following a simulated reduction of WSN density. We found that substantial reductions in station numbers after one year of full deployment are possible while retaining high predictive accuracy. A reduction from 42 to 4 stations, for instance, increased mean prediction RMSEs from 0.69 K to 0.83 K for air temperature and from 3.8% to 4.4% for relative humidity, corresponding to RMSE increases of only 20% and 16%, respectively. Predictive accuracy is worse for remote stations in forests than for stations in built-up or open settings, but consistently better than a state-of-the-art numerical urban land-surface model (Surface Urban Energy and Water Balance Scheme). Stations located at the edges between built-up and rural areas are most valuable when reconstructing city-wide climate characteristics. Our study demonstrates the potential of thinning WSNs to maximize the efficient allocation of financial and personnel-related resources in urban climate research.

Efforts to green cities for cooling are succeeding unevenly because the same vegetation that cools surfaces can also intensify how hot the air feels. Previous studies have identified humid heat as a growing urban hazard, yet how physiologically active vegetation governs this trade-off between cooling and moisture accumulation remains poorly understood, leaving mitigation policy and design largely unguided. Here we quantify how vegetation structure and function influence the Heat Index (HI), a combined measure of temperature and humidity in 138 Indian cities spanning tropical savanna, semi-arid steppe, and humid subtropical climates, and across dense urban cores and semi-urban rings. Using an extreme-aware, one kilometre reconstruction of HI and an interpretable machine-learning framework that integrates SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), we isolate vegetation-climate interactions. Cooling generally strengthens for EVI >= 0.4 and LAI >= 0.05, but joint-high regimes begin to reverse toward warming when EVI >= 0.5, LAI >= 0.2, and fPAR >= 0.5,with an earlier onset for fPAR >= 0.25 in humid, dense cores. In such environments, highly physiologically active vegetation elevates near-surface humidity faster than it removes heat, reversing its cooling effect and amplifying perceived heat stress. These findings establish the climatic limits of vegetation-driven cooling and provide quantitative thresholds for climate-specific greening strategies that promote equitable and heat-resilient cities.

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a major role today in smart building infrastructures, from simple smart-home applications, to more sophisticated industrial type installations. The vast amounts of data generated from relevant systems can be processed in different ways revealing important information. This is especially true in the era of edge computing, when advanced data analysis and decision-making is gradually moving to the edge of the network where devices are generally characterised by low computing resources. In this context, one of the emerging main challenges is related to maintaining data analysis accuracy even with less data that can be efficiently handled by low resource devices. The present work focuses on correlation analysis of data retrieved from a pilot IoT network installation monitoring a small smart office by means of environmental and energy consumption sensors. The research motivation was to find statistical correlation between the monitoring variables that will allow the use of machine learning (ML) prediction algorithms for energy consumption reducing input parameters. For this to happen, a series of hypothesis tests for the correlation of three different environmental variables with the energy consumption were carried out. A total of ninety tests were performed, thirty for each pair of variables. In these tests, p-values showed the existence of strong or semi-strong correlation with two environmental variables, and of a weak correlation with a third one. Using the proposed methodology, we manage without examining the entire data set to exclude weak correlated variables while keeping the same score of accuracy.

The injection molding industry faces critical challenges in preserving and transferring field knowledge, particularly as experienced workers retire and multilingual barriers hinder effective communication. This study introduces IM-Chat, a multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs), designed to facilitate knowledge transfer in injection molding. IM-Chat integrates both limited documented knowledge (e.g., troubleshooting tables, manuals) and extensive field data modeled through a data-driven process condition generator that infers optimal manufacturing settings from environmental inputs such as temperature and humidity, enabling robust and context-aware task resolution. By adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategy and tool-calling agents within a modular architecture, IM-Chat ensures adaptability without the need for fine-tuning. Performance was assessed across 100 single-tool and 60 hybrid tasks for GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-3.5-turbo by domain experts using a 10-point rubric focused on relevance and correctness, and was further supplemented by automated evaluation using GPT-4o guided by a domain-adapted instruction prompt. The evaluation results indicate that more capable models tend to achieve higher accuracy, particularly in complex, tool-integrated scenarios. In addition, compared with the fine-tuned single-agent LLM, IM-Chat demonstrated superior accuracy, particularly in quantitative reasoning, and greater scalability in handling multiple information sources. Overall, these findings demonstrate the viability of multi-agent LLM systems for industrial knowledge workflows and establish IM-Chat as a scalable and generalizable approach to AI-assisted decision support in manufacturing.

Poultry farming faces increasing pressure to meet productivity targets while ensuring animal welfare and environmental compliance. Yet many small and medium-sized farms lack affordable, integrated tools for continuous monitoring and decision-making, relying instead on manual, reactive inspections. This paper presents Poultry Farm Intelligence (PoultryFI) - a modular, cost-effective platform that integrates six AI-powered modules: Camera Placement Optimizer, Audio-Visual Monitoring, Analytics & Alerting, Real-Time Egg Counting, Production & Profitability Forecasting, and a Recommendation Module. Camera layouts are first optimized offline using evolutionary algorithms for full poultry house coverage with minimal hardware. The Audio-Visual Monitoring module extracts welfare indicators from synchronized video, audio, and feeding data. Analytics & Alerting produces daily summaries and real-time notifications, while Real-Time Egg Counting uses an edge vision model to automate production tracking. Forecasting models predict egg yield and feed consumption up to 10 days in advance, and the Recommendation Module integrates forecasts with weather data to guide environmental and operational adjustments. This is among the first systems to combine low-cost sensing, edge analytics, and prescriptive AI to continuously monitor flocks, predict production, and optimize performance. Field trials demonstrate 100% egg-count accuracy on Raspberry Pi 5, robust anomaly detection, and reliable short-term forecasting. PoultryFI bridges the gap between isolated pilot tools and scalable, farm-wide intelligence, empowering producers to proactively safeguard welfare and profitability.

Scientists hope to prevent deaths from climate change, but heat and cold are more complicated than we thought. Libby Cowgill is an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has wheeled me and my cot into a metal-walled room set to 40 F. A loud fan pummels me from above and siphons the dregs of my body heat through the cot's mesh from below. A large respirator fits snug over my nose and mouth. The device tracks carbon dioxide in my exhales--a proxy for how my metabolism speeds up or slows down throughout the experiment. Eventually Cowgill will remove my respirator to slip a wire-thin metal temperature probe several pointy inches into my nose. Cowgill and a graduate student quietly observe me from the corner of their so-called "climate chamber. Just a few hours earlier I'd sat beside them to observe as another volunteer, a 24-year-old personal trainer, endured the cold. Every few minutes, they measured his skin temperature with a thermal camera, his core temperature with a wireless pill, and his blood pressure and other metrics that hinted at how his body handles extreme cold. He lasted almost an hour without shivering; when my turn comes, I shiver aggressively on the cot for nearly an hour straight. I'm visiting Texas to learn about this experiment on how different bodies respond to extreme climates. I jokingly ask Cowgill as she tapes biosensing devices to my chest and legs. After I exit the cold, she surprises me: "You, believe it or not, were not the worst person we've ever seen." Climate change forces us to reckon with the knotty science of how our bodies interact with the environment. Cowgill is a 40-something anthropologist at the University of Missouri who powerlifts and teaches CrossFit in her spare time. She's small and strong, with dark bangs and geometric tattoos. Since 2022, she's spent the summers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center tending to these uncomfortable experiments. Her team hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. While we know in broad strokes how people thermoregulate, the science of keeping warm or cool is mottled with blind spots. "We have the general picture.

If you care about good air, it's time for a dehumidifier. These are the best ones we've tested for everything from basements to drying laundry. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Even though I've spent the better part of my life living in humid New York City, I never owned a dehumidifier. I never had a basement, and I was ignorant of the benefits of a portable dehumidifier. I've been lucky in that I haven't had or at least known about a mold issue where I live.

Smart aquaculture systems depend on rich environmental data streams to protect fish welfare, optimize feeding, and reduce energy use. Yet public datasets that describe the air surrounding indoor tanks remain scarce, limiting the development of forecasting and anomaly-detection tools that couple head-space conditions with water-quality dynamics. We therefore introduce AQUAIR, an open-access public dataset that logs six Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) variables--air temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, total volatile organic compounds, PM2.5 and PM10--inside a fish aquaculture facility in Amghass, Azrou, Morocco. A single Awair HOME monitor sampled every five minutes from 14 October 2024 to 9 January 2025, producing more than 23,000 time-stamped observations that are fully quality-controlled and publicly archived on Figshare. We describe the sensor placement, ISO-compliant mounting height, calibration checks against reference instruments, and an open-source processing pipeline that normalizes timestamps, interpolates short gaps, and exports analysis-ready tables. Exploratory statistics show stable conditions (median CO2 = 758 ppm; PM2.5 = 12 micrograms/m3) with pronounced feeding-time peaks, offering rich structure for short-horizon forecasting, event detection, and sensor drift studies. AQUAIR thus fills a critical gap in smart aquaculture informatics and provides a reproducible benchmark for data-centric machine learning curricula and environmental sensing research focused on head-space dynamics in recirculating aquaculture systems.

Manual HVAC fault diagnosis in commercial buildings takes 8-12 hours per incident and achieves only 60 percent diagnostic accuracy, reflecting analytics that stop at correlation instead of causation. To close this gap, we present GRID (Graph-based Reasoning for Intervention and Discovery), a three-stage causal discovery pipeline that combines constraint-based search, neural structural equation modeling, and language model priors to recover directed acyclic graphs from building sensor data. Across six benchmarks: synthetic rooms, EnergyPlus simulation, the ASHRAE Great Energy Predictor III dataset, and a live office testbed, GRID achieves F1 scores ranging from 0.65 to 1.00, with exact recovery (F1 = 1.00) in three controlled environments (Base, Hidden, Physical) and strong performance on real-world data (F1 = 0.89 on ASHRAE, 0.86 in noisy conditions). The method outperforms ten baseline approaches across all evaluation scenarios. Intervention scheduling achieves low operational impact in most scenarios (cost <= 0.026) while reducing risk metrics compared to baseline approaches. The framework integrates constraint-based methods, neural architectures, and domain-specific language model prompts to address the observational-causal gap in building analytics.