Text offers intuitive access to information. This can, in particular, complement the density of numerical time series, thereby allowing improved interactions with time series models to enhance accessibility and decision-making. While the creation of question-answering datasets and models has recently seen remarkable growth, most research focuses on question answering (QA) on vision and text, with time series receiving minute attention. To bridge this gap, we propose a challenging novel time series QA (TSQA) dataset, QuAnTS, for Question Answering on Time Series data. Specifically, we pose a wide variety of questions and answers about human motion in the form of tracked skeleton trajectories. We verify that the large-scale QuAnTS dataset is well-formed and comprehensive through extensive experiments. Thoroughly evaluating existing and newly proposed baselines then lays the groundwork for a deeper exploration of TSQA using QuAnTS. Additionally, we provide human performances as a key reference for gauging the practical usability of such models. We hope to encourage future research on interacting with time series models through text, enabling better decision-making and more transparent systems.

Abubakar Salim has a lot of beef with Hollywood--and he's getting it off his chest in his latest video game. The actor, known for his roles as Alyn of Hull on House of the Dragon and Father in Raised By Wolves, has been balancing his time between the big screen and gaming, two industries that have been affected by a slew of similar issues: long hours, shrinking jobs, abuse of power, and, more recently, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence use and generative AI. Salim's sophomore game, Dead Take, is a story of Hollywood, ambition, and exploitation, dressed up as a horror game that takes aim at his industry's problems, from corruption to AI use. "Hollywood is pure horror," Salim says. Dead Take is a firm departure from his debut game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau.

Arabic Rhetoric is the field of Arabic linguistics which governs the art and science of conveying a message with greater beauty, impact and persuasiveness. The field is as ancient as the Arabic language itself and is found extensively in classical and contemporary Arabic poetry, free verse and prose. In practical terms, it is the intelligent use of word order, figurative speech and linguistic embellishments to enhance message delivery. Despite the volumes that have been written about it and the high status accorded to it, there is no way to objectively know whether a speaker or writer has used Arabic rhetoric in a given text, to what extent, and why. There is no objective way to compare the use of Arabic rhetoric across genres, authors or epochs. It is impossible to know which of pre-Islamic poetry, Andalucian Arabic poetry, or modern literary genres are richer in Arabic rhetoric. The aim of the current study was to devise a way to measure the density of the literary devices which constitute Arabic rhetoric in a given text, as a proxy marker for Arabic rhetoric itself. A comprehensive list of 84 of the commonest literary devices and their definitions was compiled. A system of identifying literary devices in texts was constructed. A method of calculating the density of literary devices based on the morpheme count of the text was utilised. Four electronic tools and an analogue tool were created to support the calculation of an Arabic text's rhetorical literary device density, including a website and online calculator. Additionally, a technique of reporting the distribution of literary devices used across the three sub-domains of Arabic rhetoric was created. The output of this project is a working tool which can accurately report the density of Arabic rhetoric in any Arabic text or speech.

Pocketpair, the company behind last year's viral game Palworld, has a new venture: publishing indie games. Its first project, scheduled for release later this year, will be an as-yet-unnamed horror game from Surgent Studios, the developer behind 2024's Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Palworld, jokingly referred to as "Pokémon with guns," was a breakout success last year, drawing in more than 25 million players in its first few months. The company's step into publishing comes at a turbulent time for video games, especially smaller studios; last year, Among Us developer Innersloth announced its own move into publishing to help push projects forward. Pocketpair's Palworld success, it seems, is allowing it to do the same.

Buildings play a crucial role in human well-being, influencing occupant comfort, health, and safety. Additionally, they contribute significantly to global energy consumption, accounting for one-third of total energy usage, and carbon emissions. Optimizing building performance presents a vital opportunity to combat climate change and promote human flourishing. However, research in building analytics has been hampered by the lack of accessible, available, and comprehensive real-world datasets on multiple building operations. In this paper, we introduce the Building TimeSeries (BTS) dataset. Our dataset covers three buildings over a three-year period, comprising more than ten thousand timeseries data points with hundreds of unique ontologies. Moreover, the metadata is standardized using the Brick schema. To demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we performed benchmarks on two tasks: timeseries ontology classification and zero-shot forecasting. These tasks represent an essential initial step in addressing challenges related to interoperability in building analytics.

A decade ago, Abubakar Salim lost his father. An actor by trade, with credits in Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon's upcoming season, he searched for years for the right medium to work through the hurt. Nothing did it justice--until he tried to make a video game. "If you're really depicting grief in a truthful and honest way, it is so open and chaotic that actually, you can kind of gamify it," he says. Salim is the CEO and creative director of Surgent Studios, the developer behind the upcoming Metroidvania game Tales of Kenzera: Zau.

UNSW Engineering Professor Flora Salim has been honoured for her pioneering work in computing and machine learning by Women in AI, a global advocacy group for women in the artificial intelligence (AI) field. The 2022 Women in AI Awards Australia and New Zealand recognised women across various industries committed to excellence in AI. Finalists were judged on innovation, leadership and inspiring potential, global impact, and the ability of the AI solution to provide a social good for the community. Prof. Salim was recognised for her AI achievements in the Defence and Intelligence award category. The award acknowledged her research in the cross-cutting areas of ubiquitous computing and machine learning, with a focus on efficient, fair, and explainable machine learning for multi-dimensional sensor data, towards enabling situational and behaviour intelligence for multiple applications.

Sydney: Australian computer scientists have developed a novel Artificial Intelligence-based model that can hear the effects of Covid-19 in the sound of a forced cough, even when people are asymptomatic, an advance that can pave the way for detecting the infectious disease via diagnostic mobile phone apps. During the pandemic, many crowdsourcing platforms have been designed to gather respiratory sound audios from both healthy and Covid-19 positive groups for research purposes. A team of researchers from RMIT University accessed datasets from two of these platforms -- Covid-19 Sounds App and COSWARA -- to train the algorithm using contrastive self-supervised learning, a method by which a system works independently to encode what makes two things similar or different. With further development, their algorithm could power a diagnostic mobile phone app, said lead author Hao Xue, Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Computing Technologies. "We've overcome a major hurdle in the development of a reliable, easily-accessible and contactless preliminary diagnosis tool for Covid-19," said Xue, Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Computing Technologies.