The integration of robotics and automation into self-driving laboratories (SDLs) can introduce additional safety complexities, in addition to those that already apply to conventional research laboratories. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is an essential requirement for ensuring the safety and well-being of workers in laboratories, self-driving or otherwise. Fires are another important risk factor in chemical laboratories. In SDLs, fires that occur close to mobile robots, which use flammable lithium batteries, could have increased severity. Here, we present Chemist Eye, a distributed safety monitoring system designed to enhance situational awareness in SDLs. The system integrates multiple stations equipped with RGB, depth, and infrared cameras, designed to monitor incidents in SDLs. Chemist Eye is also designed to spot workers who have suffered a potential accident or medical emergency, PPE compliance and fire hazards. To do this, Chemist Eye uses decision-making driven by a vision-language model (VLM). Chemist Eye is designed for seamless integration, enabling real-time communication with robots. Based on the VLM recommendations, the system attempts to drive mobile robots away from potential fire locations, exits, or individuals not wearing PPE, and issues audible warnings where necessary. It also integrates with third-party messaging platforms to provide instant notifications to lab personnel. We tested Chemist Eye with real-world data from an SDL equipped with three mobile robots and found that the spotting of possible safety hazards and decision-making performances reached 97 % and 95 %, respectively.

A key goal of modern materials science is accelerating the pace of materials discovery. Self-driving labs, or systems that select experiments using machine learning and then execute them using automation, are designed to fulfil this promise by performing experiments faster, more intelligently, more reliably, and with richer metadata than conventional means. This review summarizes progress in understanding the degree to which SDLs accelerate learning by quantifying how much they reduce the number of experiments required for a given goal. The review begins by summarizing the theory underlying two key metrics, namely acceleration factor AF and enhancement factor EF, which quantify how much faster and better an algorithm is relative to a reference strategy. Next, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature, which reveals a wide range of AFs with a median of 6, and that tends to increase with the dimensionality of the space, reflecting an interesting blessing of dimensionality. In contrast, reported EF values vary by over two orders of magnitude, although they consistently peak at 10-20 experiments per dimension. To understand these results, we perform a series of simulated Bayesian optimization campaigns that reveal how EF depends upon the statistical properties of the parameter space while AF depends on its complexity. Collectively, these results reinforce the motivation for using SDLs by revealing their value across a wide range of material parameter spaces and provide a common language for quantifying and understanding this acceleration.

In an era increasingly shaped by decentralized knowledge ecosystems and pervasive AI technologies, fostering sustainable learner agency has become a critical educational imperative. This paper introduces a novel conceptual framework integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) and Learning Analytics (LA) to cultivate Self - Directed Growth -- a dynamic competency enabling learner s to iteratively drive their own developmental pathways across diverse contexts. Building upon critical gaps in current Self - Directed Learning (SDL) and AI - mediated educational research, the proposed Aspire to Potentials for Learners (A2PL) model reconcept ualizes the interplay of learner aspirations, complex thinking, and summative self - assessment within GAI - supported environments. Methodological implications for future intervention designs and data analytics are discussed, positioning Self - Directed Growth as a pivotal axis for designing equitable, adaptive, and sustainable learning systems in the digital era. 1. Introduction The educational realm faces two increasingly prominent challenges that threaten to reshape the landscape of learning and development . Firstly, the traditional teacher - dominated, institution - centered environment is being eclipsed by a decentralized, ever - evolving, and technologically advanced online landscape. In this new paradigm, knowledge and skills are not poised and delivered by a single expositor, but are constantly renewed, reproduced, and reiterated through sharing and co - creation, rendering existing models of education insufficient. And the overreliance on EdTech tools, as well as information search and synthesis tools, such as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), among students poses a significant challenge in the contemporary educational landscape, while there is a concerning lack of research examining whether these tools genuinely foster the development of learner agency. The integration of AI into educational practices offers a transformative opportunity to enhance learning outcomes and promote equity. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), AI has the potential to acc elerate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) by improving access to quality education for all learners, regardless of their socioeconomic background (UNESCO, 2019; UNESCO, 2021). As some noted, AI facilitates access to information and online education, helping to bridge the information, skill, and educational gaps faced by disadvantaged individuals who encounter barriers to traditional learning opportunities due to time constraints, financial limitations, geographic distance, or physic al challenges (Thakkar et al., 2020; Sanabria - Z et al., 2023).

Rising labor costs and increasing logistical demands pose significant challenges to modern delivery systems. Automated Electric Vehicles (AEVs) could reduce reliance on delivery personnel and increase route flexibility, but their adoption is limited due to varying customer acceptance and integration complexities. Shared Distribution Locations (SDLs) offer an alternative to door-to-door (D2D) delivery by providing a wider delivery window and serving multiple community customers, thereby improving last-mile logistics through reduced delivery time, lower costs, and higher customer satisfaction.This paper introduces the Multi-Trip Time-Dependent Hybrid Vehicle Routing Problem (MTTD-MVRP), a challenging variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that combines Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) with conventional vehicles. The problem's complexity arises from factors such as time-dependent travel speeds, strict time windows, battery limitations, and driver labor constraints, while integrating both SDLs and D2D deliveries. To solve the MTTD-MVRP efficiently, we develop a tailored meta-heuristic based on Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) augmented with column generation (CG). This approach intensively explores the solution space using problem-specific operators and adaptively refines solutions, balancing high-quality outcomes with computational effort. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method delivers near-optimal solutions for large-scale instances within practical time limits.From a managerial perspective, our findings highlight the importance of integrating autonomous and human-driven vehicles in last-mile logistics. Decision-makers can leverage SDLs to reduce operational costs and carbon footprints while still accommodating customers who require or prefer D2D services.

The soft Dice loss (SDL) has taken a pivotal role in numerous automated segmentation pipelines in the medical imaging community. Over the last years, some reasons behind its superior functioning have been uncovered and further optimizations have been explored. However, there is currently no implementation that supports its direct utilization in scenarios involving soft labels. Hence, a synergy between the use of SDL and research leveraging the use of soft labels, also in the context of model calibration, is still missing. In this work, we introduce Dice semimetric losses (DMLs), which (i) are by design identical to SDL in a standard setting with hard labels, but (ii) can be employed in settings with soft labels. Our experiments on the public QUBIQ, LiTS and KiTS benchmarks confirm the potential synergy of DMLs with soft labels (e.g.\ averaging, label smoothing, and knowledge distillation) over hard labels (e.g.\ majority voting and random selection). As a result, we obtain superior Dice scores and model calibration, which supports the wider adoption of DMLs in practice. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}.

Automatic medical report generation (MRG) is of great research value as it has the potential to relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing. Despite recent advancements, accurate MRG remains challenging due to the need for precise clinical understanding and the identification of clinical findings. Moreover, the imbalanced distribution of diseases makes the challenge even more pronounced, as rare diseases are underrepresented in training data, making their diagnostic performance unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose diagnosis-driven prompts for medical report generation (PromptMRG), a novel framework that aims to improve the diagnostic accuracy of MRG with the guidance of diagnosis-aware prompts. Specifically, PromptMRG is based on encoder-decoder architecture with an extra disease classification branch. When generating reports, the diagnostic results from the classification branch are converted into token prompts to explicitly guide the generation process. To further improve the diagnostic accuracy, we design cross-modal feature enhancement, which retrieves similar reports from the database to assist the diagnosis of a query image by leveraging the knowledge from a pre-trained CLIP. Moreover, the disease imbalanced issue is addressed by applying an adaptive logit-adjusted loss to the classification branch based on the individual learning status of each disease, which overcomes the barrier of text decoder's inability to manipulate disease distributions. Experiments on two MRG benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed method, where it obtains state-of-the-art clinical efficacy performance on both datasets.

We consider the problem of evaluating representations of data for use in solving a downstream task. We propose to measure the quality of a representation by the complexity of learning a predictor on top of the representation that achieves low loss on a task of interest, and introduce two methods, surplus description length (SDL) and $\varepsilon$ sample complexity ($\varepsilon$SC). In contrast to prior methods, which measure the amount of information about the optimal predictor that is present in a specific amount of data, our methods measure the amount of information needed from the data to recover an approximation of the optimal predictor up to a specified tolerance. We present a framework to compare these methods based on plotting the validation loss versus training set size (the "loss-data" curve). Existing measures, such as mutual information and minimum description length probes, correspond to slices and integrals along the data-axis of the loss-data curve, while ours correspond to slices and integrals along the loss-axis. We provide experiments on real data to compare the behavior of each of these methods over datasets of varying size along with a high performance open source library for representation evaluation at https://github.com/willwhitney/reprieve.

Purpose: AI in radiology is hindered chiefly by: 1) Requiring large annotated data sets. 2) Non-generalizability that limits deployment to new scanners / institutions. And 3) Inadequate explainability and interpretability. We believe that reinforcement learning can address all three shortcomings, with robust and intuitive algorithms trainable on small datasets. To the best of our knowledge, reinforcement learning has not been directly applied to computer vision tasks for radiological images. In this proof-of-principle work, we train a deep reinforcement learning network to predict brain tumor location. Materials and Methods: Using the BraTS brain tumor imaging database, we trained a deep Q network on 70 post-contrast T1-weighted 2D image slices. We did so in concert with image exploration, with rewards and punishments designed to localize lesions. To compare with supervised deep learning, we trained a keypoint detection convolutional neural network on the same 70 images. We applied both approaches to a separate 30 image testing set. Results: Reinforcement learning predictions consistently improved during training, whereas those of supervised deep learning quickly diverged. Reinforcement learning predicted testing set lesion locations with 85% accuracy, compared to roughly 7% accuracy for the supervised deep network. Conclusion: Reinforcement learning predicted lesions with high accuracy, which is unprecedented for such a small training set. We believe that reinforcement learning can propel radiology AI well past the inherent limitations of supervised deep learning, with more clinician-driven research and finally toward true clinical applicability.

This past decade has seen an explosion of data and information. In fact, data was valued the most valuable resource by The Economist in 2017. However, there is still much data hiding in the shadows ready to be untapped and utilized--like social media content scattered across the globe in different languages. The term'dark data' sounds ominous, but it's simply unstructured data that organizations have collected or stored, lying dormant and unprocessed within and outside their organization. As much as 90% of unstructured information is never analyzed, according to analyst firm IDC, largely because it's in foreign languages, formats and channels.

SDL a global leader in content creation, translation and delivery, today calls on brands to rethink current content strategies, and prepare for a digital future where content supply chains are autonomous, machine-first and human optimized, for greater impact with worldwide audiences, across any language and device. Companies are struggling to handle the growing volume and velocity of content required to engage with global audiences. And it's expected to get worse: 93% say the content they produce will increase in the next two years. SDL's Enabling the Future of Content report addresses these challenges, offering insights on how companies can move towards an autonomous content supply chain of the future, capable of delivering any type of content to global audiences. Peggy Chen, CMO, SDL said, "Engaging with customers globally requires content, and lots of it.