Point defects govern many important functional properties of two - dimensional ( 2D) materials. However, resolving the three - dimensional (3D) arrangement of these defects in multi - layer 2D materials remains a fundamental challenge, hindering rational defect engineering . Our approach reconstructs the 3D coordinates of vacancies across hundreds of thousands of lattice sites, generating robust statistical insight into their dist ribution that can be correlated with specinullic synthesis pathways. This large - scale data enables us to classify a hierarchy of defect structures -- from isolated vacancies to nanopores -- revealing their preferred formation and interaction mechanisms, as corroborated by molecular dynamics simulations . This work provides a generalizable framework for understanding and ultimately controlling point defects across large volumes, paving the way for the rational design of defect - engineered functional 2D materials. Keywords: 2D materials, point defects, autonomous materials science, electron microscopy, machine learning 2 Two - dimensional (2D) materials have become a major nullield of modern research in materials science after the discovery of graphene in 2004 . The challenge of characterizing point defects is signinullicantly amplinullied in few - layered 2D materials. For instance, MXenes -- a class of 2D transition metal carbides, carbonitrides, and nitrides -- consist of nanosheets containing two to nullive layers of metal ato ms, which complicates defect analysis compared to single - layer materials .

The application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to economic modeling reveals a fundamental conflict between the assumptions of equilibrium theory and the emergent behavior of learning agents. While canonical economic models assume atomistic agents act as `takers' of aggregate market conditions, a naive single-agent RL simulation incentivizes the agent to become a `manipulator' of its environment. This paper first demonstrates this discrepancy within a search-and-matching model with concave production, showing that a standard RL agent learns a non-equilibrium, monopsonistic policy. Additionally, we identify a parametric bias arising from the mismatch between economic discounting and RL's treatment of intertemporal costs. To address both issues, we propose a calibrated Mean-Field Reinforcement Learning framework that embeds a representative agent in a fixed macroeconomic field and adjusts the cost function to reflect economic opportunity costs. Our iterative algorithm converges to a self-consistent fixed point where the agent's policy aligns with the competitive equilibrium. This approach provides a tractable and theoretically sound methodology for modeling learning agents in economic systems within the broader domain of computational social science.

The use of recommender systems in the recruitment domain has been labeled as 'high-risk' in recent legislation. As a result, strict requirements regarding explainability and fairness have been put in place to ensure proper treatment of all involved stakeholders. To allow for stakeholder-specific explainability, while also handling highly heterogeneous recruitment data, we propose a novel explainable multi-stakeholder job recommender system using graph neural networks: the Occupational Knowledge-based Recommender using Attention (OKRA). The proposed method is capable of providing both candidate- and company-side recommendations and explanations. We find that OKRA performs substantially better than six baselines in terms of nDCG for two datasets. Furthermore, we find that the tested models show a bias toward candidates and vacancies located in urban areas. Overall, our findings suggest that OKRA provides a balance between accuracy, explainability, and fairness.

Among the factors of production, human capital or skilled manpower is the one that keeps evolving and adapts to changing conditions and resources. This adaptability makes human capital the most crucial factor in ensuring a sustainable growth of industry/sector. As new technologies are developed and adopted, the new generations are required to acquire skills in newer technologies in order to be employable. At the same time professionals are required to upskill and reskill themselves to remain relevant in the industry. There is however no straightforward method to identify the skill needs of the industry at a given point of time. Therefore, this paper proposes a data to decision framework that can successfully identify the desired skill set in a given area by analysing the advertorial data collected from popular online job portals and supplied as input to the framework. The proposed framework uses techniques of statistical analysis, data mining and natural language processing for the purpose. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated on CS&IT job advertisement data from India. The analytical results not only provide useful insights about current state of skill needs in CS&IT industry but also provide practical implications to prospective job applicants, training agencies, and institutions of higher education & professional training.

The recruitment process is undergoing a significant transformation with the increasing use of machine learning and natural language processing techniques. While previous studies have focused on automating candidate selection, the role of multiple vacancies in this process remains understudied. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel pipeline that leverages Large Language Models and graph similarity measures to suggest ideal candidates for specific job openings. Our approach represents candidate profiles as multimodal embeddings, enabling the capture of nuanced relationships between job requirements and candidate attributes. The proposed approach has significant implications for the recruitment industry, enabling companies to streamline their hiring processes and identify top talent more efficiently. Our work contributes to the growing body of research on the application of machine learning in human resources, highlighting the potential of LLMs and graph-based methods in revolutionizing the recruitment landscape.

The question of whether AI substitutes or complements human work is central to debates on the future of work. This paper examines the impact of AI on skill demand and compensation in the U.S. economy, analysing 12 million online job vacancies from 2018 to 2023. It investigates internal effects (within-job substitution and complementation) and external effects (across occupations, industries, and regions). Our findings reveal a significant increase in demand for AI-complementary skills, such as digital literacy, teamwork, and resilience, alongside rising wage premiums for these skills in AI roles like Data Scientist. Conversely, substitute skills, including customer service and text review, have declined in both demand and value within AI-related positions. Examining external effects, we find a notable rise in demand for complementary skills in non-AI roles linked to the growth of AI-related jobs in specific industries or regions. At the same time, there is a moderate decline in non-AI roles requiring substitute skills. Overall, AI's complementary effect is up to 50% larger than its substitution effect, resulting in net positive demand for skills. These results, replicated for the UK and Australia, highlight AI's transformative impact on workforce skill requirements. They suggest reskilling efforts should prioritise not only technical AI skills but also complementary skills like ethics and digital literacy.

The emergence of deep learning (DL) has provided great opportunities for the high-throughput analysis of atomic-resolution micrographs. However, the DL models trained by image patches in fixed size generally lack efficiency and flexibility when processing micrographs containing diversified atomic configurations. Herein, inspired by the similarity between the atomic structures and graphs, we describe a few-shot learning framework based on an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN) to analyze a library of atomic structures (e.g., vacancies, phases, grain boundaries, doping, etc.), showing significantly promoted robustness and three orders of magnitude reduced computing parameters compared to the image-driven DL models, which is especially evident for those aggregated vacancy lines with flexible lattice distortion. Besides, the intuitiveness of graphs enables quantitative and straightforward extraction of the atomic-scale structural features in batches, thus statistically unveiling the self-assembly dynamics of vacancy lines under electron beam irradiation. A versatile model toolkit is established by integrating EGNN sub-models for single structure recognition to process images involving varied configurations in the form of a task chain, leading to the discovery of novel doping configurations with superior electrocatalytic properties for hydrogen evolution reactions. This work provides a powerful tool to explore structure diversity in a fast, accurate, and intelligent manner.

Public opinion on recommender systems has become increasingly wary in recent years. In line with this trend, lawmakers have also started to become more critical of such systems, resulting in the introduction of new laws focusing on aspects such as privacy, fairness, and explainability for recommender systems and AI at large. These concepts are especially crucial in high-risk domains such as recruitment. In recruitment specifically, decisions carry substantial weight, as the outcomes can significantly impact individuals' careers and companies' success. Additionally, there is a need for a multi-stakeholder approach, as these systems are used by job seekers, recruiters, and companies simultaneously, each with its own requirements and expectations. In this paper, I summarize my current research on the topic of explainable, multi-stakeholder job recommender systems and set out a number of future research directions.

The increased use of information retrieval in recruitment, primarily through job recommender systems (JRSs), can have a large impact on job seekers, recruiters, and companies. As a result, such systems have been determined to be high-risk in recent legislature. This requires JRSs to be trustworthy and transparent, allowing stakeholders to understand why specific recommendations were made. To fulfill this requirement, the stakeholders' exact preferences and needs need to be determined. To do so, we evaluated an explainable job recommender system using a realistic, task-based, mixed-design user study (n=30) in which stakeholders had to make decisions based on the model's explanations. This mixed-methods evaluation consisted of two objective metrics - correctness and efficiency, along with three subjective metrics - trust, transparency, and usefulness. These metrics were evaluated twice per participant, once using real explanations and once using random explanations. The study included a qualitative analysis following a think-aloud protocol while performing tasks adapted to each stakeholder group. We find that providing stakeholders with real explanations does not significantly improve decision-making speed and accuracy. Our results showed a non-significant trend for the real explanations to outperform the random ones on perceived trust, usefulness, and transparency of the system for all stakeholder types. We determine that stakeholders benefit more from interacting with explanations as decision support capable of providing healthy friction, rather than as previously-assumed persuasive tools.

The labor market is undergoing rapid changes, with increasing demands on job seekers and a surge in job openings. Identifying essential skills and competencies from job descriptions is challenging due to varying employer requirements and the omission of key skills. This study addresses these challenges by comparing traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods based on encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs) for extracting skills from Russian job vacancies. Using a labeled dataset of 4,000 job vacancies for training and 1,472 for testing, the performance of both approaches is evaluated. Results indicate that traditional NER models, especially DeepPavlov RuBERT NER tuned, outperform LLMs across various metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and inference time. The findings suggest that traditional NER models provide more effective and efficient solutions for skill extraction, enhancing job requirement clarity and aiding job seekers in aligning their qualifications with employer expectations. This research contributes to the field of natural language processing (NLP) and its application in the labor market, particularly in non-English contexts.