本文介绍了CAIR的设计和实施：为社会机器人和其他对话代理而设计的基于知识的自主互动的云系统。该系统对于低成本机器人和设备特别方便。为开发人员提供了一种可持续的解决方案，可以通过网络连接来管理口头和非语言互动，约有3,000个对话主题可以进行“闲聊”，并提供了一个预先煮熟的计划库，只需要将其接地到机器人的库中物理能力。该系统的结构为一组REST API端点，因此可以通过添加新的API来轻松扩展它，以提高连接到云的客户端的功能。该系统的另一个关键功能是它旨在使客户的开发变得直接：这样，可以轻松地赋予多个设备与用户自主交互的能力，了解何时执行特定的操作并利用云服务提供的所有信息。文章概述并讨论了为评估系统响应时间的性能而执行的实验结果，为研究和市场解决方案铺平了道路。提供了与ROS的客户的存储库的链接，并提供了诸如Pepper和Nao之类的流行机器人的链接。

本文介绍了图像“培养”的概念，即定义为改变“文化特征的画笔”的过程，使物体被认为属于给定文化的同时保留其功能。首先，我们提出了一种基于生成的对冲网络（GaN）将物体从源转换为目标文化域的管道。然后，我们通过在线调查问卷收集数据，以测试有关意大利参与者对属于不同文化的物体和环境的偏好的四个假设。正如预期的那样，结果取决于个人口味和偏好：然而，它们符合我们的猜想，即某些人在与机器人或其他智能系统的互动期间，可能更愿意被示出其文化领域已被修改以匹配其的图像文化背景。

本文介绍了“多样性意识”机器人技术的概念，并讨论了开发计算模型以嵌入具有多样性意识的机器人的必要性：也就是说，能够适应和重新配置其行为以识别，尊重和重视独特性的机器人他们与他们互动以促进包容性的人，无论其年龄，种族，性别，认知或身体能力等。最后，本文从以前具有文化能力的机器人的经验开始，讨论了基于本体和贝叶斯网络的技术解决方案。

An Anomaly Detection (AD) System for Self-diagnosis has been developed for Multiphase Flow Meter (MPFM). The system relies on machine learning algorithms for time series forecasting, historical data have been used to train a model and to predict the behavior of a sensor and, thus, to detect anomalies.

Diffusion models have achieved justifiable popularity by attaining state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic objects from seemingly arbitrarily complex data distributions, including when conditioning generation on labels. Unfortunately, however, their iterative nature renders them very computationally inefficient during the sampling process. For the multi-class conditional generation problem, we propose a novel, structurally unique framework of diffusion models which are hierarchically branched according to the inherent relationships between classes. In this work, we demonstrate that branched diffusion models offer major improvements in efficiently generating samples from multiple classes. We also showcase several other advantages of branched diffusion models, including ease of extension to novel classes in a continual-learning setting, and a unique interpretability that offers insight into these generative models. Branched diffusion models represent an alternative paradigm to their traditional linear counterparts, and can have large impacts in how we use diffusion models for efficient generation, online learning, and scientific discovery.

In the era of digital healthcare, the huge volumes of textual information generated every day in hospitals constitute an essential but underused asset that could be exploited with task-specific, fine-tuned biomedical language representation models, improving patient care and management. For such specialized domains, previous research has shown that fine-tuning models stemming from broad-coverage checkpoints can largely benefit additional training rounds over large-scale in-domain resources. However, these resources are often unreachable for less-resourced languages like Italian, preventing local medical institutions to employ in-domain adaptation. In order to reduce this gap, our work investigates two accessible approaches to derive biomedical language models in languages other than English, taking Italian as a concrete use-case: one based on neural machine translation of English resources, favoring quantity over quality; the other based on a high-grade, narrow-scoped corpus natively written in Italian, thus preferring quality over quantity. Our study shows that data quantity is a harder constraint than data quality for biomedical adaptation, but the concatenation of high-quality data can improve model performance even when dealing with relatively size-limited corpora. The models published from our investigations have the potential to unlock important research opportunities for Italian hospitals and academia. Finally, the set of lessons learned from the study constitutes valuable insights towards a solution to build biomedical language models that are generalizable to other less-resourced languages and different domain settings.

Crop type maps are critical for tracking agricultural land use and estimating crop production. Remote sensing has proven an efficient and reliable tool for creating these maps in regions with abundant ground labels for model training, yet these labels remain difficult to obtain in many regions and years. NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar instrument, originally designed for forest monitoring, has shown promise for distinguishing tall and short crops. In the current study, we leverage GEDI to develop wall-to-wall maps of short vs tall crops on a global scale at 10 m resolution for 2019-2021. Specifically, we show that (1) GEDI returns can reliably be classified into tall and short crops after removing shots with extreme view angles or topographic slope, (2) the frequency of tall crops over time can be used to identify months when tall crops are at their peak height, and (3) GEDI shots in these months can then be used to train random forest models that use Sentinel-2 time series to accurately predict short vs. tall crops. Independent reference data from around the world are then used to evaluate these GEDI-S2 maps. We find that GEDI-S2 performed nearly as well as models trained on thousands of local reference training points, with accuracies of at least 87% and often above 90% throughout the Americas, Europe, and East Asia. Systematic underestimation of tall crop area was observed in regions where crops frequently exhibit low biomass, namely Africa and South Asia, and further work is needed in these systems. Although the GEDI-S2 approach only differentiates tall from short crops, in many landscapes this distinction goes a long way toward mapping the main individual crop types. The combination of GEDI and Sentinel-2 thus presents a very promising path towards global crop mapping with minimal reliance on ground data.

Algorithms and technologies are essential tools that pervade all aspects of our daily lives. In the last decades, health care research benefited from new computer-based recruiting methods, the use of federated architectures for data storage, the introduction of innovative analyses of datasets, and so on. Nevertheless, health care datasets can still be affected by data bias. Due to data bias, they provide a distorted view of reality, leading to wrong analysis results and, consequently, decisions. For example, in a clinical trial that studied the risk of cardiovascular diseases, predictions were wrong due to the lack of data on ethnic minorities. It is, therefore, of paramount importance for researchers to acknowledge data bias that may be present in the datasets they use, eventually adopt techniques to mitigate them and control if and how analyses results are impacted. This paper proposes a method to address bias in datasets that: (i) defines the types of data bias that may be present in the dataset, (ii) characterizes and quantifies data bias with adequate metrics, (iii) provides guidelines to identify, measure, and mitigate data bias for different data sources. The method we propose is applicable both for prospective and retrospective clinical trials. We evaluate our proposal both through theoretical considerations and through interviews with researchers in the health care environment.

Brain decoding is a field of computational neuroscience that uses measurable brain activity to infer mental states or internal representations of perceptual inputs. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to brain decoding that also relies on semantic and contextual similarity. We employ an fMRI dataset of natural image vision and create a deep learning decoding pipeline inspired by the existence of both bottom-up and top-down processes in human vision. We train a linear brain-to-feature model to map fMRI activity features to visual stimuli features, assuming that the brain projects visual information onto a space that is homeomorphic to the latent space represented by the last convolutional layer of a pretrained convolutional neural network, which typically collects a variety of semantic features that summarize and highlight similarities and differences between concepts. These features are then categorized in the latent space using a nearest-neighbor strategy, and the results are used to condition a generative latent diffusion model to create novel images. From fMRI data only, we produce reconstructions of visual stimuli that match the original content very well on a semantic level, surpassing the state of the art in previous literature. We evaluate our work and obtain good results using a quantitative semantic metric (the Wu-Palmer similarity metric over the WordNet lexicon, which had an average value of 0.57) and perform a human evaluation experiment that resulted in correct evaluation, according to the multiplicity of human criteria in evaluating image similarity, in over 80% of the test set.

Predictive coding is a message-passing framework initially developed to model information processing in the brain, and now also topic of research in machine learning due to some interesting properties. One of such properties is the natural ability of generative models to learn robust representations thanks to their peculiar credit assignment rule, that allows neural activities to converge to a solution before updating the synaptic weights. Graph neural networks are also message-passing models, which have recently shown outstanding results in diverse types of tasks in machine learning, providing interdisciplinary state-of-the-art performance on structured data. However, they are vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, and unfit for out-of-distribution generalization. In this work, we address this by building models that have the same structure of popular graph neural network architectures, but rely on the message-passing rule of predictive coding. Through an extensive set of experiments, we show that the proposed models are (i) comparable to standard ones in terms of performance in both inductive and transductive tasks, (ii) better calibrated, and (iii) robust against multiple kinds of adversarial attacks.