Technology

This paper presents SurgicalRoomAgent, a voice-interactive multi-agent system for smart operating rooms based on large language models (LLMs). The system achieves natural language understanding, device control, intraoperative recording, and surgical report generation through a layered architecture comprising a voice interaction pipeline (wake, ASR, turn detection, agent reasoning, TTS) and an agent core (skill registry, task planner, device manager). Three key technologies are investigated: (1) KV Cache prefix warming for low-latency inference, reducing recomputation overhead from approximately 500 ms to tens of milliseconds via byte-level Longest Common Prefix reuse; (2) streaming partial JSON parsing with early parallel task execution, reducing end-to-end latency by approximately 30%; and (3) progressive skill prompt disclosure, which dynamically filters system prompts based on user role, connected devices, and surgical phase to maximize information density within limited context windows. The system is implemented using the Qwen3-27B model with llama.cpp/sglang inference engines. Experimental analysis demonstrates effective operation within a 16,384-token context limit and multi-device parallel control response times meeting OR real-time requirements.

Augmenting instruments with sensors and neural network mappings is a well-explored digital musical instrument design approach. While augmentations can create new expressive opportunities, they also exert aesthetic influence and can constrain musicians' gestural language, which, if left unchecked, can lead to technological capture. To examine this, we conducted a study with a professional percussionist, co-developing a gesture mapping toolkit and recording a ten-track album. Drawing on the concept of productive dissonance, our study aimed to hold the musician's aesthetic in tension with technological constraints. This, along with a practice-based reflective approach, supported the development of a continuous gesture recognition method for percussive mapping and surfaced insights into the design process. We identify knowing-when as a form of tacit knowledge that supported productive dissonance, and raise an open question: absent a musician's broader social context, how do we know whether a technology's influence is genuinely supporting their practice?

Translation students need to learn both how to use translation technologies and how to judge the choices those technologies make available. This article presents LoopCAT, an Apache-2.0-licensed, local-first computer-assisted translation environment co-created with OpenAI Codex using GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6, and proposes a framework connecting workflow competence, evaluative judgement, and technological agency. The account draws on repository history, implementation inspection, and the verification records of an identified development build. LoopCAT combines local project storage, translation memories, terminology, quality assurance, document exchange, and optional connections to local or hosted AI services. Its English, Catalan, and Turkish interface catalogs also make the application itself available as teaching material: students can translate English UI strings into another language, review the existing automatically generated target drafts, import their revisions, and test the interface. We organize these opportunities around four forms of participation: operating a workflow, evaluating outputs, inspecting and configuring mechanisms, and making or defending a bounded intervention. A six-session sequence, a UI-localization assignment, a placeholder example, and an assessment rubric specify how teachers could use the framework. The paper separates implemented capabilities from proposed educational benefits; it reports no new student-learning outcomes. It distinguishes the latest package checks from earlier regression evidence and sets out a protocol for classroom evaluation. LoopCAT provides an inspectable setting for teaching how translation decisions interact with data, interfaces, and software rules. Whether these activities improve judgement, transfer, or participation remains an empirical question.

We seek to understand the effect of adding disruptive highly-capable new technologies to competitions by assessing the addition of Dynamite to Rock-Paper-Scissors. We find that providing a versatile Dynamite move to only one player provides limited value (win probability increases from 50% to 55.5%) and is played rarely. That value decreases further if the game is expanded beyond just the original three moves. We also observe several mechanisms by which prior moves can become strategically unplayable, or obsolete. We hope that this model illustrates some non-intuitive aspects of developing new versatile technologies. We also hope that it illustrates some pitfalls for developers and integrators to avoid in order to create value rather than merely capability.

As populations age, cognitive decline from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia is a defining health challenge of the coming decades, yet routine assessment often misses its earliest signs. This article critically synthesizes recent technological advances for detecting and managing cognitive impairment in older adults, spanning neurophysiological signals (chiefly electroencephalography, EEG), structural and molecular neuroimaging (MRI and amyloid/tau PET), blood-based biomarkers, and digital markers, integrated through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL). Beyond summarizing, it contributes a cross-disciplinary taxonomy, a methodological-rigor lens foregrounding subject- and site-independent validation, an integrative early-detection framework linking tiered screening to intervention, and comparison tables of detection methods, interventions, and risk and protective factors. EEG markers (alpha/theta changes, P300 latency) and deep models (CNNs, LSTM/BiLSTM, transformers, self-supervised EEG foundation models) report strong accuracy, yet many rest on small, single-site datasets unlikely to survive rigorous external validation. Elsewhere, gains are tangible: plasma p-tau217 has reached clinical utility, with the first blood test cleared to aid Alzheimer's diagnosis in 2025; anti-amyloid therapies (lecanemab, donanemab) are approved despite modest, contested benefits; and multidomain lifestyle prevention has matured. Wearable, remote, speech, and virtual-reality tools enable continuous, ecologically valid monitoring, and multimodal fusion improves sensitivity and specificity. Barriers remain: standardization, explainability, data privacy, and equitable, externally validated deployment. The field's near-term promise lies in trustworthy, multimodal, longitudinally validated systems linking early detection to actionable, personalized care.

Digital twins have emerged as a foundational technology within the context of Industry 4.0, offering a paradigm for the real-time virtual representation of physical systems. However, managing their growing complexity, particularly in distributed industrial environments, requires intelligent architectures capable of autonomous decision-making, dynamic adaptability, and inter-agent coordination. This systematic review explores the intersection between Multi-Agent Systems and Digital Twins, with a particular focus on predictive maintenance applications in resource-constrained contexts. Through a critical analysis of over 547 papers published in high-impact journals (IEEE Transactions, Nature, Elsevier, MDPI), we establish a taxonomy of existing hybrid architectures, identify persistent technological bottlenecks, and formulate three open research questions concerning: (i) the deployment of artificial intelligence on resource-constrained microcontrollers, (ii) distributed multi-node coordination via lightweight communication protocols, and (iii) the hierarchical orchestration of Digital Twins toward smart factory control integrating residual life estimation and explainable Artificial Intelligence. The results of this analysis reveal that, despite significant progress, no existing system offers an integrated embedded-distributed hierarchical solution that simultaneously meets the requirements of Industry 5.0.

Energy system models guide societally important decisions, but their credibility rests on quantitative assumptions that are difficult to source and audit. Meta-analyses can improve transparency and modeling practices, but the rapid growth of publications makes manual information extraction increasingly impractical. Consequently, databases are updated infrequently and efforts are often duplicated across research groups. Here, we demonstrate the highly accurate automated extraction of quantitative information from 76,000 energy system studies published since 2010. We compile 3.2 million structured quantitative data points together with 20 million associated metadata entries, spanning a broad spectrum of technologies, methodological approaches and system characteristics. Beyond providing input data for models, the resulting FAIR database make the energy systems literature itself analysable. We show where academic assumptions diverge from empirical observed data, and how research priorities vary at scale across technologies, regions and time. To facilitate broad use within the community, the database is provided through an interactive dashboard, enabling users to filter, analyse and download data according to their specific research needs.

AI-driven algorithms and automated tools are increasingly embedded in the correctional landscape, shaping parole eligibility,release decisions, and surveillance. These tools are also often framed as objective, inevitable solutions to inefficiency andbias. Yet, these computational systems are rarely designed with input from justice-impacted individuals, which means theymight fail to address the real needs of incarcerated people. To address this gap, we surveyed 31 formerly incarcerated peopleabout their parole experiences and their visions for technologies that could support parole preparation. Contrary to dominantassumptions, participants did not imagine computational tools as instruments to dismantle the prison system, but as resourcesfor navigating power: translating complex parole concepts into culturally familiar terms, documenting personal transformationin board-legible ways, and recognizing the often-invisible labor of families. We argue that these imaginaries point towardtechnologies designed for strategic agency, where tools help incarcerated individuals and their families build the capacity tonavigate existing power structures in pursuit of freedom. We conclude by reframing computational tools for parole awayfrom surveillance and toward human-centered systems that support people in navigating carceral power structures.

The groundbreaking development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly boosting the ability to generate content such as images and videos, reshaping communication paradigms. This article introduces generative communications (GenCom), a novel paradigm for 6G networks in which large AI models (LAMs) drive semantic understanding, reasoning, and content generation, embedding these into the communication process. Unlike traditional systems that strictly pursue accurate bit transmission, GenCom enables transmitters to convey only minimal yet sufficient information, while receivers leverage shared generative priors and knowledge bases to synthesize the intended output. Communication is thus redefined as controlled generation rather than data reproduction. We formalize the concept of GenCom, clarify its AI-native and generation-driven properties, and present its core mechanisms. A two-layer GenCom architecture supported by key enabling technologies is proposed, and analysis of four representative application scenarios demonstrates that GenCom offers ultra-efficient transmission, semantic-level robustness, and new network functions. Finally, we outline future research directions, including foundational theory and real-time processing, highlighting a promising pathway toward 6G networks.

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms have significant potential for applications such as Search and Rescue (SAR) and environmental monitoring, but their real-world deployment is limited by a lack of situational awareness, intermittent connectivity, and significant cybersecurity risks. Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a shift from standalone Large Language Model (LLM) toward closed-loop cognitive architectures that integrate perception, memory, reasoning/planning, and action to enable adaptive, goal-directed swarm behavior. Within this framework, Agentic AI provides a unifying structure for autonomous and adaptive swarm operations while expanding the system attack surface compared to conventional AI systems. This paper proposes LLM-Centric Agentic AI for UAV Swarms (LAUS) and reviews key enabling technologies such as onboard and edge computing, 5G/6G connectivity, multimodal intelligence, and cybersecurity mechanisms, and analyzes threats such as Priority Manipulation Attacks (PMA) that can distort decision-making and degrade network performance. Finally, it identifies open research challenges, including hallucination-resistant reasoning, onboard LLM deployment under SWaP constraints, and standardized security benchmarks for perception-reasoning attacks in agentic UAV systems.

This paper takes issue with the recent themes of both the RO-MAN and the HRI conferences for their portrayal of a future human-robot society as inevitable. The focus is on discussing how such statements ultimately shape research. By treating a future human-robot society as a fait accompli, license is given for user studies to imagine any scenario they like, no matter whether it has any ecological relevance, and to emphasise the scenario design over actually creating robot abilities needed to fullfill the imagined role. Meanwhile, research that focusses on actual societal needs, without assuming that robots are a solution, is deprioritised, as is technical development, in particular with respect to abilities that are necessary to enable robots that function as social agents rather than a mere automation of tasks. A frame that simply assumes a robot future not only detracts from scientific advancement in favour of a techno-solutionism we ought to resist, it is also self-defeating as it risks stifling the research needed to bring it about. We should therefore reject attempts to frame and promote the field in terms of the inevitable social robot and instead focus on one that facilitates advances in the field regardless of what the future holds. This paper suggests that a renewed focus on cognitive mechanisms necessary for the "I" in HRI would be a good starting point.

Most studies on technology development have been conducted from a thematic perspective, but the topics are coarse-grained and insufficient to accurately represent technology. The development of automatic entity recognition techniques makes it possible to extract technology-related entities on a large scale. Thus, we perform a more accurate analysis of technology development from an entity-centric perspective. To begin with, we extract technology-related entities such as methods, datasets, metrics, and tools in articles on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and we apply a semi-automatic approach to normalize the entities. Subsequently, we calculate the z-scores of entities based on their co-occurrence networks to measure their impact. We then analyze the development trends of new technologies in the NLP domain since the beginning of the 21st century. The findings of this paper include three aspects: Firstly, the continued increase in the average number of entities per paper implies a growing burden on researchers to acquire relevant technical background knowledge. However, the emergence of pre-trained language models has injected new vitality into the technological innovation of the NLP domain. Secondly, Methods dominate among the 179 high-impact entities. An analysis of the z-score trend about the top 10 entities reveals that pre-trained language models, exemplified by BERT and Transformer, have become mainstream in recent years. Unlike the trend of the other eight method entities, the impact of Wikipedia dataset and BLEU metric has continued to rise in the long term. Thirdly, in recent years, there has been a remarkable surge in popularity for new high-impact technologies than ever before, and their acceptance by researchers has accelerated at an unprecedented speed. Our study provides a new perspective on analyzing technology development in a specific domain.

AI nudification uses generative models to create synthetic non-consensual sexually explicit imagery (SNEACI) of real individuals. Prior work has examined dedicated nudification platforms and model repositories, finding that most targets are female celebrities. However, the anonymous content community, where SNEACI is actively requested, generated, and exchanged, remains unexplored. In this work, we present a large-scale study of AI nudification in the wild, identifying 24,105 SNEACI items. We find a significant shift in target demographics: non-celebrity individuals now account for 55.8% of targets, compared to only 4.7% in prior studies, indicating that AI nudification has expanded from targeting public figures to increasingly harming individuals within users' own social circles. Meanwhile, open-source models dominate production, with Stable Diffusion family generating 42.7% of images and Wan generating 66.5% of videos, all driven by thousands of shared fine-tuned models and accessible tutorials. Yet the ecosystem runs on a small cohort of active producers, with the most prolific producing 780 items, drives community engagement, shapes target demographics, and disseminates technical knowledge that lowers barriers for new producers. Our work provides an empirical understanding of how AI nudification operates in the wild, revealing the mechanisms that sustain this ecosystem and highlighting the urgent need for interventions in platform governance, technical safeguards, and affected individual protection.

Ray Kurzweil described a thesis of accelerating returns, which is the most influential narratives in discussions of technological progress. Its central claim is that advances in multiple technological fields, especially compute, artificial intelligence, brain science, and biotechnology, interact in such a way that progress becomes self-amplifying and approximately exponential. This paper gives a simple mathematical interpretation of that claim and then argues that, even if such acceleration is real, it does not by itself resolve the central problem of scientific discovery. The reason is that accelerating returns apply most naturally to executional and infrastructural capability, whereas genuine discovery often depends on a different capacity: qualitative reasoning about when a current framework is structurally inadequate and what conceptual move is needed next. Recent ARC-AGI-3 results sharpen this distinction: humans solve the benchmark at ceiling, whereas frontier AI systems remain below 1%, indicating that the gap between current AI and human flexible reasoning is still very large. At the same time, Demis Hassabis has emphasized that humans must retain their sense of meaning and what they choose to focus their lives on, a reminder that the future of AI is not only a technical forecast but also a question of what forms of human understanding are worth preserving and transmitting. This paper positions the Qualitative Engine for Science (QES) [3] as a response to that missing capacity. In this view, the Kurzweil theory helps explain why quantitative capability may accelerate, while QES addresses the central problem in scientific discovery that acceleration alone does not solve. Its value does not depend on when AGI arrives, but on the fact that the processes of scientific discovery themselves constitute a form of human wisdom worth preserving, organizing, and making accessible.

Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers -- also referred as the "invisible second patients" -- experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to be transformative for development, but Africa is currently facing a fragmented and challenging "AI divide". This paper provides an empirical analysis of the current state of the AI landscape and how it compares with Africa's technological preparedness for the future. In our analysis, we approach the "AI Divide" from three angles: infrastructure, accessibility, and human capacity. First, we look at the physical constraints that prevent Africa from integrating digitally. We then evaluate the human-centred factors that limit the development of AI technology on the continent. Finally, we examine the human capacity to develop AI systems on the continent and provide three focused case studies. Our investigation shows that the physical infrastructure needed to build an AI economy on the continent is lagging, with only 38% internet penetration, poor broadband coverage and less than 1% of all data centres globally. Other constraints include high data costs relative to income, gender-based digital divides, and the need to build more representative NLP models that can understand Africa's native languages. However, there are positive trends towards the emergence of local initiatives and grassroots movements, such as startups and universities, contributing to AI development on the continent. Based on these findings, we provide concrete recommendations to policymakers to help develop a more comprehensive and equitable AI ecosystem on the African continent.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using WiFi signals has emerged as a transformative technology for smart homes, healthcare monitoring, security systems, and ambient assisted living. Unlike traditional camera-based systems that raise significant privacy concerns and fail in low-light conditions, or wearable sensors that require user compliance, WiFi-based HAR is non-intrusive, privacy-preserving, cost-effective, and works seamlessly in any lighting condition. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to recognize three distinct human activities: "No Presence" (empty room), "Walking", and "Walking + Arm-waving" using the Wallhack1.8k WiFi spectrogram dataset. We propose three key improvements to address the main challenges in WiFi-based HAR. First, to address high performance variance, we implement ensemble learning with five different CNN architectures (Deep CNN, Wide CNN, MobileNetV2, ResNet50V2, and EfficientNetB0). Second, to address the small dataset size limitation, we apply aggressive data augmentation techniques including time-warping, frequency masking, and noise addition. Third, to evaluate real-world generalization capability, we perform cross-scenario evaluation (training on Line-of-Sight and testing on Non-Line-of-Sight) and cross-antenna evaluation (training on Biquad antenna and testing on PIFA antenna). Our ensemble model achieved a test accuracy of 94.87% on the LOS scenario with Biquad antenna, outperforming the best individual model by 0.66%. Data augmentation improved Random Forest performance from 60% to 95%. Cross-scenario evaluation showed minimal accuracy drops of only 1.37% and 2.07%, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. The results indicate that the proposed approach is robust, reliable, and suitable for real-world deployment in diverse environments with different hardware configurations.

Tropical forests worldwide are under intense deforestation pressure driven by economic and political interests, and scientific evidence suggests this deforestation contributes to climate change. This paper proposes a novel logging method for tropical forests, Ultra-Reduced-Impact-Encased-Logging (URIEL). This new method is based on heli-logging techniques combined with intensive use of robotics and AI integrated with post-harvest silvicultural treatments performed by drones. The concept of appropriate equipment for this method was developed, dimensions were determined, details were completed in a digital proof of concept, and an effective digital simulation and economic feasibility analysis were carried out for various helicopter-timber-distance combinations. The results demonstrated that a URIEL method has high economic viability and makes it possible to virtually eliminate collateral damage to forests while maintaining ecosystem services. The main conclusion of this paper is that, despite the satisfactory scientific and technological results, the feasibility of a Uriel method depends on the integration of stakeholders intrinsic to the context: high-tech industry; political governments; certified logging companies; and native populations.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is the first automation wave to reach high-cognitive tasks at scale, yet its effects on intra-urban inequality remain largely unknown. Using 5 million job postings from Beijing (2018--2024), we construct a neighborhood-level GenAI Exposure Index by aggregating task-level assessments from five leading large language models. We examine the spatial, structural and causal mechanisms of this shock. We find that GenAI exposure is highly concentrated in the city's core districts, deepening the intra-urban AI divide. Since 2023, high-exposure neighborhoods have experienced wage stagnation even as they continue to attract high-skilled workers -- a "high-skill trap." This wage penalty is driven by task de-skilling and intensified labor-market crowding. A difference-in-differences design centered on ChatGPT's release supports a causal interpretation. These findings challenge the prevailing theory of skill-biased technological change and provide a basis for inclusive AI governance in global technology hubs.

In most of the modern societies, there is a broad consensus regarding the need for promoting privacy and thus placing restrictions on technological-including AI-developments to protect people's right to privacy. In order to meet these expectations on the algorithmic level, first we need to make the concept of privacy and the related or derived rights formally specified. However, the notion of (the right to) privacy is subject to different interpretations. In this paper, we use a multi-modal logic to provide an initial formalization of different theories, basic principles and their implications investigating the right to privacy as an epistemic right within the theory of normative positions.

We examine the structural transformation of creative industries under generative artificial intelligence, drawing on 374 primary sources spanning policy documents, industry data, creator surveys, and platform analytics. Beginning with the December 2024 release of OpenAI's Sora video model as a watershed event, we trace the historical pattern of creative resistance to technological disruption, then develop an analytical framework -- the Human-AI Agency Continuum for mapping the spectrum of human and machine collaboration in creative work. We present evidence for the "slop ceiling," an audience-imposed quality threshold that constrains AI-generated content to approximately 1--3% of platform streams despite comprising 44% of uploads. Analysis of the UK Government's 2025 consultation on AI and copyright (over 11,500 responses, 88% opposing expanded AI training rights) reveals deep structural tensions between technology firms and creative workers. We investigate how major studios, from Disney's $1 billion OpenAI investment to Netflix's AI-native animation unit, are positioning for an AI-augmented production pipeline. The work covers coordination collapse in creative supply chains, the emergence of new professional roles such as prompt engineers and AI orchestrators, and proposes four principles for navigating the transition: transparency, consent, compensation, and human-centred design. Eight appendices provide quantitative analysis, a glossary, topical bibliography, and deep dives into shadow AI adoption, AI stigma, and algorithmic intent.

The use of social robots in home environments is on the rise. This exploratory study applies regularization techniques (e.g., Lasso and Ridge regression) to investigate variables and identify new models of technology acceptance in the context of social robots. Within the original UTAUT2 framework, performance expectancy, social influence, and hedonic motivation emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictors of intention to use the technology. In addition, usability, trust, and competence were identified as promising variables in a model predicting intention to use.

In pediatrics, patients, caregivers, and clinicians share responsibility for health decisions, but limited collaboration can undermine outcomes. We conducted a qualitative study examining decision-makers perceptions toward collaborative decision-making technologies, including interactive dashboards, VR simulators, and AI voice assistants. Findings reveal differences in user opinions across groups and indicate technology acceptance is linked to users trust of these technologies. Technology developers and researchers need to explore design and implementation strategies that build and facilitate trust or appropriate distrust between users and these novel technologies before these tools can effectively support collaborative decision-making.

Robust pedestrian safety is crucial to the next-generation of intelligent transportation systems. Such systems rely on active pedestrian localization and predictive collision alerts. Pedestrian localization can be supported by Ultra-Wideband technology and Bluetooth 6.0, which offer high-precision ranging and low-latency communication, making them promising candidates for vehicular collision warning systems. This paper assesses the localization accuracy of these technologies for pedestrian alerting and benchmarks their performance against Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Experimental evaluations performed in this paper focused on key performance metrics, including localization accuracy and robustness to environmental conditions. Preliminary results suggest that Ultra-Wideband and Bluetooth 6.0 can serve as viable alternatives or complements to Global Navigation Satellite Systems in certain scenarios, improving situational awareness and enabling timely pedestrian alerts.

Scientific and technological frontiers advance through punctuated dynamics, yet the principles governing these dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we collect and analyze datasets tracking the evolution of frontiers across 9 different domains, spanning materials discovery, structural biology, AI, computational biomedicine, data science, theoretical computer science, Formula-1 racing, and physical wheel building. Analyzing 6.8M solutions to 6.7K tasks, we uncover three universal patterns: (1) waiting times between new frontiers are heavy-tailed, with most attempts concentrated in long stasis; (2) frontier records accumulate at a sublinear rate, faster than logarithmic yet slower than linear growth; (3) record-breaking events are temporally correlated, generating short-term predictability yet long-term unpredictability. Despite the differences in the scale, scope, and definition of the settings, these patterns are remarkably consistent across all domains we study, and are not captured by models from complex systems, record statistics, economics of innovation, and cultural evolution. We trace the missing ingredient to the distinction between radical and incremental innovation, and develop a minimal, analytically solvable model incorporating both radical resets that restructure what is achievable and incremental refinements that exploit the current frontier. The simple model reproduces all three empirical regularities. Remarkably, the leading-order predictions are parameter-independent, identifying a new universality class governing punctuated progress and yielding testable predictions about how openness and access to frontier solutions shape the pace of advance. Overall, these results reveal universal dynamics governing punctuated progress and identify the interplay between radical resets and incremental refinements as the key driver of how scientific and technological frontiers advance.

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

Forecasting innovation, intended as the emergence of new technological combinations, is a fundamental challenge for science and policy. We show that forthcoming combinations leave an early trace in the collective language of patents, with predictive signals detectable even decades in advance. We show that signal is not attributable to any single inventor, but emerges as a collective shift in how technologies are described across thousands of patents. To this end, we introduce TechToken, a transformer-based model that treats technologies, classified by International Patent Classification codes, as words in its vocabulary, learning the language of technologies by embedding these codes during fine-tuning. We define context similarity between code embeddings as a measure of linguistic convergence and show that it accurately predicts first technological combinations. TechToken also improves general representation quality, outperforming state-of-the-art models across different patent-related tasks.

This paper presents the rAIson platform, a high-level technological environment for the development of automated, reliable and explainable decision-making agents. The research underlying the platform and its technological progress has now reached a mature stage that allows the platform to be used for the development of complex real-life applications without writing a single line of code.

Scientific research has long been human-led, driving new knowledge and transformative technologies through the continual revision of questions, methods and claims as evidence accumulates. Although large language model (LLM)-based agents are beginning to move beyond assisting predefined research workflows, none has yet demonstrated end-to-end autonomous discovery in a real physical system that produces a nontrivial result supported by experimental evidence. Here we introduce Qiushi Discovery Engine, an LLM-based agentic system for end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform. Qiushi Engine combines nonlinear research phases, Meta-Trace memory and a dual-layer architecture to maintain adaptive and stable research trajectories across long-horizon investigations involving thousands of LLM-mediated reasoning, measurement and revision actions. It autonomously reproduces a published transmission-matrix experiment on a non-original platform and converts an abstract coherence-order theory into experimental observables, providing, to our knowledge, the first observation of this class of coherence-order structure. More importantly, in an open-ended study involving 145.9 million tokens, 3,242 LLM calls, 1,242 tool calls, 163 research notes and 44 scripts, Qiushi Engine proposes and experimentally validates optical bilinear interaction, a physical mechanism structurally analogous to a core operation in Transformer attention. This AI-discovered mechanism suggests a route towards high-speed, energy-efficient optical hardware for pairwise computation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an AI agentic system autonomously identifying and experimentally validating a nontrivial, previously unreported physical mechanism, marking a milestone for research-level autonomous agents.

Technology mapping is a critical yet challenging stage in logic synthesis. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to generate optimization scripts, their potential for core algorithm enhancement remains untapped. We introduce MappingEvolve, an open-source framework that pioneers the use of LLMs to directly evolve technology mapping code. Our method abstracts the mapping process into distinct optimization operators and employs a hierarchical agent-based architecture, comprising a Planner, Evolver, and Evaluator, to guide the evolutionary search. This structured approach enables strategic and effective code modifications. Experiments show our method significantly outperforms direct evolution and strong baselines, achieving 10.04% area reduction versus ABC and 7.93% versus mockturtle, with 46.6%--96.0% $S_{overall}$ improvement on EPFL benchmarks, while explicitly navigating the area--delay trade-off. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Flians/MappingEvolve.

Mobile robots that move between outdoor and indoor environments still struggle with consistent positioning. Satellite-based and terrestrial ranging each work well in their home domains, but combining them at the raw measurement level has received little attention, and the building boundary is precisely where both classes degrade. This paper reports preliminary observations from the HYMN dataset, which time-synchronizes raw measurements from GNSS, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), WiFi Fine Time Measurement (FTM), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) against millimeter-level ground truth in an industrial setting. Per-zone measurement availability and ranging-residual behavior are characterised. The two technology classes turn out to be complementary, and the indoor-outdoor transition is where their weaknesses overlap. The dataset is publicly available.

This paper explores how {\textit{Calm Technology}} can be integrated into Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), with a particular focus on the household environment. It offers comprehensive guidelines for designing assistive robots that prioritize and enhance the human need for {\textit{equanimity}}, ensuring interactions are calm, non-intrusive, and harmonious. The paper examines the widespread influence of technology in contemporary life and its impact on cognitive capabilities, underscoring the need for responsible robotics and ethical considerations in future technological developments. By adapting {\textit{Calm Technology}} principles to domestic robots, the article provides concrete examples and features that should be employed in household assistive robotics. The goal is to foster a balanced, unobtrusive interaction between humans and robots, especially in the home environment, as it is the most privat environment in everyone's life, paving the way for applications and further research in the field.

Forecasting transformative technologies remains a critical but challenging task, particularly in fast-evolving domains such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Traditional expert-based methods struggle to keep pace with short innovation cycles and ambiguous early-stage terminology. In this work, we propose a novel, data-driven pipeline to monitor the emergence of transformative technologies by identifying patterns of technological convergence. Our approach leverages advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract semantic triples from unstructured text and construct a large-scale graph of technology-related entities and relations. We introduce a new method for grouping semantically similar technology terms (noun stapling) and develop graph-based metrics to detect convergence signals. The pipeline includes multi-stage filtering, domain-specific keyword clustering, and a temporal trend analysis of topic co-occurence. We validate our methodology on two complementary datasets: 278,625 arXiv preprints (2017--2024) to capture early scientific signals, and 9,793 USPTO patent applications (2018-2024) to track downstream commercial developments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can identify both established and emerging convergence patterns, offering a scalable and generalizable framework for technology forecasting grounded in full-text analysis.

Institutions of higher learning, research institutes and other scientific research units have abundant scientific and technological resources of experts and scholars, and these talents with great scientific and technological innovation ability are an important force to promote industrial upgrading. The scientific and technological resources of experts and scholars are mainly composed of basic attributes and scientific research achievements. The basic attributes include information such as research interests, institutions, and educational work experience. However, due to information asymmetry and other reasons, the scientific and technological resources of experts and scholars cannot be connected with the society in a timely manner, and social needs cannot be accurately matched with experts and scholars. Therefore, it is very necessary to build an expert and scholar information database and provide relevant expert and scholar retrieval services. This paper sorts out the related research work in this field from four aspects: text relation extraction, text knowledge representation learning, text vector retrieval and visualization system.

With the advent of the cloud computing era, the cost of creating, capturing, and managing information has gradually decreased. The amount of data on the Internet is showing explosive growth, and more scientific and technological resources are being uploaded to the network. Different from news and social media data, scientific and technological resources are mainly composed of academic-style resources or entities, such as papers, patents, authors, and research institutions. There is a rich relationship network between these resources, from which a large amount of cutting-edge scientific and technological information can be mined. Existing scientific resource management and classification standards are difficult to completely cover all entities and associations, and they cannot accurately extract the important information contained in scientific and technological resources. Therefore, how to construct a complete and accurate representation of scientific and technological resources from structured and unstructured reports and texts, and how to tap the potential value of scientific and technological resources, are urgent problems. A feasible solution is to construct accurate portraits of scientific and technological resources by combining knowledge graph technology, text representation learning, entity extraction, and knowledge service components.

Embodied AI is widely discussed as a job-displacement problem. The deeper risk, however, is governance lag: the time and capability gap between a measurable change in technology deployment and an institutional response able to address its consequences. Building on the established pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma, this article argues that embodied AI intensifies that gap through scalable models and platforms, task-level reorganization, and the separation of upstream technological control from downstream social impact. We distinguish three mutually reinforcing forms of lag, observational, institutional, and distributive, and propose a compliance architecture based on deployment visibility, stack-level accountability, trigger-based adjustment, and automatic distributional response. The central policy challenge is not automation alone, but whether governance systems can become observable, responsive, and adaptive before disruption becomes entrenched.