Background and Objective: Continuous wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring is increasingly used for ambulatory arrhythmia surveillance, yet forecasting impending atrial fibrillation (AF) is challenged by inter-patient ECG variability. This study investigated whether personalizing a global model via fine-tuning on an individual's ECG signals improves short-term forecasting of impending AF. Methods: A global model trained on the ICENTIA11K dataset was compared against personalized models fine-tuned across three cohorts: ICENTIA11K, IRIDIA-AF, and MobiCARE. Following preprocessing, models processed 60-second ECG segments for a five-minute forecast horizon. We evaluated the impact of adaptation data volume and analyzed ECG features, such as heart rate and RMSSD. Results: Personalized models significantly outperformed the global model, achieving AUROCs of 0.711 vs. 0.614 in ICENTIA11K and 0.686 vs. 0.585 in MobiCARE. Personalization benefits increased with the amount of patient-specific fine-tuning data. While the global model's accuracy rose as AF onset approached, personalized models in the two external cohorts exhibited distinct temporal dynamics, which may indicate the capture
Proper nutrition is very important for the well-being and independence of elderly people. A significant loss of body weight or a decrease of the Body Mass Index respectively is an indicator for malnutrition. A continuous monitoring of the BMI enables doctors and nutritionists to intervene on impending malnutrition. However, continuous monitoring of the BMI by professionals is not applicable and self-monitoring not reliable. In this article a method for monitoring the trend of the BMI based on ambient sensors is introduced. The ambient sensors are used to measure the time a person spends for preparing meals at home. When the trend of the average time for 4 weeks changes, so does the trend of the BMI for those 4 weeks. Both values show a very strong correlation. Thus, the average time for preparing a meal is a suitable indicator for doctors and nutritionists to examine the patient further, become aware of an impending malnutrition, and intervene at an early stage of malnutrition. The method has been tested on a real-world dataset collected during a 10-month field study with 20 participants of an age of about 85 years.
This paper investigates the synergy between 6G and AI. It argues that they can unlock future horizons, by discussing how they can address future challenges in healthcare, transportation, virtual reality, education, resource management, robotics, in addition to public safety and warfare. However, these great opportunities come also with greater risk. Therefore, the paper provides an overview of the security risks and challenges, along with possible mitigation techniques.
With a new generation of observatories coming online this decade, the process of characterizing exoplanet atmospheres will need to be reinvented. Currently mostly on the instrumental side, characterization bottlenecks will soon stand by the models used to translate spectra into atmospheric properties. Limitations stemming from our stellar and atmospheric models have already been highlighted. Here, we show that the current limitations of the opacity models used to decode exoplanet spectra propagate into an accuracy wall at ~0.5-1.0 dex (i.e., 3 to 10x) on the atmospheric properties, which is an order of magnitude above the precision targeted by JWST Cycle 1 programs and needed for, e.g., meaningful C/O-ratio constraints and biosignatures identification. We perform a sensitivity analysis using nine different opacity models and find that most of the retrievals produce harmonious fits owing to compensations in the form of >5$σ$ biases on the derived atmospheric parameters translating in the aforementioned accuracy wall. We suggest a two-tier approach to alleviate this problem involving a new retrieval procedure and guided improvements in opacity data, their standardization and optim
The procedure by means of which the occurrence time of an impending mainshock can be identified by analyzing in natural time the seismicity in the candidate area subsequent to the recording of a precursory Seismic Electric Signals (SES) activity is reviewed. Here, we report the application of this procedure to an Mw5.4 mainshock that occurred in Greece on 17 November 2014 and was strongly felt in Athens. This mainshock (which is pretty rare since it is the strongest in that area for more than half a century) was preceded by an SES activity recorded on 27 July 2014 and the results of the natural time analysis reveal that the system approached the critical point (mainshock occurrence) early in the morning on 15 November 2014. SES activities that have been recently recorded are also presented. Furthermore, in a Note we discuss the case of the Mw5.3 earthquake that was also strongly felt in Athens on 19 July 2019 (Parnitha fault).
Upon employing the analysis in a new time domain, termed natural time, it has been recently demonstrated that a remarkable change of seismicity emerges before major mainshocks in California. What constitutes this change is that the fluctuations of the order parameter of seismicity exhibit a clearly detectable minimum. This is identified by using a natural time window sliding event by event through the time series of the earthquakes in a wide area and comprising a number of events that would occur on the average within a few months or so. Here, we suggest a method to estimate the epicentral area of an impending mainshock by an additional study of this minimum using an area window sliding through the wide area. We find that when this area window surrounds (or is adjacent to) the future epicentral area, the minimum of the order parameter fluctuations in this area appears at a date very close to the one at which the minimum is observed in the wide area. The method is applied here to major earthquakes that occurred in California during the recent decades including the largest one, i.e., the 1992 Landers earthquake.
The analogy between self-similar time series with given Hurst exponent H and Markovian, Gaussian stochastic processes with multiplicative noise and entropic index q (Borland, PRE 57, 6, 6634-6642, 1998) allows us to explain the empirical results reported in (Pavithran et al., EPL, 129 2020 24004) and (Pavithran et al. Sci. Reports 10.1 (2020) 1-8) with the help of the properties of the nonextensive entropy Sq of index q: a dominant oscillating mode arises as H goes to zero in many different systems and its amplitude is proportional to 1/ H^2 . Thus, a decrease of H acts as precursor of large oscillations of the state variable, which corresponds to catastrophic events in many problems of practical interest. In contrast, if H goes to 1 then the time series is strongly intermittent, fluctuations of the state variable follow a power law whose exponent depends on H, and exceedingly large event are basically unpredictable. These predictions agree with observations in problems of aeroacoustics, aeroelasticity, electric engineering, hydrology, laser physics, meteorology, plasma physics, plasticity, polemology, seismology and thermoacoustics.
In line of the intermediate-term monitoring of seismic activity aimed at prediction of the world largest earthquakes the seismic dynamics of the Earth's lithosphere is analysed as a single whole, which is the ultimate scale of the complex hierarchical non-linear system. The present study demonstrates that the lithosphere does behave, at least in intermediate-term scale, as non-linear dynamic system that reveals classical symptoms of instability at the approach of catastrophe, i.e., mega-earthquake. These are: (i) transformation of magnitude distribution, (ii) spatial redistribution of seismic activity, (iii) rise and acceleration of activity, (iv) change of dependencies across magnitudes of different types, and other patterns of collective behaviour. The observed global scale seismic behaviour implies the state of criticality of the Earth lithosphere in the last decade.
We have developed a 3-step criterion to decide if a comet coming from the Oort Cloud will disintegrate. If we apply this criterion to comet C/2013 US10 we find that the probability of disintegration is 92%. The Secular Light Curve of this comet exhibits complexity beyond current scientific understanding, suggesting that our knowledge of cometary science is incomplete.
We present evidence to conclude that comet C/2012 S1 ISON is about to turn off or disintegrate.
Accident anticipation aims to predict impending collisions from dashcam videos and trigger early alerts. Existing methods rely on binary supervision with manually annotated "anomaly onset" frames, which are subjective and inconsistent, leading to inaccurate risk estimation. In contrast, we propose RiskProp, a novel collision-anchored self-supervised risk propagation paradigm for early accident anticipation, which removes the need for anomaly onset annotations and leverages only the reliably annotated collision frame. RiskProp models temporal risk evolution through two observation-driven losses: first, since future frames contain more definitive evidence of an impending accident, we introduce a future-frame regularization loss that uses the model's next-frame prediction as a soft target to supervise the current frame, enabling backward propagation of risk signals; second, inspired by the empirical trend of rising risk before accidents, we design an adaptive monotonic constraint to encourage a non-decreasing progression over time. Experiments on CAP and Nexar demonstrate that RiskProp achieves state-of-the-art performance and produces smoother, more discriminative risk curves, improv
Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are trained on, face an impending shortage of high-quality training data, and are increasingly deployed as both research tools and peer reviewers. We analyze three ways in which LLMs have changed the value of failure data and show that the systematic absence of such data degrades their utility as research tools, training data consumers, and peer reviewers alike. We outline experimental protocols to validate these claims and discuss the structural conditions under which a failure-inclusive publishing culture could emerge.
We construct early-warning signals for impending critical transitions in non-Markovian systems. We analyze stochastic forcings such as fractional Brownian motion, fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes and red noise in fast-slow systems exhibiting such transitions. We show that the effectiveness of indicators such as autocovariance, autocorrelation, and spectral density depends on several properties of the underlying system. In particular, we compare the influence of the Hurst index and the bifurcation type. We prove that the rotatory dynamics associated with a Hopf bifurcation substantially alters the scaling laws of these observables. Finally, we provide practical guidelines for implementing these signals and validate them on both theoretical and applied models.
The early prediction of tipping points, distinguished by sudden and catastrophic shifts from stable states, poses a challenging task that would enable us to assess the impending threat across natural and engineered systems. This threat becomes particularly acute in low-fluctuation environments, where tipping occurs through saddle-node bifurcation without prior warning in noise dynamics. In this study, we investigate the tipping point dynamics of avalanche catastrophes in low-fluctuation domain, employing model system like the zero temperature random field Ising model and thermally deposited cobalt films. As the system approaches the tipping point, avalanche activity reveals pronounced critical behaviour, including critical slowing down, variance enhancement, and a growing spatial correlation length--hallmarks that may serve as early warning signals of impending collapse. Crucially, we demonstrate that increasing disorder in the system reduces its vulnerability to catastrophic failure. In highly disorder regimes, these early warning signals emerge well before the transition, thereby providing a large margin for anticipation and mitigation. This key finding suggests a protective role
Tangential interactions between particles play a central role in suspension rheology. We show theoretically that these interactions, often attributed to contact friction, are a direct consequence of fluid flows between rough particles in relative motion. We find that small surface asperities generically lead to localized hydrodynamic sliding forces and torques that can exceed their smooth counterparts by orders of magnitude. A fully analytic thin-film theory shows that these forces grow inversely with the surface separation, significantly more singular than the logarithmic scaling for smooth particles. The impending singularity tightly constrains the particles' rotation with their translation, recovering a crucial ingredient in dense suspension rheology. Despite their purely hydrodynamic origin, these features resemble several aspects of dry rolling and sliding friction.
We propose a design space for data melodification, where standard visualization idioms and fundamental data characteristics map to rhetorical devices of music for a more affective experience of data. Traditional data sonification transforms data into sound by mapping it to different parameters such as pitch, volume, and duration. Often and regrettably, this mapping leaves behind melody, harmony, rhythm and other musical devices that compose the centuries-long persuasive and expressive power of music. What results is the occasional, unintentional sense of tinnitus and horror film-like impending doom caused by a disconnect between the semantics of data and sound. Through this work we ask, can the aestheticization of sonification through (classical) music theory make data simultaneously accessible, meaningful, and pleasing to one's ears?
The impending discovery and monitoring of hundreds of new gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae from upcoming ground and space based large area surveys such as LSST, \textit{Euclid}, and \textit{Roman} necessitates the development of improved numerical methods for studying gravitational microlensing. We present in this work the fastest microlensing map generation code currently publicly available. We utilize graphics processing units to take advantage of the inherent parallelizable nature of creating magnification maps, in addition to using 1) the fast multipole method to reduce the runtime dependence on the number of microlenses and 2) inverse polygon mapping to reduce the number of rays required. The code is available at https://github.com/weisluke/microlensing/.
Patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often experience pathological increases in intracranial pressure (ICP), leading to intracranial hypertension (tIH), a common and serious complication. Early warning of an impending rise in ICP could potentially improve patient outcomes by enabling preemptive clinical intervention. However, the limited availability of patient data poses a challenge in developing reliable prediction models. In this study, we aim to determine whether foundation models, which leverage transfer learning, may offer a promising solution.
In this paper, I examine questions surrounding AI neutrality through the prism of existing literature and scholarship about mediation and media pluralism. Such traditions, I argue, provide a valuable theoretical framework for how we should approach the (likely) impending era of AI mediation. In particular, I suggest examining further the notion of algorithmic pluralism. Contrasting this notion to the dominant idea of algorithmic transparency, I seek to describe what algorithmic pluralism may be, and present both its opportunities and challenges. Implemented thoughtfully and responsibly, I argue, Algorithmic or AI pluralism has the potential to sustain the diversity, multiplicity, and inclusiveness that are so vital to democracy.