Search Results (35,009)

Purpose: This study provides a critical examination of the literature on applying artificial intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR) in restaurant settings and related foodservice operations. It focuses on how AI and XE influence consumer nutrition awareness and decision-making about food choices, and their implications for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and service delivery in foodservice environments. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a systematic literature review (SLR) approach following the PRISMA method. An initial search identified over 3900 academic papers published between 2016 and 2025. Studies were selected on the basis of predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and 26 peer-reviewed articles were analyzed. The review provides a conceptual synthesis and develops propositions for practical applications and future research directions. Findings: The review reveals a shift from static systems that rely on optimization, toward adaptive and user-centered solutions that are behavior-oriented. AI applications predominate in the case of calorie tracking, personalized recommendations, and menu planning. Though deployment of XR technologies (e.g., AR and VR) is less prevalent, they offer potential for immersive, and real-time interventions. A key distinction emerges between studies demonstrating empirical effectiveness (e.g., improved understanding and healthier choices) and those focused on technical and/or conceptual developments. To date, there has been limited validation of behavioral impacts in foodservice settings. Originality: This study offers a theory-informed conceptualization of AI and XR applications in restaurant and foodservice contexts by integrating three perspectives: hospitality (menus and dining experience), nutrition (dietary awareness and healthier choices), and human–technology interaction (technology acceptance and user engagement). The study reconceptualizes AI- and XR-enabled systems as behavioral intervention tools and outlines a focused research agenda for advancing nutritional communication in foodservice environments. Full article

Emery–Dreifuss muscular dystrophy (EDMD) is a rare inherited neuromuscular disorder within the spectrum of nuclear envelope diseases, classically characterized by early musculo-tendinous contractures, slowly progressive myopathy, and cardiac involvement dominated by conduction disease and arrhythmias, with variable evolution toward cardiomyopathy and heart failure. This narrative review provides a comprehensive and clinically actionable synthesis of cardiovascular manifestations across EDMD genotypes and phenotypes, outlining pragmatic diagnostic and therapeutic pathways for real-world care. A targeted literature search was performed in PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science, focusing on studies addressing cardiovascular involvement in EDMD. Relevant original studies, case series, registries, guideline documents, and high-quality reviews were selected and synthesized narratively, with particular emphasis on diagnostic strategies, risk stratification, and management approaches. Cardiac involvement in EDMD encompasses a broad and heterogeneous spectrum, including atrial disease and conduction disturbances, ventricular arrhythmias, dilated cardiomyopathy, thromboembolic complications, and sudden cardiac death. Phenotypic expression varies according to the underlying genetic substrate, with distinct atrial- and ventricular-dominant trajectories. Early recognition and structured cardiovascular surveillance are essential to guide timely intervention, including anticoagulation, device therapy, and heart failure management. Despite growing awareness, significant gaps remain in risk prediction and standardized management strategies. EDMD represents a paradigmatic model of cardiomyopathy characterized by prominent electrical instability and systemic involvement. A structured, genotype- and phenotype-informed approach centered on early surveillance, proactive arrhythmia and thromboembolic risk management and timely device therapy may improve clinical decision-making in real-world settings. Future perspectives include the integration of precision medicine and the development of gene- and pathway-targeted therapies, with the potential to shift from symptomatic management toward disease-modifying strategies. Full article

Mobile robot path planning in complex environments remains challenging due to obstacle constraints, high-dimensional search space, and the need to balance path optimality and safety. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an improved Red-Billed Blue Magpie Optimizer (IRBMO) with multi-strategy cooperation. Specifically, a territorial awareness mechanism enhances global exploration to avoid premature path convergence, a representative individual learning strategy improves exploitation to refine path quality, and a random subpopulation diffusion strategy helps escape local optima in complex obstacle environments. The proposed method is applied to grid-based path planning problems with different map sizes and obstacle densities. Experimental results show that IRBMO significantly reduces path length compared with other algorithms, while achieving faster convergence and better stability. Parameter sensitivity analysis, ablation study, and convergence analysis further verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategies. In addition, benchmark tests on CEC2017 and CEC2022 functions against 19 competitors further confirm its optimization capability. Overall, IRBMO provides an effective and robust solution for robot path planning problems. Full article

Earthquake-induced landslide reactivation poses a sustained hazard for years following major seismic events, yet operational prediction remains constrained by heterogeneous multi-modal data, sparse supervision, and the absence of uncertainty-aware frameworks. This paper presents PIMSEL, a physically guided multi-modal semi-supervised framework for post-seismic landslide reactivation risk assessment. PIMSEL integrates satellite-derived morphological features, precipitation time series, and seismic hazard attributes through four components: entropy-regularized optimal transport for cross-modal semantic alignment without paired supervision; causally constrained hierarchical fusion enforcing domain-consistent modal weighting; scenario-based prototype mutation for semi-supervised learning from sparse expert annotations; and prototype-anchored variational graph clustering that simultaneously stratifies landslides into HIGH, MEDIUM, and LOW risk tiers and produces decomposed aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty estimates for operational triage. The HIGH risk tier operationally corresponds to predicted reactivation, validated against 598 documented reactivation events across 7482 co-seismic landslides from three Sichuan Province earthquake sequences: the 2013 Lushan (Mw 7.0), 2017 Jiuzhaigou (Mw 7.0), and 2022 Luding (Mw 6.8) events. PIMSEL achieves 82.5% reactivation recall and 66.4% precision, outperforming twelve baselines across clustering quality, classification, and uncertainty calibration metrics. Ablation studies confirm that optimal transport alignment contributes the largest individual performance gain. Current limitations include quarterly assessment frequency and dependence on optical imagery under cloud cover, which future integration of real-time meteorological triggers and SAR data should address. Full article

In this study, we aimed to examine the multiplicative interaction model as a tool to assess the impact of plant extracts and fermentation products on the growth of mycelium of selected fungi. The materials used in the study included a total of 16 products. Plant extracts were obtained by the processes of ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) or supercritical CO₂ extraction, and the fermentation broths were produced by Enterobacter and Paenibacillus bacteria in a bioreactor. All these products were examined in vitro using 12 cultures of frequently occuring pathogenic fungi collected from cereals and oilseed rape cultivation. For mycelium diameter in all three examined concentrations, the Additive Main impacts and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI) analyses showed substantial impacts of both the product and the pathogen as well as the product-by-pathogen interaction. It is advised that future plant protection techniques incorporate product E8, a plant extract (the CO₂ extract of a ginger plant belonging to the Zingiberaceae family), since it demonstrated excellent stability and good average mycelium diameter values across all concentrations examined. As far as the authors are aware, this is the first time the AMMI model has been used to evaluate the impact of product–pathogen interactions on mycelium diameter. Full article

Blood pressure is a central marker of cardiovascular risk, but continuous monitoring remains difficult because cuff-based measurements are intermittent and uncomfortable. Photoplethysmography (PPG) is already ubiquitous in wearables and can, in principle, enable cuffless blood pressure estimation from a single optical signal. However, many deep learning approaches that perform well in floating-point are impractical for microcontroller-class devices, where memory budgets, latency, and integer-only arithmetic constrain what can be deployed. A key open question is which neural architectures retain accuracy after full-integer quantization, rather than only under desktop inference. Here, we show an end-to-end, microcontroller-oriented evaluation framework that benchmarks multiple 1D convolutional models for cuffless systolic and diastolic pressure estimation from single-channel PPG, jointly optimizing estimation error, model footprint, and quantization robustness. We find that floating-point accuracy alone is a poor predictor of deployability: some lightweight CNNs exhibit substantial performance drift after INT8 conversion, whereas a compact residual 1D CNN preserves its predictions with near-identical error statistics after integer quantization. We then deploy the selected integer-only model on an STM32N6 microcontroller using an industrial toolchain and confirm that on-device inference maintains low bias and limited error dispersion while meeting real-time constraints for continuous operation. These results highlight architecture-dependent quantization stability as a critical design dimension for sensor-edge intelligence and support the feasibility of fully on-device cuffless blood pressure monitoring without multimodal sensing or cloud processing. Full article

Aero-engine defects often exhibit micro-scale and high-frequency characteristics under complex metallic textures, which makes precise segmentation difficult. Most existing pixel-level methods rely on spatial-domain modeling and lack frequency-domain decoupling. As a result, high-frequency details are easily hidden by low-frequency background information. In addition, repeated downsampling weakens the representation of fine-grained structures, leading to inaccurate boundary localization and limited robustness. To address these issues, a spectrum-driven hierarchical learning network is proposed for aero-engine defect segmentation. First, a dual-band spectral module is constructed using the discrete cosine transform to separate high-frequency and low-frequency components, providing stable and physically meaningful frequency-domain priors for the network. Second, a detail-guided module is designed where high-frequency features adaptively guide skip connections, compensating information loss during encoding and improving boundary recovery. Furthermore, a low-frequency-driven region-aware modeling module is developed. The internal defect regions, boundary areas, and background regions are modeled hierarchically. A dynamic hyper-kernel generation mechanism performs region-sensitive convolutional modeling, improving adaptation to complex structural variations. Extensive experiments on the Turbo19 and NEU-Seg datasets demonstrate that the proposed method produces accurate defect boundaries and achieves mIoU scores of 89.82% and 91.44%, improving over the second-best method by 5.22% and 4.42%, respectively. Full article

The construction industry is one of the major sources of carbon emissions, and green retrofitting of buildings is an effective pathway to promoting sustainable development in the sector. However, existing research and implementation strategies often struggle to reconcile the needs of governments, businesses, and residents. Therefore, this study proposes a comprehensive research framework that employs bibliometric and text analysis methods to examine implementation barriers in retrofitting projects across four dimensions: policy, cost, technology, and resident satisfaction. The results indicate that retrofitting costs are the primary factor, while technology is a secondary factor. Furthermore, existing policies feature vague technical standards, insufficient incentives, and a lack of differentiation. Conflicts of interest and challenges regarding cost allocation persist throughout the renovation life cycle. Decision-support tools and renovation technologies face limitations and issues regarding applicability. Residents face constraints from multiple factors, including their knowledge base and economic capacity. Based on these findings, the government urgently needs to improve a differentiated policy system and encourage technological R&D and knowledge dissemination. Enterprises must actively respond to policies and optimize their technologies and management practices. Residents need to enhance their energy-saving awareness, participate in retrofitting efforts, and improve their energy consumption behaviors. Full article

The increasing complexity of next-generation wireless systems challenges the scalability and generalization capabilities of traditional model-driven physical layer (PHY) design, which relies on analytically derived channel models and optimization frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and critical review of deep learning (DL) architectures enabling the transition toward AI-native PHY design. A unified optimization perspective is developed in which all PHY tasks—including channel estimation, channel state information (CSI) feedback, massive MIMO processing, signal detection, channel coding, beamforming, resource allocation, and semantic-aware transmission—are formulated under a common empirical risk minimization (ERM) framework. Neural architectures such as autoencoders, convolutional and recurrent networks, transformers, and reinforcement learning models are examined through their underlying optimization formulations, loss functions, training methodologies, and representation learning mechanisms. The review compares model-driven and AI-native approaches in terms of performance metrics, computational complexity, robustness, generalization capability, and practical deployment constraints, including hardware limitations, energy efficiency, and real-time feasibility. The analysis highlights the conditions under which AI-native architectures provide adaptability and performance improvements while identifying trade-offs in complexity, latency, and interpretability. The study concludes by outlining prioritized research directions toward fully adaptive and self-optimizing wireless communication systems. Full article

Background/Objectives: Early autism screening needs to be both accurate and privacy-preserving, but single-source assessments can miss clinically important context. We therefore study a preliminary integrated framework that combines privacy-preserving questionnaire-based risk estimation with a second reasoning component based on a large language model (LLM) that evaluates symptom narratives. The objective is to test whether structured screening outputs can be translated into uncertainty-aware narrative reasoning within one privacy-conscious workflow. Methods: The proposed pipeline links a PATE-style AQ-10 screening stage to a MedPrompt-style consensus reasoning stage that operates on behavioral summaries and transcript-style inputs. Evaluation includes component-wise testing on AQ-10 data, an end-to-end controlled setting, synthetic stress testing, and transcript-only analysis on 26 examples. Results: In component-wise evaluation, the combined pipeline reaches ceiling performance on a controlled AQ-10 split, synthetic stress testing reduces accuracy to 97.2%, and transcript-only testing shows that contextual factors such as age substantially improve sensitivity. Conclusions: These findings support only a highly preliminary proof-of-concept under constrained evaluation conditions and should be interpreted as motivation for broader external validation rather than as evidence of practical decision-support readiness across settings. Full article

Imaging-based multi-omics derived from digital histopathology provides a valuable approach for characterizing tumor heterogeneity from routine clinical specimens. However, robust multi-cancer histopathological analysis remains challenging due to pronounced intra-tumor variability, inter-organ morphological overlap, and sensitivity to staining and acquisition variations, which can limit the generalizability of deep learning models. These limitations are largely driven by insufficient representation learning, particularly in multi-organ and multi-class diagnostic settings. In this study, we propose a hierarchically regularized representation learning framework for multi-cancer histopathological image analysis that models imaging-based features across multiple organs and diagnostic categories. The framework integrates complementary mechanisms to capture fine-grained cellular morphology, long-range tissue architecture, and organ-aware diagnostic semantics within a unified computational model. A hierarchical supervision strategy guides the network to reduce entanglement between organ-level structural characteristics and disease-specific diagnostic patterns in the learned representations. The method operates without pixel-level annotations or handcrafted morphological priors, supporting scalable experimental evaluation. We demonstrate the approach on balanced lung and colon cancer histopathology cohorts, achieving 96.5% accuracy on lung cancer classification and 96.8% accuracy on colon cancer classification. Ablation and robustness analyses further validate the contributions of hierarchical regularization and consistency learning. Overall, this work provides a demonstrated proof-of-concept framework for representation-centric imaging-based analysis in multi-organ histopathology under the evaluated dataset conditions. Full article

The widespread adoption of encryption protocols such as TLS 1.3 has significantly reduced the visibility of packet payloads, limiting the effectiveness of traditional traffic analysis methods. Recent deep learning approaches attempt to learn representations directly from raw byte sequences; however, in encrypted environments, byte-level patterns often exhibit high entropy and unstable ordering, raising concerns about their reliability. In this work, we revisit the roles of content and structural information in traffic classification and argue that effective modeling should move beyond content-only representations. We propose a structure-aware framework that models hierarchical relationships across fields, layers, and sessions while representing byte information using compact, permutation-invariant summaries. In addition, we introduce a hierarchical shuffle pretraining strategy to capture relational dependencies and an adaptive inter-level gating mechanism to dynamically integrate multi-level representations. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with varying levels of encryption demonstrate that byte-level sequential patterns are not always essential, while structural information provides consistent complementary cues. Furthermore, the importance of different structural levels varies across datasets, highlighting the need for adaptive multi-level modeling. The proposed method achieves strong performance across diverse datasets, including highly encrypted traffic, while maintaining robustness under domain shifts and limited data scenarios. These results suggest that combining compact content representations with structural context and adaptive integration is a promising direction for encrypted traffic analysis. Full article

Reliable pedestrian perception in autonomous driving depends not only on detecting the target, but also on how completely and consistently its three-dimensional geometry is captured from different sensor viewpoints. This study presents a LiDAR-based observability framework for evaluating pedestrian representation on the ANTA compact autonomous vehicle platform using a roof-mounted Top LiDAR (TL), a Front-Right LiDAR (FRL), and their fused configuration. The pedestrian was analyzed in a canonical local frame using geometric extent ratios, projected surface occupancy, voxel-based volumetric occupancy, and statistical descriptors of the local point distribution, integrated into a global observability score, $S_{3D}$. A Distance-Robustness Index (DRI), an overlap-based complementarity analysis, and a lightweight temporal centroid-sensitivity check over 20 consecutive frames were used to characterize performance across distance. Using ROS 2 bag data processed offline in MATLAB R2025b the fused configuration achieved the highest mean global score (0.563), compared with 0.504 for FRL and 0.432 for TL, and the highest robustness ($\mathrm{DRI}=0.5628$, $CV=10.7\%$). The results show that 1 m maximizes local density, 2–3 m maximize projected and volumetric completeness, and 7 m provides the best balanced observability. Within the evaluated platform and under the controlled benchmark conditions, complementary multi-LiDAR fusion provided the strongest overall geometry-aware pedestrian representation. Full article

This paper presents a lightweight semantic retrieval framework driven by an in-memory knowledge graph (IMKG) to overcome the limitations of traditional keyword matching and the prohibitive hardware costs of deep learning models in digitizing ancient Chinese literature. By extracting structured metadata from canonical texts, we construct a dense, bidirectional graph schema. Diverging from resource-intensive neural architectures, our system abandons heavyweight vector embeddings in favor of a highly optimized, template-based heuristic matching engine natively implemented in Java. This purely symbolic approach ensures deterministic execution, zero-dependency deployment, and seamless operation on standard CPU-only servers. To handle complex historical inquiries, the framework integrates a context-aware dialogue manager for multi-turn anaphora and ellipsis resolution, alongside a synergistic tiered caching mechanism. Extensive evaluations on a benchmark of 13,652 annotated queries demonstrate that the system achieves an exceptional intent recognition accuracy of 97.14%, robust context retention, and ultra-low response latency (≤17 ms). Ultimately, this architecture provides a sustainable, highly reproducible, and cost-effective paradigm for the semantic exploration of classical textual heritage, exceptionally suited for small-to-medium cultural institutions. Full article

Tool-using AI agents couple a language model with controller logic, memory, and external tools such as browsers, email, calendars, file systems, and transaction APIs. This architecture expands capability, but it also enlarges the security boundary: agents routinely ingest untrusted content while holding privileges that can reveal private data and trigger external side effects. The resulting failures are not limited to poor text generation; they include prompt injection, indirect injection through tool outputs, confused-deputy behavior, unauthorized actions, and misleading claims about the tool state. Because large-scale testing on deployed products is difficult, vendor-specific, and ethically sensitive, we present a transparent, theoretical simulation-based framework for evaluating user-facing risk in tool-using agents. The methodological contribution is a formal threat model that separates compromise, harm, and severity, and a Monte Carlo evaluation pipeline that maps architectural choices (permissions, retrieval, memory exposure, and approvals) and defensive controls to comparable outcome metrics. We instantiate the framework for six representative threat scenarios and nine defense configurations, reporting attack success rate (ASR), benign task success, latency overhead, and severity-weighted harm. Across scenarios, the least-privilege tool design is the strongest single broad control, human-in-the-loop approvals sharply reduce high-impact actions and exports but degrade under user error and habituation, retrieval allowlisting nearly eliminates indirect injection while leaving other channels largely unaffected, and rate limiting reduces tail severity more than ASR. These results position agent safety as an architectural and operational problem and because they arise from an assumption-explicit simulator rather than field measurements, should be read as comparative design guidance rather than incident-rate estimates for any deployed product. Full article