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The task of spatial clustering of transcriptomics data is of paramount importance. It enables the classification of tissue samples into diverse subpopulations of cells, which, in turn, facilitates the analysis of the biological functions of clusters, tissue reconstruction, and cell-cell interactions. Many approaches leverage gene expressions, spatial locations, and histological images to detect spatial domains; however, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as state of the art models suffer from a limitation in the assumption of pairwise connections between nodes. In the case of domain detection in spatial transcriptomics, some cells are found to be not directly related. Still, they are grouped as the same domain, which shows the incapability of GNNs for capturing implicit connections among the cells. While graph edges connect only two nodes, hyperedges connect an arbitrary number of nodes along their edges, which lets Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) capture and utilize richer and more complex structural information than traditional GNNs. We use autoencoders to address the limitation of not having the actual labels, which are well-suited for unsupervised learning. Our model has demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving the highest iLISI score of 1.843 compared to other methods. This score indicates the greatest diversity of cell types identified by our method. Furthermore, our model outperforms other methods in downstream clustering, achieving the highest ARI values of 0.51 and Leiden score of 0.60.

Climate change is negatively impacting the world's biodiversity. To build automated systems to monitor these negative biodiversity impacts, large-scale, volunteer-collected datasets like iNaturalist are built from community-identified, natural imagery. However, such volunteer-based data are opportunistic and lack a structured sampling strategy, resulting in geographic, temporal, observation quality, and socioeconomic, biases that stymie uptake of these models for downstream biodiversity monitoring tasks. Here we introduce DivShift North American West Coast (DivShift-NAWC), a curated dataset of almost 8 million iNaturalist plant images across the western coast of North America, for exploring the effects of these biases on deep learning model performance. We compare model performance across four known biases and observe that they indeed confound model performance. We suggest practical strategies for curating datasets to train deep learning models for monitoring climate change's impacts on the world's biodiversity., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

In this work, we investigate the problem of Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) navigation in a dense marine environment with a high-intensity current flow. The complexities arising from static and dynamic obstacles and the disturbance forces caused by current flow render existing navigation protocols inadequate for ensuring safety and avoiding collisions at sea. To learn a safe and efficient robot policy, we propose a novel methodology that leverages attention mechanisms to capture heterogeneous interactions of the agents with the static and moving obstacles and the flow disturbances from the environment in space and time. In particular, we refine a temporal function with MarineFormer, a Transformer navigation policy for spatially variable Marine environment, trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning (RL). MarineFormer uses foundational spatio-temporal graph attention with transformer architecture to process spatial attention and temporal sequences in an environment that simulates a 2D turbulent marine condition. We propose architectural modifications that improve the stability and learning speed of the recurrent models. The flow velocity estimation, which can be derived from flow simulations or sensors, is incorporated into a model-free RL framework to prevent the robot from entering into high-intensity current flow regions including intense vortices, while potentially leveraging the flow to assist in transportation. The investigated 2D marine environment encompasses flow singularities, including vortices, sinks, and sources, representing fundamental planar flow patterns associated with flood or maritime thunderstorms. Our proposed method is trained with a new reward model to deal with static and dynamic obstacles and disturbances from the current flow.

In-hand manipulation of tools using dexterous hands in real-world is an underexplored problem in the literature. In addition to more complex geometry and larger size of the tools compared to more commonly used objects like cubes or cylinders, task oriented in-hand tool manipulation involves many sub-tasks to be performed sequentially. This may involve reaching to the tool, picking it up, reorienting it in hand with or without regrasping to reach to a desired final grasp appropriate for the tool usage, and carrying the tool to the desired pose. Research on long-horizon manipulation using dexterous hands is rather limited and the existing work focus on learning the individual sub-tasks using a method like reinforcement learning (RL) and combine the policies for different subtasks to perform a long horizon task. However, in general a single method may not be the best for all the sub-tasks, and this can be more pronounced when dealing with multi-fingered hands manipulating objects with complex geometry like tools. In this paper, we investigate the use of a mixed-method approach to solve for the long-horizon task of tool usage and we use imitation learning, reinforcement learning and model based control. We also discuss a new RL-based teacher-student framework that combines real world data into offline training. We show that our proposed approach for each subtask outperforms the commonly adopted reinforcement learning approach across different subtasks and in performing the long horizon task in simulation. Finally we show the successful transferability to real world.

Planning contact-rich interactions for multi-finger manipulation is challenging due to the high-dimensionality and hybrid nature of dynamics. Recent advances in data-driven methods have shown promise, but are sensitive to the quality of training data. Combining learning with classical methods like trajectory optimization and search adds additional structure to the problem and domain knowledge in the form of constraints, which can lead to outperforming the data on which models are trained. We present Diffusion-Informed Probabilistic Contact Search (DIPS), which uses an A* search to plan a sequence of contact modes informed by a diffusion model. We train the diffusion model on a dataset of demonstrations consisting of contact modes and trajectories generated by a trajectory optimizer given those modes. In addition, we use a particle filter-inspired method to reason about variability in diffusion sampling arising from model error, estimating likelihoods of trajectories using a learned discriminator. We show that our method outperforms ablations that do not reason about variability and can plan contact sequences that outperform those found in training data across multiple tasks. We evaluate on simulated tabletop card sliding and screwdriver turning tasks, as well as the screwdriver task in hardware to show that our combined learning and planning approach transfers to the real world.

Imitation learning has demonstrated significant potential in performing high-precision manipulation tasks using visual feedback from cameras. However, it is common practice in imitation learning for cameras to be fixed in place, resulting in issues like occlusion and limited field of view. Furthermore, cameras are often placed in broad, general locations, without an effective viewpoint specific to the robot's task. In this work, we investigate the utility of active vision (AV) for imitation learning and manipulation, in which, in addition to the manipulation policy, the robot learns an AV policy from human demonstrations to dynamically change the robot's camera viewpoint to obtain better information about its environment and the given task. We introduce AV-ALOHA, a new bimanual teleoperation robot system with AV, an extension of the ALOHA 2 robot system, incorporating an additional 7-DoF robot arm that only carries a stereo camera and is solely tasked with finding the best viewpoint. This camera streams stereo video to an operator wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset, allowing the operator to control the camera pose using head and body movements. The system provides an immersive teleoperation experience, with bimanual first-person control, enabling the operator to dynamically explore and search the scene and simultaneously interact with the environment. We conduct imitation learning experiments of our system both in real-world and in simulation, across a variety of tasks that emphasize viewpoint planning. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-guided AV for imitation learning, showing significant improvements over fixed cameras in tasks with limited visibility. Project website: https://soltanilara.github.io/av-aloha/, Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

Human navigation is facilitated through the association of actions with landmarks, tapping into our ability to recognize salient features in our environment. Consequently, navigational instructions for humans can be extremely concise, such as short verbal descriptions, indicating a small memory requirement and no reliance on complex and overly accurate navigation tools. Conversely, current autonomous navigation schemes rely on accurate positioning devices and algorithms as well as extensive streams of sensory data collected from the environment. Inspired by this human capability and motivated by the associated technological gap, in this work we propose a hierarchical end-to-end meta-learning scheme that enables a mobile robot to navigate in a previously unknown environment upon presentation of only a few sample images of a set of landmarks along with their corresponding high-level navigation actions. This dramatically simplifies the wayfinding process and enables easy adoption to new environments. For few-shot waypoint detection, we implement a metric-based few-shot learning technique through distribution embedding. Waypoint detection triggers the multi-task low-level maneuver controller module to execute the corresponding high-level navigation action. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme using a small-scale autonomous vehicle on novel indoor navigation tasks in several previously unseen environments., Comment: Appeared at the 40th Anniversary of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA@40), 23-26 September, 2024, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 9 pages, 5 figures

Proto-Danksharding, proposed in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), aims to incrementally improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain by introducing a new type of transaction known as blob-carrying transactions. These transactions incorporate binary large objects (blobs) of data that are stored off-chain but referenced and verified on-chain to ensure data availability. By decoupling data availability from transaction execution, Proto-Danksharding alleviates network congestion and reduces gas fees, laying the groundwork for future, more advanced sharding solutions. This letter provides an analytical model to derive the delay for these new transactions. We model the system as an $\mathrm{M/D}^B/1$ queue which we then find its steady state distribution through embedding a Markov chain and use of supplementary variable method. We show that transactions with more blobs but less frequent impose higher delays on the system compared to lower blobs but more frequent.

Hypergraphs tackle the limitations of traditional graphs by introducing {\em hyperedges}. While graph edges connect only two nodes, hyperedges connect an arbitrary number of nodes along their edges. Also, the underlying message-passing mechanisms in Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) are in the form of vertex-hyperedge-vertex, which let HGNNs capture and utilize richer and more complex structural information than traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). More recently, the idea of overlapping subgraphs has emerged. These subgraphs can capture more information about subgroups of vertices without limiting one vertex belonging to just one group, allowing vertices to belong to multiple groups or subgraphs. In addition, one of the most important problems in graph clustering is to find densest overlapping subgraphs (DOS). In this paper, we propose a solution to the DOS problem via Agglomerative Greedy Enumeration (DOSAGE) algorithm as a novel approach to enhance the process of generating the densest overlapping subgraphs and, hence, a robust construction of the hypergraphs. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that the DOSAGE algorithm significantly outperforms the HGNNs and six other methods on the node classification task.

Bimanual manipulation presents unique challenges compared to unimanual tasks due to the complexity of coordinating two robotic arms. In this paper, we introduce InterACT: Inter-dependency aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers, a novel imitation learning framework designed specifically for bimanual manipulation. InterACT leverages hierarchical attention mechanisms to effectively capture inter-dependencies between dual-arm joint states and visual inputs. The framework comprises a Hierarchical Attention Encoder, which processes multi-modal inputs through segment-wise and cross-segment attention mechanisms, and a Multi-arm Decoder that generates each arm's action predictions in parallel, while sharing information between the arms through synchronization blocks by providing the other arm's intermediate output as context. Our experiments, conducted on various simulated and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks, demonstrate that InterACT outperforms existing methods. Detailed ablation studies further validate the significance of key components, including the impact of CLS tokens, cross-segment encoders, and synchronization blocks on task performance. We provide supplementary materials and videos on our project page., Comment: Accepted at Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024

Recent advances in deep learning have completely transformed the domain of computational pathology (CPath). More specifically, it has altered the diagnostic workflow of pathologists by integrating foundation models (FMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) in their assessment and decision-making process. The limitations of existing deep learning approaches in CPath can be overcome by FMs through learning a representation space that can be adapted to a wide variety of downstream tasks without explicit supervision. Deploying VLMs allow pathology reports written in natural language be used as rich semantic information sources to improve existing models as well as generate predictions in natural language form. In this survey, a holistic and systematic overview of recent innovations in FMs and VLMs in CPath is presented. Furthermore, the tools, datasets and training schemes for these models are summarized in addition to categorizing them into distinct groups. This extensive survey highlights the current trends in CPath and its possible revolution through the use of FMs and VLMs in the future., Comment: 20 pages, 19 figures and 9 tables

Parameterizing finger rolling and finger-object contacts in a differentiable manner is important for formulating dexterous manipulation as a trajectory optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods which often assume simplified geometries of the robot and object or do not explicitly model finger rolling, we propose a method to further extend the capabilities of dexterous manipulation by accounting for non-trivial geometries of both the robot and the object. By integrating the object's Signed Distance Field (SDF) with a sampling method, our method estimates contact and rolling-related variables and includes those in a trajectory optimization framework. This formulation naturally allows for the emergence of finger-rolling behaviors, enabling the robot to locally adjust the contact points. Our method is tested in a peg alignment task and a screwdriver turning task, where it outperforms the baselines in terms of achieving desired object configurations and avoiding dropping the object. We also successfully apply our method to a real-world screwdriver turning task, demonstrating its robustness to the sim2real gap.

Novelty detection is a critical task for deploying machine learning models in the open world. A crucial property of novelty detection methods is universality, which can be interpreted as generalization across various distributions of training or test data. More precisely, for novelty detection, distribution shifts may occur in the training set or the test set. Shifts in the training set refer to cases where we train a novelty detector on a new dataset and expect strong transferability. Conversely, distribution shifts in the test set indicate the methods' performance when the trained model encounters a shifted test sample. We experimentally show that existing methods falter in maintaining universality, which stems from their rigid inductive biases. Motivated by this, we aim for more generalized techniques that have more adaptable inductive biases. In this context, we leverage the fact that contrastive learning provides an efficient framework to easily switch and adapt to new inductive biases through the proper choice of augmentations in forming the negative pairs. We propose a novel probabilistic auto-negative pair generation method AutoAugOOD, along with contrastive learning, to yield a universal novelty detector method. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method under different distribution shifts in various image benchmark datasets. Notably, our method emerges universality in the lens of adaptability to different setups of novelty detection, including one-class, unlabeled multi-class, and labeled multi-class settings. Code: https://github.com/mojtaba-nafez/UNODE, Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, conference

Training data sets intended for unsupervised anomaly detection, typically presumed to be anomaly-free, often contain anomalies (or contamination), a challenge that significantly undermines model performance. Most robust unsupervised anomaly detection models rely on contamination ratio information to tackle contamination. However, in reality, contamination ratio may be inaccurate. We investigate on the impact of inaccurate contamination ratio information in robust unsupervised anomaly detection. We verify whether they are resilient to misinformed contamination ratios. Our investigation on 6 benchmark data sets reveals that such models are not adversely affected by exposure to misinformation. In fact, they can exhibit improved performance when provided with such inaccurate contamination ratios., Comment: This is an accepted extended abstract at Black in AI Workshop which will be co-located with NeurIPS 2024 in Canada

This research project's objective was to investigate the impacts of transit stop location (near-side versus far-side) on pedestrian safety and traffic operations. Three different video-based behavioral observation data collections at signalized intersections in Utah were utilized, studying: (1) transit vehicle stop events and transit rider crossing behaviors and vehicle conflicts; (2) pedestrian conflicts with right-turning vehicles (driver/pedestrian reactions, conflict severity); and (3) pedestrian crossing behaviors (crossing location, crossing behaviors). These outcomes were statistically compared for near-side versus far-side transit stop locations. Far-side transit stops appear better for general traffic operations. Although transit departure delays are more likely and impactful at far-side stops, actions can be taken to improve transit operations there. On the other hand, far-side transit stops appear to be worse for pedestrian safety, corroborating prior crash-based research findings. Specifically, conflicts at far-side stops were more severe, and drivers were less likely to slow or stop for pedestrians. Reconciling these differing findings likely requires improving pedestrian safety at some far-side transit stops, and prioritizing safety over operational efficiency at other near-side transit stops.

Recent advancements in learned image compression (LIC) methods have demonstrated superior performance over traditional hand-crafted codecs. These learning-based methods often employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformer-based architectures. However, these nonlinear approaches frequently overlook the frequency characteristics of images, which limits their compression efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transformer-based image compression method that enhances the transformation stage by considering frequency components within the feature map. Our method integrates a novel Hybrid Spatial-Channel Attention Transformer Block (HSCATB), where a spatial-based branch independently handles high and low frequencies at the attention layer, and a Channel-aware Self-Attention (CaSA) module captures information across channels, significantly improving compression performance. Additionally, we introduce a Mixed Local-Global Feed Forward Network (MLGFFN) within the Transformer block to enhance the extraction of diverse and rich information, which is crucial for effective compression. These innovations collectively improve the transformation's ability to project data into a more decorrelated latent space, thereby boosting overall compression efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework surpasses state-of-the-art LIC methods in rate-distortion performance.

In this study, we explored whether and how area-wide air pollution affected individuals' activity participation and travel behaviors, and how these effects differed by neighborhood context. Using multi-day travel survey data provided by 403 adults from 230 households in a small urban area in northern Utah, US, we analyzed a series of 20 activity and travel outcomes. We investigated the associations of three different metrics of (measured and perceived) air quality with these outcomes, separately for residents of urban and suburban/rural neighborhoods, and controlled for personal and household characteristics. Our models found some measurable changes in activity and travel patterns on days with poor air quality. In urban areas, people engaged in more mandatory (work/school) activities, whereas there was no discernible change in suburban/rural areas. The total travel time for urban residents increased, driven by increases in trip-making and travel time by public modes (bus) and increases in travel time by private modes (car). On the other hand, suburban/rural residents traveled shorter total distances (mostly through lower vehicle miles traveled), and there was a notable uptick in the probability of being an active mode user (walk/bike). Air quality perceptions also seemed to play a role, at least for urban residents who walked/biked longer distances, rode the bus for longer distances/times, and drove fewer miles on days with worse perceived air pollution. Overall, the results are somewhat encouraging, finding more evidence of altruistic than risk-averse travel behavioral responses to episodes of area-wide air pollution; although, more research is needed.

Tomographic locality is a principle commonly used in the program of finding axioms that pick out quantum theory within the landscape of possible theories. The principle asserts the sufficiency of local measurements for achieving a tomographic characterization of any bipartite state. In this work, we explore the meaning of the principle of tomographic locality by developing a simple scheme for generating a wide variety of theories that violate the principle. In this scheme, one starts with a tomographically local theory -- which can be classical, quantum or post-quantum -- and a physical symmetry, and one restricts the processes in the theory to all and only those that are covariant with respect to the collective action of that symmetry. We refer to the resulting theories as twirled worlds. We show that failures of tomographic locality are ubiquitous in twirled worlds. From the possibility of such failures in classical twirled worlds, we argue that the failure of tomographic locality (i.e., tomographic nonlocality) does not imply ontological holism. Our results also demonstrate the need for researchers seeking to axiomatize quantum theory to take a stand on the question of whether there are superselection rules that have a fundamental status., Comment: 5+11 pages, 2 figures. Comments welcome!

Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a crucial tool in network anomaly detection (NAD) for cybersecurity. While DL models for anomaly detection excel at extracting features and learning patterns from data, they are vulnerable to data contamination -- the inadvertent inclusion of attack-related data in training sets presumed benign. This study evaluates the robustness of six unsupervised DL algorithms against data contamination using our proposed evaluation protocol. Results demonstrate significant performance degradation in state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms when exposed to contaminated data, highlighting the critical need for self-protection mechanisms in DL-based NAD models. To mitigate this vulnerability, we propose an enhanced auto-encoder with a constrained latent representation, allowing normal data to cluster more densely around a learnable center in the latent space. Our evaluation reveals that this approach exhibits improved resistance to data contamination compared to existing methods, offering a promising direction for more robust NAD systems., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.03576

The field of causal Machine Learning (ML) has made significant strides in recent years. Notable breakthroughs include methods such as meta learners (arXiv:1706.03461v6) and heterogeneous doubly robust estimators (arXiv:2004.14497) introduced in the last five years. Despite these advancements, the field still faces challenges, particularly in managing tightly coupled systems where both the causal treatment variable and a confounding covariate must serve as key decision-making indicators. This scenario is common in applications of causal ML for marketing, such as marketing segmentation and incremental marketing uplift. In this work, we present our formally proven algorithm, iterative causal segmentation, to address this issue.

Accurate detection and characterization of nanoparticles within confined spaces is crucial for applications ranging from nanofluidics to biotechnology. We present a novel approach that combines interferometric scattering (iSCAT) detection with trapping by dielectrophoresis (DEP) to achieve label-free detection of nanoparticles that are trapped and/or actuated between nano-gap electrodes. DEP utilizes the interaction between the induced dipole of the particle and the applied electric field to create a trapping potential. We demonstrate our method by trapping and label-free detection of down to 20 nm polystyrene nanoparticles. Additionally, we demonstrate that the signal-to-noise ratio of our detection can be boosted up to 20-fold by periodic actuation of the nanoparticle in the trap. This is done by a digital lock-in detection scheme on the modulated scattering signal. Our method holds promise for various applications, including assembly of nanoparticles, single-particle property analysis, and nanofluidic devices.

In contemporary society, the application of artificial intelligence for automatic food recognition offers substantial potential for nutrition tracking, reducing food waste, and enhancing productivity in food production and consumption scenarios. Modern technologies such as Computer Vision and Deep Learning are highly beneficial, enabling machines to learn automatically, thereby facilitating automatic visual recognition. Despite some research in this field, the challenge of achieving accurate automatic food recognition quickly remains a significant research gap. Some models have been developed and implemented, but maintaining high performance swiftly, with low computational cost and low access to expensive hardware accelerators, still needs further exploration and research. This study employs the pretrained MobileNetV2 model, which is efficient and fast, for food recognition on the public Food11 dataset, comprising 16643 images. It also utilizes various techniques such as dataset understanding, transfer learning, data augmentation, regularization, dynamic learning rate, hyperparameter tuning, and consideration of images in different sizes to enhance performance and robustness. These techniques aid in choosing appropriate metrics, achieving better performance, avoiding overfitting and accuracy fluctuations, speeding up the model, and increasing the generalization of findings, making the study and its results applicable to practical applications. Despite employing a light model with a simpler structure and fewer trainable parameters compared to some deep and dense models in the deep learning area, it achieved commendable accuracy in a short time. This underscores the potential for practical implementation, which is the main intention of this study.

Let ${\Bbb G}$ be a locally compact quantum group and ${\mathcal T}(L^2({\Bbb G}))$ be the Banach algebra of trace class operators on $L^2({\Bbb G})$ with the convolution induced by the right fundamental unitary of ${\Bbb G}$. We study the space of harmonic operators $\widetilde{\mathcal H}_\omega$ in ${\mathcal B}(L^2({\Bbb G}))$ associated to a contractive element $\omega\in {\mathcal T}(L^2({\Bbb G}))$. We characterize the existence of non-zero harmonic operators in ${\mathcal K}(L^2({\Bbb G}))$ and relate them with some properties of the quantum group ${\Bbb G}$, such as finiteness, amenability and co-amenability.

To safely navigate intricate real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles must be able to adapt to diverse road conditions and anticipate future events. World model (WM) based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach by learning and predicting the complex dynamics of various environments. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist an accessible platform for training and testing such algorithms in sophisticated driving environments. To fill this void, we introduce CarDreamer, the first open-source learning platform designed specifically for developing WM based autonomous driving algorithms. It comprises three key components: 1) World model backbone: CarDreamer has integrated some state-of-the-art WMs, which simplifies the reproduction of RL algorithms. The backbone is decoupled from the rest and communicates using the standard Gym interface, so that users can easily integrate and test their own algorithms. 2) Built-in tasks: CarDreamer offers a comprehensive set of highly configurable driving tasks which are compatible with Gym interfaces and are equipped with empirically optimized reward functions. 3) Task development suite: This suite streamlines the creation of driving tasks, enabling easy definition of traffic flows and vehicle routes, along with automatic collection of multi-modal observation data. A visualization server allows users to trace real-time agent driving videos and performance metrics through a browser. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments using built-in tasks to evaluate the performance and potential of WMs in autonomous driving. Thanks to the richness and flexibility of CarDreamer, we also systematically study the impact of observation modality, observability, and sharing of vehicle intentions on AV safety and efficiency. All code and documents are accessible on https://github.com/ucd-dare/CarDreamer., Comment: Dechen Gao, Shuangyu Cai, Hanchu Zhou, Hang Wang contributed equally

The Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) framework, emerging as the cornerstone for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile networks, heralds a transformative shift in radio access network architecture. As the adoption of Open RAN accelerates, ensuring its security becomes critical. The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) plays a central role in Open RAN by improving network efficiency and flexibility. Nevertheless, it also brings about potential security risks that need careful scrutiny. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate the current state of RIC security comprehensively. This assessment is essential to gain a profound understanding of the security considerations associated with RIC. This survey combines a comprehensive analysis of RAN security, tracing its evolution from 2G to 5G, with an in-depth exploration of RIC security, marking the first comprehensive examination of its kind in the literature. Real-world security incidents involving RIC are vividly illustrated, providing practical insights. The study evaluates the security implications of the RIC within the 6G Open RAN context, addressing security vulnerabilities, mitigation strategies, and potential enhancements. It aims to guide stakeholders in the telecom industry toward a secure and dependable telecommunications infrastructure. The article serves as a valuable reference, shedding light on the RIC's crucial role within the broader network infrastructure and emphasizing security's paramount importance. This survey also explores the promising security opportunities that the RIC presents for enhancing network security and resilience in the context of 6G mobile networks. It outlines open issues, lessons learned, and future research directions in the domain of intelligent control in 6G open RAN, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of this dynamic landscape., Comment: 36 pages, 14 figures, IEEE COMST (in review)

This paper aims to analyze the stochastic performance of a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system in a downlink scenario, where a base station (BS) transmits a dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) signal matrix, serving the purpose of transmitting communication data to the user while simultaneously sensing the angular location of a target. The channel between the BS and the user is modeled as a random channel with Rayleigh fading distribution, and the azimuth angle of the target is assumed to follow a uniform distribution. Due to the randomness inherent in the network, the challenge is to consider suitable performance metrics for this randomness. To address this issue, for users, we employ the user's rate outage probability (OP) and ergodic rate, while for target, we propose using the OP of the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the angle of arrival and the ergodic CRLB. We have obtained the expressions of these metrics for scenarios where the BS employs two different beamforming methods. Our approach to deriving these metrics involves computing the probability density function (PDF) of the signal-to-noise ratio for users and the CRLB for the target. We have demonstrated that the central limit theorem provides a viable approach for deriving these PDFs. In our numerical results, we demonstrate the trade-off between sensing and communication (S \& C) by characterizing the region of S \& C metrics and by obtaining the Pareto optimal boundary points, confirmed with simulations., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.15388

$^{18}$F-Fluoromisonidazole ($^{18}$F-FMISO) is a highly promising positron emission tomography radiopharmaceutical for identifying hypoxic regions in solid tumors. This research employs spatiotemporal multi-scale mathematical modeling to explore how different levels of angiogenesis influence the transport of radiopharmaceuticals within tumors. In this study, two tumor geometries with heterogeneous and uniform distributions of capillary networks were employed to incorporate varying degrees of microvascular density. The synthetic image of the heterogeneous and vascularized tumor was generated by simulating the angiogenesis process. The proposed multi-scale spatiotemporal model accounts for intricate physiological and biochemical factors within the tumor microenvironment, such as the transvascular transport of the radiopharmaceutical agent, its movement into the interstitial space by diffusion and convection mechanisms, and ultimately its uptake by tumor cells. Results showed that both quantitative and semi-quantitative metrics of $^{18}$F-FMISO uptake differ spatially and temporally at different stages during tumor growth. The presence of a high microvascular density in uniformly vascularized tumor increases cellular uptake, as it allows for more efficient release and rapid distribution of radiopharmaceutical molecules. This results in enhanced uptake compared to the heterogeneous vascularized tumor. In both heterogeneous and uniform distribution of microvessels in tumors, the diffusion transport mechanism has a more pronounced than convection. The findings of this study shed light on the transport phenomena behind $^{18}$F-FMISO radiopharmaceutical distribution and its delivery in the tumor microenvironment, aiding oncologists in their routine decision-making processes.

Plasma technology has undeniably revolutionized industrial processes in recent decades. Atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) has emerged as a prominent and widely applicable tool in various scientific disciplines. Notably, plasma-assisted flow control has become a subject of intense interest, particularly applying surface dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD) plasma actuators for aerodynamic flow control. In this study, a two-dimensional model of the SDBD plasma actuator is developed using the COMSOL Multiphysics program, incorporating air gas discharge reactions with N2/O2/Ar gases in specific ratios (0.78, 0.21, 0.01). The investigation focuses on the impact of dielectric materials (mica, silica glass, quartz, and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)) on plasma characteristics and body force within the plasma actuator under constant input parameters. Moreover, the study explores how variable pressure (760, 660, and 560 torr) in different applications influences plasma properties, ultimately affecting the magnitude of the body force in the plasma actuator. These findings contribute to optimizing plasma technology for flow control applications and enhance industrial efficiency and performance.