Abstract

The ability of students to read, understand and explain code is tightly interlinked to their ability to trace. Multiple studies have shown that tracing helps students improve their comprehension of code. Analysis of the traces also provides insight into student misconceptions about program execution. We are interested in exploring pen-and-paper activities related to tracing control-flow. While the literature presents several tracing methodologies, existing pen-and-paper activities prioritise tracking the values of variables as they change throughout the program; control-flow is not adequately addressed. To fill this gap, we propose a comprehensive suite of class activities around control-flow of programs and report our experience deploying it in a first-year university programming course. In these activities, students construct six hand-drawn artefacts representing the static and dynamic aspects of a program's control-flow. We use a simplified subset of Python that includes sequential, conditional, iterative and (first-order) procedural control. We chose this subset to match the syllabus of the introduction to computer programming course of our university. We report the results of a preliminary study conducted to explore the feasibility of constructing the artefacts. Most students correctly understood the structure of the artefacts. We also report what these artefacts revealed about students' misconceptions related to control-flow in programs. Students had difficulty identifying the destination of a procedure call and its return. A significant number of their misconceptions were related to transfer of control when encountering errors.

Abstract

Dynamic scene rendering and reconstruction play a crucial role in computer vision and augmented reality. Recent methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have enabled accurate modeling of dynamic urban scenes, but for urban scenes they require both camera and LiDAR data, ground-truth 3D segmentations and motion data in the form of tracklets or pre-defined object templates such as SMPL. In this work, we explore whether a combination of 2D object agnostic priors in the form of depth and point tracking coupled with a signed distance function (SDF) representation for dynamic objects can be used to relax some of these requirements. We present a novel approach that integrates Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to create a more robust object representation by harnessing the strengths of both methods. Our unified optimization framework enhances the geometric accuracy of 3D Gaussian splatting and improves deformation modeling within the SDF, resulting in a more adaptable and precise representation. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in rendering metrics even without LiDAR data on urban scenes. When incorporating LiDAR, our approach improved further in reconstructing and generating novel views across diverse object categories, without ground-truth 3D motion annotation. Additionally, our method enables various scene editing tasks, including scene decomposition, and scene composition.

Abstract

In the circuit model of quantum computing, amplitude amplification techniques can be used to find solutions to NP-hard problems defined on n-bits in time poly(n)2^{n/2}. In this work, we investigate whether such general statements can be made for adiabatic quantum optimization, as provable results regarding its performance are mostly unknown. Although a lower bound of Ω(2^{n/2})has existed in such a setting for over a decade, a purely adiabatic algorithm with this running time has been absent. We show that adiabatic quantum optimization using an unstructured search approach results in a running time that matches this lower bound (up to a polylogarithmic factor) for a broad class of classical local spin Hamiltonians. For this, it is necessary to bound the spectral gap throughout the adiabatic evolution and compute beforehand the position of the avoided crossing with sufficient precision so as to adapt the adiabatic schedule accordingly. However, we show that the position of the avoided crossing is approximately given by a quantity that depends on the degeneracies and inverse gaps of the problem Hamiltonian and is NP-hard to compute even within a low additive precision. Furthermore, computing it exactly (or nearly exactly) is #P-hard. Our work indicates a possible limitation of adiabatic quantum optimization algorithms, leaving open the question of whether provable Grover-like speed-ups can be obtained for any optimization problem using this approach.

Abstract

Data science and artificial intelligence (DSAI) based methods can process massive amounts of data to extract useful knowledge and can be employed to build decision support systems in various domains. Like other domains, the legal systems in several countries are being digitized and there is a scope to build DSAI-based frameworks to improve the performance of legal systems. In the literature, research efforts are being made to investigate DSAI-based methods to improve justice delivery. The Indian legal system is currently experiencing a major problem with a substantial backlog of cases. This paper provides an overview of DSAI-based efforts in the legal domain related to India. We also listed potential research issues to be explored. We hope the issues will encourage further research to improve justice delivery performance in India and other countries.

Abstract

Dysarthric speech poses significant challenges in developing as- sistive technologies, primarily due to the limited availability of data. Recent advances in neural speech synthesis, especially zero-shot voice cloning, facilitate synthetic speech generation for data augmentation; however, they may introduce biases to- wards dysarthric speech. In this paper, we investigate the effec- tiveness of state-of-the-art F5-TTS in cloning dysarthric speech using TORGO dataset, focusing on intelligibility, speaker sim- ilarity, and prosody preservation. We also analyze potential biases using fairness metrics like Disparate Impact and Parity Difference to assess disparities across dysarthric severity lev- els. Results show that F5-TTS exhibits a strong bias toward speech intelligibility over speaker and prosody preservation in dysarthric speech synthesis. Insights from this study can help integrate fairness-aware dysarthric speech synthesis, fostering the advancement of more inclusive speech technologies.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Transformer (XFMR) design intended for integrated millimeter-wave (mmWave) applications. The XFMR consists of an 8-shaped primary inductor and a dumbbell-shaped secondary inductor. This structure addresses key challenges in on-chip XFMR design by improving electromagnetic interference (EMI) suppression, reducing unwanted signal coupling, and optimizing magnetic field symmetry. Additionally, the geometry enables better layout efficiency and isolation, contributing to improved performance in tightly integrated environments. To demonstrate the practical advantages of the proposed XFMR, it is implemented in a low-voltage, low-phase-noise (PN) LC VCO designed for 23.8-27.2 GHz operation. Simulation results in TSMC 65~nm CMOS technology show a tuning range of 3.4~GHz, a PN lesser than −110 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, and a figure-of-merit (FoM) greater than 186 dBc/Hz, at 0.6 V supply. These results validate the effectiveness of the XFMR in enhancing VCO performance, highlighting its potential for use in high-performance mmWave design.

Abstract

Recent progress and development of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques have enabled addressing complex biomolecular problems. AI/ML models learn the underlying distribution of data they are trained on and when exposed to new inputs, they make predictions based on patterns and relationships previously observed in the training set. Further, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can be used to accurately generate protein structure or sequence from specific selected properties. This review specifically focuses on the applications of AI/ML in predicting important functional properties of proteins, and the potential prospects of reverse-engineering in depicting the sequence and structure, from available protein-property information.

Abstract

Motorized two-wheelers (MTW) dominate Indian road but remain underrepresented in driver behavior research. This study presents the first large-scale analysis of MTW driver gaze behavior in naturalistic, heterogeneous urban traffic, using the myEye2Wheeler dataset. A semantic segmentation pipeline (YOLOv11 + SAM2) was used to extract object-level gaze metrics under two attention modes: direct gaze (foveal overlap) and central vision (parafoveal monitoring). Results reveal a functional division: central vision supports broad monitoring, while direct gaze enables brief, selective sampling. Novice riders exhibit road-anchored scanning, returning to the road between object fixations, while experienced riders form longer chains of attention across multiple objects. The findings suggest that experience primarily refines temporal rhythm rather than altering allocation strategy and reduces object-class effects in gaze patterns. These findings offer new insight into MTW attention structures and inform future work on behavior modeling and safety systems.

Abstract

This paper presents an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled system that utilizes machine learning (ML) techniques to estimate the water flow in pipelines based on multi-modal sensor data. Traditional methods of water flow monitoring, mainly digital water flow meters, are prohibitively expensive, making largescale deployments challenging. To address this, an alternative has been proposed that leverages the correlation between water flow rate, motor current consumption, and pipeline pressure. Current consumption data of water motors has been integrated with pipeline pressure data to develop ML-based solutions that estimate the value of water flow without directly measuring it. The proposed approach enables digital flow monitoring at a fraction of the cost of conventional digital flow meters while offering high time granularity and accuracy, making it a scalable and practical solution for smart water management in diverse settings. The system’s robustness has been demonstrated by testing the model against erasures in the data.

Abstract

Cloud-based storage service has emerged as a promising alternative to managing local storage, offering users additional features, such as storage, backup, and restoration of various resources, including software, applications, and sensitive private information, within a virtual database, while ensuring data confidentiality and security. However, the widespread use of cloud services by individuals and organisations raises concerns regarding user accessibility and data security due to increasing social threats and adversarial attacks. Searchable encryption (SE) has been introduced to address these issues, providing a secure environment for a convenient and effective way of data searching and sharing. SE models have been advanced by integrating blockchain functionalities to tackle certain existing vulnerabilities and enhance user accessibility, data privacy, and integrity. This survey work explores various research works on SE techniques leveraging cloud and blockchain functionalities, discussing and categorizing the diverse approaches based on different criteria. This study also discusses the different enhancements made to SE techniques over the years, including the underlying requirements that led to the inclusion of blockchain functionalities. Moreover, this study provides a comparative analysis of existing survey works done in this area, which highlights a lack of recent literature surveys that thoroughly explore blockchain-based public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) schemes. Particularly, we delve into the technical aspects of PEKS by classifying, analyzing and comparing different functionalities based on various aspects. The survey concludes with a comparative analysis of existing PEKS solutions and a discussion on identified research gaps, aiming to improve future research on PEKS approaches in this emerging field.