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Generative AI is increasingly used in learning environments, but most systems focus on generating responses rather than supporting interaction. This limitation is especially important for blind and visually impaired (BVI) learners, who rely on non-visual ways to navigate and understand programming tasks. We present findings from a co-design study with BVI high school students exploring expectations for AI assistants in expressive computer science learning. Participants described how AI could support accessible interaction, guide learning, and empower learner agency. We derive two design principles for inclusive AI assistants: (1) situated multimodal interaction and (2) scaffolded iterative interaction. These principles shift the focus from adapting outputs (e.g., audio) to designing interactions that support how learners navigate and engage in the CS learning context. Our work highlights the importance of interaction design in accessible AI and the value of involving BVI learners in the design of AI-powered educational technologies. 

Recent Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks span across a multitude of stationary and robotic devices, namely unmanned ground vehicles, surface vessels, and aerial drones, to carry out mission-critical services such as search and rescue operations, wildfire monitoring, and flood/hurricane impact assessment. Achieving communication synchrony, reliability, and minimal communication jitter among these devices is a key challenge both at the simulation and system levels of implementation due to the underpinning differences between a physics-based robot operating system (ROS) simulator that is time-based and a network-based wireless simulator that is event-based, in addition to the complex dynamics of mobile and heterogeneous IoT devices deployed in a real environment. Nevertheless, synchronization between physics (robotics) and network simulators is one of the most difficult issues to address in simulating a heterogeneous multi-robot system before transitioning it into practice. The existing TCP/IP communication protocol-based synchronizing middleware mostly relied on Robot Operating System 1 (ROS1), which expends a significant portion of communication bandwidth and time due to its master-based architecture. To address these issues, we design a novel synchronizing middleware between robotics and traditional wireless network simulators, relying on the newly released real-time ROS2 architecture with a master-less packet discovery mechanism. Additionally, we propose a ground and aerial agents’ velocity-aware customized QoS policy for Data Distribution Service (DDS) to minimize the packet loss and transmission latency between a diverse set of robotic agents, and we offer the theoretical guarantee of our proposed QoS policy. We performed extensive network performance evaluations both at the simulation and system levels in terms of packet loss probability and average latency with line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and TCP/UDP communication protocols over our proposed ROS2-based synchronization middleware. Moreover, for a comparative study, we presented a detailed ablation study replacing NS-3 with a real-time wireless network simulator, EMANE, and masterless ROS2 with master-based ROS1. Our proposed middleware attests to the promise of building a largescale IoT infrastructure with a diverse set of stationary and robotic devices that achieve low-latency communications (12% and 11% reduction in simulation and reality, respectively) while satisfying the reliability (10% and 15% packet loss reduction in simulation and reality, respectively) and high-fidelity requirements of mission-critical applications. 

We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time—an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society to society. Thus, to develop policies that favor the sustained use of resources, we must understand the processes that cause the synchrony of human populations. To date, it is not clear whether human societies display long-term synchrony or, if they do, the poten- tial causes. Our analysis begins to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the long-term synchrony of human societies, and we hypothesize that the synchrony of human populations results from (i) the creation of social ties that couple populations over smaller scales and (ii) much larger scale, globally convergent tra- jectories of cultural evolution toward more energy-consuming political economies with higher carrying capacities. Our results suggest that the process of globalization is a natural consequence of evolutionary trajectories that increase the carrying capacities of human societies. 

A new technique is developed to identify dielectrons ( $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ ) with Lorentz boost ${\gamma }_{\mathrm{L}}>20$ that produce one single merged cluster in the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS detector. The identification uses two multivariate models: one for the case where both electron tracks are reconstructed, and another where only one of the tracks is reconstructed. The efficiency is determined using proton-proton collision data collected at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. Boosted $J/\psi$ mesons decaying into $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ pairs are used to estimate the efficiency of the model with two tracks, yielding an overall efficiency of 80%. The $Z\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}\gamma$ events, where the photon converts into a collimated dielectron, are used for the model with a single track, yielding an efficiency of about 60%. A dedicated energy correction for dielectron candidates is also developed using $B^{\pm }\to J/\psi K^{\pm }\to e^{+}{e}^{-}{K}^{\pm }$ data. 

A search for Higgs boson ( $H$ ) production in association with two vector bosons ( $V=W$ , $Z$ ) via vector-boson scattering (VBS) is presented using proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$ by the CMS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $138{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ . Events containing two forward jets consistent with VBS, a large-radius jet from the decay of a boosted $H$ to a pair of $b$ quarks, and zero, one, or two charged leptons coming from $V$ decays are selected. The process is excluded at 95% confidence level for observed (expected) values of the $VVHH$ coupling modifier ${\kappa }_{2V}$ outside the interval $0.40<{\kappa }_{2V}<1.60$ ( $0.34<{\kappa }_{2V}<1.66$ ), assuming standard model values for all other couplings, thus establishing a novel probe of the $VVHH$ interaction. Constraints are also set on the individual ${\kappa }_{2W}$ and ${\kappa }_{2Z}$ coupling modifiers and on the allowed region in the ${\kappa }_{2W}\text{−}{\kappa }_{2Z}$ plane. 

Evidence of the production of two $Z$ bosons and a photon in proton-proton collisions is reported for the first time in CMS. The analysis uses data collected by the CMS experiment between 2016 and 2018 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $138{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ . Evidence for the process $pp\to ZZ\gamma \to 4\ell \gamma$ ( $\ell =e$ , $\mu$ ), with an observed (expected) significance of 3.7 (3.1) standard deviations in a fiducial region defined by $p_{\mathrm{T}}^{\gamma }>20\mathrm{GeV}$ , $\left|{\eta }^{\gamma }\right|<2.4$ , $\mathrm{\Delta }R(\ell ,\gamma )>0.5$ , $m_Z$ between 60 and 120 GeV, and the invariant mass of either of the two $Z$ bosons combined with the photon ( $m_{Z_{\gamma }}$ ) larger than 100 GeV, is reported. The measured (predicted) fiducial cross section is ${60}_{-22}^{+27}\mathrm{ab}$ ( $47.56\pm 0.04\mathrm{ab}$ ). Additionally, the inclusive production of $pp\to 4\ell \gamma$ is studied by removing the $m_{Z_{\gamma }}$ requirement to include final state radiation where one $Z$ boson decays to $2\ell \gamma$ , yielding an observed (expected) significance of 5.0 (4.2) standard deviations and a measured (predicted) fiducial cross section of ${156}_{-35}^{+39}\mathrm{ab}$ ( $99.97\pm 0.09\mathrm{ab}$ ). 

The existence of a new spin-zero particle with a mass below the electroweak scale is predicted by several theoretical models. Searches for resonant production of photon pairs at the LHC are able to probe these models. We present a search for a narrow resonance produced through gluon fusion that decays into a pair of photons with an invariant mass between 10 and 70 GeV, using a proton-proton collision dataset from the CMS experiment. This dataset, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $54.4{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ , was recorded in 2018 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV using a newly introduced diphoton trigger that enabled exploration of the low-mass diphoton spectrum. No significant excess above the expected background is observed. Upper limits are set on the product of the gluon fusion production cross section and the branching fraction of the diphoton decay of a narrow resonance. An interpretation of these limits within an effective field theory framework for axionlike particles is also provided.