Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do

In recent years, electricity suppliers have installed millions of smart meters worldwide to improve the management of the smart grid system. These meters collect a large amount of electrical consumption data to produce valuable information to help consumers reduce their electricity footprint. However, having non-expert users (e.g., consumers or sales advisors) understand these data and derive usage patterns for different appliances has become a significant challenge for electricity suppliers because these data record the aggregated behavior of all appliances. At the same time, ground-truth labels (which could train appliance detection and localization models) are expensive to collect and extremely scarce in practice. This paper introduces DeviceScope, an interactive tool designed to facilitate understanding smart meter data by detecting and localizing individual appliance patterns within a given time period. Our system is based on CamAL (Class Activation Map-based Appliance Localization), a novel weakly supervised approach for appliance localization that only requires the knowledge of the existence of an appliance in a household to be trained. This paper appeared in ICDE 2025.

From Transformers to Large Language Models: A systematic review of AI applications in the energy sector towards Agentic Digital Twins

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long promised to improve energy management in smart grids by enhancing situational awareness and supporting more effective decision-making. While traditional machine learning has demonstrated notable results in forecasting and optimization, it often struggles with generalization, situational awareness, and heterogeneous data integration. Recent advances in foundation models such as Transformer architecture and Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved capabilities in modelling complex temporal and contextual relationships, as well as in multi-modal data fusion which is essential for most AI applications in the energy sector. In this review we synthesize the rapid expanding field of AI applications in the energy domain focusing on Transformers and LLMs. We examine the architectural foundations, domain-specific adaptations and practical implementations of transformer models across various forecasting and grid management tasks. We then explore the emerging role of LLMs in the field: adaptation and fine tuning for the energy sector, the type of tasks they are suited for, and the new challenges they introduce. Along the way, we highlight practical implementations, innovations, and areas where the research frontier is rapidly expanding. These recent developments reviewed underscore a broader trend: Generative AI (GenAI) is beginning to augment decision-making not only in high-level planning but also in day-to-day operations, from forecasting and grid balancing to workforce training and asset onboarding. Building on these developments, we introduce the concept of the Agentic Digital Twin, a next-generation model that integrates LLMs to bring autonomy, proactivity, and social interaction into digital twin-based energy management systems.

Universal Differential Equations for Scientific Machine Learning of Node-Wise Battery Dynamics in Smart Grids

Universal Differential Equations (UDEs), which blend neural networks with physical differential equations, have emerged as a powerful framework for scientific machine learning (SciML), enabling data-efficient, interpretable, and physically consistent modeling. In the context of smart grid systems, modeling node-wise battery dynamics remains a challenge due to the stochasticity of solar input and variability in household load profiles. Traditional approaches often struggle with generalization and fail to capture unmodeled residual dynamics. This work proposes a UDE-based approach to learn node-specific battery evolution by embedding a neural residual into a physically inspired battery ODE. Synthetic yet realistic solar generation and load demand data are used to simulate battery dynamics over time. The neural component learns to model unobserved or stochastic corrections arising from heterogeneity in node demand and environmental conditions. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the trained UDE aligns closely with ground truth battery trajectories, exhibits smooth convergence behavior, and maintains stability in long-term forecasts. These findings affirm the viability of UDE-based SciML approaches for battery modeling in decentralized energy networks and suggest broader implications for real-time control and optimization in renewable-integrated smart grids.

Variational Autoencoder-Based Approach to Latent Feature Analysis on Efficient Representation of Power Load Monitoring Data

With the development of smart grids, High-Dimensional and Incomplete (HDI) Power Load Monitoring (PLM) data challenges the performance of Power Load Forecasting (PLF) models. In this paper, we propose a potential characterization model VAE-LF based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for efficiently representing and complementing PLM missing data. VAE-LF learns a low-dimensional latent representation of the data using an Encoder-Decoder structure by splitting the HDI PLM data into vectors and feeding them sequentially into the VAE-LF model, and generates the complementary data. Experiments on the UK-DALE dataset show that VAE-LF outperforms other benchmark models in both 5% and 10% sparsity test cases, with significantly lower RMSE and MAE, and especially outperforms on low sparsity ratio data. The method provides an efficient data-completion solution for electric load management in smart grids.

Benchmarking Pre-Trained Time Series Models for Electricity Price Forecasting

Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is crucial for effective decision-making in power trading on the spot market. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have inspired the development of numerous time series foundation models (TSFMs) for time series forecasting, their effectiveness in EPF remains uncertain. To address this gap, we benchmark several state-of-the-art pretrained models--Chronos-Bolt, Chronos-T5, TimesFM, Moirai, Time-MoE, and TimeGPT--against established statistical and machine learning (ML) methods for EPF. Using 2024 day-ahead auction (DAA) electricity prices from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium, we generate daily forecasts with a one-day horizon. Chronos-Bolt and Time-MoE emerge as the strongest among the TSFMs, performing on par with traditional models. However, the biseasonal MSTL model, which captures daily and weekly seasonality, stands out for its consistent performance across countries and evaluation metrics, with no TSFM statistically outperforming it.

Federated Learning for Smart Grid: A Survey on Applications and Potential Vulnerabilities

The Smart Grid (SG) is a critical energy infrastructure that collects real-time electricity usage data to forecast future energy demands using information and communication technologies (ICT). Due to growing concerns about data security and privacy in SGs, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising training framework. FL offers a balance between privacy, efficiency, and accuracy in SGs by enabling collaborative model training without sharing private data from IoT devices. In this survey, we thoroughly review recent advancements in designing FL-based SG systems across three stages: generation, transmission and distribution, and consumption. Additionally, we explore potential vulnerabilities that may arise when implementing FL in these stages. Furthermore, we discuss the gap between state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL research and its practical applications in SGs, and we propose future research directions. Unlike traditional surveys addressing security issues in centralized machine learning methods for SG systems, this survey is the first to specifically examine the applications and security concerns unique to FL-based SG systems. We also introduce FedGridShield, an open-source framework featuring implementations of SOTA attack and defense methods. Our aim is to inspire further research into applications and improvements in the robustness of FL-based SG systems.

Real-Time Cascade Mitigation in Power Systems Using Influence Graph Improved by Reinforcement Learning

Despite high reliability, modern power systems with growing renewable penetration face an increasing risk of cascading outages. Real-time cascade mitigation requires fast, complex operational decisions under uncertainty. In this work, we extend the influence graph into a Markov decision process model (MDP) for real-time mitigation of cascading outages in power transmission systems, accounting for uncertainties in generation, load, and initial contingencies. The MDP includes a do-nothing action to allow for conservative decision-making and is solved using reinforcement learning. We present a policy gradient learning algorithm initialized with a policy corresponding to the unmitigated case and designed to handle invalid actions. The proposed learning method converges faster than the conventional algorithm. Through careful reward design, we learn a policy that takes conservative actions without deteriorating system conditions. The model is validated on the IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems. The results show that proactive line disconnections can effectively reduce cascading risk, and certain lines consistently emerge as critical in mitigating cascade propagation.

Advances in AI portend a new era of sophisticated disinformation operations. While individual AI systems already create convincing -- and at times misleading -- information, an imminent development is the emergence of malicious AI swarms. These systems can coordinate covertly, infiltrate communities, evade traditional detectors, and run continuous A/B tests, with round-the-clock persistence. The result can include fabricated grassroots consensus, fragmented shared reality, mass harassment, voter micro-suppression or mobilization, contamination of AI training data, and erosion of institutional trust. With democratic processes worldwide increasingly vulnerable, we urge a three-pronged response: (1) platform-side defenses -- always-on swarm-detection dashboards, pre-election high-fidelity swarm-simulation stress-tests, transparency audits, and optional client-side "AI shields" for users; (2) model-side safeguards -- standardized persuasion-risk tests, provenance-authenticating passkeys, and watermarking; and (3) system-level oversight -- a UN-backed AI Influence Observatory.

Real-world time series are often governed by complex nonlinear dynamics. Understanding these underlying dynamics is crucial for precise future prediction. While deep learning has achieved major success in time series forecasting, many existing approaches do not explicitly model the dynamics. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepEDM, a framework that integrates nonlinear dynamical systems modeling with deep neural networks. Inspired by empirical dynamic modeling (EDM) and rooted in Takens' theorem, DeepEDM presents a novel deep model that learns a latent space from time-delayed embeddings, and employs kernel regression to approximate the underlying dynamics, while leveraging efficient implementation of softmax attention and allowing for accurate prediction of future time steps. To evaluate our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments on synthetic data of nonlinear dynamical systems as well as real-world time series across domains. Our results show that DeepEDM is robust to input noise, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in forecasting accuracy.

TimeRecipe: A Time-Series Forecasting Recipe via Benchmarking Module Level Effectiveness

Time-series forecasting is an essential task with wide real-world applications across domains. While recent advances in deep learning have enabled time-series forecasting models with accurate predictions, there remains considerable debate over which architectures and design components, such as series decomposition or normalization, are most effective under varying conditions. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate models at a high level, offering limited insight into why certain designs work better. To mitigate this gap, we propose TimeRecipe, a unified benchmarking framework that systematically evaluates time-series forecasting methods at the module level. TimeRecipe conducts over 10,000 experiments to assess the effectiveness of individual components across a diverse range of datasets, forecasting horizons, and task settings. Our results reveal that exhaustive exploration of the design space can yield models that outperform existing state-of-the-art methods and uncover meaningful intuitions linking specific design choices to forecasting scenarios. Furthermore, we release a practical toolkit within TimeRecipe that recommends suitable model architectures based on these empirical insights. The benchmark is available at github.

Malicious node aware wireless multi hop networks: a systematic review of the literature and recommendations for future research

Wireless communication provides great advantages that are not available through their wired counterparts such as flexibility, ease of deployment and use, cost reductions, and convenience. Wireless multi-hop networks (WMN) do not have any centralized management infrastructure. Wireless multi-hop networks have many benefits since proposed. In such networks when a node wants to send a packet to a destination where is not in the transmission range, depend on some intermediate nodes. In this type of networks packet sending is in the form of multiple hop until destination and this work is dynamic. Lack of centralized management cause that some nodes show malicious function. Malicious nodes are that receive packets and drop them maliciously. These malicious nodes could have many reasons such as hardware failure, software failure or lack of power. Such nodes make multiple packets drop from the network and the performance of network strongly decreases. As a result, the throughput of the network decrease, increase end-to-end delay and increase overhead. Therefore, we must aware from presence of malicious node in the network and do routing based on this awareness. Therefore, this paper aims to study and review the present malicious node detection methods that proposed in literatures. We categorized networks in groups, including ad hoc networks, MANET, DTN, Opportunistic networks, WSN, VANET and other wireless networks and compare malicious node detection met

Some notes in trying to eliminate the brunt of the log level spamming. The entries seem to occur primarily when switching virtual desktops. And also when alt-tabbing between windows.

Current logging level can be determined with (this is after I made changes, some lines have been removed for succinctness):

root@x670e:/home/rpb# systemctl --user show plasma-kwin_wayland | grep -i log
SyslogPriority=30
SyslogLevelPrefix=yes
SyslogLevel=6
SyslogFacility=3
LogLevelMax=5
DropInPaths=/usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kwin_wayland.service.d/log.conf

A change to the logging level can be made with (doesn't seem to totally work. but was worth a try):

mkdir /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kwin_wayland.service.d

cat > /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kwin_wayland.service.d/log.conf << EOF
[Service]
LogLevelMax=warning
StandardOutput=null
EOF

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl --user daemon-reload
# optional, close all work, as this resets the gui session:
systemctl --user restart plasma-kwin_wayland

Hints of a solution are at kwin_wayland spamming journal with GPU info.

Check to see if the file was included with:

systemctl --user cat plasma-kwin_wayland 

Logging destination can be checked with:

 systemctl --user show plasma-kwin_wayland | grep Standard
StandardInput=null
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=inherit

Package: rtkit (0.13-5.1 and others) describes trkit-daemon as:

RealtimeKit is a D-Bus system service that changes the scheduling policy of user processes/threads to SCHED_RR (i.e. realtime scheduling mode) on request. It is intended to be used as a secure mechanism to allow real-time scheduling to be used by normal user processes.

The control file is located at /usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service. Additional configurations can be supplied via .conf files in /usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d.

In Debian, logging for rtkit-daemon has not been specifically specified.

Based upon notes at Stop rtkit-daemon from spamming logs with "Supervising X threads of Y processes of Z users", the solution is simply to set the logging level.

mkdir /usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d

cat > /usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service.d/log.conf << EOF
[Service]
LogLevelMax=info
EOF

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart rtkit-daemon.service

Since the message is of level debuginfo, logging level info should eliminate most of the spam.

Logging level is a numeric value based upon the following list:

• 0 or emergency, (highest priority messages)
• 1 or alert,
• 2 or critical,
• 3 or error,
• 4 or warning,
• 5 or notice,
• 6 or info
• 7 or debuginfo (lowest priority messages)

Note: if no loglevel is specified in whatever systemd service .conf file, the loglevel of the daemon defaults to 7, in other words allowing the highest level of verbosity (which confirms my earlier statement). More details can be founrd in systemd.exec — Execution environment configuration.

There is an outstanding bug in Debian. Continue reading "rtkit-daemon[<pid>]: Supervising..." »

When starting out in automating processes and functions in infrastructure management and software deployment, typically much time is spent in putting the nuts and bolts of the system together through declarative commands from such tools as Ansible or Terraform.

Once typical patterns have been encountered and documented, an additional level of abstraction can be used to manage the intent of these deployments. Rather than building single-purpose scripts to handle individual elements, these purpose built patterns can be aggregated (like subroutines) to start to assemble and configure multiple integrated components of infrastructure.

These assemblies can then be used to ensure that test scenarios are consistent across pre-prod environments such as development, quality assurance, performance optimization and on into production.

High level abstraction designs become the defacto documentation for how something is built.

Network Automation Is More than Just Ansible

Start at the Beginning-Automating Network Design: Claudia de Luna’s AutoCon3 Opening Keynote Summary

Some tabs I've had open for too many years, need to clean up, but thought important enough that I might come back to them.

• Linux sysctl - tutorial shows where some of the most used and quoted sysctl/network parameters are located into the Linux network flow
• A deep dive into Linux namespaces, part 4 (ifeanyi.co) - A deep dive into Linux namespaces - in multiple parts - A Linux namespace is an abstraction over resources in the operating system. We can think of a namespace as a box. Inside this box are these system resources, which ones exactly depend on the box’s (namespace’s) type. There are currently 7 types of namespaces Cgroup, IPC, Network, Mount, PID, User, UTS.
• Making containers safer - different kernel mechanisms that can be used to make containers more secure and provided some recommendations
• How To Show Available WiFi Networks, Their Channels, Signal Strength And More From The Command Line - starting point: How to Show Available WiFi Networks on Linux from the Command Line (linuxuprising.com) - eg

  nmcli -f ALL dev wifi

  horst

• Hacking Reolink cameras for fun and profit - binwalk, strace, wireshark, ghidra, gdb, busybox, baichuan protocol, ...
• Reverse engineering my router's firmware with binwalk (embeddedbits.org) - hackernews
• Firefox Multi-Account Containers
• I2C in a Nutshell (memfault.com) - hackernews, I2C in a Nutshell - content
• This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server” (twitter.com/poa_nyc) - hackernews
• lobster network summary
• Linux Performance: Almost Always Add Swap Space – Part 2: ZRAM
• how Linux keeps time - and how to use it
• OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming (obsproject.com) - hackernews
• Intel Virtualisation: How VT-X, KVM and QEMU Work Together (binarydebt.wordpress.com) - hackernews, Binary Debt

A Two-Staged LLM-Based Framework for CI/CD Failure Detection and Remediation with Industrial Validation

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are pivotal to modern software engineering, yet diagnosing and resolving their failures remains a complex and labor-intensive challenge. In this paper, we present LogSage, the first end-to-end LLM-powered framework that performs root cause analysis and solution generation from failed CI/CD pipeline logs. During the root cause analysis stage, LogSage employs a specialized log preprocessing pipeline tailored for LLMs, which extracts critical error logs and eliminates noise to enhance the precision of LLM-driven root cause analysis. In the solution generation stage, LogSage leverages RAG to integrate historical resolution strategies and utilizes tool-calling to deliver actionable, automated fixes. We evaluated the root cause analysis stage using a newly curated open-source dataset, achieving 98\% in precision and 12\% improvement over naively designed LLM-based log analysis baselines, while attaining near-perfect recall. The end-to-end system was rigorously validated in a large-scale industrial CI/CD environment of production quality, processing more than 3,000 executions daily and accumulating more than 1.07 million executions in its first year of deployment, with end-to-end precision exceeding 88\%. These two forms of evaluation confirm that LogSage providing a scalable and practical solution to manage CI/CD pipeline failures in real-world DevOps workflows.

Grasp2Grasp: Vision-Based Dexterous Grasp Translation via Schrodinger Bridges

We propose a new approach to vision-based dexterous grasp translation, which aims to transfer grasp intent across robotic hands with differing morphologies. Given a visual observation of a source hand grasping an object, our goal is to synthesize a functionally equivalent grasp for a target hand without requiring paired demonstrations or hand-specific simulations. We frame this problem as a stochastic transport between grasp distributions using the Schr\"odinger Bridge formalism. Our method learns to map between source and target latent grasp spaces via score and flow matching, conditioned on visual observations. To guide this translation, we introduce physics-informed cost functions that encode alignment in base pose, contact maps, wrench space, and manipulability. Experiments across diverse hand-object pairs demonstrate our approach generates stable, physically grounded grasps with strong generalization. This work enables semantic grasp transfer for heterogeneous manipulators and bridges vision-based grasping with probabilistic generative modeling.

Learning to Hear Broken Motors: Signature-Guided Data Augmentation for Induction-Motor Diagnostics

The application of machine learning (ML) algorithms in the intelligent diagnosis of three-phase engines has the potential to significantly enhance diagnostic performance and accuracy. Traditional methods largely rely on signature analysis, which, despite being a standard practice, can benefit from the integration of advanced ML techniques. In our study, we innovate by combining ML algorithms with a novel unsupervised anomaly generation methodology that takes into account the engine physics model. We propose Signature-Guided Data Augmentation (SGDA), an unsupervised framework that synthesizes physically plausible faults directly in the frequency domain of healthy current signals. Guided by Motor Current Signature Analysis, SGDA creates diverse and realistic anomalies without resorting to computationally intensive simulations. This hybrid approach leverages the strengths of both supervised ML and unsupervised signature analysis, achieving superior diagnostic accuracy and reliability along with wide industrial application. The findings highlight the potential of our approach to contribute significantly to the field of engine diagnostics, offering a robust and efficient solution for real-world applications.

Experimental Covert Communication Using Software-Defined Radio

The fundamental information-theoretic limits of covert, or low probability of detection (LPD), communication have been extensively studied for over a decade, resulting in the square root law (SRL): only $L\sqrt{n}$ covert bits can be reliably transmitted over time-bandwidth product $n$, for constant $L>0$. Transmitting more either results in detection or decoding errors. The SRL imposes significant constraints on hardware realization of provably-secure covert communication. Thus, experimental validation of covert communication is underexplored: to date, only two experimental studies of SRL-based covert communication are available, both focusing on optical channels. Here, we report our initial results demonstrating the provably-secure covert radio-frequency (RF) communication using software-defined radios (SDRs). These validate theoretical predictions, open practical avenues for implementing covert communication systems, as well as raise future research questions.

Automatic Stage Lighting Control: Is it a Rule-Driven Process or Generative Task?

Stage lighting plays an essential role in live music performances, influencing the engaging experience of both musicians and audiences. Given the high costs associated with hiring or training professional lighting engineers, Automatic Stage Lighting Control (ASLC) has gained increasing attention. However, most existing approaches only classify music into limited categories and map them to predefined light patterns, resulting in formulaic and monotonous outcomes that lack rationality. To address this issue, this paper presents an end-to-end solution that directly learns from experienced lighting engineers -- Skip-BART. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to conceptualize ASLC as a generative task rather than merely a classification problem. Our method modifies the BART model to take audio music as input and produce light hue and value (intensity) as output, incorporating a novel skip connection mechanism to enhance the relationship between music and light within the frame grid.We validate our method through both quantitative analysis and an human evaluation, demonstrating that Skip-BART outperforms conventional rule-based methods across all evaluation metrics and shows only a limited gap compared to real lighting engineers.Specifically, our method yields a p-value of 0.72 in a statistical comparison based on human evaluations with human lighting engineers, suggesting that the proposed approach closely matches human lighting engineering performance. To support further research, we have made our self-collected dataset, code, and trained model parameters available at github: Skip-BART

Regulatory Graphs and GenAI for Real-Time Transaction Monitoring and Compliance Explanation in Banking

This paper presents a real-time transaction monitoring framework that integrates graph-based modeling, narrative field embedding, and generative explanation to support automated financial compliance. The system constructs dynamic transaction graphs, extracts structural and contextual features, and classifies suspicious behavior using a graph neural network. A retrieval-augmented generation module generates natural language explanations aligned with regulatory clauses for each flagged transaction. Experiments conducted on a simulated stream of financial data show that the proposed method achieves superior results, with 98.2% F1-score, 97.8% precision, and 97.0% recall. Expert evaluation further confirms the quality and interpretability of generated justifications. The findings demonstrate the potential of combining graph intelligence and generative models to support explainable, audit-ready compliance in high-risk financial environments.

Cluster-Aware Causal Mixer for Online Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series

Early and accurate detection of anomalies in time series data is critical, given the significant risks associated with false or missed detections. While MLP-based mixer models have shown promise in time series analysis, they lack a causality mechanism to preserve temporal dependencies inherent in the system. Moreover, real-world multivariate time series often contain numerous channels with diverse inter-channel correlations. A single embedding mechanism for all channels does not effectively capture these complex relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cluster-aware causal mixer to effectively detect anomalies in multivariate time series. Our model groups channels into clusters based on their correlations, with each cluster processed through a dedicated embedding layer. In addition, we introduce a causal mixer in our model, which mixes the information while maintaining causality. Furthermore, we present an anomaly detection framework that accumulates the anomaly evidence over time to prevent false positives due to nominal outliers. Our proposed model operates in an online fashion, making it suitable for real-time time-series anomaly detection tasks. Experimental evaluations across six public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently achieves superior F1 scores.

Deep Learning Enhanced Multi-Day Turnover Quantitative Trading Algorithm for Chinese A-Share Market

This paper presents a sophisticated multi-day turnover quantitative trading algorithm that integrates advanced deep learning techniques with comprehensive cross-sectional stock prediction for the Chinese A-share market. Our framework combines five interconnected modules: initial stock selection through deep cross-sectional prediction networks, opening signal distribution analysis using mixture models for arbitrage identification, market capitalization and liquidity-based dynamic position sizing, grid-search optimized profit-taking and stop-loss mechanisms, and multi-granularity volatility-based market timing models. The algorithm employs a novel approach to balance capital efficiency with risk management through adaptive holding periods and sophisticated entry/exit timing. Trained on comprehensive A-share data from 2010-2020 and rigorously backtested on 2021-2024 data, our method achieves remarkable performance with 15.2\% annualized returns, maximum drawdown constrained below 5\%, and a Sharpe ratio of 1.87. The strategy demonstrates exceptional scalability by maintaining 50-100 daily positions with a 9-day maximum holding period, incorporating dynamic profit-taking and stop-loss mechanisms that enhance capital turnover efficiency while preserving risk-adjusted returns. Our approach exhibits robust performance across various market regimes while maintaining high capital capacity suitable for institutional deployment.

SealOS+: A Sealos-based Approach for Adaptive Resource Optimization Under Dynamic Workloads for Securities Trading System

As securities trading systems transition to a microservices architecture, optimizing system performance presents challenges such as inefficient resource scheduling and high service response delays. Existing container orchestration platforms lack tailored performance optimization mechanisms for trading scenarios, making it difficult to meet the stringent 50ms response time requirement imposed by exchanges. This paper introduces SealOS+, a Sealos-based performance optimization approach for securities trading, incorporating an adaptive resource scheduling algorithm leveraging deep reinforcement learning, a three-level caching mechanism for trading operations, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based load prediction model. Real-world deployment at a securities exchange demonstrates that the optimized system achieves an average CPU utilization of 78\%, reduces transaction response time to 105ms, and reaches a peak processing capacity of 15,000 transactions per second, effectively meeting the rigorous performance and reliability demands of securities trading.

Domainator: Detecting and Identifying DNS-Tunneling Malware Using Metadata Sequences

In recent years, malware with tunneling (or: covert channel) capabilities is on the rise. While malware research led to several methods and innovations, the detection and differentiation of malware solely based on its DNS tunneling features is still in its infancy. Moreover, no work so far has used the DNS tunneling traffic to gain knowledge over the current actions taken by the malware. In this paper, we present Domainator, an approach to detect and differentiate state-of-the-art malware and DNS tunneling tools without relying on trivial (but quickly altered) features such as "magic bytes" that are embedded into subdomains. Instead, we apply an analysis of sequential patterns to identify specific types of malware. We evaluate our approach with 7 different malware samples and tunneling tools and can identify the particular malware based on its DNS traffic. We further infer the rough behavior of the particular malware through its DNS tunneling artifacts. Finally, we compare our Domainator with related methods.

Farm-LightSeek: An Edge-centric Multimodal Agricultural IoT Data Analytics Framework with Lightweight LLMs

Amid the challenges posed by global population growth and climate change, traditional agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) systems is currently undergoing a significant digital transformation to facilitate efficient big data processing. While smart agriculture utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable precise control, it still encounters significant challenges, including excessive reliance on agricultural expert knowledge, difficulties in fusing multimodal data, poor adaptability to dynamic environments, and bottlenecks in real-time decision-making at the edge. Large language models (LLMs), with their exceptional capabilities in knowledge acquisition and semantic understanding, provide a promising solution to address these challenges. To this end, we propose Farm-LightSeek, an edge-centric multimodal agricultural IoT data analytics framework that integrates LLMs with edge computing. This framework collects real-time farmland multi-source data (images, weather, geographic information) via sensors, performs cross-modal reasoning and disease detection at edge nodes, conducts low-latency management decisions, and enables cloud collaboration for model updates. The main innovations of Farm-LightSeek include: (1) an agricultural "perception-decision-action" closed-loop architecture; (2) cross-modal adaptive monitoring; and (3)a lightweight LLM deployment strategy balancing performance and efficiency. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Farm-LightSeek consistently achieves reliable performance in mission-critical tasks, even under the limitations of edge computing resources. This work advances intelligent real-time agricultural solutions and highlights the potential for deeper integration of agricultural IoT with LLMs.

Olfactory Inertial Odometry: Methodology for Effective Robot Navigation by Scent

Olfactory navigation is one of the most primitive mechanisms of exploration used by organisms. Navigation by machine olfaction (artificial smell) is a very difficult task to both simulate and solve. With this work, we define olfactory inertial odometry (OIO), a framework for using inertial kinematics, and fast-sampling olfaction sensors to enable navigation by scent analogous to visual inertial odometry (VIO). We establish how principles from SLAM and VIO can be extrapolated to olfaction to enable real-world robotic tasks. We demonstrate OIO with three different odour localization algorithms on a real 5-DoF robot arm over an odour-tracking scenario that resembles real applications in agriculture and food quality control. Our results indicate success in establishing a baseline framework for OIO from which other research in olfactory navigation can build, and we note performance enhancements that can be made to address more complex tasks in the future.

Learning to See More: UAS-Guided Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery for Precision Agriculture

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and satellites are key data sources for precision agriculture, yet each presents trade-offs. Satellite data offer broad spatial, temporal, and spectral coverage but lack the resolution needed for many precision farming applications, while UAS provide high spatial detail but are limited by coverage and cost, especially for hyperspectral data. This study presents a novel framework that fuses satellite and UAS imagery using super-resolution methods. By integrating data across spatial, spectral, and temporal domains, we leverage the strengths of both platforms cost-effectively. We use estimation of cover crop biomass and nitrogen (N) as a case study to evaluate our approach. By spectrally extending UAS RGB data to the vegetation red edge and near-infrared regions, we generate high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery and improve biomass and N estimation accuracy by 18% and 31%, respectively. Our results show that UAS data need only be collected from a subset of fields and time points. Farmers can then 1) enhance the spectral detail of UAS RGB imagery; 2) increase the spatial resolution by using satellite data; and 3) extend these enhancements spatially and across the growing season at the frequency of the satellite flights. Our SRCNN-based spectral extension model shows considerable promise for model transferability over other cropping systems in the Upper and Lower Chesapeake Bay regions. Additionally, it remains effective even when cloud-free satellite data are unavailable, relying solely on the UAS RGB input. The spatial extension model produces better biomass and N predictions than models built on raw UAS RGB images. Once trained with targeted UAS RGB data, the spatial extension model allows farmers to stop repeated UAS flights. While we introduce super-resolution advances, the core contribution is a lightweight and scalable system for affordable on-farm use.