Abstract
With the widespread availability and pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in many application areas across the globe, the role of crowdsourcing has seen an upsurge in terms of importance for scaling up data-driven algorithms in rapid cycles through a relatively low-cost distributed workforce or even on a volunteer basis. However, there is a lack of systematic and empirical examination of the interplay among the processes and activities combining crowd-machine hybrid interaction. To uncover the enduring aspects characterizing the human-centered AI design space when involving ensembles of crowds and algorithms and their symbiotic relations and requirements, a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) lens strongly rooted in the taxonomic tradition of conceptual scheme development is taken with the aim of aggregating and characterizing some of the main component entities in the burgeoning domain of hybrid crowd-AI centered systems. The goal of this article is thus to propose a theoretically grounded and empirically validated analytical framework for the study of crowd-machine interaction and its environment. Based on a scoping review and several cross-sectional analyses of research studies comprising hybrid forms of human interaction with AI systems and applications at a crowd scale, the available literature was distilled and incorporated into a unifying framework comprised of taxonomic units distributed across integration dimensions that range from the original time and space axes in which every collaborative activity take place to the main attributes that constitute a hybrid intelligence architecture. The upshot is that when turning to the challenges that are inherent in tasks requiring massive participation, novel properties can be obtained for a set of potential scenarios that go beyond the single experience of a human interacting with the technology to comprise a vast set of massive machine-crowd interactions.

Abstract
The application of machine learning to insurance risk prediction requires learning from sensitive data. This raises multiple ethical and legal issues. One of the most relevant ones is privacy. However, privacy-preserving methods can potentially hinder the predictive potential of machine learning models. In this paper, we present preliminary experiments with life insurance data using two privacy-preserving techniques: discretization and encryption. Our objective with this work is to assess the impact of such privacy preservation techniques in the accuracy of ML models. We instantiate the problem in three general, but plausible Use Cases involving the prediction of insurance claims within a 1-year horizon. Our preliminary experiments suggest that discretization and encryption have negligible impact in the accuracy of ML models.

Abstract
There are several compelling reasons for exploring the ocean, for instance, the potential for accessing valuable resources, such as energy and minerals; establishing sovereignty; and addressing environmental issues. As a result, the scientific community has increasingly focused on the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for ocean exploration. Recent research has demonstrated that buoyancy change modules can greatly enhance the energy efficiency of these vehicles. However, the literature is scarce regarding the dynamic models of the vertical motion of buoyancy change modules. It is therefore difficult to develop adequate depth controllers, as this is a very complex task to perform in situ. The focus of this paper is to develop simplified linear models for a buoyancy change module that was previously designed by the authors. These models are experimentally identified and used to fine-tune depth controllers. Experimental results demonstrate that the controllers perform well, achieving a virtual zero steady-state error with satisfactory dynamic characteristics.

Abstract
The Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (METIS) is is one of three first-generation science instruments for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and has recently completed its final design phase. Its Single Conjugate Adaptive Optics (SCAO) system will provide the performance of an extreme adaptive optics system which enables high contrast imaging observations in the thermal/mid-infrared wavelength domain (3 µm – 13.3 µm). The Real-Time Computer (RTC) is the central component of the SCAO real-time control system. It executes the time critical wavefront control loop as well as associated control tasks by processing the data from the pyramid wavefront sensor and controlling the set of ELT actuators dedicated to adaptive optics. A total of up to 4,866 commands to be computed at a loop rate of up to 1 kHz imposes a number of demanding constraints in terms of memory throughput and computing power on the Hard Real-Time Core (HRTC), which employs GPU acceleration for the bulk of computations. Several auxiliary functions need to be in place to establish and maintain the quality of the wavefront correction. Among them are the control of the pupil position, the compensation of misregistration and of non-common path aberration, and the adaptation of the temporal control parameters. The main wavefront control loop has been prototyped to verify timing requirements. A median RTC computation time of 382 µs was achieved for a 300k samples (5 minutes) run. The results are presented in this paper together with the foreseen RTC hardware and the software deployment within the SCAO Control System.

Abstract
This paper presents the main contributions of the VCMI Team to the ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2023 task. We addressed both the concept detection and caption prediction tasks. Regarding concept detection, our team employed different approaches to assign concepts to medical images: multi-label classification, adversarial training, autoregressive modelling, image retrieval, and concept retrieval. We also developed three model ensembles merging the results of some of the proposed methods. Our best submission obtained an F1-score of 0.4998, ranking 3rd among nine teams. Regarding the caption prediction task, our team explored two main approaches based on image retrieval and language generation. The language generation approaches, based on a vision model as the encoder and a language model as the decoder, yielded the best results, allowing us to rank 5th among thirteen teams, with a BERTScore of 0.6147.

Abstract
An important problem in directional statistics is to test the null hypothesis of a common mean direction for several populations. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test for vectorial data may be used to test the hypothesis of the equality of the mean directions for several von Mises-Fisher populations. As this test is valid only for large concentrations, we propose in this paper to apply the resampling techniques of bootstrap and permutation to the ANOVA test. We carried out an extensive simulation study in order to evaluate the performance of the ANOVA test with the resampling techniques, for several sphere dimensions and different sample sizes and we compare with the usual ANOVA test for data from von Mises-Fisher populations. The purpose of this simulation study is also to investigate whether the proposed tests are preferable to the ANOVA test, for low concentrations and small samples. Finally, we present an example with spherical data.