Tootfinder

One of my books is in here. Probably check for any of your professional (or less professional) writing and sign on:
https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/115105862107138339

Good Morning #Canada
March 1975, the Beaver is officially designated as a National Symbol of Canada, meaning #BeaverWeek is helping us celebrate 50 years of celebrity status for the tail slapping mammals. The National Symbol of Canada Act came about because in January of 1975, a New York Senator proposed making the Beaver an official state animal. Canadians, who loved Beavers more than Americans, moved quickly. The youngest MP in history, 23 year old Sean O’Sullivan, introduced a private member's bill to counter the American attempt to grab our Beaver. O'Sullivan should be immortalized on the $5 bill.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-dam-the-myth-the-legend-50-years-of-the-beaver/

Differentially Private Federated Quantum Learning via Quantum Noise
Atit Pokharel, Ratun Rahman, Shaba Shaon, Thomas Morris, Dinh C. Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20310 http…

Differentially Private Federated Quantum Learning via Quantum Noise
Quantum federated learning (QFL) enables collaborative training of quantum machine learning (QML) models across distributed quantum devices without raw data exchange. However, QFL remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where shared QML model updates can be exploited to undermine information privacy. In the context of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, a key question arises: How can inherent quantum noise be leveraged to enforce differential privacy (DP) and protect model infor…

windsurfers: Windsurfers network (1986)
A network of interpersonal contacts among windsurfers in southern California during the Fall of 1986. The edge weights indicate the perception of social affiliations majored by the tasks in which each individual was asked​ to sort cards with other surfer’s name in the order of closeness.
This network has 43 nodes and 336 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

NoticeLight: Embracing Socio-Technical Asymmetry through Tangible Peripheral Robotic Embodiment in Hybrid Collaboration
Marie Altmann, Kimberly Hegemann, Ali Askari, Vineetha Rallabandi, Max Pascher, Jens Gerken
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22125

NoticeLight: Embracing Socio-Technical Asymmetry through Tangible Peripheral Robotic Embodiment in Hybrid Collaboration
Hybrid collaboration has become a fixture in modern workplaces, yet it introduces persistent socio-technical asymmetries-especially disadvantaging remote participants, who struggle with presence disparity, reduced visibility, and limited non-verbal communication. Traditional solutions often seek to erase these asymmetries, but recent research suggests embracing them as productive design constraints. In this context, we introduce NoticeLight: a tangible, peripheral robotic embodiment designed to…

HLTCOE at LiveRAG: GPT-Researcher using ColBERT retrieval
Kevin Duh, Eugene Yang, Orion Weller, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22356 …

HLTCOE at LiveRAG: GPT-Researcher using ColBERT retrieval
The HLTCOE LiveRAG submission utilized the GPT-researcher framework for researching the context of the question, filtering the returned results, and generating the final answer. The retrieval system was a ColBERT bi-encoder architecture, which represents a passage with many dense tokens. Retrieval used a local, compressed index of the FineWeb10-BT collection created with PLAID-X, using a model fine-tuned for multilingual retrieval. Query generation from context was done with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct…

Requirements on bandpass resolution and measurement precision for LiteBIRD
S. Giardiello, A. Carones, T. Ghigna, L. Pagano, F. Piacentini, L. Montier, R. Takaku, E. Calabrese, D. Adak, E. Allys, A. Anand, J. Aumont, M. Ballardini, A. J. Banday, R. B. Barreiro, N. Bartolo, S. Basak, M. Bersanelli, A. Besnard, M. Bortolami, T. Brinckmann, F. J. Casas, K. Cheung, M. Citran, L. Clermont, F. Columbro, A. Coppolecchia, F. Cuttaia, P. de Bernardis, E. de la Hoz, M. De Lucia, S. Della Torre, E…

Requirements on bandpass resolution and measurement precision for LiteBIRD
In this work, we study the impact of an imperfect knowledge of the instrument bandpasses on the estimate of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in the context of the next-generation LiteBIRD satellite. We develop a pipeline to include bandpass integration in both the time-ordered data (TOD) and the map-making processing steps. We introduce the systematic effect by having a mismatch between the ``real'', high resolution bandpass $τ$, entering the TOD, and the estimated one $τ_s$, used in the map-ma…

One of Southern California assets these days are the Coulson helicopters contracted to live at several airports in Orange, LA and Ventura Counties. At the risk of sounding like an advert, they're amazing.
3,050 gallon capacity (a tad more than a MAFFS C-130), GPS guided dropping, able to reload in 2 minutes while hovering, and full night-dropping ability.
For comparison, that's about triple the load of the Firehawk, and almost double what the CL-415 Super Scooper can de…

windsurfers: Windsurfers network (1986)
A network of interpersonal contacts among windsurfers in southern California during the Fall of 1986. The edge weights indicate the perception of social affiliations majored by the tasks in which each individual was asked​ to sort cards with other surfer’s name in the order of closeness.
This network has 43 nodes and 336 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

ARAG: Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation for Personalized Recommendation
Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Pratheek Vadla, Priyank Gupta, Kai Zhao, Aysenur Inan, Kehui Yao, Jianpeng Xu, Praveen Kanumala, Jason Cho, Sushant Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21931

ARAG: Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation for Personalized Recommendation
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promise in enhancing recommendation systems by incorporating external context into large language model prompts. However, existing RAG-based approaches often rely on static retrieval heuristics and fail to capture nuanced user preferences in dynamic recommendation scenarios. In this work, we introduce ARAG, an Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for Personalized Recommendation, which integrates a multi-agent collaboration mechanism int…