Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Don’t get me wrong - while using the fountain pen I am still trying to maintain good writing posture and I’m continuing to do my regular hand stretches.
But for a sense of the difference: before, I was happy with the fact that I managed to develop a good pain management routine to allow me to write like 2-3 pages at a time without convulsing in pain.
And now I can write 6 pages nonstop without even thinking or feeling anything. A short 5–10 minute rest and I can come back for more.
This is such a big deal to me. I was able to draw yesterday with a relaxed hand after spending hours writing notes. Before I’d only be able to do one or the other in a day!
And then I finished the evening by writing out a chapter of my novel by hand.
And today my hand is totally fine!!

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 17: Vicki Jarrett
So far she's published a couple of really good novels and a collection of short stories. She strikes me as the type of author who aims for quality, not quantity.
I adored her first novel "Nothing is Heavy", based on real life experiences in Edinburgh. Her other novel, "Always North" is an eco-thriller set in Svalbard, a Norwegian arctic island.
Both great…

DeLTa: Demonstration and Language-Guided Novel Transparent Object Manipulation
Taeyeop Lee, Gyuree Kang, Bowen Wen, Youngho Kim, Seunghyeok Back, In So Kweon, David Hyunchul Shim, Kuk-Jin Yoon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05662

DeLTa: Demonstration and Language-Guided Novel Transparent Object Manipulation
Despite the prevalence of transparent object interactions in human everyday life, transparent robotic manipulation research remains limited to short-horizon tasks and basic grasping capabilities.Although some methods have partially addressed these issues, most of them have limitations in generalizability to novel objects and are insufficient for precise long-horizon robot manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose DeLTa (Demonstration and Language-Guided Novel Transparent Object Manip…

Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Dynamic Weight-based Temporal Aggregation for Low-light Video Enhancement
Ruirui Lin, Guoxi Huang, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09450 https://

Dynamic Weight-based Temporal Aggregation for Low-light Video Enhancement
Low-light video enhancement (LLVE) is challenging due to noise, low contrast, and color degradations. Learning-based approaches offer fast inference but still struggle with heavy noise in real low-light scenes, primarily due to limitations in effectively leveraging temporal information. In this paper, we address this issue with DWTA-Net, a novel two-stage framework that jointly exploits short- and long-term temporal cues. Stage I employs Visual State-Space blocks for multi-frame alignment, reco…

Constrained Sensing and Reliable State Estimation with Shallow Recurrent Decoders on a TRIGA Mark II Reactor
Stefano Riva, Carolina Introini, Jos\`e Nathan Kutz, Antonio Cammi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12368

Constrained Sensing and Reliable State Estimation with Shallow Recurrent Decoders on a TRIGA Mark II Reactor
Shallow Recurrent Decoder networks are a novel data-driven methodology able to provide accurate state estimation in engineering systems, such as nuclear reactors. This deep learning architecture is a robust technique designed to map the temporal trajectories of a few sparse measures to the full state space, including unobservable fields, which is agnostic to sensor positions and able to handle noisy data through an ensemble strategy, leveraging the short training times and without the need for …

Toward Efficient and Privacy-Aware eHealth Systems: An Integrated Sensing, Computing, and Semantic Communication Approach
Yinchao Yang, Yahao Ding, Zhaohui Yang, Chongwen Huang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Mohammad Shikh-Bahaei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11514

Toward Efficient and Privacy-Aware eHealth Systems: An Integrated Sensing, Computing, and Semantic Communication Approach
Real-time and contactless monitoring of vital signs, such as respiration and heartbeat, alongside reliable communication, is essential for modern healthcare systems, especially in remote and privacy-sensitive environments. Traditional wireless communication and sensing networks fall short in meeting all the stringent demands of eHealth, including accurate sensing, high data efficiency, and privacy preservation. To overcome the challenges, we propose a novel integrated sensing, computing, and se…

In-situ characterisation and data-driven crystal plasticity analysis of short-to-long crack transition in a ductile aluminium alloy
Abdalrhaman Koko, Bemin Sheen, Caitlin Green, Fionn Dunne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03713

In-situ characterisation and data-driven crystal plasticity analysis of short-to-long crack transition in a ductile aluminium alloy
Crack arrest in ductile alloys plays a critical role in damage-tolerant design for aerospace and structural applications, yet the transition from microstructure-sensitive short cracks to load-controlled long cracks remains poorly understood. Here, we present an in-situ, high-resolution experimental study of crack propagation in cold-worked 5052 aluminium alloy using scanning electron microscopy digital image correlation (SEM-DIC), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), and novel data-driven c…

VRPAgent: LLM-Driven Discovery of Heuristic Operators for Vehicle Routing Problems
Andr\'e Hottung, Federico Berto, Chuanbo Hua, Nayeli Gast Zepeda, Daniel Wetzel, Michael R\"omer, Haoran Ye, Davide Zago, Michael Poli, Stefano Massaroli, Jinkyoo Park, Kevin Tierney
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07073

VRPAgent: LLM-Driven Discovery of Heuristic Operators for Vehicle Routing Problems
Designing high-performing heuristics for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) is a complex task that requires both intuition and deep domain knowledge. Large language model (LLM)-based code generation has recently shown promise across many domains, but it still falls short of producing heuristics that rival those crafted by human experts. In this paper, we propose VRPAgent, a framework that integrates LLM-generated components into a metaheuristic and refines them through a novel genetic search. By u…

Native Hybrid Attention for Efficient Sequence Modeling
Jusen Du, Jiaxi Hu, Tao Zhang, Weigao Sun, Yu Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07019 https://arxiv.…

Native Hybrid Attention for Efficient Sequence Modeling
Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a novel hybrid architecture of linear and full attention that integrates both intra \& inter-layer hybridization into a unified layer design. NHA maintains long-term context in key-value slots updated by a linear RNN, and augments them with short-term tokens fro…

A Novel Short-Term Anomaly Prediction for IIoT with Software Defined Twin Network
Bilal Dalgic (Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey), Betul Sen (Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey), Muge Erel-Ozcevik (Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20068

A Novel Short-Term Anomaly Prediction for IIoT with Software Defined Twin Network
Secure monitoring and dynamic control in an IIoT environment are major requirements for current development goals. We believe that dynamic, secure monitoring of the IIoT environment can be achieved through integration with the Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Digital Twin (DT) paradigms. The current literature lacks implementation details for SDN-based DT and time-aware intelligent model training for short-term anomaly detection against IIoT threats. Therefore, we have proposed a novel framew…

Retentive Relevance: Capturing Long-Term User Value in Recommendation Systems
Saeideh Bakhshi, Phuong Mai Nguyen, Robert Schiller, Tiantian Xu, Pawan Kodandapani, Andrew Levine, Cayman Simpson, Qifan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07621

Retentive Relevance: Capturing Long-Term User Value in Recommendation Systems
Recommendation systems have traditionally relied on short-term engagement signals, such as clicks and likes, to personalize content. However, these signals are often noisy, sparse, and insufficient for capturing long-term user satisfaction and retention. We introduce Retentive Relevance, a novel content-level survey-based feedback measure that directly assesses users' intent to return to the platform for similar content. Unlike other survey measures that focus on immediate satisfaction, Retenti…

Real Time Headway Predictions in Urban Rail Systems and Implications for Service Control: A Deep Learning Approach
Muhammad Usama, Haris Koutsopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03121

Real Time Headway Predictions in Urban Rail Systems and Implications for Service Control: A Deep Learning Approach
Efficient real-time dispatching in urban metro systems is essential for ensuring service reliability, maximizing resource utilization, and improving passenger satisfaction. This study presents a novel deep learning framework centered on a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) model designed to predict the complex spatiotemporal propagation of train headways across an entire metro line. By directly incorporating planned terminal headways as a critical input alongside historical headway…

When Collaborative Maintenance Falls Short: The Persistence of Retracted Papers on Wikipedia
Haohan Shi, Yulin Yu, Daniel M. Romero, Em\H{o}ke-\'Agnes Horv\'at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18403 …

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 14:
Anne Donovan
Her novel "BuddhaDa" is one of the most clever, hilarious, uplifting and yet very serious works of literature I've ever read. It sits on my favourites shelf. As she writes the dialogues the way people talk, you will learn some Scots Glasgow dialect along the way. I had the pleasure of attending a reading with her at a local library in Edinburgh and she signed this much-love…

In-space manufacturing of optical lenses: Fluidic Shaping aboard the International Space Station
Omer Luria, Mor Elgarisi, Eytan Stibbe, Michael Lopez-Alegria, Crissy Canerday, Alexey Razin, Sivan Perl, Valeri Frumkin, Jonathan Ericson, Khaled Gommed, Daniel Widerker, Israel Gabay, Ruslan Belikov, Edward Balaban, Moran Bercovici
https://ar…

In-space manufacturing of optical lenses: Fluidic Shaping aboard the International Space Station
In-space manufacturing technologies are vital for enabling advanced space missions and addressing logistical limitations of space exploration. While additive manufacturing has progressed rapidly, it still falls short of delivering the ultra-smooth surfaces required for optical elements. Fluidic Shaping is a novel method that harnesses surface tension under microgravity to form optical components with exceptionally smooth surfaces. This study demonstrates the feasibility and potential of Fluidic…

Supervised Machine Learning for Predicting Open Quantum System Dynamics and Detecting Non-Markovian Memory Effects
Ali Abu-Nada, Subhashish Banerjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22758

Supervised Machine Learning for Predicting Open Quantum System Dynamics and Detecting Non-Markovian Memory Effects
We present a \emph{novel} and scalable supervised machine learning framework to predict open-quantum system dynamics and detect non-Markovian memory using only local ancilla measurements. A system qubit is coherently coupled to an ancilla via a symmetric XY Hamiltonian; the ancilla interacts with a noisy environment and is the only qubit we measure. A feedforward neural network, trained on short sliding windows of supplementary data from the past, forecasts the observable system $\langle Z_{(S)…

Just finished "Tall Water" written by SJ Sindu and illustrated by Dion MBD. An excellent semi-autobiographical graphic novel about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Sri Lankan civil war, and parental estrangement.
Absolutely beautiful illustrations and a gripping plot had me tear through it in just an hour or so, though it's by no means short for a graphic novel. If my list of authors I deeply respect grows too fast, I'll just have to keep posting in my other thread indefinitely.
#AmReading

Remaining Time Prediction in Outbound Warehouse Processes: A Case Study (Short Paper)
Erik Penther, Michael Grohs, Jana-Rebecca Rehse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18986 https://…

Mamba Outpaces Reformer in Stock Prediction with Sentiments from Top Ten LLMs
Lokesh Antony Kadiyala, Amir Mirzaeinia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01203 https://

Mamba Outpaces Reformer in Stock Prediction with Sentiments from Top Ten LLMs
The stock market is extremely difficult to predict in the short term due to high market volatility, changes caused by news, and the non-linear nature of the financial time series. This research proposes a novel framework for improving minute-level prediction accuracy using semantic sentiment scores from top ten different large language models (LLMs) combined with minute interval intraday stock price data. We systematically constructed a time-aligned dataset of AAPL news articles and 1-minute Ap…

A laser with instability reaching $4 \times 10^{-17}$ based on a 10-cm-long silicon cavity at sub-5-K temperatures
Zhi-Ang Chen, Hao-Ran Zeng, Wen-Wei Wang, Han Zhang, Run-Qi Lei, Jian-Zhang Li, Cai-Yin Pang, She-Song Huang, Xibo Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06636

A laser with instability reaching $4 \times 10^{-17}$ based on a 10-cm-long silicon cavity at sub-5-K temperatures
The realization of ultra-stable lasers with $10^{-17}$-level frequency stability has enabled a wide range of researches on precision metrology and fundamental science, where cryogenic single-crystalline cavities constitute the heart of such ultra-stable lasers. For further improvements in stability, increasing the cavity length at few-kelvin temperatures provides a promising alternative to utilizing relatively short cavities with novel coating, but has yet to be demonstrated with state-of-the-a…

Hybrid FIM and STAR-BD-RIS-Aided Wireless Communications with Short Packet Length: A Meta-TD3 Approach
Ayla Eftekhari, Maryam Cheraghy, Armin Farhadi, Mohammad Robat Mili, Qingqing Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16417

Hybrid FIM and STAR-BD-RIS-Aided Wireless Communications with Short Packet Length: A Meta-TD3 Approach
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIM) have been widely adopted in multi-user wireless communication systems to enhance channel quality through simultaneous transmission and reflection of signals and three-dimensional reconfiguration of antennas. In this paper, we propose a novel system architecture that integrates the benefits of both technologies by deploying an FIM antenna at the base station (BS) and a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting…

Index-MSR: A high-efficiency multimodal fusion framework for speech recognition
Jinming Chen, Lu Wang, Zheshu Song, Wei Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22744 https://

Index-MSR: A high-efficiency multimodal fusion framework for speech recognition
Driven by large scale datasets and LLM based architectures, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable improvements in accuracy. However, challenges persist for domain-specific terminology, and short utterances lacking semantic coherence, where recognition performance often degrades significantly. In this work, we present Index-MSR, an efficient multimodal speech recognition framework. At its core is a novel Multimodal Fusion Decoder (MFD), which effectively incorporate…

Session-Level Spoken Language Assessment with a Multimodal Foundation Model via Multi-Target Learning
Hong-Yun Lin, Jhen-Ke Lin, Chung-Chun Wang, Hao-Chien Lu, Berlin Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16025

Session-Level Spoken Language Assessment with a Multimodal Foundation Model via Multi-Target Learning
Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Existing efforts often rely on cascaded pipelines, which are prone to error propagation, or end-to-end models that often operate on a short audio window, which might miss discourse-level evidence. This paper introduces a novel multimodal found…

In any case, day 2: Ursula K Le Guin.
As I've said elsewhere, part of her science fiction thesis is that "human" can encompass much more than what we mere Terrans think of it as, and that moral standing extends broadly throughout the universe. This is the antithesis of Tokens fantasy, wherein "race" is real and determines moral standing. For Le Guin, it's barely okay to intervene in complex alien politics unless you carefully ensure you're not causing systemic harms; for Tolkien, it's okay to ambush and murder orc children, because they are by nature evil.
Add to her excellent politics Le Guin's masterful worldbuilding and unparalleled range of plots, and you have the one author I loved as a decidedly liberal and naïve teen and love even more now that I'm an adult. She's an absolute legend and deserves a very high place on any list of women authors (or list of authors, period.).
For a short story, try "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" which you can read here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
For fantasy "A Wizard of Earthsea" (also has a nice graphic novel adaptation), or for science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness" or if you want a more anarchist flavor, "The Dispossessed."
I'll close this with an amazing quote from her:
"""
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
"""

CSIT-Free Downlink Transmission for mmWave MU-MISO Systems in High-Mobility Scenario
Jeongjae Lee, Wonseok Choi, Songnam Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15564 https://

CSIT-Free Downlink Transmission for mmWave MU-MISO Systems in High-Mobility Scenario
This paper investigates the downlink (DL) transmission in millimeter-wave (mmWave) multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems especially focusing on a high speed mobile scenario. To complete the DL transmission within an extremely short channel coherence time, we propose a novel DL transmission framework that eliminates the need for channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), of which acquisition process requires a substantial overhead, instead fully exploiting the given…