Na Yeon Kim

Leslie Ching Ow Tiong, Hyuk Jun Yoo, Na Yeon Kim et al.

Although robot-based automation in chemistry laboratories can accelerate the material development process, surveillance-free environments may lead to dangerous accidents primarily due to machine control errors. Object detection techniques can play vital roles in addressing these safety issues; however, state-of-the-art detectors, including single-shot detector (SSD) models, suffer from insufficient accuracy in environments involving complex and noisy scenes. With the aim of improving safety in a surveillance-free laboratory, we report a novel deep learning (DL)-based object detector, namely, DenseSSD. For the foremost and frequent problem of detecting vial positions, DenseSSD achieved a mean average precision (mAP) over 95% based on a complex dataset involving both empty and solution-filled vials, greatly exceeding those of conventional detectors; such high precision is critical to minimizing failure-induced accidents. Additionally, DenseSSD was observed to be highly insensitive to the environmental changes, maintaining its high precision under the variations of solution colors or testing view angles. The robustness of DenseSSD would allow the utilized equipment settings to be more flexible. This work demonstrates that DenseSSD is useful for enhancing safety in an automated material synthesis environment, and it can be extended to various applications where high detection accuracy and speed are both needed.

Ralf Beuthan, Megan Coffee, Heejin Kim et al.

The polygenic risk scores (PRS) have emerged as an important methodology for quantifying genetic predisposition to complex traits and clinical disease. Significant progress has been made in applying PRS to conditions such as obesity, cancer, and type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Studies have demonstrated that PRS can effectively identify individuals at high risk, thereby enabling early screening, personalized treatment, and targeted interventions for diseases with a genetic predisposition. One current limitation of PRS, however, is the lack of interpretability tools. To address this problem for T2DM, researchers at the Graduate School of Data Science at the Seoul National University introduced eXplainable PRS (XPRS). This visualization tool decomposes PRSs into gene-level and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) contribution scores via Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), providing granular insights into the specific genetic factors driving an individual's risk profile. We used a co-design approach to assess XPRS trustworthiness by considering legal, medical, ethical, and technical robustness during early design and potential clinical use. For that, we used Z-inspection, an ethically aligned Trustworthy AI co-design methodology, and piloted the Council of Europe's Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Impact Assessment for AI Systems (HUDERIA) (Council of Europe (CAI) 2025). The findings of this use-case comprise a comprehensive set of ethical, legal, and technical lessons learned. These insights, identified by a multidisciplinary team of experts (ethics, legal, human rights, computer science, and medical), serve as a framework for designers to navigate future challenges with this and other AI systems. The findings also provide a useful reference for researchers developing explainability frameworks for PRS in diverse clinical contexts.