Amira Mouakher

Franco Bagnoli, Sara Dridi, Bassem Sellami et al.

In mathematics and engineering, control theory is concerned with the analysis of dynamical systems through the application of suitable control inputs. One of the prominent problems in control theory is controllability which concerns the ability to determine whether there exists a control input that can steer a dynamical system from an initial state to a desired final state within a finite time horizon. There is a general theory for controlling linear or linearizable system, but it cannot be applied to discrete systems like cellular automata, which is the problem of that we address in this paper. We develop a general theory for linear (and affine) cellular automata, and apply it to examples of one-dimensional and two-dimensional Boolean cases. We introduce the concept of controllability matrix and show that controllability holds if and only if the controllability matrix is invertible.

Franco Bagnoli, Bassem Sellami, Amira Mouakher et al.

In this exploratory paper we introduce the problem of cognitive agents that learn how to modify their environment according to local sensing to reach a global goal. We concentrate on discrete dynamics (cellular automata) on a two-dimensional system. We show that agents may learn how to approximate their goal when the environment is passive, while this task becomes impossible if the environment follows an active dynamics.

Katerina Katsarou, George Zountsas, Karam Tomotaki-Dawoud et al.

Reliable monitoring of surgical instrument exchanges is essential for maintaining procedural efficiency and patient safety in the operating room. Automatic detection of instrument handovers in intraoperative video remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, background clutter, and the temporally evolving nature of interaction events. We propose a spatiotemporal vision framework for event-level detection and direction classification of surgical instrument handovers in surgical videos. The model combines a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone for spatial feature extraction with a unidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for temporal aggregation. A unified multi-task formulation jointly predicts handover occurrence and interaction direction, enabling consistent modeling of transfer dynamics while avoiding error propagation typical of cascaded pipelines. Predicted confidence scores form a temporal signal over the video, from which discrete handover events are identified via peak detection. Experiments on a dataset of kidney transplant procedures demonstrate strong performance, achieving an F1-score of 0.84 for handover detection and a mean F1-score of 0.72 for direction classification, outperforming both a single-task variant and a VideoMamba-based baseline for direction prediction while maintaining comparable detection performance. To improve interpretability, we employ Layer-CAM attribution to visualize spatial regions driving model decisions, highlighting hand-instrument interaction cues.