Nan Kong

Shen Chang, Renran Tian, Nicole Adams et al.

Rapid naloxone delivery via drones offers a promising solution for responding to opioid overdose emergencies (OOEs), by extending lifesaving interventions to medically untrained bystanders before emergency medical services (EMS) arrive. Recognizing the critical role of bystander situational awareness (SA) in human-autonomy teaming (HAT), we address a key research gap in real-time SA assessment by introducing the Drone-Assisted Naloxone Delivery Simulation Dataset (DANDSD). This pioneering dataset captures HAT during simulated OOEs, where college students without medical training act as bystanders tasked with administering intranasal naloxone to a mock overdose victim. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a video-based real-time SA assessment framework that utilizes graph embeddings and transformer models to assess bystander SA in real time. Our approach integrates visual perception and comprehension cues--such as geometric, kinematic, and interaction graph features--and achieves high-performance SA prediction. It also demonstrates strong temporal segmentation accuracy, outperforming the FINCH baseline by 9% in Mean over Frames (MoF) and 5% in Intersection over Union (IoU). This work supports the development of adaptive drone systems capable of guiding bystanders effectively, ultimately improving emergency response outcomes and saving lives.

Shen Chang, Dennis Liu, Renran Tian et al.

Consistent high-quality nursing care is essential for patient safety, yet current nursing education depends on subjective, time-intensive instructor feedback in training future nurses, which limits scalability and efficiency in their training, and thus hampers nursing competency when they enter the workforce. In this paper, we introduce a video-language model (VLM) based framework to develop the AI capability of automated procedural assessment and feedback for nursing skills training, with the potential of being integrated into existing training programs. Mimicking human skill acquisition, the framework follows a curriculum-inspired progression, advancing from high-level action recognition, fine-grained subaction decomposition, and ultimately to procedural reasoning. This design supports scalable evaluation by reducing instructor workload while preserving assessment quality. The system provides three core capabilities: 1) diagnosing errors by identifying missing or incorrect subactions in nursing skill instruction videos, 2) generating explainable feedback by clarifying why a step is out of order or omitted, and 3) enabling objective, consistent formative evaluation of procedures. Validation on synthesized videos demonstrates reliable error detection and temporal localization, confirming its potential to handle real-world training variability. By addressing workflow bottlenecks and supporting large-scale, standardized evaluation, this work advances AI applications in nursing education, contributing to stronger workforce development and ultimately safer patient care.

Aditi Iyer, Bingjing Tang, Vinayak Rao et al.

We propose a novel two-phase approach to functional network estimation of multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, which applies model-based image segmentation to determine a group-representative connectivity map. In our approach, we first improve clustering-based Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to generate maps of components occurring consistently across subjects, and then estimate the group-representative map through MAP-MRF (Maximum a priori - Markov random field) labeling. For the latter, we provide a novel and efficient variational Bayes algorithm. We study the performance of the proposed method using synthesized data following a theoretical model, and demonstrate its viability in blind extraction of group-representative functional networks using simulated fMRI data. We anticipate the proposed method will be applied in identifying common neuronal characteristics in a population, and could be further extended to real-world clinical diagnosis.