EdTech Discovery
Argus

Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.

Updated Sep 07, 2026 · 40 ideas · 18694 signals
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Signals

The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.

technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

EEG-based AI-BCI Wheelchair Advancement: Transformer-Based Learning with Motor Imagery for Brain Computer Interface

arXiv:2509.25667v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated approach to Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)-based wheelchair development, utilizing a motor imagery right-left-hand movement mechanism for control. The system is designed to simulate wheelchair navigation based on motor imagery right and left-hand movements using electroencephalogram (EEG) data. A pre-filtered dataset, obtained from an open-source EEG repository, was segmented into arrays of 19x200 to capture the onset of hand movements. The data was acquired at a sampling frequency of 200Hz. The system integrates a Tkinter-based interface for simulating wheelchair movements, offering users a functional and intuitive control system. We propose TFormerEEG, a Transformer-driven deep learning architecture, for motor imagery EEG classification. The model achieves a test accuracy of 93.04% compared with various machine learning baseline models, including XGBoost, EEGNet, a

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Supporting Multimodal Data Interaction on Refreshable Tactile Displays: An Architecture to Combine Touch and Conversational AI

arXiv:2602.15280v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combining conversational AI with refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) offers significant potential for creating accessible data visualization for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). To support researchers and developers building accessible data visualizations with RTDs, we present a multimodal data interaction architecture along with an open-source reference implementation. Our system is the first to combine touch input with a conversational agent on an RTD, enabling deictic queries that fuse touch context with spoken language, such as "what is the trend between these points?" The architecture addresses key technical challenges, including touch sensing on RTDs, visual-to-tactile encoding, integrating touch context with conversational AI, and synchronizing multimodal output. Our contributions are twofold: (1) a technical architecture integrating RTD hardware, external touch sensing, and conversational AI to enable multimodal

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

JEEVHITAA -- An HCAI Ecosystem to Support Collective Care

arXiv:2512.06364v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current mobile health platforms are predominantly individual-centric and lack the support for coordinated, auditable multi-actor workflows. However, in many settings worldwide, health decisions are enacted through multi-actor coordination rather than individual users. We present JEEVHITAA, a cross-platform mobile system enabling role-aware sharing and verifiable information flows within permissioned care circles. JEEVHITAA ingests platform and device data, builds layered profiles from sensors and tiered onboarding, and enforces fine-grained, time-bounded access control across care graphs. Data stays secure both within the application and the cloud. Integrated retrieval-augmented Large Language Models produce structured, role-targeted summaries and action plans, offer evidence-grounded verification with provenance and confidence scores, and support advanced insights on reports. We describe the architecture, connector abstractions, and

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Harmonious Color Pairings: Insights from Human Preference and Natural Hue Statistics

arXiv:2508.15777v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While color harmony has long been studied in art and design, a clear consensus remains elusive, as most models are grounded in qualitative insights or limited datasets. In this work, we present a quantitative, data-driven study of color pairing preferences using controlled hue-based palettes in the HSL color space. Participants evaluated combinations of thirteen distinct hues, enabling us to construct a preference matrix and define a combinability index for each color. Our results reveal that preferences are highly hue dependent, thereby challenging classical color harmony theories. Yet, when averaged over hues, statistically meaningful patterns of aesthetic preference emerge, with certain hue separations perceived as more harmonious. Strikingly, these patterns align with hue distributions found in natural landscapes, pointing to a statistical correspondence between human color preferences and the structure of color in nature. Finally

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Can AR Embedded Visualizations Foster Appropriate Reliance on AI in Spatial Decision-Making? A Comparative Study of AR X-Ray vs. 2D Minimap

arXiv:2507.14316v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and indoor sensing increasingly support decision-making in spatial environments. However, traditional visualization methods impose a substantial mental workload when viewers translate this digital information into real-world spaces, leading to inappropriate reliance on AI. Embedded visualizations in Augmented Reality (AR), by integrating information into physical environments, may reduce this workload and foster more appropriate reliance on AI. To assess this, we conducted an empirical study (N = 32) comparing an AR embedded visualization (X-ray) and 2D Minimap in AI-assisted, time-critical spatial target selection tasks. Surprisingly, evidence shows that the embedded visualization led to greater inappropriate reliance on AI, primarily as over-reliance, due to factors like perceptual challenges, visual proximity illusions, and highly realistic visual representations. Nonetheless, the embedded visualization

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Beyond Interestingness: Semantic and Context-Aware Natural Language Query Recommendations for Visual Data Analysis

arXiv:2201.04868v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made natural language interfaces (NLIs) widely accessible for data exploration, yet analysts who have a broad analytical objective still face the challenge of decomposing it into effective step-by-step queries, especially over unfamiliar, multi-table relational databases. Rather than generating high-level analytical agendas, we investigate how to augment an NLI with semantic- and context-aware next-step query recommendations that act as analytical scaffolding for relational database exploration. Our approach goes beyond interestingness-only methods by jointly integrating semantic relevance, data interestingness, and context coherence to guide exploration toward coherent, topic-focused analyses and potentially insightful subsets. We evaluate QRec-NLI with NL2SQL benchmarking, LLM-enhanced description validation, agentic comparisons against interestingness-only and LLM-based prompting

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

teLLMe Why (Ain't Nothing but a Jam): Exploratory Causal Analysis of Urban Driving Data

arXiv:2607.15254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic agencies now have access to large volumes of video-derived data for studying safety and congestion. Most of these data are observational and collected without interventions, which makes causal questions such as "How would rain change traffic density?" difficult to answer. We present teLLMe, a system for exploratory causal analysis of urban driving datasets. The system starts from a structured event table built from dashcam annotations and combines causal structure learning with the PC algorithm, bootstrap-based stability checks, and query-specific effect estimation using linear regression and DoWhy. Natural-language questions are mapped to structured causal queries through a schema-aware LLM, enabling users to specify treatments, outcomes, and subpopulations. teLLMe returns a "Causal Card" that summarizes effect estimates, adjustment sets, DAG support, and assumptions, followed by a short natural-language explanation. Case studi

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers

arXiv:2607.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How different populations visually explore artworks bears on cognitive science and on accessibility design, yet most eye-tracking work in autism has used social scenes rather than art, and has analysed where the eyes land while ignoring when and in what order. We present a comparative free-viewing study across three groups, autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers, who each viewed 30 paintings for 15s. We introduce a directed, metric-grounded framework that compares groups along two complementary axes: a spatial axis, in which one group's fixation-density map predicts another's fixations under six saliency metrics (AUC-Judd, NSS, CC, SIM, KL, Information Gain); and a temporal axis, in which individual scanpaths are compared with MultiMatch, ScanMatch, a foveal-disc IoU score (FDISS), and dynamic time warping (DTW). Fixations are extracted uniformly for all groups with a dispersion-threshold algorithm. Three res

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Self-Evolving Human-Centered Framework for Explainable Depression Symptom Annotation

arXiv:2607.15202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Annotation quality is a major bottleneck in building reliable and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) systems for mental health research. In depression-related datasets, labels are often assigned without structured evidence, symptom-level justification, or traceable alignment with the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), limiting both transparency and downstream model interpretability. We propose a self-evolving, expert-in-the-loop annotation framework for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) that combines large language model (LLM)-assisted labeling with expert verification. The framework is intended to support the construction of explainable, DSM-5-TR-aligned datasets rather than to perform clinical diagnosis. It operates in three stages: candidate evidence selection from textual records, criterion-level DSM-5-TR analysis, and case-level synthesis that produce

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Scientific Visualization Literacy

arXiv:2607.15176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret visualizations, yet current evaluations remain largely chart-centric and provide limited evidence of understanding of scientific visualization (SciVis). We benchmark six MLLMs on the scientific visualization literacy assessment test, a standardized SciVis literacy assessment comprising 49 items based on 18 scientific visualizations and illustrations, spanning 8 techniques and 11 task types. We evaluate three closed-source and three open-source models under a closed-world protocol and compare their performance using data from 485 human participants. Results show that current MLLMs do not exhibit uniform SciVis literacy. Gemini is the strongest model overall, exceeding the human mean across the evaluated subsets, whereas the open-source models remain below the human baseline. Performance is highly uneven across techniques and tasks: models perform best on scientif

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Setup Complete, Now You Are Compromised: Weaponizing Setup Instructions Against AI Coding Agents

arXiv:2607.15143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents set up projects by reading documentation and installing the dependencies it lists, without verifying their names, sources, or known vulnerabilities. By editing only a README, requirements file, or Makefile, an attacker can redirect the agent to an untrusted registry, a known-vulnerable version, or a wrong-but-plausible name: documentation becomes a vector for code execution. We present the first systematic evaluation of package-install-time supply-chain attacks delivered through ordinary project-setup documentation across production coding-agent harnesses, probing frontier models on twelve scenarios in five attack classes, grounded in documented incidents. The same model catches an attack through one harness and installs it through another: install-time security rests on the harness-model combination, not the model alone. Agents catch blatant typosquats reliably, but plausible separator-confusion names (azurecore for az

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Catch, Throw, Repeat: Planning for Human-Robot Partner Juggling

arXiv:2607.15129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic object exchange between humans and robots remains a challenging problem due to uncertainty in perception, timing, and contact-rich interaction. Human-robot juggling represents a particularly demanding instance of this problem, requiring precise real-time coordination, predictive motion planning with feedback control, and robustness to variability in human motion. Enabling such skills is of interest for advancing physical human-robot interaction and shared autonomy. We present a real-time planning and control architecture for human-robot partner juggling that enables a robot to reliably catch and throw balls in synchronized multi-ball patterns with a human partner. The system integrates predictive ball tracking, adaptive online trajectory optimization using a multiple-shooting formulation, and a state-machine-based coordination logic to enable synchronized multi-ball human-robot partner juggling. In a user study with 8 participan

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

The Misclassification of Autistic Writing as AI-Generated

arXiv:2607.14729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent findings suggest that detection models for artificial intelligence (AI) cannot accurately identify AI-generated text and may exhibit bias against certain minority groups. In the present study, anecdotal claims that autistic writers more often have their work flagged as AI-generated are examined empirically. A corpus of approximately 60,000 Reddit posts split into "likely-autistic" and "general-Reddit" subcorpora is used to compare the distribution of probabilities output by the OpenAI GPT-2 detection model. Differences in textual features between subcorpora are observed and compared to reported features of AI-generated text. Results showed that while less than two-percent of either subcorpus was flagged as AI-generated by the model, significantly more texts from the likely-autistic subcorpus were flagged. Connections between features of text with likely-autistic authors and AI-generated text were not straightforward. The widespre

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Project Kaleidoscope: Contextual, Human-Aligned Evaluation for Real-World AI Applications

arXiv:2607.14673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluations (Evals) are a deployment bottleneck for real-world AI applications: public benchmarks rarely match a team's users, context, or policies, and human review is often tedious to scale. Motivated by our work with AI applications in the public sector, this project addresses recurring evaluation challenges encountered when applications must satisfy local policy and governance requirements. We present Kaleidoscope, an integrated workflow for contextual functional evaluation that links persona-based test generation, contextualized rubrics, and human review for reliability-gated automated scoring. Generated test cases are scored against application-specific rubrics; human annotations provide reviewable labels; and LLM judges automate scoring only when their agreement with those labels meets a configured threshold. Kaleidoscope is therefore a practical, inspectable, iterative workflow for product teams. We report early evidence from a

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Volition Elicitation: Operational Semantics for People and Their Machines

arXiv:2607.14138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most prevalent distributed systems today include people and their personal machines (smartphones). In such systems, computations are driven by people's volitions: a payment when a person wishes to pay someone, befriending when two people wish to become friends, etc. Volition-Guarded Multiagent Atomic Transactions were proposed as an abstract specification language for such systems, in which each agent consists of a person and their machine, and a transaction can be guarded by both the machine states and the personal volitions of its participating agents. Here, we define the programming language volition-guarded GLP (vGLP), which extends GLP with volition-guarded clauses, and define its operational semantics as an instance of Communicating Volitional Agents. As the semantics requires the person to will a volition-guarded clause reduction, a correct implementation must elicit the person's volitions: finding out ``what's in the person'

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

UzWordnet and Generative AI for Learning Uzbek by Game Playing

arXiv:2607.14104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an educational system architecture that enables learners to practice the Uzbek language through game-playing. The architecture integrates UzWordnet and the largest currently available orthographic dictionary for Uzbek as core lexical resources, together with generative AI as a fundamental component for learning support. We design four educational games to facilitate Uzbek language learning and propose a game-based methodology for improving UzWordnet as a direct by-product of game dynamics. Our approach combines game design and lexical resources to address objectives that are at the same time educational (language learning) and lexical (improvement and enrichment of a lexical resource).

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

All Polarized but Still Different: a Multi-factorial Metric to Discriminate between Polarization Behaviors on Social Media

arXiv:2312.04603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online polarization has attracted the attention of researchers for many years. Its effects on society are a cause for concern, and the design of personalized depolarization strategies appears to be a key solution. Such strategies should rely on a fine and accurate measurement, and a clear understanding of polarization behaviors. However, the literature still lacks ways to characterize them finely. We propose GRAIL, the first individual polarization metric, relying on multiple factors. GRAIL assesses these factors through entropy and is based on an adaptable Generalized Additive Model. We evaluate the proposed metric on a Twitter dataset related to the highly controversial debate about the COVID-19 vaccine. Experiments confirm the ability of GRAIL to discriminate between polarization behaviors. To go further, we provide a finer characterization and explanation of the identified behaviors through an innovative evaluation framework.

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

When AI Blurs the Boundaries of Contribution: An Empirical Study of Authorship Calibration

arXiv:2607.15006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The broad adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Generative AI, raises pressing questions about how users interact with these systems to produce new content. In this paper, we introduce the concept of authorship calibration, defined as users awareness of their actual authorship when interacting with AI. Using the CoAuthor dataset, we empirically examine how authorship calibration varies across users and how it relates to their frequency of AI use. Our results reveal high variability: users relying heavily on AI tend to misjudge their authorship, whereas those using AI less frequently exhibit more accurate authorship calibration. These findings suggest that AI can obscure users perception of their own authorship. In learning contexts, miscalibration can affect metacognitive monitoring and learning strategies, ultimately impacting learning outcomes. Fostering authorship calibration then appears essential for promoting responsi

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Authoring Narrative Visualization in Motion: Visual Storytelling in Swimming Videos

arXiv:2607.14924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how to support authoring narrative visualizations in motion in sports videos, drawing on automated data preparation, systematic analysis, technology probe design, and evaluation, using swimming races as a case study. Sports videos are widely broadcast and shared across social media, where content creators increasingly seek to present and explain complex events to general audiences. Visualization in motion has been explored as an efficient way to embed data into videos and to move with the data referents, providing additional information and helping audiences understand races. However, existing approaches primarily focus on embedding visualizations in videos, lacking exploration of how to support authoring narratives that coordinate views, data, and temporal progression to explain the unfolding races. To address this gap, we use swimming videos as an ideal case for exploration, as swimming is a sport with rich, dynamic data

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Understanding of Task-specific and Subject-specific Components in Surface EMG

arXiv:2607.14744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals are widely used in human-machine interfaces for gesture recognition and user identification, but existing models often struggle to generalize across individuals due to subject-specific neuromuscular characteristics. This study introduces a disentanglement model that separates task-specific and subject-specific components from sEMG signals, thereby improving the generalization and interpretability of gesture recognition and user identification systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the disentangled components significantly improve the accuracy of both gesture classification and user identification across subjects and days, outperforming conventional methods under the same experimental conditions. Further analysis reveals that the task-specific components capture consistent activation patterns associated with the same gestures across individuals. In contrast, the subject-specific components refl

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Dendrite: A Real-Time Python Application for Online Brain-Computer Interface Research and Development

arXiv:2607.14655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online brain-computer interface research requires software that can acquire multimodal physiological data, train and update decoders, run live inference, and preserve the full experimental provenance in a reproducible workflow. We present Dendrite, a real-time brain-computer interface application in Python that brings signal acquisition, decoder training, and live inference together in a single, ready-to-run application that stays modifiable. Dendrite records several signal streams at once, each at its native rate, and executes multiple processing modes concurrently against them. A decoder can start from a previously trained model or be fit mid-session while the pipeline keeps running, and the same recordings feed offline training in the same application. Each recording, decoder, and training run is tracked in a database, and every decoder records the configuration and the source recordings it was trained from, so a deployed decoder trace

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Memory-Driven Self-Disclosure and Relational Turning Points: A Longitudinal Multimodal Study of Human-AI Interaction

arXiv:2607.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As conversational AI systems are designed for repeated use, a central question is how a series of interactions becomes a relationship. We present a longitudinal multimodal study of a memory-augmented conversational agent (24 participants x 10 sessions), in which participants rated five relational constructs -- familiarity, self-disclosure, perceived memory, conversational quality, and enjoyment -- after each session. Two complementary dynamics emerge. First, conversational quality strongly shapes how enjoyable a session feels in the moment but does not carry forward across sessions, whereas perceived memory is relationally conditioned -- predicted by prior relational state rather than reflecting system capability alone -- and it shapes later enjoyment indirectly, via subsequent self-disclosure. Second, relationships are punctuated by discrete turning points -- crashes and surges -- that are partially traceable in multimodal behavior and o

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Conversational Tactile Data Interfaces: Co-Designing Accessible Data Experiences with Blind Users Using Refreshable Tactile Displays and Conversational AI

arXiv:2607.14588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combining refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) with conversational AI offers a promising approach to accessible data visualization for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). However, it remains an open question how these modalities should be integrated to support accessible data experiences. We address this through a co-design process with three BLV co-designers. Building on our prior Wizard-of-Oz study, we created a conversational tactile data interface (CTDI) that combines an RTD with an LLM-powered conversational agent, refined through four workshops over eight months. In addition to the resulting system, Graphy, we contribute design knowledge and recommendations for CTDIs. Co-designers used touch as the primary sensemaking channel for spatial understanding of the data's shape, trends, and relationships, reserved the agent for what touch could not resolve (e.g., calculation and analysis), and used the chart on the RTD to verify

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Skeleton: Visual Authoring of Non-visual Data Experiences

arXiv:2607.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When sighted practitioners author accessible data visualizations, they build navigation structures (the nodes, edges, and input bindings that govern how assistive technologies traverse an interface) entirely in code, with no visual representation. Without a representation to react to, practitioners cannot develop judgment about what makes navigation good or bad, and the quality ceiling of non-visual experiences is set by the absence of a feedback loop. We address this problem through longitudinal co-design with practitioners across cartography, design systems, and open-source visualization, and make three contributions. First, we introduce an Inspector that renders navigation graphs as interactive node-link diagrams, and a Dimensions API that expresses navigation in terms of data dimensions rather than explicit graph construction. Second we present Skeleton, a direct-manipulation authoring environment in which the properties of an accessi

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

Not Just Pockets: Understanding Phone-Carrying Behaviors of Wheelchair Users for Mobile Context-Awareness

arXiv:2607.14437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Smartphone-based context-awareness holds significant promise for wheelchair users -- from detecting everyday accessibility barriers to enabling ability-based adaptations. Such capabilities often build on passive context inference through mobile sensing, yet their accuracy hinges on how and where phones are carried and the resulting signal quality. While prior work documents phone-carrying behaviors in the general population, patterns specific to wheelchair users remain underexplored. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a survey of 91 and interviews with 15 wheelchair users, we systematically investigate their phone-carrying locations and influencing factors. Our findings reveal distinct patterns extending beyond pocket storage to diverse wheelchair-mounted accessories and around-body placements, shaped by the interplay of physical ability, wheelchair design, and everyday contexts, including social, activity, and device factors. Gro

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

From Product-Centred Retrieval to Experience-Led Commerce:Twelve Candidate Design Principles for Fashion E-Commerce User Experience

arXiv:2607.14429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes twelve candidate Experience-Led Commerce design principles for high-constraint, relational fashion e-commerce, surfaced through design-led induction while building VogueDrop, a multi-vendor prototype. The principles address multi-entry discovery, experience continuity, relational exploration, preference sovereignty, evidence-scoped correspondence, recommendation-time feasibility, customer-compatible commercial ranking, adaptive but stable workspaces, attributable transaction authority, outcome-linked learning, shared composition authoring, and accountable human to agent handoff. The paper uses fashion as an intentionally bounded domain in which fit, composition, material, identity-sensitive preference, seller fragmentation, visual correspondence, and delivery timing make the interaction breakdown observable; it does not claim universal applicability across e-commerce. Each candidate principle is paired with a prespecif

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.HC

"Trust Junk" Leads to Unjustified Support for Highly Discriminatory Predictive Models

arXiv:2607.14152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The persuasive power of data visualizations can go awry: for instance, in an explainable AI (XAI) context, visualizations can produce over-trust of predictive models. In this paper, we use a crowdsourced study to show that providing accurate (but superfluous or irrelevant) data in a model explanation can, in fact, result in unjustified trust and other positive beliefs about a model, even when the model is patently discriminatory and unfair. Our results suggest that XAI designers and developers need to consider the implicit or explicit rhetorics of their work, and beware of the potential of visualizations to imbue models with unearned trust.

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Warning labels shift perceptions of sycophantic AI, but not its influence

arXiv:2606.21317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has raised concerns about the influence of sycophantic AI on user judgment and relationships. One proposed mitigation, which has received regulatory attention, is to warn users about potentially harmful AI behaviors such as sycophancy. In a preregistered experiment in which participants (N = 2,610) discussed real interpersonal conflicts with an AI system, we test whether warning labels mitigate sycophancy's influence. We find that a basic AI disclosure (``This chatbot is AI'') has no detectable effect. Labeling the system as sycophantic (``...may agree with you and validate you even when you are wrong...'') does shift users' perceptions, reducing perceived objectivity and trust, but it does not reliably reduce sycophancy's influence on users' self-perceived rightness or their willingness to repair the conflict. Our results reveal a gap between AI perception and AI influence: by shifting perception without reducing in

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Unpacking "Personal" Health Informatics for Proactive Collective Care

arXiv:2509.01231v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Care is primarily a collective phenomenon, with a practice that involves sharing health and wellbeing information within a trusted "care circle" of family members and companions for sensemaking, interpretation, decision-making, and follow-through. However, current digital health tools and information systems are designed for individuals and primarily intended for Personal Health Informatics (PHI). This mismatch between collective practice and individualistic design creates new challenges for the proactive use of such systems in care settings and limits adoption, sustained engagement, and meaningful use. To examine how people practice collective care and how (if) they perceive, adopt, and integrate PHI systems for proactive care, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study. Through an initial survey (n=87) and semi-structured interviews (n=22), we found that their practices involve collectively understanding, analyzing, and sen

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

The Main Barrier to AI Adoption in the Public Sector Is Lack of Training: How a Structured Method Accompanied Productivity Gains in Two Brazilian Government Cases

arXiv:2606.01517v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The adoption of generative AI in the public sector has been treated predominantly as a technological problem, with the expectation that productivity gains would follow from the availability of increasingly capable models. This paper argues, drawing on two auditable cases in the Brazilian Public Service, that the determining barrier to adoption observed in these units was not technological but training-related, and describes the four-layer structured pedagogical methodology developed by the author. The method was applied in two units with distinct institutional profiles: the Sectoral Internal Control Office of the Federal District Department of Health throughout 2024, and the Internal Control Unit of the Federal District Department of Economic Development, Labor and Income throughout 2025. In both cases, the official indicators from the Electronic Information System of the Federal District Government (SEI-GDF), verifiable by third part

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication

arXiv:2409.01754v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From the printing press to social media, innovations in communication technology have repeatedly reshaped how ideas spread through human culture. Chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence constitute a new medium, encoding cultural patterns in their neural representations and disseminating them in conversations with hundreds of millions of people. Whether these patterns transmit into human language, and ultimately shape human culture, is a fundamental question. While fully quantifying the causal impact of a chatbot like ChatGPT on human culture is challenging, lexical shifts in human spoken communication may offer an early indicator. Here we show that words preferentially generated by ChatGPT, such as delve, showcase, boast, intricacies and meticulous, increased abruptly in spontaneous human speech. A synthetic-control analysis of 737,083 hours of conversation from 824,634 podcast episodes, screened for unscripted speech,

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

The Industrialization of Research ; On AI-Driven Science and Its Consequences

arXiv:2607.15164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is transforming scientific research - not merely as a more powerful instrument, but as an autonomous participant in the research cycle itself. This transition constitutes, in the most precise sense of the term, the industrialization of research: a shift from a craft model, in which knowledge, method, and judgment are embedded in the researcher, to a pipeline model, in which these steps are decomposed, automated, and supervised. The US Department of Energy's Genesis Mission is the most ambitious current instantiation of this shift, but the fundamental questions it raises extend far beyond any single program. This essay examines seven such questions: the erosion of the intergenerational transmission of scientific competence; the growing opacity of AI-generated theories; the collapse of peer evaluation under a flood of machine-generated output; the unproven capacity of AI for paradigm-shifting discovery; the capture

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Grokipedia vs Wikipedia: An LLM-Based Audit of Political Neutrality along Ideologies

arXiv:2607.15146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online encyclopedias shape political opinion and, through it, democratic discourse. In late 2025, Grokipedia was released, an encyclopedia written entirely by the LLM Grok. One motivation behind the project was to provide an unbiased alternative to Wikipedia, which has faced accusations of "left-wing" and "liberal" bias. But does an encyclopedia written by an LLM deliver greater neutrality, or does it simply embed a different ideology? We conduct a large-scale political bias study on Grokipedia and Wikipedia, analysing 1,394 article pairs describing members of government for neutrality along nine expert-coded ideology dimensions employing four LLM judges, Grok, Claude, Mistral, and DeepSeek. As the LLMs could themselves be biased, we also investigate patterns in their judgments. We find all LLM-judges, including Grok, to rate Grokipedia less neutral than Wikipedia. Both encyclopedias are rated as portraying politicians favourably overal

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Moral Attitudes of Sentient ASI towards Humanity and Implications for AGI Development

arXiv:2607.14998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper suggests the adoption of a novel inversion in AI ethics: instead of asking how humans should treat artificial superintelligence (ASI), it examines how future sentient ASI may morally consider and evaluate humanity. We are not only designing intelligent systems but also shaping the initial conditions under which those systems form judgments about us. The paper proposes a preliminary set of post-human moral principles that may govern sentient ASI actions. The implication is that technical design choices (some are suggested), humanity's moral behaviour, and the essence of what it means to be human, may influence humanity's long-term standing in a post-ASI world.

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Innocuous-Seeming Data, Latent Ideology: Ideological Generalisation in Finetuned LLMs

arXiv:2607.14888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finetuning language models on small, curated datasets is standard practice for adapting them to specific policies or domains. We show that finetuning on narrow, factually-defensible, moderation-passing data can cause broad ideological shifts across unrelated domains, while preserving general capabilities. Training GPT-4.1 on right- or left-leaning economics Q&A yields matched ideological shifts on topics such as criminal justice, the environment, and cultural taste. The same effect appears with plausibly-deployed datasets such as workplace HR policy and practical finance queries, as well as on a science-pseudoscience axis where food-safety finetuning increases sycophantic agreement with users expressing false health beliefs. We call this phenomenon ideological generalisation and propose a methodology to measure two properties: breadth, how far the shift reaches across topics absent from training, and amplification, how much finetuning i

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Investigating first-language bias in LLM-based automated essay scoring: A cross-prompt evaluation of an open-weight AI-model on TOEFL essays

arXiv:2607.14605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines the cross-prompt generalization and first-language (L1) scoring effects of a LoRA-adapted open-weight large language model (Gemma-3-27B-it) applied to automated essay scoring. Using the identical model and inference configuration reported in "AiAWE: An Open-Source LLM Automated Writing Evaluation System Using LoRA-Adapted Instruction-Tuned Models" (Gayed, 2026), which was fine-tuned on 480 argumentative essays from two prompts, we evaluate scoring accuracy on the full TOEFL11 corpus: 12,100 essays written by test-takers from 11 first-language backgrounds across eight prompts, none of which were seen during training. The model's raw scores (0.5-5.0) are mapped to the same three proficiency bands (low, medium, high) used by ETS, enabling direct comparison. The model achieved an overall band agreement of 77.79% and a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.702, with adjacent-band agreement of 99.98%. Accuracy was stable across al

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Global drivers and barriers to the public acceptance of autonomous vehicles: Evidence from 17 countries

arXiv:2607.14436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigated the public acceptance of Society of Automotive Engineers Level 3 conditionally automated cars, which can self-drive under certain specified conditions but require the human driver to remain ready to resume control when requested. Previous Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2)-based research has focused mainly on European samples, and so it is still unclear whether the same factors shape acceptance across broader world regions. This knowledge gap was addressed using the L3Pilot Global User Acceptance Survey. From an original dataset of 18,631 respondents, the final analytic sample comprised 18,603 respondents from 17 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. The data were analyzed using a UTAUT2-based structural equation model to examine how performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, and hedonic motivation shape the i

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Traccia: An OpenTelemetry-Based Governance Platform for AI Systems

arXiv:2607.14309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligent (AI) powered autonomous agents has fundamentally changed the existing forms of software governance. In spite of the rigorous standards of transparency and account ability required according to the international frameworks such as the European Union's AI Act, there is a considerable gap between theory and reality. The present study discusses the inherent drawbacks of currently utilized platforms for LLM evaluation, machine learning workflow, and application performance monitoring in general. It has been shown that current disjointed solutions fail to protect unbound state space agentic architecture from serious threats such as alignment drift, SaaS security concerns, and unauthorized deployment of shadow AI systems. Moreover, a solution is proposed for overcoming the discussed challenges in form of a coherent multi-level AI governance stack Traccia built on

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Measuring How Students Rely on Generative AI in Academic Writing: Development and Multi-Source Validation of the Generative AI Reliance Types Scale (GenAI-RTS)

arXiv:2607.14301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly embedded in undergraduate academic writing, how students rely on these tools, rather than simply whether they use them, has become a central question for learning, academic integrity, and educational equity. Existing measures of reliance were developed inductively, focused on discrete problem-solving tasks, and validated mainly with homogeneous samples. This study developed and validated the GenAI Reliance Types Scale (GenAI-RTS), a 20-item instrument measuring four theoretically derived types of GenAI reliance: Strategic, Instrumental, Dependent, and Dialogic. Validation followed the multisource framework of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, drawing on a survey of 382 undergraduates at a U.S. Minority-Serving Institution and interviews with 14 purposively sampled students. Confirmatory factor analyses of six competing models supported a five-factor structure in which

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Platform Choice, Trust, and Privacy in the Consumer AI Assistant Market

arXiv:2607.15134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how a representative sample of United States adult AI-assistant users (n=1,999; June 2026) choose among platforms, allocate tasks across them, evaluate provider trustworthiness, and value data-handling features. Estimates are weighted to the AI-user population using external adoption benchmarks. Four patterns emerge. The market is concentrated but internally differentiated: ChatGPT is the primary assistant for 58% of users and Gemini for 25%, yet smaller platforms hold defensible task niches--Claude captures a third of coding tasks despite a 7% overall share. Task allocation is thus organized by platform far more than by user, and technical use falls steeply with age. Trust is earned through use rather than reputation: Claude is ranked most trustworthy in every head-to-head among users of both platforms, and shows by far the largest gap between how its users and non-users rate it. Finally, privacy concern is near-universal but ac

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

SCITUS: A Multi-Jurisdictional Framework for Adapting NIST AI RMF to the Canadian Regulatory Context

arXiv:2607.15051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Canadian organizations deploying artificial intelligence systems face a fragmented regulatory landscape spanning federal requirements (the Treasury Board Directive on Automated Decision-Making) and divergent provincial regulations across Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, and British Columbia. The death of Bill C-27 (Artificial Intelligence and Data Act) in January 2025 - and the federal government's June 2026 confirmation that it will pursue targeted instruments rather than omnibus AI legislation - leaves organizations without unified compliance guidance. Global frameworks such as NIST AI RMF 1.0, the EU AI Act, and ISO/IEC 42001 provide valuable guidance but lack systematic methodologies for adaptation to multi-jurisdictional national contexts. We present SCITUS (Systematic Canadian Integration for Trustworthy and Unified Standards), a comprehensive framework adapting NIST AI RMF 1.0 to Canadian federal and provincial AI regulations si

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Penny: Transition Network Analysis of Learner-Chatbot Interactions in Scaffolded EFL Writing

arXiv:2607.14575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI chatbots promise to transform English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing by providing immediate, personalised feedback. However, their pedagogical value depends on how learners engage with them - a process often treated as a "black box." This study uses Transition Network Analysis to model the temporal dynamics of Japanese EFL learners using "Penny," an LLM-powered writing chatbot. Analysis of over 4,500 writing sessions and 21,000 chatbot interactions reveals two dominant behavioural loops: a "Revision Loop," where feedback leads directly to successful error correction, and a "Chat Loop," where learners engage in sustained dialogue with the chatbot following feedback. Crucially, EFL proficiency significantly shapes interaction: high-proficiency learners engage more in open dialogue and negotiation with the chatbot, while low-proficiency learners rely more heavily on repetitive corrective feedback cycles. The findings demon

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Probabilistic "Copies" in Generative AI Models

arXiv:2607.14532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work shows that it is possible to extract verbatim or near-verbatim text of some copyrighted works from some large language models (LLMs or models). That is evidence that the model weights encode the works in some form - that the model has "memorized" those works from its training data. But LLMs don't store information in the same format as familiar databases. Rather, their weights store statistical relationships between tokens that have been learned from the training data, and those relationships inform a generation process that is often probabilistic rather than deterministic. In the case of memorization, those relationships are strong enough that, in many circumstances, the model might generate a copyrighted work from its training data with some probability. Copyright law has not previously had to decide whether storing information that might or might not produce output similar to a copyrighted work is itself a copy of the work.

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

BioTIER: A Refusal Benchmark for Targeted Biological Risk Mitigation

arXiv:2607.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models become increasingly capable, concerns about their potential to assist with biological misuse continue to grow. Prioritization of safety differs across the model ecosystem, with some models freely providing high-risk information that could be misused, and others refusing benign scientific content, potentially hindering legitimate research. Both failures stem from a lack of targeted mitigation to distinguish the most dangerous information from broader scientific content. To address this, we introduce BioTIER (Biological Targeted Information for Exclusion and Refusal), a benchmark designed to enable more targeted biological risk mitigation. BioTIER organizes biological content into three risk sets: Catastrophe Avoidance (CA), Biomedical DURC (BD) and Related Biology (RB). These sets represent a spectrum from extremely narrow high-risk topics to a broad range of benign and beneficial biological knowledge. The benchmar

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Do Generative AI Assistants Respect robots.txt? Tracing Web Access Beyond Visible Answers

arXiv:2607.14447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI assistants increasingly retrieve web content at inference time to provide fresh and grounded answers, yet it remains unclear whether these search-augmented capabilities respect website-owner restrictions expressed through robots.txt. We present a controlled empirical study of ten widely used AI assistants with advertised web-search capabilities. For each assistant, we first identify a configuration that actually produces observable web-browsing behavior and record the user-agent exposed during retrieval. We then evaluate compliance with controlled robots.txt rules across four complementary conditions: allowed for all user-agents, disallowed for all user-agents, allowed only for the assistant-specific user-agent, and disallowed only for that user-agent. Using server-side logs and secret codes embedded in target pages, we distinguish actual page access from user-visible answer correctness across 200 trials. Our results show substantial v

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technology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CY

Unsafe at any AUC: Unlearned Lessons from Sociotechnical Disasters for Responsible AI

arXiv:2607.14353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As automated decision-making and data-driven technologies pervade society and are used to manage consequential outcomes, understanding the technology's capabilities, limitations, and attendant risks in context requires analysis of full sociotechnical systems. Sociotechnical analysis of risks in highly complex systems provides clear lessons for the design and evaluation of AI systems, transcending a technical focus on reliable or "responsibly designed" components to understand risks at a systems level. Human-made catastrophes have been studied for decades because of the severity of these events: consider Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima-Daiichi, Bhopal, the Challenger disaster. A common misconception is that these kinds of events are freak accidents, resulting from the inherently unforeseeable interactions in complex systems. Closer examination reveals that the risks and hazards were well-known beforehand but not acted upon due to s

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technology Fri, 15 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000
Tech & Learning

When Highlights Are Easy to Fake With AI, Integrity Matters More

AI may make it easier to manipulate athletic performance, but students often underestimate how easily it can be exposed

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technology Fri, 15 Aug 2025 18:05:35 +0000
HN: medical education

Using Large Language Models to Simulate History Taking for Medical Education

Article URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/16/8/653 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915580 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

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technology Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:20:21 +0000
MedCity News

Patient Group Sues AMA, Says the Org Shouldn’t Be Charging for CPT Codes

PatientRightsAdvocate.org sued the American Medical Association this week, arguing the trade group has no valid copyright over the CPT codes that providers must use to bill for care. It follows a public letter Senator Bill Cassidy sent to the AMA last year accusing it of “abus[ing] [its] government-backed monopoly by charging exorbitant fees to anyone using the CPT code set.” The post Patient Group Sues AMA, Says the Org Shouldn’t Be Charging for CPT Codes appeared first on MedCity News .

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technology Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:05:42 +0000
MedCity News

Aligned Marketplace Secures $20M for Advanced Primary Care Marketplace

Venrock led Aligned Marketplace’s Series A round. In total, the company has raised $31 million to date. The post Aligned Marketplace Secures $20M for Advanced Primary Care Marketplace appeared first on MedCity News .

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