XR-CareerAssist: An Immersive Platform for Personalised Career Guidance Leveraging Extended Reality and Multimodal AI

Conventional career guidance platforms rely on static, text-driven interfaces that struggle to engage users or deliver personalised, evidence-based insights. Although Computer-Assisted Career Guidance Systems have evolved since the 1960s, they remain limited in interactivity and pay little attention to the narrative dimensions of career development. We introduce XR-CareerAssist, a platform that unifies Extended Reality (XR) with several Artificial Intelligence (AI) modules to deliver immersive, multilingual career guidance. The system integrates Automatic Speech Recognition for voice-driven interaction, Neural Machine Translation across English, Greek, French, and Italian, a Langchain-based conversational Training Assistant for personalised dialogue, a BLIP-based Vision-Language model for career visualisations, and AWS Polly Text-to-Speech delivered through an interactive 3D avatar. Career trajectories are rendered as dynamic Sankey diagrams derived from a repository of more than 100,000 anonymised professional profiles. The application was built in Unity for Meta Quest 3, with backend services hosted on AWS. A pilot evaluation at the University of Exeter with 23 participants returned 95.6% speech recognition accuracy, 78.3% overall user satisfaction, and 91.3% favourable ratings for system responsiveness, with feedback informing subsequent improvements to motion comfort, audio clarity, and text legibility. XR-CareerAssist demonstrates how the fusion of XR and AI can produce more engaging, accessible, and effective career development tools, with the integration of five AI modules within a single immersive environment yielding a multimodal interaction experience that distinguishes it from existing career guidance platforms.

AI-Driven Modular Services for Accessible Multilingual Education in Immersive Extended Reality Settings: Integrating Speech Processing, Translation, and Sign Language Rendering

This work introduces a modular platform that brings together six AI services, automatic speech recognition via OpenAI Whisper, multilingual translation through Meta NLLB, speech synthesis using AWS Polly, emotion classification with RoBERTa, dialogue summarisation via flan t5 base samsum, and International Sign (IS) rendering through Google MediaPipe. A corpus of IS gesture recordings was processed to derive hand landmark coordinates, which were subsequently mapped onto three dimensional avatar animations inside a virtual reality (VR) environment. Validation comprised technical benchmarking of each AI component, including comparative assessments of speech synthesis providers and multilingual translation models (NLLB 200 and EuroLLM 1.7B variants). Technical evaluations confirmed the suitability of the platform for real time XR deployment. Speech synthesis benchmarking established that AWS Polly delivers the lowest latency at a competitive price point. The EuroLLM 1.7B Instruct variant attained a higher BLEU score, surpassing NLLB. These findings establish the viability of orchestrating cross modal AI services within XR settings for accessible, multilingual language instruction. The modular design permits independent scaling and adaptation to varied educational contexts, providing a foundation for equitable learning solutions aligned with European Union digital accessibility goals.

Better Together: Using Multi-task Learning to Improve Feature Selection within Structural Datasets

There have been recent efforts to move to population-based structural health monitoring (PBSHM) systems. One area of PBSHM which has been recognised for potential development is the use of multi-task learning (MTL); algorithms which differ from traditional independent learning algorithms. Presented here is the use of the MTL, ''Joint Feature Selection with LASSO'', to provide automatic feature selection for a structural dataset. The classification task is to differentiate between the port and starboard side of a tailplane, for samples from two aircraft of the same model. The independent learner produced perfect F1 scores but had poor engineering insight; whereas the MTL results were interpretable, highlighting structural differences as opposed to differences in experimental set-up.

Bayesian Modelling of Multivalued Power Curves from an Operational Wind Farm

Power curves capture the relationship between wind speed and output power for a specific wind turbine. Accurate regression models of this function prove useful in monitoring, maintenance, design, and planning. In practice, however, the measurements do not always correspond to the ideal curve: power curtailments will appear as (additional) functional components. Such multivalued relationships cannot be modelled by conventional regression, and the associated data are usually removed during pre-processing. The current work suggests an alternative method to infer multivalued relationships in curtailed power data. Using a population-based approach, an overlapping mixture of probabilistic regression models is applied to signals recorded from turbines within an operational wind farm. The model is shown to provide an accurate representation of practical power data across the population.