Detecting Brick Kiln Infrastructure at Scale: Graph, Foundation, and Remote Sensing Models for Satellite Imagery Data

Brick kilns are a major source of air pollution and forced labor in South Asia, yet large-scale monitoring remains limited by sparse and outdated ground data. We study brick kiln detection at scale using high-resolution satellite imagery and curate a multi city zoom-20 (0.149 meters per pixel) resolution dataset comprising over 1.3 million image tiles across five regions in South and Central Asia. We propose ClimateGraph, a region-adaptive graph-based model that captures spatial and directional structure in kiln layouts, and evaluate it against established graph learning baselines. In parallel, we assess a remote sensing based detection pipeline and benchmark it against recent foundation models for satellite imagery. Our results highlight complementary strengths across graph, foundation, and remote sensing approaches, providing practical guidance for scalable brick kiln monitoring from satellite imagery.

Advancing oncology with federated learning: transcending boundaries in breast, lung, and prostate cancer. A systematic review

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution to address the limitations of centralised machine learning (ML) in oncology, particularly in overcoming privacy concerns and harnessing the power of diverse, multi-center data. This systematic review synthesises current knowledge on the state-of-the-art FL in oncology, focusing on breast, lung, and prostate cancer. Distinct from previous surveys, our comprehensive review critically evaluates the real-world implementation and impact of FL on cancer care, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing ML generalisability, performance and data privacy in clinical settings and data. We evaluated state-of-the-art advances in FL, demonstrating its growing adoption amid tightening data privacy regulations. FL outperformed centralised ML in 15 out of the 25 studies reviewed, spanning diverse ML models and clinical applications, and facilitating integration of multi-modal information for precision medicine. Despite the current challenges identified in reproducibility, standardisation and methodology across studies, the demonstrable benefits of FL in harnessing real-world data and addressing clinical needs highlight its significant potential for advancing cancer research. We propose that future research should focus on addressing these limitations and investigating further advanced FL methods, to fully harness data diversity and realise the transformative power of cutting-edge FL in cancer care.

Mitigating climate and health impact of small-scale kiln industry using multi-spectral classifier and deep learning

Industrial air pollution has a direct health impact and is a major contributor to climate change. Small scale industries particularly bull-trench brick kilns are one of the major causes of air pollution in South Asia often creating hazardous levels of smog that is injurious to human health. To mitigate the climate and health impact of the kiln industry, fine-grained kiln localization at different geographic locations is needed. Kiln localization using multi-spectral remote sensing data such as vegetation index results in a noisy estimates whereas use of high-resolution imagery is infeasible due to cost and compute complexities. This paper proposes a fusion of spatio-temporal multi-spectral data with high-resolution imagery for detection of brick kilns within the "Brick-Kiln-Belt" of South Asia. We first perform classification using low-resolution spatio-temporal multi-spectral data from Sentinel-2 imagery by combining vegetation, burn, build up and moisture indices. Then orientation aware object detector: YOLOv3 (with theta value) is implemented for removal of false detections and fine-grained localization. Our proposed technique, when compared with other benchmarks, results in a 21x improvement in speed with comparable or higher accuracy when tested over multiple countries.