Nashville, TN & Williamsburg, VA – 24 Nov 2025 – A new study published in Artif. Intell. Auton. Syst. delivers the first systematic cross-model analysis of prompt engineering for structured data generation, offering actionable guidance for developers, data scientists, and organizations leveraging large language models (LLMs) in healthcare, e-commerce, and beyond. Led by Ashraf Elnashar from Vanderbilt University, alongside co-authors Jules White (Vanderbilt University) and Douglas C. Schmidt (William & Mary), the research benchmarks six prompt styles across three leading LLMs to solve a critical challenge: balancing accuracy, speed, and cost in structured data workflows.

Structured data—from medical records and receipts to business analytics—powers essential AI-driven tasks, but its quality and efficiency depend heavily on how prompts are designed. “Prior research only scratched the surface, testing a limited set of prompts on single models,” said Elnashar, the study’s corresponding author and a researcher in Vanderbilt’s Department of Computer Science. “Our work expands the horizon by evaluating six widely used prompt formats across ChatGPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini, revealing clear trade-offs that let practitioners tailor their approach to real-world needs.”

Automakers are required to design their vehicles so they emit sounds at low speeds to alert pedestrians to their presence, and researchers can design custom sounds to maximize their effectiveness. Mei Suzuki and her team’s efforts created a library of sounds and played them to volunteers, both in a studio and in real road conditions. They then asked the volunteers to rate each and found the best performer was a version of pink noise — a type of noise dominated by lower-frequency notes.

N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide, better known as DEET, is one of the world’s most widely used insect repellents – and it is now turning up in rivers, lakes, groundwater and even drinking water around the globe, according to a new review by an international research team. The authors warn that while DEET helps protect millions of people from mosquito-borne diseases, its growing footprint in aquatic environments raises questions about long‑term ecological and health risks.

SSA and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) are pleased to announce that Francisco José Sánchez-Sesma, professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), is the 2026 recipient of the William B. Joyner Lecture Award.