Recent advances in general-purpose AI underscore the urgent need to align AI systems with human goals and values. Yet, the lack of a clear, shared understanding of what constitutes "alignment" limits meaningful progress and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this position paper, we argue that the research community should explicitly define and critically reflect on "alignment" to account for the bidirectional and dynamic relationship between humans and AI. Through a systematic review of over 400 papers spanning HCI, NLP, ML, and more, we examine how alignment is currently defined and operationalized. Building on this analysis, we introduce the Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment framework, which not only incorporates traditional efforts to align AI with human values but also introduces the critical, underexplored dimension of aligning humans with AI – supporting cognitive, behavioral, and societal adaptation to rapidly advancing AI technologies. Our findings reveal significant gaps in current literature, especially in long-term interaction design, human value modeling, and mutual understanding. We conclude with three central challenges and actionable recommendations to guide future research toward more nuanced, reciprocal, and human-AI alignment approaches.

OBJECTIVE: We propose a new analytic framework, "Artificial Synthetic Imaging Data (ASID) Workflow," for sleep classification from a wearable device comprising: 1) the creation of ASID from data collected by a non-invasive wearable device that permits real-time multi-modal physiological monitoring on heart rate (HR), 3-axis accelerometer, electrodermal activity, and skin temperature, denoted as "Temporal E4 Data" (TED) and 2) the use of an image classification supervised learning algorithm, convolutional neural network (CNN), to classify periods of sleep. METHODS: We investigate ASID Workflow under 6 settings (3 data resolutions × 2 HR scenarios). Competing machine/deep learning classification algorithms, including logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, k-nearest neighbors, and Long Short-Term Memory, are applied to TED as comparisons, termed "Competing Workflow." RESULTS: The ASID Workflow achieves excellent performance with mean weighted accuracy across settings of 94.7%, and is superior to the Competing Workflow with high and low resolution data regardless of the inclusion of HR modality. This superiority is maximized for low resolution data without HR. Additionally, CNN has a relatively low subject-wise test computational cost compared with competing algorithms. CONCLUSION: We demonstrate the utility of creating ASID from multi-modal physiological data and applying a preexisting image classification algorithm to achieve better classification accuracy. We shed light on the influence of data resolution and HR modality on the Workflow's performance. SIGNIFICANCE: Applying CNN to ASID allows us to capture both temporal and spatial dependency among physiological variables and modalities by using 2D images' topological structure that competing algorithms fail to utilize.

Influenza rapidly spreads in seasonal epidemics and imposes a considerable economic burden on hospitals and other healthcare costs. Thus, predicting the propagation of influenza accurately is crucial in preventing influenza outbreaks and protecting public health. Most current studies focus on the spread simulation of influenza. However, few studies have investigated the dependencies between meteorological variables and influenza activity. This study develops a non-parametric model based on Gaussian process regression for influenza prediction considering meteorological effect to capture temporal dependencies hidden in influenza time series. To identify the most explanatory external variables, L1-regularization is applied to identify meteorology factor subsets, and three types of covariance functions are designed to characterize non-stationary and periodic behavior in influenza activity. The dependencies of diseases and meteorology are modeled through the designed cross-covariance function. A real case in Shenzhen, China was studied to validate our proposed model along with comparisons to recently developed multivariate statistical models for influenza prediction. Results show that our proposed influenza prediction approach achieves superior performance in terms of one-week-ahead prediction of influenza-like illness.