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Everyday health information literacy (EHIL) denotes people’s confidence and perceptions of their capability to obtain, evaluate, and use health information in everyday life. This paper presents results from a survey of older Finns on how EHIL relates to perceptions of digital health services. A postal survey was conducted with a random sample of 1,500 Finns aged 55– 70 years. In total, 373 completed surveys (25%) were returned. We used an adapted screening tool to measure EHIL and subject position scales to indicate attitudes towards digital health services. The data were analysed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 3.0. The analysis suggested that EHIL is positively related to more positive attitudes to digital health services and negatively to more negative attitudes to such services. The results emphasise the importance of EHIL as an enabler of the acceptance of digital health services. The study also introduces new methods for analysing EHIL., HIBA

This paper describes in detail a novel manufacturing process for optical gratings suitable for use in the UV and soft X-ray regimes in a single-crystal diamond substrate based on highly focused swift heavy-ion irradiation. This type of grating is extensively used in light source facilities such as synchrotrons or free electron lasers, with ever-increasing demands in terms of thermal loads, depending on beamline operational parameters and architecture. The process proposed in this paper may be a future alternative to current manufacturing techniques, providing the advantage of being applicable to single-crystal diamond substrates, with their unique properties in terms of heat conductivity and radiation hardness. The paper summarizes the physical principle used for the grating patterns produced by swift heavy-ion irradiation and provides full details for the manufacturing process for a specific grating configuration, inspired in one of the beamlines at the ALBA synchrotron light source, while stressing the most challenging points for a potential implementation. Preliminary proof-of-concept experimental results are presented, showing the practical implementation of the methodology proposed herein.

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)-including critical reflections on what changing a societys relation to energy (efficiency) even means-have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasi, Funding Agencies|European Union [826025]

This paper presents a study of retellings about Genshin Impact, exploring how the game’s narrative design inspires players to create fiction and art based on the game’s universe. A questionnaire sent to players rendered 1606 replies. Based on the findings in this corpus, eight players and creators of retellings were interviewed in-depth. Among our findings were that players were most inspired by the characters, detailed worldbuilding, and regional cultures in the game world. Their motivation to create was often spurred by the gaps and ambiguities in the detailed narrative design, wanting to “fill in the gaps” and, through their creation of fiction, further explore the intricacies of the game’s narrative elements.

In reinforcement learning, an agent makes decisions to maximize rewards in an environment. Rewards are an integral part of the reinforcement learning as they guide the agent towards its learning objective. However, having consistent rewards can be infeasible in certain scenarios, due to either cost, the nature of the problem or other constraints. In this paper, we investigate the problem of delayed, aggregated, and anonymous rewards. We propose and analyze two strategies for conducting policy evaluation under cumulative periodic rewards, and study them by making use of simulation environments. Our findings indicate that both strategies can achieve similar sample efficiency as when we have consistent rewards.

Educational concepts are the core of teaching and learning. From the perspective of educational technology, concepts are essential meta-data, represen- tative terms that can connect different learning materials, and are the foundation for many downstream tasks. Some studies on automatic concept extraction have been conducted, but there are no studies looking at the K-12 level and focused on the Swedish language. In this paper, we use a state-of-the-art Swedish BERT model to build an automatic concept extractor for the Biology subject using fine- annotated digital textbook data that cover all content for K-12. The model gives a recall measure of 72% and has the potential to be used in real-world settings for use cases that require high recall. Meanwhile, we investigate how input data fea- tures influence model performance and provide guidance on how to effectively use text data to achieve the optimal results when building a named entity recognition (NER) model.

Epidemics of infectious diseases can pose a serious threat to public health and the global economy. Despite scientific advances, containment and mitigation of infectious diseases remain a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate the potential of reinforcement learning as a decision making tool for epidemic control by constructing a deep Reinforcement Learning simulator, called EpidRLearn, composed of a contact-based, age-structured extension of the SEIR compartmental model, referred to as C-SEIR. We evaluate EpidRLearn by comparing the learned policies to two deterministic policy baselines. We further assess our reward function by integrating an alternative reward into our deep RL model. The experimental evaluation indicates that deep reinforcement learning has the potential of learning useful policies under complex epidemiological models and large state spaces for the mitigation of infectious diseases, with a focus on COVID-19.

Automatically understanding the content of medical images and delivering accurate descriptions is an emerging field of artificial intelligence that combines skills in both computer vision and natural language processing fields. Medical image captioning is involved in various applications related to diagnosis, treatment, report generation and computer-aided diagnosis to facilitate the decision making and clinical workflows. Unlike generic image captioning, medical image captioning highlights the relationships between image objects and clinical findings, which makes it a very challenging task. Although few review papers have already been published in this field, their coverage is still quite limited and only particular problems are addressed. This motivates the current paper where a rapid review protocol was adopted to review the latest achievements in automatic medical image captioning from the medical domain perspective. We aim through this review to provide the reader with an up-to-date literature in this field by summarizing the key findings and approaches in this field, including the related datasets, applications and limitations as well as highlighting the main competitions, challenges and future directions.

Purpose LCA is increasingly used in infrastructure policy and planning. This study maps approaches used in comparativeLCA of road and rail infrastructure to (1) determine the length of the analysis period, (2) estimate the maintenance frequency,and (3) include the efects of climate change on infrastructure performance. A LCA may need to fulfl diferent requirementsin diferent decision-contexts. The relevance of the approaches for decision-making in policy and procurement is thereforediscussed. Methods Ninety-two comparative LCAs of road and rail infrastructure published in peer-reviewed journals January 2016–July 2020 were reviewed. Papers were found through a systematic process of searching electronic databases, applying inclusion criteria, and conducting backward and forward snowballing. Results and discussion The analysis period was commonly determined based on infrastructure service life. The maintenancefrequency was estimated based on current practice, laboratory tests, modelling, or scenarios. The efects of climate changewere considered in two papers by comparing results in a control case and in a changed climate. In policy and procurement,current practice approaches are not adapted to innovative solutions or to climate change. Modelling and laboratory tests couldimprove calculations of the maintenance phase but might have some limitations related to innovative solutions. Scenarioscould be readily applied in a policy context; however, in procurement, consistent and generic scenarios should be used. Conclusions Results suggest what approaches could be used to account for maintenance in infrastructure LCA dependingon the decision-context. The LCA community is suggested to research other approaches than current practice to account forlong analysis periods, climate change, and innovative solutions. Additionally, literature not covered here could be reviewedfor additional approaches and perspectives. Examples include stand-alone LCAs, method development papers, pape, QC 20221012

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)-including critical reflections on what changing a societys relation to energy (efficiency) even means-have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasi, Funding Agencies|European Union [826025]

The paper has two parts, in the first part, we apply the localisation technique to the Rozansky-Witten theory on compact hyperkahler targets. We do so via first reformulating the theory as some supersymmetric sigma-model. We obtain the exact formula for the partition function with Wilson loops on S-1 x Sigma(g) and the lens spaces, the results match with earlier computations using Feynman diagrams on K3. The second part is motivated by a very curious paper (Gukov in J Geom Phys 168, 104311, 2021), where the equivariant index formula for the dimension of the Hilbert space of the Rozansky-Witten theory is interpreted as a kind of Verlinde formula. In this interpretation, the fixed points of the target hyperkahler geometry correspond to certain 'states'. We extend the formalism of part one to incorporate equivariance on the target geometry. For certain non-compact hyperkahler geometry, we can apply the tilting theory to the derived category of coherent sheaves, whose objects label the Wilson loops, allowing us to pick a basis for the latter. We can then compute the fusion products in this basis and we show that the objects that have diagonal fusion rules are intimately related to the fixed points of the geometry. Using these objects as basis to compute the dimension of the Hilbert space leads back to the Verlinde formula, thus answering the question that motivated the paper.

This paper presents updated Monte Carlo configurations used to model the production of single electroweak vector bosons (W, Z/gamma*) in association with jets in proton-proton collisions for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Improvements pertaining to the electroweak input scheme, parton-shower splitting kernels and scale-setting scheme are shown for multi-jet merged configurations accurate to next-to-leading order in the strong and electroweak couplings. The computational resources required for these set-ups are assessed, and approximations are introduced resulting in a factor three reduction of the per-event CPU time without affecting the physics modelling performance. Continuous statistical enhancement techniques are introduced by ATLAS in order to populate low cross-section regions of phase space and are shown to match or exceed the generated effective luminosity. This, together with the lower per-event CPU time, results in a 50% reduction in the required computing resources compared to a legacy set-up previously used by the ATLAS collaboration. The set-ups described in this paper will be used for future ATLAS analyses and lay the foundation for the next generation of Monte Carlo predictions for single vector-boson plus jets production., For complete list of authors see http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2022)089

This paper extends classical results by Langer and Kramers [1-3] and combines them with modern methods from high-temperature field theory [4-8]. Assuming Langevin dynamics, the end-product is an all-orders description of bubble-nucleation at high temperatures. Specifically, it is shown that equilibrium and non-equilibrium effects factorize to all orders the nucleation rate splits into a statistical and a dynamical prefactor. The derivation clarifies, and incorporates, higher-order corrections from zero-modes [9-11]. The rate is also shown to be real to all orders in perturbation theory. The methods are applied to several models. As such, Feynman rules are given; the relevant power-counting is introduced; RG invariance is shown; the connection with the effective action is discussed, and an explicit construction of propagators in an inhomogeneous background is given. The formalism applies to both phase and Sphaleron transitions. While mainly focused on field theory, the methods are applicable to finite-dimensional systems. Finally, as this paper assumes an effective Langevin description [4-7, 12-14], all results only hold within this framework.

This paper documents how the limit concept is treated in high school, at a university and in teacher education in England, France and Sweden. To this end we make use of vignettes, data-grounded accounts of the situation at the three levels in the three countries. These are analysed using the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD). While university praxeologies are relatively similar across the three countries, greater differences manifest themselves in high school and teacher education. For instance, at the high school level, in France a local praxeology on the limits of sequences is taught, which is not the case in England or Sweden. Results from the analysis of limits are extrapolated to comment on implications for the teaching of calculus, and for teacher education, in the three countries. The paper also raises methodological issues in our approach.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) establishes a right for individuals to get access to information about automated decision-making based on their personal data. However, the application of this right comes with caveats. This paper investigates how European insurance companies have navigated these obstacles. By recruiting volunteering insurance customers, requests for information about how insurance premiums are set were sent to 26 insurance companies in Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Findings illustrate the practice of responding to GDPR information requests and the paper identifies possible explanations for shortcomings and omissions in the responses. The paper also adds to existing research by showing how the wordings in the different language versions of the GDPR could lead to different interpretations. Finally, the paper discusses what can reasonably be expected from explanations in consumer oriented information., QC 20220530

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)-including critical reflections on what changing a societys relation to energy (efficiency) even means-have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasi, Funding Agencies|European Union [826025]

Everyday health information literacy (EHIL) denotes people’s confidence and perceptions of their capability to obtain, evaluate, and use health information in everyday life. This paper presents results from a survey of older Finns on how EHIL relates to perceptions of digital health services. A postal survey was conducted with a random sample of 1,500 Finns aged 55– 70 years. In total, 373 completed surveys (25%) were returned. We used an adapted screening tool to measure EHIL and subject position scales to indicate attitudes towards digital health services. The data were analysed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 3.0. The analysis suggested that EHIL is positively related to more positive attitudes to digital health services and negatively to more negative attitudes to such services. The results emphasise the importance of EHIL as an enabler of the acceptance of digital health services. The study also introduces new methods for analysing EHIL., HIBA

This paper extends classical results by Langer and Kramers [1-3] and combines them with modern methods from high-temperature field theory [4-8]. Assuming Langevin dynamics, the end-product is an all-orders description of bubble-nucleation at high temperatures. Specifically, it is shown that equilibrium and non-equilibrium effects factorize to all orders the nucleation rate splits into a statistical and a dynamical prefactor. The derivation clarifies, and incorporates, higher-order corrections from zero-modes [9-11]. The rate is also shown to be real to all orders in perturbation theory. The methods are applied to several models. As such, Feynman rules are given; the relevant power-counting is introduced; RG invariance is shown; the connection with the effective action is discussed, and an explicit construction of propagators in an inhomogeneous background is given. The formalism applies to both phase and Sphaleron transitions. While mainly focused on field theory, the methods are applicable to finite-dimensional systems. Finally, as this paper assumes an effective Langevin description [4-7, 12-14], all results only hold within this framework.

The paper has two parts, in the first part, we apply the localisation technique to the Rozansky-Witten theory on compact hyperkahler targets. We do so via first reformulating the theory as some supersymmetric sigma-model. We obtain the exact formula for the partition function with Wilson loops on S-1 x Sigma(g) and the lens spaces, the results match with earlier computations using Feynman diagrams on K3. The second part is motivated by a very curious paper (Gukov in J Geom Phys 168, 104311, 2021), where the equivariant index formula for the dimension of the Hilbert space of the Rozansky-Witten theory is interpreted as a kind of Verlinde formula. In this interpretation, the fixed points of the target hyperkahler geometry correspond to certain 'states'. We extend the formalism of part one to incorporate equivariance on the target geometry. For certain non-compact hyperkahler geometry, we can apply the tilting theory to the derived category of coherent sheaves, whose objects label the Wilson loops, allowing us to pick a basis for the latter. We can then compute the fusion products in this basis and we show that the objects that have diagonal fusion rules are intimately related to the fixed points of the geometry. Using these objects as basis to compute the dimension of the Hilbert space leads back to the Verlinde formula, thus answering the question that motivated the paper.

This paper documents how the limit concept is treated in high school, at a university and in teacher education in England, France and Sweden. To this end we make use of vignettes, data-grounded accounts of the situation at the three levels in the three countries. These are analysed using the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD). While university praxeologies are relatively similar across the three countries, greater differences manifest themselves in high school and teacher education. For instance, at the high school level, in France a local praxeology on the limits of sequences is taught, which is not the case in England or Sweden. Results from the analysis of limits are extrapolated to comment on implications for the teaching of calculus, and for teacher education, in the three countries. The paper also raises methodological issues in our approach.

This paper presents updated Monte Carlo configurations used to model the production of single electroweak vector bosons (W, Z/gamma*) in association with jets in proton-proton collisions for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Improvements pertaining to the electroweak input scheme, parton-shower splitting kernels and scale-setting scheme are shown for multi-jet merged configurations accurate to next-to-leading order in the strong and electroweak couplings. The computational resources required for these set-ups are assessed, and approximations are introduced resulting in a factor three reduction of the per-event CPU time without affecting the physics modelling performance. Continuous statistical enhancement techniques are introduced by ATLAS in order to populate low cross-section regions of phase space and are shown to match or exceed the generated effective luminosity. This, together with the lower per-event CPU time, results in a 50% reduction in the required computing resources compared to a legacy set-up previously used by the ATLAS collaboration. The set-ups described in this paper will be used for future ATLAS analyses and lay the foundation for the next generation of Monte Carlo predictions for single vector-boson plus jets production., For complete list of authors see http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2022)089

Valid assessment of pain is essential in daily clinical practice to enhance the quality of care for the patients and to avoid the risk of addiction to strong analgesics. The aim of this paper is to find a method for objective and quantitative evaluation of pain using multiple physiological markers. Data was obtained from healthy volunteers exposed to thermal and ischemic stimuli. Twelve subjects were recruited and their physiological data including skin conductance, heart rate, and skin temperature were collected via a wrist-worn sensor together with their selfreported pain on a visual analogue scale (VAS). Statistically significant differences (p < 0.01) were found between physiological scores obtained with the wearable sensor before and during the thermal test. Test-retest reliability of sensor-based measures was good during the thermal test with intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from 0.22 to 0.89. These results support the idea that a multi-sensor wearable device can objectively measure physiological reactions in the subjects due to experimentally induced pain, which could be used for daily clinical practice and as an endpoint in clinical studies. Nevertheless, the results indicate a need for further investigation of the method in real-life pain settings.

Purpose LCA is increasingly used in infrastructure policy and planning. This study maps approaches used in comparativeLCA of road and rail infrastructure to (1) determine the length of the analysis period, (2) estimate the maintenance frequency,and (3) include the efects of climate change on infrastructure performance. A LCA may need to fulfl diferent requirementsin diferent decision-contexts. The relevance of the approaches for decision-making in policy and procurement is thereforediscussed. Methods Ninety-two comparative LCAs of road and rail infrastructure published in peer-reviewed journals January 2016–July 2020 were reviewed. Papers were found through a systematic process of searching electronic databases, applying inclusion criteria, and conducting backward and forward snowballing. Results and discussion The analysis period was commonly determined based on infrastructure service life. The maintenancefrequency was estimated based on current practice, laboratory tests, modelling, or scenarios. The efects of climate changewere considered in two papers by comparing results in a control case and in a changed climate. In policy and procurement,current practice approaches are not adapted to innovative solutions or to climate change. Modelling and laboratory tests couldimprove calculations of the maintenance phase but might have some limitations related to innovative solutions. Scenarioscould be readily applied in a policy context; however, in procurement, consistent and generic scenarios should be used. Conclusions Results suggest what approaches could be used to account for maintenance in infrastructure LCA dependingon the decision-context. The LCA community is suggested to research other approaches than current practice to account forlong analysis periods, climate change, and innovative solutions. Additionally, literature not covered here could be reviewedfor additional approaches and perspectives. Examples include stand-alone LCAs, method development papers, pape, QC 20221012

The paper has two parts, in the first part, we apply the localisation technique to the Rozansky-Witten theory on compact hyperkahler targets. We do so via first reformulating the theory as some supersymmetric sigma-model. We obtain the exact formula for the partition function with Wilson loops on S-1 x Sigma(g) and the lens spaces, the results match with earlier computations using Feynman diagrams on K3. The second part is motivated by a very curious paper (Gukov in J Geom Phys 168, 104311, 2021), where the equivariant index formula for the dimension of the Hilbert space of the Rozansky-Witten theory is interpreted as a kind of Verlinde formula. In this interpretation, the fixed points of the target hyperkahler geometry correspond to certain 'states'. We extend the formalism of part one to incorporate equivariance on the target geometry. For certain non-compact hyperkahler geometry, we can apply the tilting theory to the derived category of coherent sheaves, whose objects label the Wilson loops, allowing us to pick a basis for the latter. We can then compute the fusion products in this basis and we show that the objects that have diagonal fusion rules are intimately related to the fixed points of the geometry. Using these objects as basis to compute the dimension of the Hilbert space leads back to the Verlinde formula, thus answering the question that motivated the paper.

This paper documents how the limit concept is treated in high school, at a university and in teacher education in England, France and Sweden. To this end we make use of vignettes, data-grounded accounts of the situation at the three levels in the three countries. These are analysed using the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD). While university praxeologies are relatively similar across the three countries, greater differences manifest themselves in high school and teacher education. For instance, at the high school level, in France a local praxeology on the limits of sequences is taught, which is not the case in England or Sweden. Results from the analysis of limits are extrapolated to comment on implications for the teaching of calculus, and for teacher education, in the three countries. The paper also raises methodological issues in our approach.

This paper presents updated Monte Carlo configurations used to model the production of single electroweak vector bosons (W, Z/gamma*) in association with jets in proton-proton collisions for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Improvements pertaining to the electroweak input scheme, parton-shower splitting kernels and scale-setting scheme are shown for multi-jet merged configurations accurate to next-to-leading order in the strong and electroweak couplings. The computational resources required for these set-ups are assessed, and approximations are introduced resulting in a factor three reduction of the per-event CPU time without affecting the physics modelling performance. Continuous statistical enhancement techniques are introduced by ATLAS in order to populate low cross-section regions of phase space and are shown to match or exceed the generated effective luminosity. This, together with the lower per-event CPU time, results in a 50% reduction in the required computing resources compared to a legacy set-up previously used by the ATLAS collaboration. The set-ups described in this paper will be used for future ATLAS analyses and lay the foundation for the next generation of Monte Carlo predictions for single vector-boson plus jets production., For complete list of authors see http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2022)089

This paper extends classical results by Langer and Kramers [1-3] and combines them with modern methods from high-temperature field theory [4-8]. Assuming Langevin dynamics, the end-product is an all-orders description of bubble-nucleation at high temperatures. Specifically, it is shown that equilibrium and non-equilibrium effects factorize to all orders the nucleation rate splits into a statistical and a dynamical prefactor. The derivation clarifies, and incorporates, higher-order corrections from zero-modes [9-11]. The rate is also shown to be real to all orders in perturbation theory. The methods are applied to several models. As such, Feynman rules are given; the relevant power-counting is introduced; RG invariance is shown; the connection with the effective action is discussed, and an explicit construction of propagators in an inhomogeneous background is given. The formalism applies to both phase and Sphaleron transitions. While mainly focused on field theory, the methods are applicable to finite-dimensional systems. Finally, as this paper assumes an effective Langevin description [4-7, 12-14], all results only hold within this framework.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) establishes a right for individuals to get access to information about automated decision-making based on their personal data. However, the application of this right comes with caveats. This paper investigates how European insurance companies have navigated these obstacles. By recruiting volunteering insurance customers, requests for information about how insurance premiums are set were sent to 26 insurance companies in Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Findings illustrate the practice of responding to GDPR information requests and the paper identifies possible explanations for shortcomings and omissions in the responses. The paper also adds to existing research by showing how the wordings in the different language versions of the GDPR could lead to different interpretations. Finally, the paper discusses what can reasonably be expected from explanations in consumer oriented information., QC 20220530

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)-including critical reflections on what changing a societys relation to energy (efficiency) even means-have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasi, Funding Agencies|European Union [826025]

Recent work has established a route towards the semiclassical validity of the Page curve, and so provided evidence that information escapes an evaporating black hole. However, a protocol to explicitly recover and make practical use of that information in the classical limit has not yet been given. In this paper, we describe such a protocol, showing that an observer may reconstruct the phase space of the black hole interior by measuring the Uhlmann phase of the Hawking radiation. The process of black hole formation and evaporation provides an invertible map between this phase space and the space of initial matter configurations. Thus, all classical information is explicitly recovered. We assume in this paper that replica wormholes contribute to the gravitational path integral., source:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP01(2022)119

The advancement of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) has the potential to transform the educational landscape and influence the role of all involved stakeholders. In recent years, the applications of AIED have been gradually adopted to progress our understanding of students’ learning and enhance learning performance and experience. However, the adoption of AIED has led to increasing ethical risks and concerns regarding several aspects such as personal data and learner autonomy. Despite the recent announcement of guidelines for ethical and trustworthy AIED, the debate revolves around the key principles underpinning ethical AIED. This paper aims to explore whether there is a global consensus on ethical AIED by mapping and analyzing international organizations’ current policies and guidelines. In this paper, we first introduce the opportunities offered by AI in education and potential ethical issues. Then, thematic analysis was conducted to conceptualize and establish a set of ethical principles by examining and synthesizing relevant ethical policies and guidelines for AIED. We discuss each principle and associated implications for relevant educational stakeholders, including students, teachers, technology developers, policymakers, and institutional decision-makers. The proposed set of ethical principles is expected to serve as a framework to inform and guide educational stakeholders in the development and deployment of ethical and trustworthy AIED as well as catalyze future development of related impact studies in the field.

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported an error in Table 1 noting that the ORreported by Kildea et al 2019 [2] is 0.50 (0.31-83), not1.22 (0.80 – 1.86) as previously reported. This changesthe result from not statistically significant, to statistically significant. This has been reflected in the final paragraph of the results section. Additionally, the authors noted that the paper Kildea et al 2012 [3] was not included in the reference list. This has been corrected and can be seen at reference #38. The reported Odds Ratio for this reference was also incorrect. The OR was 0.92 (0.59-1.43), and not 0.92 (0.58-1.46) as I reported. This has been corrected in the table. It does not change the results of the data or conclusions. Additionally, the measure of effect in Table 1 for Kildea et al 2016 [4] was generated from raw data in their paper. The authors have asked that we correct this to the previously published P Value of 0.906 for preterm and 0.122 for low birthweight. This has been corrected in table 1 and the corrections do not change the results of the data or the conclusions.

Runtime enforcement refers to the theories, techniques, and tools for enforcing correct behavior with respect to a formal specification of systems at runtime. In this paper, we are interested in techniques for constructing runtime enforcers for the concrete application domain of enforcing safety in AI. We discuss how safety is traditionally handled in the field of AI and how more formal guarantees on the safety of a self- learning agent can be given by integrating a runtime enforcer. We survey a selection of work on such enforcers, where we distinguish between ap- proaches for discrete and continuous action spaces. The purpose of this paper is to foster a better understanding of advantages and limitations of different enforcement techniques, focusing on the specific challenges that arise due to their application in AI. Finally, we present some open challenges and avenues for future work., QC 20221201

The present paper continues our investigation of an implementation of a least-squares collocation method for higher-index differential-algebraic equations. In earlier papers, we were able to substantiate the choice of basis functions and collocation points for a robust implementation as well as algorithms for the solution of the discrete system. The present paper is devoted to an analytic estimation of condition numbers for different components of an implementation. We present error estimations, which show the sources for the different errors., QC 20230308

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is the discipline that aims to provide a holistic view of the enterprise by explicating business and IT alignment from the perspectives of high-level corporate strategy down to daily operations and network infrastructures. EAs are consequently complex as they compose and integrate many aspects on different architecture layers. A recent proposal to cope with this complexity and to make EAs amenable to automated and intuitive visual analysis is the transformation of EA models into EA Knowledge Graphs. A remaining limitation of these approaches is that they perceive the EA to be static, i.e., they represent and analyze EAs at a single point in time. In the paper at hand, we introduce a historization concept, a prototypical implementation, and a performance analysis for how EAs can be represented and processed to enable the analysis of their evolution., QC 20230307

Automatically adapting an interactive application to its use context is highly dependent on the existence of a declarative model. The Model-Based User Interface Development research made important progress in fully declarative specifications on interactive applications. However, the Abstract User Interface declarative models, such as task-based or communication-based models, are unfamiliar to designers and developers. This paper presents early explorations into a research program aimed at achieving fully declarative interactive applications: outlining a static concrete user interface and deriving the interaction from its affordances. The basic assumption is that for a well-designed user interface, the UI function can be derived from its form through affordance mechanisms. As the static aspects like the UI initial form are already being described declaratively in industrial practice, fully declarative interactive applications would result from the new research program., QC 20230307

Software engineers are sedentary and need technological help for a more healthy life. Current software engineering tasks are mostly confined to the standard sedentary desktop user interface. We believe that software engineering should be restructured so that it offers a non-sedentary alternative. In this paper, we describe a new research approach, called Post-sedentary Software Engineering. Our ambition with this approach is to provide an alternative, healthier work context without decreasing productivity. We take a spatial approach to post-sedentary tool design, starting from the assumption an interactive 3D environment with appropriate metaphors is necessary for full body movement. We discuss available technologies for achieving this goal and outline four studies that incorporate the software engineering phases of code comprehension, code creation and debugging in a non-sedentary context., QC 20230307

The allowable range of speed that a vehicle can tolerate in a constant radius turn is crucial for the development of smart assistance systems. Although the development of advanced system observers has been grown since early days of its introduction, extensive study is required in monitoring the vehicle’s behaviour in the conditions such as variation of vehicle dynamic parameters and terrain type. Autonomous vehicles will fail to judge the parameter of the road cornering due to the safety constraints of the vehicle. Thus, the primary concern of this paper is to study the vehicle’s behaviour for different curvature profiles. A real-time simulation for a typical Sedan is presented to test a constant roundabout turning with a radius of 50 m for this measure. In prior to that, a detailed analysis on the vehicle stability and handling responses are discussed. The vehicle is found to be traveling in a stable region at a speed from 10 to 74 km/h. The vehicle enters a critical area when speed is more than 74 km/h. Therefore, that the allowable range of speed that the vehicle can travel in a 50 m radius turn lies between 10 to 74 km/h. The stability is evaluated by two criterions which are the yaw rate and sideslip angle., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-981-19-2094-3QC 20230228

Large-scale numerical optimization problems arise from many fields and have applications in both industrial and academic contexts. Finding solutions to such optimization problems efficiently requires algorithms that are able to leverage the increasing parallelism available in modern computing hardware. In this paper, we review previous work on parallelizing algorithms for nonlinear optimization. To introduce the topic, the paper starts by giving an accessible introduction to nonlinear optimization and high-performance computing. This is followed by a survey of previous work on parallelization and utilization of high-performance computing hardware for nonlinear optimization algorithms. Finally, we present a number of optimization software libraries and how they are able to utilize parallel computing today. This study can serve as an introduction point for researchers interested in nonlinear optimization or high-performance computing, as well as provide ideas and inspiration for future work combining these topics., QC 20230220

In this paper, we study lattice gauge theory on Z4 with finite Abelian structure group. When the inverse coupling strength is sufficiently large, we use ideas from disagreement percolation to give an upper bound on the decay of correlations of local functions. We then use this upper bound to compute the leading-order term for both the expected value of the spin at a given plaquette as well as for the two-point correlation function. Moreover, we give an upper bound on the dependency of the size of the box on which the model is defined. The results in this paper extend and refine results by Chatterjee and Borgs., QC 20230124

This paper calls for a re-appraisal of McGee’s analysis of the semantics, logic and probabilities of indicative conditionals presented in his 1989 paper Conditional probabilities and compounds of conditionals. The probabilistic measures introduced by McGee are given a new axiomatisation—built on the principle that the antecedent of a conditional is probabilistically independent of the conditional—and a more transparent method of constructing such measures is provided. McGee’s Dutch book argument is restructured to more clearly reveal that it introduces a novel contribution to the epistemology of semantic indeterminacy, and shows that its more controversial implications are unavoidable if we want to maintain the Ramsey Test along with the standard laws of probability. Importantly, it is shown that the counterexamples that have been levelled at McGee’s analysis—generating a rather wide consensus that it yields ‘unintuitive’ or ‘wrong’ probabilities for compounds —fail to strike at their intended target; for to honour the intuitions of the counterexamples one must either give up the Ramsey Test or the standard laws of probability. It will be argued that we need to give up neither if we take the counterexamples as further evidence that the indicative conditional sometimes allows for a non-epistemic ‘causal’ interpretation alongside its usual epistemic interpretation., QC 20230124

Interest in entrepreneurial ecosystems—the geographically-bound social networks of institutions and cultural values that give rise to and sustain entrepreneurial activity—have intensified in recent years (Roundy 2016; Spigel 2016). This growing attraction is driven by a need to better understand the concentration of high growth ventures in regions with thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems (Roundy and Fayard 2019). Despite the evolving discussions, few studies have conducted a critical analysis of the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature, with a surge in recent calls to do so (Audretsch et al. 2019). To address this gap, this study presents a bibliographic analysis of extant literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems in academic journal articles, spanning the last 25 years. The aim is to identify the most relevant authors, countries, and institutions in the field and to analyze who has contributed to the growth of the concept since its emergence. The Web of Science Core Collection is used as the repository for the bibliometric information, and bibliographic network mapping is developed using the visualization of similarities, VOSviewer, software tool. The most cited paper was published in Research Policy in 2014, by authors Autio et al. (2014), titled “Entrepreneurial innovation: the importance of context”. A citation count over the past twenty-five years shows that the authors who have influenced the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems the most are Wright, Autio, and Kenney. Other notable scholars who have also made significant contributions to the field are the economists Ács, Audretsch, and Etzkowitz, and the entrepreneurship scholars Isenberg, Spigel, and Stam. The most prolific journals on the topic are Small Business Economics, Journal of Technology Transfer, and European Planning Studies, while country-level impact and research productivity is concentrated in the USA and England. Using citations as a proxy, the most influential and prolific academic literature o, QC 20230111

Runtime enforcement refers to the theories, techniques, and tools for enforcing correct behavior with respect to a formal specification of systems at runtime. In this paper, we are interested in techniques for constructing runtime enforcers for the concrete application domain of enforcing safety in AI. We discuss how safety is traditionally handled in the field of AI and how more formal guarantees on the safety of a self- learning agent can be given by integrating a runtime enforcer. We survey a selection of work on such enforcers, where we distinguish between ap- proaches for discrete and continuous action spaces. The purpose of this paper is to foster a better understanding of advantages and limitations of different enforcement techniques, focusing on the specific challenges that arise due to their application in AI. Finally, we present some open challenges and avenues for future work., QC 20221201

According to the principles of compositional verification, verifying that lower-level components satisfy their specification will ensure that the whole system satisfies its top-level specification. The key step is to ensure that the lower-level specifications constitute a correct decomposition of the top-level specification. In a non-stochastic context, such decomposition can be analyzed using techniques of theorem proving. In industrial applications, especially for safety-critical systems, specifications are often of stochastic nature, for example giving a bound on the probability that system failure will occur before a given time. A decomposition of such a specification requires techniques beyond traditional theorem proving. The first contribution of the paper is a theoretical framework that allows the representation of, and reasoning about, stochastic and timed behavior of systems as well as specifications for such behaviors. The framework is based on traces that describe the continuoustime evolution of a system, and specifications are formulated using timed automata combined with probabilistic acceptance conditions. The second contribution is a novel approach to verifying decomposition of such specifications by reducing the problem to checking emptiness of the solution space for a system of linear inequalities., QC 20221128

This review paper provides a recent overview of current international research that is being conducted into the functional properties of cellulose as a nanomaterial. A particular emphasis is placed on fundamental and applied research that is being undertaken to generate applications, which are now becoming a real prospect given the developments in the field over the last 20 years. A short introduction covers the context of the work, and definitions of the different forms of cellulose nanomaterials (CNMs) that are most widely studied. We also address the terminology used for CNMs, suggesting a standard way to classify these materials. The reviews are separated out into theme areas, namely healthcare, water purification, biocomposites, and energy. Each section contains a short review of the field within the theme and summarizes recent work being undertaken by the groups represented. Topics that are covered include cellulose nanocrystals for directed growth of tissues, bacterial cellulose in healthcare, nanocellulose for drug delivery, nanocellulose for water purification, nanocellulose for thermoplastic composites, nanocellulose for structurally colored materials, transparent wood biocomposites, supercapacitors and batteries., QC 20221123

Time series forecasting is at the core of important application domains posing significant challenges to machine learning algorithms. Recently neural network architectures have been widely applied to the problem of time series forecasting. Most of these models are trained by minimizing a loss function that measures predictions' deviation from the real values. Typical loss functions include mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). In the presence of noise and uncertainty, neural network models tend to replicate the last observed value of the time series, thus limiting their applicability to real-world data. In this paper, we provide a formal definition of the above problem and we also give some examples of forecasts where the problem is observed. We also propose a regularization term penalizing the replication of previously seen values. We evaluate the proposed regularization term both on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results indicate that the regularization term mitigates to some extent the aforementioned problem and gives rise to more robust models., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-031-15919-0, ISBN 978-3-031-15918-3QC 20221104

Smart production logistics has introduced in manufacturing industries with emerging technologies such as digital twin, industrial internet of things, and cyber-physical system. This technological innovation initiates the new way of working, working environment, and decision-making process. Especially the decision-making process has changed from experience and intuition to knowledge and data driven. In this paper, digital twin-based services, and data visualization of material handling equipment in smart production logistics environment are presented. There are several applications of digital twin in manufacturing industries already, however feedback from the virtual environment to physical environment and interactions between them which are the essential features of digital twin are very weak in many applications. Therefore, we have developed digital twin-based services in the laboratory scale including feedback and interaction. In addition, data visualization application of material handling equipment in automotive industry is presented to provide insights to the users. Both applications have developed based on the same framework including database and middleware, so it has possibilities to develop further in the future., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-031-16410-1, ISBN 978-3-031-16411-8QC 20221104

In this paper, an open-source solver for mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems is presented. The Supporting Hyperplane Optimization Toolkit (SHOT) combines a dual strategy based on polyhedral outer approximations (POA) with primal heuristics. The POA is achieved by expressing the nonlinear feasible set of the MINLP problem with linearizations obtained with the extended supporting hyperplane (ESH) and extended cutting plane (ECP) algorithms. The dual strategy can be tightly integrated with the mixed-integer programming (MIP) subsolver in a so-called single-tree manner, i.e., only a single MIP optimization problem is solved, where the polyhedral linearizations are added as lazy constraints through callbacks in the MIP solver. This enables the MIP solver to reuse the branching tree in each iteration, in contrast to most other POA-based methods. SHOT is available as a COIN-OR open-source project, and it utilizes a flexible task-based structure making it easy to extend and modify. It is currently available in GAMS, and can be utilized in AMPL, Pyomo and JuMP as well through its ASL interface. The main functionality and solution strategies implemented in SHOT are described in this paper, and their impact on the performance are illustrated through numerical benchmarks on 406 convex MINLP problems from the MINLPLib problem library. Many of the features introduced in SHOT can be utilized in other POA-based solvers as well. To show the overall effectiveness of SHOT, it is also compared to other state-of-the-art solvers on the same benchmark set., QC 20221031

Purpose LCA is increasingly used in infrastructure policy and planning. This study maps approaches used in comparativeLCA of road and rail infrastructure to (1) determine the length of the analysis period, (2) estimate the maintenance frequency,and (3) include the efects of climate change on infrastructure performance. A LCA may need to fulfl diferent requirementsin diferent decision-contexts. The relevance of the approaches for decision-making in policy and procurement is thereforediscussed. Methods Ninety-two comparative LCAs of road and rail infrastructure published in peer-reviewed journals January 2016–July 2020 were reviewed. Papers were found through a systematic process of searching electronic databases, applying inclusion criteria, and conducting backward and forward snowballing. Results and discussion The analysis period was commonly determined based on infrastructure service life. The maintenancefrequency was estimated based on current practice, laboratory tests, modelling, or scenarios. The efects of climate changewere considered in two papers by comparing results in a control case and in a changed climate. In policy and procurement,current practice approaches are not adapted to innovative solutions or to climate change. Modelling and laboratory tests couldimprove calculations of the maintenance phase but might have some limitations related to innovative solutions. Scenarioscould be readily applied in a policy context; however, in procurement, consistent and generic scenarios should be used. Conclusions Results suggest what approaches could be used to account for maintenance in infrastructure LCA dependingon the decision-context. The LCA community is suggested to research other approaches than current practice to account forlong analysis periods, climate change, and innovative solutions. Additionally, literature not covered here could be reviewedfor additional approaches and perspectives. Examples include stand-alone LCAs, method development papers, pape, QC 20221012

There is an increasing trend to use digital and interactive tools in classrooms. There are different types of resources like serious games, gamified applications, learning platforms and many other means of interactive learning and educational tools that are being used in classrooms. However, it is quite challenging to engage students with certain impairments in this interactive learning, since the tools are often not designed for their needs. Therefore, there is a need to make design considerations flexible enough to accommodate specific requirements and needs that could influence the playing experiences for these groups. The paper explores and discusses design considerations of a digital learning environment. These are the initial design considerations with the focus on improving player experience. In this context, the emphasis is on engagement factors mainly that could support learning, keeping under consideration the target group of visually impaired students., QC 20221128