Bayesian-Symbolic Integration for Uncertainty-Aware Parking Prediction

Accurate parking availability prediction is critical for intelligent transportation systems, but real-world deployments often face data sparsity, noise, and unpredictable changes. Addressing these challenges requires models that are not only accurate but also uncertainty-aware. In this work, we propose a loosely coupled neuro-symbolic framework that integrates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) with symbolic reasoning to enhance robustness in uncertain environments. BNNs quantify predictive uncertainty, while symbolic knowledge—extracted via decision trees and encoded using probabilistic logic programming—is leveraged in two hybrid strategies: (1) using symbolic reasoning as a fallback when BNN confidence is low, and (2) refining output classes based on symbolic constraints before reapplying the BNN. We evaluate both strategies on real-world parking data under full, sparse, and noisy conditions. Results demonstrate that both hybrid methods outperform symbolic reasoning alone, and the context-refinement strategy consistently exceeds the performance of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and BNN baselines across all prediction windows. Our findings highlight the potential of modular neuro-symbolic integration in real-world, uncertainty-prone prediction tasks

An Approach to Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Systems using Threat Analysis

The rapid advancement and deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) present transformative opportunities to enhance safety, efficiency, and convenience within the transportation industry. However, these innovations introduce significant cybersecurity risks due to the complex electronics and continuous connectivity that CAVs depend on. Traditional testing methods, while critical, often fall short in detecting vulnerabilities across the vast range of scenarios these vehicles may encounter. Formal verification, a mathematical approach to system validation, offers a more rigorous and comprehensive solution by ensuring that systems operate as expected to search through all possible execution paths. However, defining appropriate system properties for verification remains a challenge, as a system designer may write properties that fail to address real-world threats effectively. This research addresses this gap by integrating threat analysis into the process of defining security properties, ensuring that the verification process is aligned with actual cybersecurity risks. We leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract key security details from threat analysis result texts, automating the generation of system properties. This approach simplifies the verification process, with its usability demonstrated through a high-level 5G-V2X design use case scenario

Fighting authoritarian populism with populism in polarised Turkey

Globally, populism is on the rise. Studies demonstrate how populism is a ‘thin’ ideology that is articulated with ideologies ranging from authoritarianism to its challenges. Here, we examine how two politicians who, at similar times in their careers, represented themselves as inclusive and democratic, yet articulated different incarnations of populism. One of these (Turkish President Erdoğan) has since become an authoritarian populist and the other (Ekrem İmamoğlu), Erdoğan’s political opposition. Both İmamoğlu in 2019 and Erdoğan in 1994 were first elected as Istanbul's mayor. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyse their public utterances around the times of these mayoral victories. This close reading reveals how discursive strategies are used in Erdoğan’s utterances that articulate the seeds of authoritarian populism while İmamoğlu, 25 years later, uses populism to challenge these. This study offers insights into how populism can be employed to both articulate and challenge authoritarian populism

Contemporary music improvisation for silent film:Challenging and evoking the jazz canon

This article explores how contemporary music improvisation for silent film both evokes and challenges the jazz canon by pushing the boundaries of genre, instrumentation, techniques, and collaboration while also engaging with the narrative and cultural contexts of the films. It draws from my practice-led research over the last twenty years, which has consisted of performing free improvised music in response to the screening of silent film, as a solo performer or as part of a jazz ensemble. The corpus of films used in the research spans animated shorts by Dutch director Gerrit van Dijk, surrealist shorts by Man Ray, German expressionist feature film by Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, French feminist film by Germaine Dulac, and documentary and amateur archive film of the North West Film Archive in Manchester and the Media Archive for Central England in Lincoln. In the performances, while jazz is taken as primary influence, musicians often incorporate elements of other musics, make use of a broader range of instruments and of non-traditional sound sources beyond the typical jazz ensemble, and employ experimental techniques and unconventional playing methods that challenge and evoke the conventional improvisational norms of jazz. Musicians might opt to follow or contradict the narrative and emotional cues of the film, which can result in processes of music making that prioritize the exploration of the boundaries of storytelling over traditional jazz forms and structures. Across this research, I have observed how silent film improvisation has been attracting diverse audiences. This cross-pollination of audiences can introduce jazz to new fans and challenge preconceived notions about who jazz is for

Strange/r/ness: (Post)digital Intimacies in Uncanny Worlds

In this article, we interrogate strange intimacies in digital culture by engaging with the multiplicity and ambiguities of the strange, the stranger, and strangeness. We situate our accounts in critical intimacies research, and those that apply this in context of digital, mediated, data, and postdigital cultures. We argue for a foregrounding of the strange, and recognise the parallels between intimacy’s resistance to singularity and the way the strange can only be approached as plurality and multiplicity. Experimenting with strange/r/ness, we then draw on a heteroglossic framework to explore four examples that differently position the strange, exploring how the strange is found, what it does, and what feelings of belonging or non-belonging it creates. Our examples broadly map onto bodily intimacies, our intimate knowledge of ourselves, belonging in communities, and the relationship between intimacy, society, and politics. They run from the micro to the macro, while the distinctions between these elements always remain permeable. We finish with a discussion of the value of bringing the intimate and the strange together, revealing their relationship to one another, and highlighting the critical capacity that developing these two concepts together permits

The Time Machine Stops

As of this writing, 1653744144847 milliseconds have elapsed since midnight on January 1, 1970, the start of the “Unix Epoch,” so named for the operating system upon which the internet is based. While that date was chosen arbitrarily, it also denotes the onset of “computime,” which Jeremy Rifkin calls “the final abstraction of time and its complete separation from human experience and rhythms of nature.” This chapter explores this notion of computime from within the computer in the form of a dialogue set in the future, which takes place inside of a game that simulates nature. The religious scholar James Carse divided games into two types: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” One has temporal boundaries, the other eliminates them; one is defined externally by “world time,” the other defines time internally through the gameplay. Now the world outside of the computer begins to look finite: the passage of time appears as a form of energy that is progressively being dispersed, and when it has been exhausted, the game is over

Trust and public sector work:How public service motivation helps explain multi-level trust relations

This chapter explores the relationship between Public Service Motivation (PSM) and trust within public organisations. It provides an overview of the existing literature, structuring this around the interpersonal, intergroup, and organisational levels of analysis. The review points to a reciprocal relationship between trust and PSM, highlighting shared theoretical foundations and empirical insights across these two concepts, such as the importance of aligned values and common ground. The challenges and barriers in cultivating PSM and trust are considered within the context of contemporary public sector work, and avenues for further research outlined, namely that of cross-level trickle effects

School ACTIVE, brain active:A meta-analysis and meta-regression on chronic school physical activity effects on cognitive performance in children and adolescents

Objective: To describe the chronic physical activity at school effects on children and adolescents' cognitive performance, examining different types of intervention in the school environment. Design: A systematic review with meta-analysis and meta-regression was conducted including experimental studies reporting the effects of physical activity at school on cognitive performance in children and adolescents. Data sources: PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Cochrane Library from database inception to February 30, 2023. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: Studies with: (P) healthy children and adolescents, (I) interventions with physical activity at school (sports, general physical activity, and physical exercises), (C) a control group, (O) cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibitory control, and attention outcomes; and (S) Randomised trials of RCTs and longitudinal designs. Results: Eighteen studies were included. The interventions were divided into three groups: different team games, general physical activity, and different physical exercises. Physical activity at school was associated with changes in cognitive flexibility (g: 0.244; 95% CI 0.116 to 0.373; p &lt; 0.001; I2 = 0%); in working memory (g: 0.123; 95% CI 0.028 to 0.219; p = 0.012; I2 = 14%); in inhibitory control (g: 0.122; 95% CI 0.062 to 0.182; p &lt; 0.001; I2 = 3%); and in attention (g: 0.100; 95% CI 0.040 to 0.161; p &lt; 0.001; I2 = 0%). Conclusion: Our results support that interventions with chronic physical activity at school have a positive effect on cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, working memory, and attention in children and adolescents. Subgroup analyses established that the impact on each outcome essentially depends on the type of intervention performed. Meta-regression showed that age was a valid predictor of improvements in working memory. Prospero registration: CRD42021274668.</p

Same as it ever was: no room for talking heads! National security, free speech and judicial deference

A number of domestic laws seek to protect national security from harmful speech and expression, and in doing so impinge on the values inherent in freedom of expression. This can be achieved by imposing criminal liability on persons who disclose sensitive information, penalising the speaker and dissuading them, and others, from communicating information to the press or to the public. Alternatively, the civil law can be employed against such persons, or those, including the press, who assist in the breaking of other's contractual or other duties of confidentiality. The latter method allows prior restraint, as well as post-speech sanctions, although internal security policies accommodate a system of prior authorisation, whereby a person can seek, and be refused, permission to publish specific material, allowing the authorities to restrict or ban publication, at least until that refusal is successfully challenged. Because such restrictions impinge on free speech and the public ‘right to know’, both the domestic courts and the law of the European Court of Human Rights must consider the legitimacy and proportionality of these restrictions. In particular, Article 10(2) of the Convention, as given effect to by the Human Rights Act 1998, insists that legal regulations are sufficiently clear to be prescribed by law, are being employed to secure a legitimate aim, and that any restriction, criminal or civil, does not impose a disproportionate interference on individual free speech. As we might expect, judicial deference from the domestic courts, and within the Strasbourg Court’s margin of appreciation, offer a great deal of discretion to the executive authorities in this balancing exercise, the judiciary being reluctant to interfere with administrative or legislative discretion where there is a tangible threat to national security and public safety. <br/

Evaluating the relative influence of climate and human activities on recent vegetation dynamics in West Bengal, India

Assessing the relative importance of climate change and human activities is important in developing sustainable management policies for regional land use. In this study, multiple remote sensing datasets, i.e. CHIRPS (Climate Hazard Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station Data) precipitation, MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Potential Evapotranspiration (PET), Soil Moisture (SM), WorldPop, and nighttime light have been analyzed to investigate the effect that climate change (CC) and regional human activities (HA) have on vegetation dynamics in eastern India for the period 2000 to 2022. The relative influence of climate and anthropogenic factors is evaluated on the basis of non-parametric statistics i.e., Mann-Kendall and Sen's slope estimator. Significant spatial and elevation-dependent variations in precipitation and LST are evident. Areas at higher elevations exhibit increased mean annual temperatures (0.22 °C/year, p &lt; 0.05) and reduced winter precipitation over the last two decades, while the northern and southwest parts of West Bengal witnessed increased mean annual precipitation (17.3 mm/year, p &lt; 0.05) and a slight cooling trend. Temperature and precipitation trends are shown to collectively impact EVI distribution. While there is a negative spatial correlation between LST and EVI, the relationship between precipitation and EVI is positive and stronger (R2 = 0.83, p &lt; 0.05). Associated hydroclimatic parameters are potent drivers of EVI, whereby PET in the southwestern regions leads to markedly lower SM. The relative importance of CC and HA on EVI also varies spatially. Near the major conurbation of Kolkata, and confirmed by nighttime light and population density data, changes in vegetation cover are very clearly dominated by HA (87%). In contrast, CC emerges as the dominant driver of EVI (70–85%) in the higher elevation northern regions of the state but also in the southeast. Our findings inform policy regarding the future sustainability of vulnerable socio-hydroclimatic systems across the entire state