2,415 research outputs found

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Evolutionary ecology of obligate fungal and microsporidian invertebrate pathogens

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    The interactions between hosts and their parasites and pathogens are omnipresent in the natural world. These symbioses are not only key players in ecosystem functioning, but also drive genetic diversity through co-evolutionary adaptations. Within the speciose invertebrates, a plethora of interactions with obligate fungal and microsporidian pathogens exist, however the known interactions is likely only a fraction of the true diversity. Obligate invertebrate fungal and microsporidian pathogen require a host to continue their life cycle, some of which have specialised in certain host species and require host death to transmit to new hosts. Due to their requirement to kill a host to spread to a new one, obligate fungal and microsporidian pathogens regulate invertebrate host populations. Pathogen specialisation to a single or very few hosts has led to some fungi evolving the ability to manipulate their host’s behaviour to maximise transmission. The entomopathogenic fungus, Entomophthora muscae, infects houseflies (Musca domestica) over a week-long proliferation cycle, resulting in flies climbing to elevated positions, gluing their mouthparts to the substrate surface, and raising their wings to allow for a clear exit from fungal conidia through the host abdomen. These sequential behaviours are all timed to occur within a few hours of sunset. The E. muscae mechanisms used in controlling the mind of the fly remain relatively unknown, and whether other fitness costs ensue from an infection are understudied.European Commissio

    Running to Your Own Beat:An Embodied Approach to Auditory Display Design

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    Personal fitness trackers represent a multi-billion-dollar industry, predicated on devices for assisting users in achieving their health goals. However, most current products only offer activity tracking and measurement of performance metrics, which do not ultimately address the need for technique related assistive feedback in a cost-effective way. Addressing this gap in the design space for assistive run training interfaces is also crucial in combating the negative effects of Forward Head Position, a condition resulting from mobile device use, with a rapid growth of incidence in the population. As such, Auditory Displays (AD) offer an innovative set of tools for creating such a device for runners. ADs present the opportunity to design interfaces which allow natural unencumbered motion, detached from the mobile or smartwatch screen, thus making them ideal for providing real-time assistive feedback for correcting head posture during running. However, issues with AD design have centred around overall usability and user-experience, therefore, in this thesis an ecological and embodied approach to AD design is presented as a vehicle for designing an assistive auditory interface for runners, which integrates seamlessly into their everyday environments

    Language integrated relational lenses

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    Relational databases are ubiquitous. Such monolithic databases accumulate large amounts of data, yet applications typically only work on small portions of the data at a time. A subset of the database defined as a computation on the underlying tables is called a view. Querying views is helpful, but it is also desirable to update them and have these changes be applied to the underlying database. This view update problem has been the subject of much previous work before, but support by database servers is limited and only rarely available. Lenses are a popular approach to bidirectional transformations, a generalization of the view update problem in databases to arbitrary data. However, perhaps surprisingly, lenses have seldom actually been used to implement updatable views in databases. Bohannon, Pierce and Vaughan propose an approach to updatable views called relational lenses. However, to the best of our knowledge this proposal has not been implemented or evaluated prior to the work reported in this thesis. This thesis proposes programming language support for relational lenses. Language integrated relational lenses support expressive and efficient view updates, without relying on updatable view support from the database server. By integrating relational lenses into the programming language, application development becomes easier and less error-prone, avoiding the impedance mismatch of having two programming languages. Integrating relational lenses into the language poses additional challenges. As defined by Bohannon et al. relational lenses completely recompute the database, making them inefficient as the database scales. The other challenge is that some parts of the well-formedness conditions are too general for implementation. Bohannon et al. specify predicates using possibly infinite abstract sets and define the type checking rules using relational algebra. Incremental relational lenses equip relational lenses with change-propagating semantics that map small changes to the view into (potentially) small changes to the source tables. We prove that our incremental semantics are functionally equivalent to the non-incremental semantics, and our experimental results show orders of magnitude improvement over the non-incremental approach. This thesis introduces a concrete predicate syntax and shows how the required checks are performed on these predicates and show that they satisfy the abstract predicate specifications. We discuss trade-offs between static predicates that are fully known at compile time vs dynamic predicates that are only known during execution and introduce hybrid predicates taking inspiration from both approaches. This thesis adapts the typing rules for relational lenses from sequential composition to a functional style of sub-expressions. We prove that any well-typed functional relational lens expression can derive a well-typed sequential lens. We use these additions to relational lenses as the foundation for two practical implementations: an extension of the Links functional language and a library written in Haskell. The second implementation demonstrates how type-level computation can be used to implement relational lenses without changes to the compiler. These two implementations attest to the possibility of turning relational lenses into a practical language feature

    Microcredentials to support PBL

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    Efficient Model Checking: The Power of Randomness

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    SUTMS - Unified Threat Management Framework for Home Networks

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    Home networks were initially designed for web browsing and non-business critical applications. As infrastructure improved, internet broadband costs decreased, and home internet usage transferred to e-commerce and business-critical applications. Today’s home computers host personnel identifiable information and financial data and act as a bridge to corporate networks via remote access technologies like VPN. The expansion of remote work and the transition to cloud computing have broadened the attack surface for potential threats. Home networks have become the extension of critical networks and services, hackers can get access to corporate data by compromising devices attacked to broad- band routers. All these challenges depict the importance of home-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems. There is a need of unified threat management framework that is developed specifically for home and small networks to address emerging security challenges. In this research, the proposed Smart Unified Threat Management (SUTMS) framework serves as a comprehensive solution for implementing home network security, incorporating firewall, anti-bot, intrusion detection, and anomaly detection engines into a unified system. SUTMS is able to provide 99.99% accuracy with 56.83% memory improvements. IPS stands out as the most resource-intensive UTM service, SUTMS successfully reduces the performance overhead of IDS by integrating it with the flow detection mod- ule. The artifact employs flow analysis to identify network anomalies and categorizes encrypted traffic according to its abnormalities. SUTMS can be scaled by introducing optional functions, i.e., routing and smart logging (utilizing Apriori algorithms). The research also tackles one of the limitations identified by SUTMS through the introduction of a second artifact called Secure Centralized Management System (SCMS). SCMS is a lightweight asset management platform with built-in security intelligence that can seamlessly integrate with a cloud for real-time updates

    Automatic Generation of Personalized Recommendations in eCoaching

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    Denne avhandlingen omhandler eCoaching for personlig livsstilsstøtte i sanntid ved bruk av informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi. Utfordringen er å designe, utvikle og teknisk evaluere en prototyp av en intelligent eCoach som automatisk genererer personlige og evidensbaserte anbefalinger til en bedre livsstil. Den utviklede løsningen er fokusert på forbedring av fysisk aktivitet. Prototypen bruker bærbare medisinske aktivitetssensorer. De innsamlede data blir semantisk representert og kunstig intelligente algoritmer genererer automatisk meningsfulle, personlige og kontekstbaserte anbefalinger for mindre stillesittende tid. Oppgaven bruker den veletablerte designvitenskapelige forskningsmetodikken for å utvikle teoretiske grunnlag og praktiske implementeringer. Samlet sett fokuserer denne forskningen på teknologisk verifisering snarere enn klinisk evaluering.publishedVersio

    Structure and function studies of GH45 glycoside hydrolases

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    The enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic material in nature is carried out by a plethora of cellulases. Glycoside hydrolase family 45 (GH45) enzymes are small cellulases most commonly found in fungi that catalyse the hydrolysis of β(1→4) linked glucans. Additionally, GH45 enzymes display a structural resemblance to non-hydrolytic protein groups such as expansins and loosenins. In this thesis, the distinctness of GH45 enzymes from different subfamilies was explored. The enzymatic activity of GH45 enzymes from Humicola insolens (HiCel45A), Mytilus edulis (MeCel45A), Trichoderma reesei (TrCel45A), Phanerochaete chrysosporium (PcCel45A), Gloeophyllum trabeum (GtCel45A) was demonstrated. Among the tested substrates were barley betaglucan, konjac glucomannan, carboxymethyl cellulose, and cellohexaose. Initial hydrolysis rates and hydrolysis yields were determined by reducing sugar assays, product formation was analysed using NMR spectroscopy and HPLC. The subfamily B and C enzymes exhibited mannanase activity, and the subfamily B enzyme MeCel45A appeared cold adapted in comparison to TrCel45A. GH45 enzymes are known to act using an inverting action mechanism. This action mechanism had not been experimentally demonstrated in subfamilies B and C, however. Here experimental evidence is provided for the inverting nature of GH45 enzymes from all subfamilies.Comparisons of GH45 enzyme structures were carried out and the first crystal structure of a GH45 subfamily C enzyme from the brown-rot fungus G. trabeum was reported at 1.3 Å resolution. Furthermore, structure and function investigations were done on an isotopically labelled Cel45A from the white-rot fungus P. chrysosporium using NMR spectroscopy. PcCel45A was expressed in Pichia pastoris with 13C and 15N labelling. A nearly complete assignment of 1 H, 13C and 15N backbone resonances was obtained and the interaction of 15Nlabelled PcCel45A with cellobiose was studied

    Meditative textual practices in England, 1661 – 1678

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    This thesis examines late seventeenth-century meditation as a textual practice in manuscript and print. It considers textual meditations, prayers, scriptural paraphrases, letters, memoirs, and verse, which appear in miscellanies in the period of the Cavalier Parliament, 1661 – 1678. It argues that texts were essential to meditative practice, and these texts were composed either for the practitioner or with distinct readerships in mind. Therefore the project examines the complex and shifting triad of writer, reader, and text in each instance. In addition, it shows how notions of completion, privacy, publication, literariness, and singular authorship are not fully compatible with the iterativity of the textual practices associated with meditation. The study considers five meditative writers, found across social and confessional spectra: Katherine Austen, John Flavel, Elizabeth Delaval, Susanna Hopton, and Thomas Traherne. Each writer collates and composes texts – originated by themselves and others – into their miscellanies; and – often over long periods of time – edits, amends, or repurposes these texts according to individual circumstance. The writers deploy diverse devotional practices and textual genres including emblem, romantic fiction, and essay. Each chapter shows how differently these writers realise the general pattern described by the thesis The thesis offers a new appreciation of the diversity of meditative practices and the textual practices associated with them. It challenges earlier perceptions of meditation as an isolated, private, devotional practice, and of meditative texts as a separate literary product of meditative thought. The thesis describes meditation as a textual habit of thought, and a rich source of knowledge, which underpinned, theological, mercantile, social, and philosophical thought. In addition, the thesis demonstrates the value of interpreting meditative texts in their material, textual, biographical, and cultural contexts, and offers a reassessment of the critical and contemporary values placed on verse and prose forms in devotional writing
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