1,225 research outputs found
Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law
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
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Adaptive Microarchitectural Optimizations to Improve Performance and Security of Multi-Core Architectures
With the current technological barriers, microarchitectural optimizations are increasingly important to ensure performance scalability of computing systems. The shift to multi-core architectures increases the demands on the memory system, and amplifies the role of microarchitectural optimizations in performance improvement. In a multi-core system, microarchitectural resources are usually shared, such as the cache, to maximize utilization but sharing can also lead to contention and lower performance. This can be mitigated through partitioning of shared caches.However, microarchitectural optimizations which were assumed to be fundamentally secure for a long time, can be used in side-channel attacks to exploit secrets, as cryptographic keys. Timing-based side-channels exploit predictable timing variations due to the interaction with microarchitectural optimizations during program execution. Going forward, there is a strong need to be able to leverage microarchitectural optimizations for performance without compromising security. This thesis contributes with three adaptive microarchitectural resource management optimizations to improve security and/or\ua0performance\ua0of multi-core architectures\ua0and a systematization-of-knowledge of timing-based side-channel attacks.\ua0We observe that to achieve high-performance cache partitioning in a multi-core system\ua0three requirements need to be met: i) fine-granularity of partitions, ii) locality-aware placement and iii) frequent changes. These requirements lead to\ua0high overheads for current centralized partitioning solutions, especially as the number of cores in the\ua0system increases. To address this problem, we present an adaptive and scalable cache partitioning solution (DELTA) using a distributed and asynchronous allocation algorithm. The\ua0allocations occur through core-to-core challenges, where applications with larger performance benefit will gain cache capacity. The\ua0solution is implementable in hardware, due to low computational complexity, and can scale to large core counts.According to our analysis, better performance can be achieved by coordination of multiple optimizations for different resources, e.g., off-chip bandwidth and cache, but is challenging due to the increased number of possible allocations which need to be evaluated.\ua0Based on these observations, we present a solution (CBP) for coordinated management of the optimizations: cache partitioning, bandwidth partitioning and prefetching.\ua0Efficient allocations, considering the inter-resource interactions and trade-offs, are achieved using local resource managers to limit the solution space.The continuously growing number of\ua0side-channel attacks leveraging\ua0microarchitectural optimizations prompts us to review attacks and defenses to understand the vulnerabilities of different microarchitectural optimizations. We identify the four root causes of timing-based side-channel attacks: determinism, sharing, access violation\ua0and information flow.\ua0Our key insight is that eliminating any of the exploited root causes, in any of the attack steps, is enough to provide protection.\ua0Based on our framework, we present a systematization of the attacks and defenses on a wide range of microarchitectural optimizations, which highlights their key similarities.\ua0Shared caches are an attractive attack surface for side-channel attacks, while defenses need to be efficient since the cache is crucial for performance.\ua0To address this issue, we present an adaptive and scalable cache partitioning solution (SCALE) for protection against cache side-channel attacks. The solution leverages randomness,\ua0and provides quantifiable and information theoretic security guarantees using differential privacy. The solution closes the performance gap to a state-of-the-art non-secure allocation policy for a mix of secure and non-secure applications
Researches regarding the evolution, magnitude and complexity of the impact generated by the economic activities on the East Jiu River
Ongoing development of modern society, based on consumption of goods and services, leads to the increase of compulsoriness of economic agents to face market requirements by increasing the degree of local and regional industrialization. Establishment of new economic activities generates negative pressures on the environment and surface waters, generating increased pollution, manifested by vulnerability of aquatic ecosystems to stressors.
Preliminary studies carried out within the doctoral thesis entitled 'Research on the evolution, magnitude and complexity of the impact of economic activities on the East Jiu' include information on characteristic elements of the East Jiu River basin, in accordance with the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/CE.
The objectives of the field research aimed to identify economic activities in the eastern Jiu Valley generating an impact on the environment (especially the mining industry, but also timber exploitation and processing, local agriculture, animal husbandry and waste storage), establishing a quarterly monitoring program of the river basin, identification of flora and fauna species and identification of areas vulnerable to potential pollution.
Based on observations made in situ and on information obtained from the evolution process of the monitoring program, the appropriate methodologies for assessing physical-chemical and ecological quality of the water were selected.
Study of the evolution of the impact generated by economic activities on the East Jiu was carried out by mathematical modelling, with finite volumes, of the East Jiu River basin and plotting of pollutant dispersion maps. The magnitude and complexity of impact generated by economic activities was studied by using a complex system based on fuzzy logic, designed based on interactions between natural and artificial systems, between physical-chemical indicators of water and ecosystem. The research carried out substantiates in development of necessary technical measures to reduce the impact generated by economic activities located in eastern Jiu Valley, without significantly changing the hydrodynamics of the river basin.
Following research, during different research stages, methods, techniques and tools were designed and accomplished with the help of which, water and aquatic ecosystems’ quality can be assessed, as well as the impact generated by human activity on the Jiu River, at a given moment and/or continuously.:CONTENT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SUMMARY
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
PURPOSE OF THE THESIS AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
CHAPTER 1 THE EAST JIUL RIVER HYDROGRAPHIC BASIN
1.1. Soil and subsoil of the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
1.2. Climate description of the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
1.3. Geology particularities of the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
1.4. Groundwater features of the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
1.5. Flora and fauna of the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
CHAPTER 2 SOURCES OF IMPACT ON THE QUALITY OF WATER, RIPARIAN, TERRESTRIAL AND AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS
2.1. Mining industry
2.2. Wood processing industry in the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
2.3. Urban agriculture and local animal husbandry
2.4. Inappropriate urban household waste storage
CHAPTER 3 MONITORING PROGRAM AND METHODS OF EVALUATION OF THE QUALITY OF THE EAST JIUL RIVER
3.1. Establishment of monitoring (control) sections
3.2. Monitoring program of the East Jiu River basin
3.3. Sampling, transport and analysis of water samples
3.4. Methodology used to establish the water quality
CHAPTER 4 QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF WATER IN THE EASTERN JIU HYDROGRAPHIC BASIN
4.1. Section 1 - JieÈ› River - upstream of household settlements (blank assay)
4.2. Section 2 - East Jiu River - in the area of Tirici village
4.3. Section 3 - Răscoala brook - before the confluence with East Jiu River
4.4. Section 4 - East Jiu River - after the confluence with the Răscoala brook
4.5. Section 5 - Taia River - upstream of the confluence with East Jiu River
4.6. Section 6 - East Jiu River - before the confluence with the Taia River
4.7. Section 7 - East Jiu River - after the confluence with the Taia River
4.8. Section 8 - Jiet River downstream of household settlements
4.9. Section 9 - East Jiu River - after the confluence with the JieÈ› River
4.10. Section 10 - East Jiu River - before the confluence with Banița River
4.11. Section 11 - RoÅŸia River - upstream of household settlements
4.12. Section 12 - Bănița River - after the confluence with the Roșia River
4.13. Section 13 - East Jiu River - after the confluence with the Banița River
4.14. Section 14 - Maleia River - before the confluence with East Jiu River
4.15. Section 15 - Slătioara River - before the confluence with East Jiu River
4.16. Section 16 – East Jiu River - before the confluence with West Jiu River
CHAPTER 5 INFLUENCES OF PHYSICAL-CHEMICAL FACTORS ON AQUATIC ICHTHYOFAUNA IN THE EAST JIU RIVER BASIN
5.1. Total suspended solids and aquatic ecosystems
5.2. Acidity or basicity reaction of surface watercourses
5.3. Aquatic ecosystem requirements for gas oversaturation
5.4. Nitrogenous compounds in watercourse
5.5. Phenols, aquatic ecosystems and water quality
CHAPTER 6 ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT GENERATED BY ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN THE EASTERN PART OF JIU VALLEY
6.1. Impact analysis of mining industry in the Eastern Part of Jiu Valley
6.2. The general impact of Eastern Jiu Valley dumps to water quality
6.3. Research on effective infiltration in the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
6.4. Research on groundwater quality in the Eastern part of Jiu Valley
6.5. Analysis of the impact generated by local micro-agriculture
6.6. Analysis of the impact generated by deforestation and wood processing
6.7. Analysis of the impact generated by non-compliant landfilling of waste
CHAPTER 7 EVOLUTION OF THE IMPACT GENERATED BY ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN THE EASTERN JIU VALLEY
7.1. Analysis of the dynamic elements of the watercourse - RMA2 mode
7.2. Analysis of pollutants concentration evolution in the water course - RMA4 module
7.3. Computational field and composition of the energy model of the East Jiu River
7.4. Extension and evolution of the impact generated by economic activities on the East Jiu River
7.5. Extension and evolution of the impact caused by organic pollution of the East Jiu River
CHAPTER 8 MAGNITUDE AND COMPLEXITY OF THE IMPACT GENERATED
BY ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN THE EASTERN JIU VALLEY
8.1. Definition of input linguistic variables
8.2. Linguistic outputs of the fuzzy interference system
8.3. Defining the Black Box set of rules
8.4. Proficiency testing of complex systems based on fuzzy logic
8.5. While it is all about the wheel do not forget about the cube
CONCLUSIONS AND PERSONAL CONTRIBUTIONS
REFERENCE
Musiktheorie als interdisziplinäres Fach: 8. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie Graz 2008
Im Oktober 2008 fand an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz (KUG) der 8. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) zum Thema »Musiktheorie als interdisziplinäres Fach« statt. Die hier vorgelegten gesammelten Beiträge akzentuieren Musiktheorie als multiperspektivische wissenschaftliche Disziplin in den Spannungsfeldern Theorie/Praxis, Kunst/Wissenschaft und Historik/Systematik. Die sechs Kapitel ergründen dabei die Grenzbereiche zur Musikgeschichte, Musikästhetik, zur Praxis musikalischer Interpretation, zur kompositorischen Praxis im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, zur Ethnomusikologie sowie zur Systematischen Musikwissenschaft. Insgesamt 45 Aufsätze, davon 28 in deutscher, 17 in englischer Sprache, sowie die Dokumentation einer Podiumsdiskussion zeichnen in ihrer Gesamtheit einen höchst lebendigen und gegenwartsbezogenen Diskurs, der eine einzigartige Standortbestimmung des Fachs Musiktheorie bietet.The 8th congress of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) took place in October 2008 at the University for Music and Dramatic Arts Graz (KUG) on the topic »Music Theory and Interdisciplinarity«. The collected contributions characterize music theory as a multi-faceted scholarly discipline at the intersection of theory/practice, art/science and history/system. The six chapters explore commonalties with music history, music aesthetics, musical performance, compositional practice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, ethnomusicology and systematic musicology. A total of 45 essays (28 in German, 17 in English) and the documentation of a panel discussion form a vital discourse informed by contemporaneous issues of research in a broad number of fields, providing a unique overview of music theory today. A comprehensive English summary appears at the beginning of all contributions
Insect neuroethology of reinforcement learning
Historically, reinforcement learning is a branch of machine learning founded on observations of how animals learn. This involved collaboration between the fields of biology and artificial intelligence that was beneficial to both fields, creating smarter artificial agents and improving the understanding of how biological systems function. The evolution of reinforcement learning during the past few years was rapid but substantially diverged from providing insights into how biological systems work, opening a gap between reinforcement learning and biology. In an attempt to close this gap, this thesis studied the insect neuroethology of reinforcement learning, that is, the neural circuits that underlie reinforcement-learning-related behaviours in insects. The goal was to extract a biologically plausible plasticity function from insect-neuronal data, use this to explain biological findings and compare it to more standard reinforcement
learning models. Consequently, a novel dopaminergic plasticity rule was developed to approximate the function of dopamine as the plasticity mechanism between neurons in the insect brain. This allowed a range of observed learning phenomena to happen in parallel, like memory depression, potentiation, recovery, and saturation. In addition, by using anatomical data of connections between neurons in the mushroom body neuropils of the insect brain, the neural incentive circuit of dopaminergic and output neurons was also explored. This, together with the dopaminergic plasticity rule, allowed for dynamic collaboration amongst parallel memory functions, such as acquisition, transfer, and forgetting. When tested on olfactory conditioning paradigms, the model reproduced the observed changes in the activity of the identified neurons in fruit flies. It also replicated the observed behaviour of the animals and it allowed for flexible behavioural control. Inspired by the visual navigation system of desert ants, the model was further challenged in the visual place recognition task. Although a relatively simple encoding of the olfactory information was sufficient to explain odour learning, a more sophisticated encoding of the visual input was required to increase the separability among the visual inputs and enable visual place recognition. Signal whitening and sparse combinatorial encoding were sufficient to boost the performance of the system in this task. The incentive circuit enabled the encoding of increasing familiarity along a known route, which dropped proportionally to the distance of the animal from that route. Finally, the proposed model was challenged in delayed reinforcement tasks, suggesting that it might take the role of an adaptive critic in the context of reinforcement learning
Transmuting values in artificial intelligence: investigating the motivations and contextual constraints shaping the ethics of artificial intelligence practitioners
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and development have seen AI applied in
various high-stakes domains such as healthcare and welfare. Furthermore, portrayals of AI are
often characterised by narratives of perpetual progress and sleek optimisation, obscuring the
intricate interactions of materiality and socio-political decision-making inherently embedded
within wider systems of design and development. The resulting ethical and social concerns
have prompted proposal of numerous frameworks, tools and guidelines for the ethical design
and development of AI. However, translating these proposals into practice has proven
challenging, and there is a paucity of research into the practical contexts shaping the ethico-onto-epistemology of AI practice. In this thesis I illustrate these contexts via the accounts of
24 AI practitioners, complemented by ethnographic observations from an industry research
lab, examining the values which motivate practitioners, the constraints which shape their
practice, and their approaches to ethics.
Weaving through these discussions of practice, values, and the nature of
responsibility, I examine how ambiguities pervade practice and shape the realities of ethical
reflection and engagement at all stages of development. My findings uncover practitioner
motivations linked with interconnected intellectual and moral values, how these related to
intellectual conduct and culture within the field, and how practitioner heuristics for ethical
decision-making are often relational and character-based in nature. This realization of values
in practice is tempered by numerous constraints including hardware limitations, epistemic
cultures, and ethical knowledge.
Drawing upon the Ethics of Ambiguity, I discuss how the
uncertainty, ambiguity and unequal access to resources shaping AI practice necessitate a
process-focused ethics which pivots away from solutions, towards critical contextual
reflexivity and awareness of how contexts impact realisation of values. To this end, I
demonstrate how The Ethics of Ambiguity can offer a path forward for ethical AI practice.
This vision of AI practice embraces ambiguities rather than attempting to segment and
sideline them, focusing on how practitioner decisions (and their eventual outputs) impact
others’ freedoms while acknowledging the multiplicity of values across socio- and geo-political contexts
The Self The Soul and The World: Affect Reason and Complexity
This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us
LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum
Contributions of Human Prefrontal Cortex to the Recogitation of Thought
Human beings have a unique ability to not only verbally articulate past and present experiences, as well as potential future ones, but also evaluate the mental representations of such things. Some evaluations do little good, in that they poorly reflect facts, create needless emotional distress, and contribute to the obstruction of personal goals, whereas some evaluations are the converse: They are grounded in logic, empiricism, and pragmatism and, therefore, are functional rather than dysfunctional. The aim of non-pharmacological mental health interventions is to revise dysfunctional thoughts into more adaptive, healthier ones; however, the neurocognitive mechanisms driving cognitive change have hitherto remained unclear. Therefore, this thesis examines the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in this aspect of human higher cognition using the relatively new method of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 1 advances recogitation as the mental ability on which cognitive restructuring largely depends, concluding that, as a cognitive task, it is a form of open-ended human problem-solving that uses metacognitive and reasoning faculties. Because these faculties share similar executive resources, Chapter 2 discusses the systems in the brain involved in controlled information processing, specifically the nature of executive functions and their neural bases. Chapter 3 builds on these ideas to propose an information-processing model of recogitation, which predicts the roles of different subsystems localized within the PFC and elsewhere in the context of emotion regulation. This chapter also highlights several theoretical and empirical challenges to investigating this neurocognitive theory and proposes some solutions, such as to use experimental designs that are more ecologically valid. Chapter 4 focuses on a neuroimaging method that is best suited to investigating questions of spatial localization in ecological experiments, namely functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 5 then demonstrates a novel approach to investigating the neural bases of interpersonal interactions in clinical settings using fNIRS. Chapter 6 explores physical activity as a ‘bottom-up’ approach to upregulating the PFC, in that it might help clinical populations with executive deficits to regulate their mental health from the ‘top-down’. Chapter 7 addresses some of the methodological issues of investigating clinical interactions and physical activity in more naturalistic settings by assessing an approach to recovering functional events from observed brain data. Chapter 8 draws several conclusions about the role of the PFC in improving psychological as well as physiological well-being, particularly that rostral PFC is inextricably involved in the cognitive effort to modulate dysfunctional thoughts, and proposes some important future directions for ecological research in cognitive neuroscience; for example, psychotherapy is perhaps too physically stagnant, so integrating exercise into treatment environments might boost the effectiveness of intervention strategies
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