Surface code fidelity at finite temperatures

We study the dependence of the fidelity of the surface code in the presence of a single finite-temperature massless bosonic environment after a quantum error correction cycle. The three standard types of environment are considered: super-Ohmic, Ohmic, and sub-Ohmic. Our results show that, for regimes relevant to current experiments, quantum error correction works well even in the presence of environment-induced, long-range inter-qubit interactions. A threshold always exists at finite temperatures, although its temperature dependence is very sensitive to the type of environment. For the super-Ohmic case, the critical coupling constant separating high- from low-fidelity decreases with increasing temperature. For both Ohmic and super-Ohmic cases, the dependence of the critical coupling on temperature is weak. In all cases, the critical coupling is determined by microscopic parameters of the environment. For the sub-Ohmic case, it also depends strongly on the duration of the QEC cycle.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Introduction to the thematic issue on selected topics from Intelligent Environments 2017

[Excerpt] Introduction: Intelligent Environments (IEs) refer to physical spaces into which IT and other pervasive computing technologies are woven and are used to achieve specific goals for the user, the environment, or both. IEs have the ultimate objective of enriching user experience, better manage and increase user awareness of that environment. The 13th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 17) was held at Seoul, Republic of Korea, and it was a great chance to share the state of the art data analytics methods and technologies. Based on the recommendations from conference committee members, four papers have been invited for this thematic issue. [...

New methods for stress assessment and monitoring at the workplace

The topic of stress is nowadays a very important one, not only in research but on social life in general. People are increasingly aware of this problem and its consequences at several levels: health, social life, work, quality of life, etc. This resulted in a significant increase in the search for devices and applications to measure and manage stress in real-time. Recent technological and scientific evolution fosters this interest with the development of new methods and approaches. In this paper we survey these new methods for stress assessment, focusing especially on those that are suited for the workplace: one of today’s major sources of stress. We contrast them with more traditional methods and compare them between themselves, evaluating nine characteristics. Given the diversity of methods that exist nowadays, this work facilitates the stakeholders’ decision towards which one to use, based on how much their organization values aspects such as privacy, accuracy, cost-effectiveness or intrusivenes

Structural onomatology for username generation: A partial account

The username hints for most of the on-line social networks are mostly unpleasant for human beings since they are mostly a simple name variation followed by numbers. This paper shows that it is possible to generate human likable usernames through heuristics guided by structural onomastics. The objective then is to conceive heuristics as such and check its availability in Twitter in order to verify if is it possible to generate a sufficiently big and available username data-set that is able to justify the transitions from unpleasant to a pleasant username suggestion. This paper finds that it is possible to generate 8281 handles on average through the proposed heuristics and their permutations, therefore, the number of various possibilities is comfortable. This is a partial account since not all possibilities were explored and some improvements are required, but suits for a proof of concept and to indicate paths.FCT Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the RD Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/202

Large language models: compilers for the 4th generation of programming languages?

This paper explores the possibility of large language models as a fourth generation programming language compiler. This is based on the idea that large language models are able to translate a natural language specification into a program written in a particular programming language. In other words, just as high-level languages provided an additional language abstraction to assembly code, large language models can provide an additional language abstraction to high-level languages. This interpretation allows large language models to be thought of through the lens of compiler theory, leading to insightful conclusions.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(UIDB/00319/2020

An exploratory design science research on troll factories

Private and military troll factories (facilities used to spread rumours in online social media) are currently proliferating around the world. By their very nature, they are obscure companies whose internal workings are largely unknown, apart from leaks to the press. They are even more concealed when it comes to their underlying technology. At least in a broad sense, it is believed that there are two main tasks performed by a troll factory: sowing and spreading. The first is to create and, more importantly, maintain a social network that can be used for the spreading task. It is then a wicked long-term activity, subject to all sorts of problems. As an attempt to make this perspective a little clearer, this paper uses exploratory design science research to produce artefacts that could be applied to online rumour spreading in social media. Then, as a hypothesis: it is possible to design a fully automated social media agent capable of sowing a social network on microblogging platforms. The expectation is that it will be possible to identify common opportunities and difficulties in the development of such tools, which in turn will allow an evaluation of the technology, but above all the level of automation of these facilities. The research is based on a general domain Twitter corpus with 4M+ tokens and on ChatGPT, and discusses both knowledge-based and deep learning approaches for smooth tweet generation. These explorations suggest that for the current, widespread and publicly available NLP technology, troll factories work like a call centre; i.e. humans assisted by more or less sophisticated computing tools (often called cyborgs).FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(2022.06822

SE4AI issues on social media agent design with use cases

This paper is the result of an endeavor of specifying a social media agent through Use Case 2.0 (the “agile Use Case”). That what was expected to be a straightforward specification task revealed issues that subverts a critical foundation of the Use Case conception, nonexistent use-case between the SuD and the actor, yielding to the extensions proposed in this paper.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020