AI App Home Design Free

AI App Home Design Free — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • ActivityPub

    ActivityPub

    ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server (C2S) API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub is the defining standard of the Fediverse, a decentralised social network of various social interaction models, and content types, which consists of independently managed instances of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube, among others. ActivityPub is considered to be an update to the ActivityPump protocol used in pump.io, and the official W3C repository for ActivityPub is identified as a fork of ActivityPump. The creation of a new standard for decentralized social networking was prompted by the complexity of OStatus, the most commonly used protocol at the time. OStatus was built using a multitude of technologies (such as Atom, Salmon, WebSub and WebFinger), a product of the infrastructure used in GNU social (the originator and largest user of the OStatus protocol), which made it difficult to implement the protocol into new software. OStatus was also only designed to work with microblogging services, with little flexibility to the types of data that it could hold. The standard was first published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a W3C Recommendation in January 2018 by the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG), a working group chartered to build the protocols and vocabularies needed to create a standard for social functionality. Shortly after, further development was moved to the Social Web Community Group (SocialCG), the successor to the SocialWG. == Design == ActivityPub uses the ActivityStreams 2.0 format for building its content, which itself uses JSON-LD. The three main data types used in ActivityPub are Objects, Activities and Actors. Objects are the most common data type, and can be images, videos, or more abstract items such as locations or events. Activities are actions that create and modify objects, for example a Create activity creates an object. Actors are representative of an individual, a group, an application or a service, and are the owners of objects. Every actor type contains an inbox and outbox stream, which sends and receives activities for a user. In order to publish data (for example liking an article), a user creates an activity that declares that they liked an Article object and publishes it to their outbox, where it is then delivered by the ActivityPub server via a POST request to the inboxes listed in the activity's to, bto, cc and bcc fields. The receiving servers then account for the newly received activity and update the article by adding the like action to it. === Example data === An example actor object that represents a user account: An example activity that likes an article object: An example article object: == Project status == The SocialCG previously organized a yearly free conference called ActivityPub Conf about the future of ActivityPub. Triages are held regularly to review issues pertaining to the ActivityPub and ActivityStreams 2.0 specifications as part of the SocialCG. In 2023, Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund donated €152,000 to socialweb.coop with the goal of building a new suite for testing various ActivityPub implementations and their compliance with the specification. === Adoption === The initial wave of adoption for ActivityPub (circa 2016–2018) came from software that was already using OStatus as their federation protocol, such as Mastodon, GNU social and Pleroma. Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, many groups of users that were critical of the acquisition migrated to Mastodon, bringing new attention to the ActivityPub protocol with it. Various major social media platforms and corporations have since pledged to implement ActivityPub support, including Tumblr, Flipboard and Meta Platforms' Threads. Threads introduced crossposting to ActivityPub in 2024 for users outside of the European Economic Area, however full 2-way compatibility remains incomplete as of 2025. == Criticism == === Accidental denial-of-service attacks === Poorly optimized ActivityPub implementations can cause unintentional distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on other websites and servers, due to the decentralized nature of the network. An example would be Mastodon's implementation of OpenGraph link previews, wherein every instance that receives a post that contains a link with OpenGraph metadata will download the associated data, such as a thumbnail, in a very short timeframe, which can slow down or crash servers as a result of the sudden burst of requests. === Account migration === ActivityPub has been criticized for not natively supporting moving accounts from one server to another, forcing implementations to build their own solutions. While there has been work on building a standardized system for migrating accounts using the Move activity via the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal organization, the current proposal only allows for basic follower migration, with all other data remaining linked to the original account. === Missing content and data === ActivityPub implementations have been criticized for missing replies and parts of reply threads from remote posts, and presenting outdated statistics (e.g. likes and reposts) about remote posts. However, this isn't a problem with the ActivityPub protocol itself, but with implementations not refreshing their content for updated data when needed. == Software using ActivityPub == === Future implementations === Flarum, an internet forum software Forgejo, a Git forge and development platform === Uncertain future implementations === GitLab, a Git forge and development platform which had previously had an open issue discussing the topic, but was later closed due to the development team moving focus to other areas. Tumblr, a microblogging platform. Despite previous statements from Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, ActivityPub integration has been delayed indefinitely. The integration would have been implemented with its WordPress migration, as the first-party plugin for interoperability would have been used for federation. Flickr, an image and video hosting site.

    Read more →
  • Run-to-completion scheduling

    Run-to-completion scheduling

    Run-to-completion scheduling or nonpreemptive scheduling is a scheduling model in which each task runs until it either finishes, or explicitly yields control back to the scheduler. Run-to-completion systems typically have an event queue which is serviced either in strict order of admission by an event loop, or by an admission scheduler which is capable of scheduling events out of order, based on other constraints such as deadlines. Some preemptive multitasking scheduling systems behave as run-to-completion schedulers in regard to scheduling tasks at one particular process priority level, at the same time as those processes still preempt other lower priority tasks and are themselves preempted by higher priority tasks.

    Read more →
  • Information professional

    Information professional

    The term information professional or information specialist refers to professionals responsible for the collection, documentation, organization, storage, preservation, retrieval, and dissemination of printed and digital information. The service delivered to the client is known as an information service. The term "information professional" is a versatile one, used to describe similar and sometimes overlapping professions, such as librarians, archivists, information managers, information systems specialists, information scientists, records managers, and information consultants. However, terminology differs among sources and organisations. Information professionals are employed in a variety of private, public, and academic institutions, as well as independently. == Skills == Since the term information professional is broad, the skills required for this profession are also varied. A Gartner report in 2011 pointed out that "Professional roles focused on information management will be different to that of established IT roles. An 'information professional' will not be one type of role or skill set, but will in fact have a number of specializations". Thus, an information professional can possess a variety of different skills, depending on the sector in which the person is employed. Some essential cross-sector skills are: IT skills, such as word-processing and spreadsheets, digitisation skills, and conducting Internet searches, together with skills loan systems, databases, content management systems, and specially designed programmes and packages. Customer service. An information professional should have the ability to address the information needs of customers. Language proficiency. This is essential in order to manage the information at hand and deal with customer needs. Soft skills. These include skills such as negotiating, conflict resolution, and time management. Management training. An information professional should be familiar with notions such as strategic planning and project management. Moreover, an information professional should be skilled in planning and using relevant systems, in capturing and securing information, and in accessing it to deliver service whenever the information is required. == Associations == Most countries have a professional association who oversee the professional and academic standards of librarians and other information professionals. There are also international associations related to LIS (library and information science), the most prominent of which is the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). In many countries, LIS courses are accredited by the relevant professional association, as the American Library Association (ALA) in the USA, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the UK, and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) in Australia. == Qualifications == Educational institutions around the world offer academic degrees, or degrees on related subjects such as Archival Studies, Information Systems, Information Management, and Records Management. Some of the institutions offering information science education refer to themselves as an iSchool, such as the CiSAP (Consortium of iSchools Asia Pacific, founded 2006) in Asia and the iSchool Caucus in the USA. There are also online e-learning resources, some of which offer certification for information professionals. === Africa === Information development in Africa started later than in other continents, mainly due to a lack of internet access, expertise and resources to manage digital infrastructure, and "opportunities for capacity development and knowledge-sharing". Nowadays, academic degrees in information studies are available at many universities of African countries, such as the University of Pretoria (South Africa), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Botswana (Botswana), and University of Nigeria (Nigeria). === Asia === LIS-related studies are available in more than 30 Asian countries. Some examples listed by iSchools Inc. are the University of Hong Kong, University of Tsukuba, Japan, Yonsei University, South Korea, National Taiwan University and Wuhan University, China. Centre of Library and Information Management Science (CLIMS) at Tata Institute of Social Science in Mumbai, India. In Southeast Asia, the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL) connects librarians and libraries in more than 10 countries with resources, networking opportunities, and support for growing library systems. === Australasia === The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) as of 2021 lists six schools offering undergraduate and postgraduate accredited university courses for "Librarian and Information Specialists" on their website. In New Zealand, the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and the Victoria University of Wellington offer undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses for information professionals. === Europe === The majority of European countries have universities, colleges, or schools which offer bachelor's degrees in LIS studies. Over 40 universities offer master's degrees in LIS-related fields, and many institutions, such as the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University of Borås (Sweden), the University of Barcelona (Spain), Loughborough University (UK), and Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK) also offer PhD degrees. === North America === Information studies and degrees are available at numerous academic institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada. U.S. professional associations, together with their European counterparts, have undertaken many educational initiatives and pioneered many advances in the field of Information studies, such as increased interdisciplinarity and more effective delivery of distance learning. The Association for Intelligent Information Management, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, offers a qualification called Certified Information Professional (CIP), earned upon passing an examination, with certification remaining valid for three years. === South America === There are many schools and colleges in Latin America, which offer courses in Library Science, Archival Studies, and Information Studies, however these subjects are taught completely separately.

    Read more →
  • CENDI

    CENDI

    CENDI (Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group) is an interagency group of senior Scientific and Technical Information (STI) managers from 14 United States federal agencies. CENDI managers cooperate by exchanging information and ideas, collaborating to address common issues, and undertaking joint initiatives. CENDI's accomplishments range from impacting federal information policy to educating a broad spectrum of stakeholders on all aspects of federal STI systems, including its value to research and the taxpayer, and to operational improvements in agency and interagency STI operations. == History == CENDI traces its roots to the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (COSATI) of the Federal Council on Science and Technology. COSATI was established in the early 1960s to coordinate the management of the results from the U.S. government's increasing commitment to scientific research and technology development. The scientific and technical information (STI) managers of the government's major research and development (R&D) agencies worked within COSATI to standardize guidelines for cataloging and indexing technical reports. COSATI ceased formal operations in the early 1970s. To continue the cooperation begun under COSATI, managers of agency STI programs from Commerce (National Technical Information Service), Energy (Office of Scientific and Technical Information), NASA (HQ/STI Division), and Defense (Defense Technical Information Center) began meeting periodically to discuss common topics and stimulate more effective cooperation. In 1985, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the four charter agencies and CENDI was established. From this small core of STI managers, CENDI has grown to its current membership, which represents the major science agencies, the national libraries, and agencies involved in the dissemination and long-term management of scientific and technical information. The vision of CENDI is to facilitate cooperative enterprise where capabilities are shared and challenges are faced together so that the sum of the accomplishments is greater than each individual agency can achieve on its own amongst federal STI agencies. The abbreviation CENDI refers to the "Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group". == Membership == New members from other federal R&D information organizations may be admitted by unanimous agreement of the members. However, it is the intent of the group that membership in CENDI should remain small and focus on organizations with STI or supporting responsibilities. Each agency provides funding to CENDI. == Members == The members of CENDI are: Defense Technical Information Center (United States Department of Defense) Office of Research and Development and Office of Environmental Information (United States Environmental Protection Agency) Government Printing Office Library of Congress NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture) National Archives and Records Administration National Library of Education (United States Department of Education) National Library of Medicine (United States Department of Health and Human Services) National Science Foundation National Technical Information Service (United States Department of Commerce) National Transportation Library (United States Department of Transportation) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (United States Department of Energy) USGS/Biological Resources Discipline (United States Department of the Interior) == Mission and operation == CENDI's mission is to help improve the productivity of federal science- and technology-based programs through effective scientific, technical, and related information support systems. In fulfilling its mission, CENDI agencies play an important role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness. === Goals === STI Coordination and Leadership: Provide coordination and leadership for information exchange on important STI policy issues. Improvement of STI Systems: Promote the development of improved STI systems through the productive interrelationship of content and technology. STI Understanding: Promote better understanding of STI and STI management. === Principals and Alternates === CENDI is made up of senior federal STI managers and each organization appoints a Principal representative. This person is the point of contact for that organization within CENDI. Each Principal has an Alternate. The Principals and Alternates comprise the main group that meets on a regular basis, usually every other month. === Secretariat === A Tennessee-based information management company, -- Information International Associates, Inc., currently serves as the CENDI Secretariat. The Secretariat provides day-to-day operations to CENDI. The Secretariat prepares the necessary materials for the Principals' meetings, provides support for the working group and task group meetings, assists in developing papers, and maintains the CENDI files and outreach tools. === Task Groups and Working Groups === The chair(s) of a working group is appointed by the Principals and has the overall responsibility for the group's activities. The Secretariat provides support at the request of the Working Group chair(s). The Working Groups and Task Groups that are currently operating are: Copyright and Intellectual Property Working Group Distribution Markings Task Group Digital Preservation Task Group Digitization Specifications Task Group Image Metadata Task Group Science.gov (see below) STI Policy Working Group Terminology Resources Task Group === Science.gov and Worldwidescience.org === In 2001, in response to the April 2001 workshop on "Strengthening the Public Information Infrastructure for Science", and taking into consideration a request from Firstgov (now USA.gov) to develop specialized topical portals, CENDI formed an alliance to develop an interagency website for access to STI. This website, called Science.gov, is a one-stop source of STI, including both selected, authoritative government websites and deep Web databases of technical reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, and other published materials. Through the volunteer efforts of members and involving over 100 staff, content and architecture is developed for the site. The Science.gov website is hosted by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). The site was formally launched in December 2002. As a result of the success of Science.gov, under DOE leadership and in cooperation with the International Council of Scientific and Technical Information, a worldwide coordination across national portals called WorldWideScience was launched in 2008. === Work with non-member organizations === CENDI works with several cooperating non-member organizations on a regular basis. These agencies are in academia, federal government, legal and policy analysis, international, non-governmental, and private organizations.

    Read more →
  • Wargame (hacking)

    Wargame (hacking)

    In hacking, a wargame (or war game) is a cyber-security challenge and mind sport in which the competitors must exploit or defend a vulnerability in a system or application, and/or gain or prevent access to a computer system. A wargame usually involves a capture the flag logic, based on pentesting, semantic URL attacks, knowledge-based authentication, password cracking, reverse engineering of software (often JavaScript, C and assembly language), code injection, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, exploits, IP address spoofing, forensics, and other hacking techniques. == Wargames for preparedness == Wargames are also used as a method of cyberwarfare preparedness. The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) organizes an annual event, Locked Shields, which is an international live-fire cyber exercise. The exercise challenges cyber security experts through real-time attacks in fictional scenarios and is used to develop skills in national IT defense strategies. == Additional applications == Wargames can be used to teach the basics of web attacks and web security, giving participants a better understanding of how attackers exploit security vulnerabilities. Wargames are also used as a way to "stress test" an organization's response plan and serve as a drill to identify gaps in cyber disaster preparedness.

    Read more →
  • Automated journalism

    Automated journalism

    Automated journalism, also known as algorithmic journalism or robot journalism, is a term that attempts to describe modern technological processes that are now in use in the journalistic profession, such as news articles and videos generated by computer programs. There are four main fields of application for automated journalism, namely automated content production, data mining, news dissemination and content optimization. Through generative artificial intelligence, stories are produced automatically by computers rather than human reporters. In the 2020s, generative pre-trained transformers have enabled the generation of articles, simply by providing prompts. Automated journalism is sometimes seen as an opportunity to free journalists from routine reporting, providing them with more time for complex tasks. It also allows efficiency and cost-cutting, alleviating some financial burden that many news organizations face. However, automated journalism is also perceived as a threat to the authorship and quality of news and a threat to the livelihoods of human journalists. == History == Historically, the process involved an algorithm that scanned large amounts of provided data, selected from an assortment of pre-programmed article structures, ordered key points, and inserted details such as names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other figures. These programs interpret, organize, and present data in human-readable ways. The output can also be customized to fit a certain voice, tone, or style. Early implementations were mainly used for stories based on statistics and numerical figures. Common topics include sports recaps, weather, financial reports, real estate analysis, and earnings reviews. Data science and AI companies such as Automated Insights, Narrative Science, United Robots and Monok develop and provide these algorithms to news outlets. In 2016, early adopters included news providers such as the Associated Press, Forbes, ProPublica, and the Los Angeles Times. StatSheet, an online platform covering college basketball, runs entirely on an automated program. In 2006, Thomson Reuters announced their switch to automation to generate financial news stories on its online news platform. Reuters used a tool called Tracer. An algorithm called Quakebot published a story about a 2014 California earthquake on The Los Angeles Times website within three minutes after the shaking had stopped. The Associated Press began using automation to cover 10,000 minor baseball leagues games annually, using a program from Automated Insights and statistics from MLB Advanced Media. Outside of sports, the Associated Press also uses automation to produce stories on corporate earnings. Since 2014, Associated Press has been publishing quarterly financial stories with help from Automated Insights. In May 2020, Microsoft announced that a number of its MSN contract journalists would be replaced by robot journalism. On 8 September 2020, The Guardian published an article entirely written by the neural network GPT-3, although the published fragments were manually picked by a human editor. Agentic Tribune produces all of its news articles automatically using AI. News broadcasters in Kuwait, Greece, South Korea, India, China and Taiwan have presented news with anchors based on generative AI models, prompting concerns about job losses for human anchors and audience trust in news that has historically been influenced by parasocial relationships with broadcasters, content creators or social media influencers. Algorithmically generated anchors have also been used by allies of ISIS for their broadcasts. In 2023, Google reportedly pitched a tool to news outlets that claimed to "produce news stories" based on input data provided, such as "details of current events". Some news company executives who viewed the pitch described it as "[taking] for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories." In February 2024, Google launched a program to pay small publishers to write three articles per day using a beta generative AI model. The program does not require the knowledge or consent of the websites that the publishers are using as sources, nor does it require the published articles to be labeled as being created or assisted by these models. Meta AI, a chatbot based on Llama 3 which summarizes news stories, was noted by The Washington Post to copy sentences from those stories without direct attribution and to potentially further decrease the traffic of online news outlets. == Benefits == === Speed === Robot reporters are built to produce large quantities of information at quicker speeds. The Associated Press announced that their use of automation has increased the volume of earnings reports from customers by more than ten times. With software from Automated Insights and data from other companies, they can produce 150 to 300-word articles in the same time it takes journalists to crunch numbers and prepare information. By automating routine stories and tasks, journalists are promised more time for complex jobs such as investigative reporting and in-depth analysis of events. Francesco Marconi of the Associated Press stated that, through automation, the news agency freed up 20 percent of reporters’ time to focus on higher-impact projects. This has also been stated by a spokesperson at Gannett, who stated "By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting." GBH reports that AI tools help increase the reach of news publishers. Mike Carragi, a product manager at Patch, stated that they were able to increase their reach from 1200 communities to 7000 communities in just a few months without the need for new employees solely through the adoption of generative AI. In fact, many communities are served solely by AI generated content, which creates summaries of existing information within the community. === Cost === Automated journalism is cheaper because more content can be produced within less time. It also lowers labour costs for news organizations. Reduced human input means less expenses on wages or salaries, paid leaves, vacations, and employment insurance. Automation serves as a cost-cutting tool for news outlets struggling with tight budgets but still wish to maintain the scope and quality of their coverage. == Concerns == === Authorship === In an automated story, there is often confusion about who should be credited as the author. Several participants of a study on algorithmic authorship attributed the credit to the programmer; others perceived the news organization as the author, emphasizing the collaborative nature of the work. There is also no way for the reader to verify whether an article was written by a robot or human, which raises issues of transparency although such issues also arise with respect to authorship attribution between human authors too. === Credibility and quality === Concerns about the perceived credibility of automated news is similar to concerns about the perceived credibility of news in general. Critics doubt if algorithms are "fair and accurate, free from subjectivity, error, or attempted influence." Again, these issues about fairness, accuracy, subjectivity, error, and attempts at influence or propaganda has also been present in articles written by humans over thousands of years. A common criticism is that machines do not replace human capabilities such as creativity, humour, and critical-thinking. However, as the technology evolves, the aim is to mimic human characteristics. When the UK's Guardian newspaper used an AI to write an entire article in September 2020, commentators pointed out that the AI still relied on human editorial content. Austin Tanney, the head of AI at Kainos said: "The Guardian got three or four different articles and spliced them together. They also gave it the opening paragraph. It doesn’t belittle what it is. It was written by AI, but there was human editorial on that." The largest single study of readers' evaluations of news articles produced with and without the help of automation exposed 3,135 online news consumers to 24 articles. It found articles that had been automated were significantly less comprehensible, in part because they were considered to contain too many numbers. However, the automated articles were evaluated equally on other criteria including tone, narrative flow, and narrative structure. Beyond human evaluation, there are now numerous algorithmic methods to identify machine written articles although some articles may still contain errors that are obvious for a human to identify, they can at times score better with these automatic identifiers than human-written articles. A 2017 Nieman Reports article by Nicola Bruno discusses whether or not machines will replace journalists and addresses concerns around the concept of automated journalism practices. Ultimately, Bruno came to the conclusion that AI would assist journalist

    Read more →
  • The Citation Project

    The Citation Project

    The Citation Project is a series of studies that measure and analyze first-year college writing students' source use and their ability to understand and implement sources within their own writing. The Citation Project reveals students' source-use habits and the issues that can be seen based on their lack of proper citation skills, such as the prevalence of plagiarism, institution policies, and the results of current writing pedagogy. The Citation Project's central findings were first presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2012. Although The Citation Project originally referred to this single 2012 study, the feedback received led to the conception of the Project as a broader initiative and as a place to gather and publish studies and data relating to student writing habits for the usage of other researches. == Method == The Citation Project's data comes from the work of 20 researchers analyzing 174 first-year composition students' research papers. The student papers studied originated from 16 institutions across the United States of America, including community colleges, public and private universities, denominational colleges, and Ivy Leagues. Researchers used bibliographic coding to aggregate data regarding the type, length, reading level, and usage of students' sources. == Findings == === Student source assessment and use === This study found that students were capable of identifying, locating, and accessing librarian-approved academic sources, most commonly accessing them with the internet. Despite students demonstrating their ability to find appropriate sources, they tend to exclusively cite the first few pages of their sources. Students' use and analysis of their citations are often limited, frequently resorting to patchwriting, directly restating their source's points, and omitting their own interpretations of their reference's ideas. The Citation Project also highlights students' struggle to accurately determine, address, and value their sources' bias, authority, and credibility. According to the Project's researchers' analysis, these habits demonstrate that first-year college writing students minimally engage with their sources and the academic conversations between them. One researcher from the Citation Project, Rebecca Moore Howard, believes these findings do not point towards students being lazy, but is rather a result of a writing pedagogy that prioritizes efficient, product-focused writing. Another interpretation offered by Sandra Jamieson, another researcher from the Citation Project explains their findings as a result of a lack of adherence to Information Learning (IL) Standards. === Pedagogy === A significant focus of The Citation Project is the development of pedagogical practices intended to equip students with writing and research techniques that will set them up for future success. Writers associated with The Citation Project, such as Tricia Serviss, believe that the practices of teachers surrounding academic integrity and writing practices are what form the foundation of how students think about writing and how to engage with assignments throughout their academic career. They also stress the importance of teaching students to effectively engage with sources rather than simply how to correctly cite them. The Citation Project asserts that endowing students with the ability to read, understand, and synthesize a variety of sources in their writing is a skill that will benefit them throughout their academic careers, and that the surface level typographical focus that many writing programs utilize is inadequate. == Plagiarism == One of the areas that The Citation Project also looks at is how students commit plagiarism throughout their writing. Plagiarism tends to be a checkpoint that gives instructors a sense where students' citation skills stand. Findings from The Citation Project reveal that the most common type of plagiarism is patchwriting which is the act of using the same sentence with only changing a couple of words. These types of issues can be seen as a learning curve due to lack of proper training. Student's that commit plagiarism are often unaware. === Policies === Another issue found is that academic plagiarism policies may not benefit a student's growth but may instead obstruct it. Policies against plagiarism tend to be harsh on the student that committed of offense. Even though student plagiarism is often unintentional academic institutions see this behavior as intentional. Student may then face harsh consequences as a result from their lack of citation knowledge. Additionally, higher level institutions assume that new students already have the skill set to avoid plagiarism which may be an unrealistic expectation. == Legacy == === Inspired studies === ==== Parrott and Napier ==== In one study, "Critical Reading and Student Self-Selected Texts: Results of a Collaborative, Explicit Curricular Approach," Jill Parrot and Trenia Napier quoted the Citation Project's findings as evidence that current collegiate writing curriculums are an ineffective means of teaching students how to properly write academic research papers. The researchers accredited current writing pedagogy's lack of emphasis on teaching critical reading skills. Parrott and Napier tested their thesis by seeing if students would produce more academic writing if they partook in a writing course that taught critical reading. Their results mostly went against this hypothesis, finding students who received additional critical reading training only significantly improved in how they integrated their sources. ==== Kocatepe ==== In May Mehtap Kocatep's study, "Reconceptualising the notion of finding information: How undergraduate students construct information as they read-to-write in an academic writing class," Kocatep expresses that she believes current conversations around writing pedagogy, including the Citation Project, operate with the underlying misconception that information is an easily discoverable static entity and its retrieval is an objective, unbiased decision. Kocatepe instead offers the analysis of what students view as valuable information and if it is worth using is influenced by the socially constructed meanings available to writers at the moment. To further examine students' source engagement, Kocatepe did a study on how female university students from the United Arab Emirates find, retrieve, use, and value sources. Kocatepe's results mainly noted students' almost exclusive reliance on using Google to find sources, as well as how students' navigated mainly English-speaking academic conversations as non-native English speakers. ==== Dahlen, Nordstrom-Sanchez, and Graff ==== Dahlen, Nordstrom-Sanchez, and Graff built their study off The Citation Project research in order to explore the attitudes and practices of students in an undergraduate writing course. As the researchers acknowledge, data collected by the Citation Project was the subject of the bulk of their analysis. This study sought to examine undergraduate writing practices tied to source-usage and elucidate any relevant trends. Dahlen, Nordstrom-Sanchez and Graff found that undergraduate writing students were not engaging with outside sources properly. Key issues discussed include lack of engagement with broad source ideas (in favor of picking out quotes), lack of paraphrasing, and inability to link information between multiple sources. ==== Davis ==== Phillip M. Davis based much of the analysis in his study on data gathered by the Citation Project. This study aimed to examine the particular effects web-based research and study had on undergraduate's papers and the replicability of their bibliographies. Davis sought to see how the shift from physical in-person library based research to online, often at-home research changed the function and usability of the bibliography as a form of documenting source usage in a given work. The primary method of analysis involved examining students' bibliographies to see where they were finding information online and how these sources were accessed. A main issue Davis found was "persistency" of URLs used for online citations. He found that only 18% of URL-based citations continued to function (the others either no longer pointing to the correct document or ceasing to exist altogether) within 3 years of their usage by students, and more than half of claimed online citations could not be found in any form. He suggests that this result brings up questions about how web-based citations should be dealt with in a university context.

    Read more →
  • Subject (documents)

    Subject (documents)

    In library and information science documents (such as books, articles and pictures) are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable. There are many ways to do this and in general there is not always consensus about which subject should be assigned to a given document. To optimize subject indexing and searching, we need to have a deeper understanding of what a subject is. The question: "what is to be understood by the statement 'document A belongs to subject category X'?" has been debated in the field for more than 100 years (see below) == Theoretical view == === Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903) === For Cutter the stability of subjects depends on a social process in which their meaning is stabilized in a name or a designation. A subject "referred [...] to those intellections [...] that had received a name that itself represented a distinct consensus in usage" (Miksa, 1983a, p. 60) and: the "systematic structure of established subjects" is "resident in the public realm" (Miksa, 1983a, p. 69); "[s]ubjects are by their very nature locations in a classificatory structure of publicly accumulated knowledge (Miksa, 1983a, p. 61). Bernd Frohmann adds: "The stability of the public realm in turn relies upon natural and objective mental structures which, with proper education, govern a natural progression from particular to general concepts. Since for Cutter, mind, society, and SKO [Systems of Knowledge Organization] stand one behind the other, each supporting each, all manifesting the same structure, his discursive construction of subjects invites connections with discourses of mind, education, and society. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), by contrast, severs those connections. Melvil Dewey emphasized more than once that his system maps no structure beyond its own; there is neither a "transcendental deduction" of its categories nor any reference to Cutter's objective structure of social consensus. It is content-free: Dewey disdained any philosophical excogitation of the meaning of his class symbols, leaving the job of finding verbal equivalents to others. His innovation and the essence of the system lay in the notation. The DDC is a poorly semiotic system of expanding nests of ten digits, lacking any referent beyond itself. In it, a subject is wholly constituted in terms of its position in the system. The essential characteristic of a subject is a class symbol which refers only to other symbols. Its verbal equivalent is accidental, a merely pragmatic characteristic... .... The conflict of interpretations over "subjects" became explicit in the battles between "bibliography" (an approach to subjects having much in common with Cutter's) and Dewey's "close classification". William Fletcher spoke for the scholarly bibliographer.... Fletcher's "subjects", like Cutter's, referred to the categories of a fantasized, stable social order, whereas Dewey's subjects were elements of a semiological system of standardized, techno-bureaucratic administrative software for the library in its corporate, rather than high culture, incarnation". (Frohmann, 1994, 112–113). Cutter's early view on what a subject is, is probably wiser than most understandings that dominated the 20th century – and also the understanding reflected in the ISO-standard quoted below. The early statements quoted by Frohmann indicate that subjects are somehow shaped in social processes. When that is said, it should be added that they are not particularly detailed or clear. We only get a vague idea of the social nature of subjects. === S. R. Ranganathan (1892–1972) === A classification system with an explicit theoretical foundation is Ranganathan's Colon Classification. Ranganathan provided an explicit definition of the concept of "subject": Subject – an organized body of ideas, whose extension and intension are likely to fall coherently within the field of interests and comfortably within the intellectual competence and the field of inevitable specialization of a normal person. A related definition is given by one of Ranganathan's students: A subject is an organized and systematized body of ideas. It may consist of one idea or a combination of several... Ranganathan's definition of "subject" is strongly influenced by his Colon Classification system. The colon system is based on the combination of single elements from facets to subject designation. This is the reason why the combined nature of subjects are emphasized so strongly. It leads, however, to absurdities such as the claim that gold cannot be a subject (but is alternatively termed "an isolate"). This aspect of the theory has been criticized by Metcalfe (1973, p. 318). Metcalfe's skepticism regarding Ranganathan's theory is formulated in hard words (op. cit., p. 317): "This pseudo-science imposed itself on British disciples from about 1950 on...". It seems unacceptable that Ranganathan defines the word subject in a way that favors his own system. A scientific concept like "subject" should make it possible to compare different ways of establishing access to information. Whether or not subjects are combined or not should be examined once their definition has been given, it should not determined a priori, in the definition. Besides the emphasis on the combined, organizing and systematizing nature of subjects contains Ranganathan's definition of subject the pragmatic demand, that a subject should be determined in a way that suits a normal person's competency or specialization. Again we see a strange kind of wishful thinking mixing a general understanding of a concept with demands put by his own specific system. One thing is what the word subject means, quite another issue is how to provide subject descriptions that fulfill demands such as the specificity of a given information retrieval language which fulfill demands put on the system, such as precision and recall. If researchers too often define terms in ways that favor specific kinds of systems, that are such definitions not useful to provide more general theories about subjects, subject analysis and IR. Among other things are comparative studies of different kinds of systems made difficult. Based on these arguments, as well as additional arguments which have been used in the literature, we may conclude that Ranganathan's definition of the concept "subject" is not suited for scientific use. Like the definition of "subject" given by the ISO-standard for topic maps, may Ranganathan's definition be useful within his own closed system. The purpose of a scientific and scholarly field is, however, to examine the relative fruitfulness of systems such as topic maps and Colon Classification. For such purpose is another understanding of "subject" necessary. === Patrick Wilson (1927–2003) === In his book Wilson (1968) examined – in particular by thought experiments – the suitability of different methods of examining the subject of a document. The methods were: identifying the author's purpose for writing the document, weighing the relative dominance and subordination of different elements in the picture, which the reading imposes on the reader, grouping or count the document's use of concepts and references, construing a set of rules for selecting elements deemed necessary (as opposed to unnecessary) for the work as a whole. Patrick Wilson shows convincingly that each of these methods are insufficient to determine the subject of a document and is led to conclude ( p. 89): "The notion of the subject of a writing is indeterminate..." or, on p. 92 (about what users may expect to find using a particular position in a library classification system): "For nothing definite can be expected of the things found at any given position". In connection to the last quote has Wilson an interesting footnote in which he writes that authors of documents often use terms in ambiguous ways ("hostility" is used as an example). Even if the librarian could personally develop a very precise understanding of a concept, he would be unable to use it in his classification, because none of the documents use the term in the same precise way. Based on this argumentation is Wilson led to conclude: "If people write on what are for them ill-defined phenomena, a correct description of their subjects must reflect the ill-definedness". Wilson's concept of subject was discussed by Hjørland (1992) who found that it is problematic to give up the precise understanding of such a basic term in LIS. Wilson's arguments led him to an agnostic position which Hjørland found unacceptable and unnecessary. Concerning the authors' use of ambiguous terms, the role of the subject analysis is to determine which documents would be fruitful for users to identify whether or not the documents use one or another term or whether a given term i

    Read more →
  • Artificial consciousness

    Artificial consciousness

    Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is consciousness hypothesized to be possible for artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The term "sentience" can be used when specifically designating ethical considerations stemming from a form of phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness, or the ability to feel qualia). Since sentience involves the ability to experience ethically positive or negative (i.e., valenced) mental states, it may justify welfare concerns and legal protection, as with non-human animals. Some scholars believe that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain; these mechanisms are labeled the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Some further believe that constructing a system (e.g., a computer system) that can emulate this NCC interoperation would result in a system that is conscious. Some scholars reject the possibility of non-biological conscious beings. == Philosophical views == As there are many hypothesized types of consciousness, there are many potential implementations of artificial consciousness. In the philosophical literature, perhaps the most common taxonomy of consciousness is into "access" and "phenomenal" variants. Access consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that can be apprehended, while phenomenal consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that seemingly cannot be apprehended, instead being characterized qualitatively in terms of "raw feels", "what it is like" or qualia. === Plausibility debate === Type-identity theorists and other skeptics hold the view that consciousness can be realized only in particular physical systems because consciousness has properties that necessarily depend on physical constitution. In his 2001 article "Artificial Consciousness: Utopia or Real Possibility," Giorgio Buttazzo says that a common objection to artificial consciousness is that, "Working in a fully automated mode, they [the computers] cannot exhibit creativity, unreprogrammation (which means can 'no longer be reprogrammed', from rethinking), emotions, or free will. A computer, like a washing machine, is a slave operated by its components." For other theorists (e.g., functionalists), who define mental states in terms of causal roles, any system that can instantiate the same pattern of causal roles, regardless of physical constitution, will instantiate the same mental states, including consciousness. ==== Thought experiments ==== David Chalmers proposed two thought experiments intending to demonstrate that "functionally isomorphic" systems (those with the same "fine-grained functional organization", i.e., the same information processing) will have qualitatively identical conscious experiences, regardless of whether they are based on biological neurons or digital hardware. The "fading qualia" is a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment. It involves replacing, one by one, the neurons of a brain with a functionally identical component, for example based on a silicon chip. Chalmers makes the hypothesis, knowing it in advance to be absurd, that "the qualia fade or disappear" when neurons are replaced one-by-one with identical silicon equivalents. Since the original neurons and their silicon counterparts are functionally identical, the brain's information processing should remain unchanged, and the subject's behaviour and introspective reports would stay exactly the same. Chalmers argues that this leads to an absurd conclusion: the subject would continue to report normal conscious experiences even as their actual qualia fade away. He concludes that the subject's qualia actually don't fade, and that the resulting robotic brain, once every neuron is replaced, would remain just as sentient as the original biological brain. Similarly, the "dancing qualia" thought experiment is another reductio ad absurdum argument. It supposes that two functionally isomorphic systems could have different perceptions (for instance, seeing the same object in different colors, like red and blue). It involves a switch that alternates between a chunk of brain that causes the perception of red, and a functionally isomorphic silicon chip, that causes the perception of blue. Since both perform the same function within the brain, the subject would not notice any change during the switch. Chalmers argues that this would be highly implausible if the qualia were truly switching between red and blue, hence the contradiction. Therefore, he concludes that the equivalent digital system would not only experience qualia, but it would perceive the same qualia as the biological system (e.g., seeing the same color). Greg Egan's short story Learning To Be Me (mentioned in §In fiction), illustrates how undetectable duplication of the brain and its functionality could be from a first-person perspective. Critics object that Chalmers' proposal begs the question in assuming that all mental properties and external connections are already sufficiently captured by abstract causal organization. Van Heuveln et al. argue that the dancing qualia argument contains an equivocation fallacy, conflating a "change in experience" between two systems with an "experience of change" within a single system. Mogensen argues that the fading qualia argument can be resisted by appealing to vagueness at the boundaries of consciousness and the holistic structure of conscious neural activity, which suggests consciousness may require specific biological substrates rather than being substrate-independent. Anil Seth argues that the complexity of brain neurons intrinsically matters in addition to their function and that it is not possible to replace any part of the brain with a perfect silicon equivalent. He points out that some of biological neurons exhibit activity aimed at cleaning up metabolic waste products, and writes that a perfect silicon replacement would require a silicon-based metabolism, but silicon is not suitable for creating such artificial metabolism. ==== In large language models ==== In 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a viral claim that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient. Lemoine supplied as evidence the chatbot's humanlike answers to many of his questions; however, the chatbot's behavior was judged by the scientific community as likely a consequence of mimicry, rather than machine sentience. Lemoine's claim was widely derided for being ridiculous. Moreover, attributing consciousness based solely on the basis of LLM outputs or the immersive experience created by an algorithm is considered a fallacy. However, while philosopher Nick Bostrom states that LaMDA is unlikely to be conscious, he additionally poses the question of "what grounds would a person have for being sure about it?" One would have to have access to unpublished information about LaMDA's architecture, and also would have to understand how consciousness works, and then figure out how to map the philosophy onto the machine: "(In the absence of these steps), it seems like one should be maybe a little bit uncertain. [...] there could well be other systems now, or in the relatively near future, that would start to satisfy the criteria." David Chalmers argued in 2023 that LLMs today display impressive conversational and general intelligence abilities, but are likely not conscious yet, as they lack some features that may be necessary, such as recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. Nonetheless, he considers that non-biological systems can be conscious, and suggested that future, extended models (LLM+s) incorporating these elements might eventually meet the criteria for consciousness, raising both profound scientific questions and significant ethical challenges. However, the view that consciousness can exist without biological phenomena is controversial and some reject it. Kristina Šekrst cautions that anthropomorphic terms such as "hallucination" can obscure important ontological differences between artificial and human cognition. While LLMs may produce human-like outputs, she argues that it does not justify ascribing mental states or consciousness to them. Instead, she advocates for an epistemological framework (such as reliabilism) that recognizes the distinct nature of AI knowledge production. She suggests that apparent understanding in LLMs may be a sophisticated form of AI hallucination. She also questions what would happen if an LLM were trained without any mention of consciousness. === Testing === Sentience is an inherently first-person phenomenon. Because of that, and due to the lack of an empirical definition of sentience, directly measuring it may be impossible. Although systems may display numerous behaviors correlated with sentience, determining whether a system is sentient is known as the hard pr

    Read more →
  • Subject indexing

    Subject indexing

    Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, the objective is to identify and describe the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document, such as a book; objects in a collection, such as a library; and documents (such as books and articles) within a field of knowledge. Subject indexing is used in information retrieval especially to create bibliographic indexes to retrieve documents on a particular subject. Examples of academic indexing services are Zentralblatt MATH, Chemical Abstracts, and PubMed. The index terms were mostly assigned by experts but author keywords are also common. The process of indexing begins with any analysis of the subject of the document. The indexer must then identify terms that appropriately identify the subject, either by extracting words directly from the document or assigning words from a controlled vocabulary. The terms in the index are then presented in a systematic order. Indexers must decide how many terms to include and how specific the terms should be. Together this gives a depth of indexing. == Subject analysis == The first step in indexing is to decide on the subject matter of the document. In manual indexing, the indexer would consider the subject matter in terms of answer to a set of questions such as "Does the document deal with a specific product, condition or phenomenon?". As the analysis is influenced by the knowledge and experience of the indexer, it follows that two indexers may analyze the content differently and so come up with different index terms. This will impact on the success of retrieval. === Automatic vs. manual subject analysis === Automatic indexing follows set processes of analyzing frequencies of word patterns and comparing results to other documents in order to assign to subject categories. This requires no understanding of the material being indexed. This leads to more uniform indexing but at the expense of the true meaning being interpreted. A computer program will not understand the meaning of statements and may therefore fail to assign some relevant terms or assign incorrectly. Human indexers focus their attention on certain parts of the document such as the title, abstract, summary and conclusions, as analyzing the full text in depth is costly and time-consuming. An automated system takes away the time limit and allows the entire document to be analyzed, but also has the option to be directed to particular parts of the document. == Term selection == The second stage of indexing involves the translation of the subject analysis into a set of index terms. This can involve extracting from the document or assigning from a controlled vocabulary. With the ability to conduct a full text search widely available, many people have come to rely on their own expertise in conducting information searches and full text search has become very popular. Subject indexing and its experts, professional indexers, catalogers, and librarians, remains crucial to information organization and retrieval. These experts understand controlled vocabularies and are able to find information that cannot be located by full text search. The cost of expert analysis to create subject indexing is not easily compared to the cost of hardware, software and labor to manufacture a comparable set of full-text, fully searchable materials. With new web applications that allow every user to annotate documents, social tagging has gained popularity especially in the Web. One application of indexing, the book index, remains relatively unchanged despite the information revolution. === Extraction/Derived indexing === Extraction indexing involves taking words directly from the document. It uses natural language and lends itself well to automated techniques where word frequencies are calculated and those with a frequency over a pre-determined threshold are used as index terms. A stop-list containing common words (such as "the", "and") would be referred to and such stop words would be excluded as index terms. Automated extraction indexing may lead to loss of meaning of terms by indexing single words as opposed to phrases. Although it is possible to extract commonly occurring phrases, it becomes more difficult if key concepts are inconsistently worded in phrases. Automated extraction indexing also has the problem that, even with use of a stop-list to remove common words, some frequent words may not be useful for allowing discrimination between documents. For example, the term glucose is likely to occur frequently in any document related to diabetes. Therefore, use of this term would likely return most or all the documents in the database. Post-coordinated indexing where terms are combined at the time of searching would reduce this effect but the onus would be on the searcher to link appropriate terms as opposed to the information professional. In addition terms that occur infrequently may be highly significant for example a new drug may be mentioned infrequently but the novelty of the subject makes any reference significant. One method for allowing rarer terms to be included and common words to be excluded by automated techniques would be a relative frequency approach where frequency of a word in a document is compared to frequency in the database as a whole. Therefore, a term that occurs more often in a document than might be expected based on the rest of the database could then be used as an index term, and terms that occur equally frequently throughout will be excluded. Another problem with automated extraction is that it does not recognize when a concept is discussed but is not identified in the text by an indexable keyword. Since this process is based on simple string matching and involves no intellectual analysis, the resulting product is more appropriately known as a concordance than an index. === Assignment indexing === An alternative is assignment indexing where index terms are taken from a controlled vocabulary. This has the advantage of controlling for synonyms as the preferred term is indexed and synonyms or related terms direct the user to the preferred term. This means the user can find articles regardless of the specific term used by the author and saves the user from having to know and check all possible synonyms. It also removes any confusion caused by homographs by inclusion of a qualifying term. A third advantage is that it allows the linking of related terms whether they are linked by hierarchy or association, e.g. an index entry for an oral medication may list other oral medications as related terms on the same level of the hierarchy but would also link to broader terms such as treatment. Assignment indexing is used in manual indexing to improve inter-indexer consistency as different indexers will have a controlled set of terms to choose from. Controlled vocabularies do not completely remove inconsistencies as two indexers may still interpret the subject differently. == Index presentation == The final phase of indexing is to present the entries in a systematic order. This may involve linking entries. In a pre-coordinated index the indexer determines the order in which terms are linked in an entry by considering how a user may formulate their search. In a post-coordinated index, the entries are presented singly and the user can link the entries through searches, most commonly carried out by computer software. Post-coordination results in a loss of precision in comparison to pre-coordination. == Depth of indexing == Indexers must make decisions about what entries should be included and how many entries an index should incorporate. The depth of indexing describes the thoroughness of the indexing process with reference to exhaustivity and specificity. === Exhaustivity === An exhaustive index is one which lists all possible index terms. Greater exhaustivity gives a higher recall, or more likelihood of all the relevant articles being retrieved, however, this occurs at the expense of precision. This means that the user may retrieve a larger number of irrelevant documents or documents which only deal with the subject in little depth. In a manual system a greater level of exhaustivity brings with it a greater cost as more man-hours are required. The additional time taken in an automated system would be much less significant. At the other end of the scale, in a selective index only the most important aspects are covered. Recall is reduced in a selective index as if an indexer does not include enough terms, a highly relevant article may be overlooked. Therefore, indexers should strive for a balance and consider what the document may be used. They may also have to consider the implications of time and expense. === Specificity === The specificity describes how closel

    Read more →
  • FAIR data

    FAIR data

    FAIR data is data which meets the 2016 FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The FAIR principles emphasize machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) because humans increasingly rely on computational support to deal with data as a result of the increase in the volume, complexity, and rate of production of data. The abbreviation FAIR/O data is sometimes used to indicate that the dataset or database in question complies with the FAIR principles and also carries an explicit data‑capable open license. == FAIR principles published by GO FAIR == Findable The first step in (re)using data is to find them. Metadata and data should be easy to find for both humans and computers. Machine-readable metadata are essential for automatic discovery of datasets and services, so this is an essential component of the FAIRification process. F1. (Meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier F2. Data are described with rich metadata (defined by R1 below) F3. Metadata clearly and explicitly include the identifier of the data they describe F4. (Meta)data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource Accessible Once the user finds the required data, they need to know how they can be accessed, possibly including authentication and authorisation. A1. (Meta)data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardised communications protocol A1.1 The protocol is open, free, and universally implementable A1.2 The protocol allows for an authentication and authorisation procedure, where necessary A2. Metadata are accessible, even when the data are no longer available Interoperable The data usually need to be integrated with other data. In addition, the data need to interoperate with applications or workflows for analysis, storage, and processing. I1. (Meta)data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation I2. (Meta)data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles I3. (Meta)data include qualified references to other (meta)data Reusable The ultimate goal of FAIR is to optimise the reuse of data. To achieve this, metadata and data should be well-described so that they can be replicated and/or combined in different settings. R1. (Meta)data are richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes R1.1. (Meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license R1.2. (Meta)data are associated with detailed provenance R1.3. (Meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards The principles refer to three types of entities: data (or any digital object), metadata (information about that digital object), and infrastructure. For instance, principle F4 defines that both metadata and data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource (the infrastructure component). === Acceptance and implementation === Before FAIR, a 2007 OECD report was the most influential paper discussing similar ideas related to data accessibility. In January 2014, the Lorentz Centre at Leiden University hosted a workshop entitled "Jointly designing a data FAIRPORT" where the participants first formulated the FAIR principles. After further discussions, they were published in the March 2016 issue of Scientific Data. At the 2016 G20 Hangzhou summit, the G20 leaders issued a statement endorsing the application of FAIR principles to research. Also in 2016, a group of Australian organisations developed a Statement on FAIR Access to Australia's Research Outputs, which aimed to extend the principles to research outputs more generally. In 2017, Germany, Netherlands and France agreed to establish an international office to support the FAIR initiative, the GO FAIR International Support and Coordination Office. Other international organisations active in the research data ecosystem, such as CODATA or Research Data Alliance (RDA) also support FAIR implementations by their communities. FAIR principles implementation assessment is being explored by FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group of RDA, CODATA's strategic Decadal Programme "Data for Planet: Making data work for cross-domain challenges" mentions FAIR data principles as a fundamental enabler of data driven science. The Association of European Research Libraries recommends the use of FAIR principles. A 2017 paper by advocates of FAIR data reported that awareness of the FAIR concept was increasing among various researchers and institutes, but also, understanding of the concept was becoming confused as different people apply their own differing perspectives to it. Guides on implementing FAIR data practices state that the cost of a data management plan in compliance with FAIR data practices should be 5% of the total research budget. In 2019 the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) released the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance as a complementary guide. The CARE principles extend principles outlined in FAIR data to include Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics to ensure data guidelines address historical contexts and power differentials. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance were drafted at the International Data Week and Research Data Alliance Plenary co-hosted event, "Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles for the Governance of Indigenous Data Workshop", held 8 November 2018, in Gaborone, Botswana. The lack of information on how to implement the guidelines have led to inconsistent interpretations of them. In January 2020, representatives of nine groups of universities around the world produced the Sorbonne declaration on research data rights, which included a commitment to FAIR data, and called on governments to provide support to enable it. In 2021, researchers identified the FAIR principles as a conceptual component of data catalog software tools, with the other components being metadata management, business context and data responsibility roles. In April 2022, Matthias Scheffler and colleagues argued in Nature that FAIR principles are "a must" so that data mining and artificial intelligence can extract useful scientific information from the data. There have been moves in the geosciences to establish FAIR data by use of decimal georeferencing However, making data (and research outcomes) FAIR is a challenging task, and it is challenging to assess the FAIRness. In 2020, the FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group published a set of guidelines for assessing "FAIRness".

    Read more →
  • In-place algorithm

    In-place algorithm

    In computer science, an in-place algorithm is an algorithm that operates directly on the input data structure without requiring extra space proportional to the input size. In other words, it modifies the input in place, without creating a separate copy of the data structure. An algorithm which is not in-place is sometimes called not-in-place or out-of-place. In-place can have slightly different meanings. In its strictest form, the algorithm can only have a constant amount of extra space, counting everything including function calls and pointers. However, this form is very limited as simply having an index to a length n array requires O(log n) bits. More broadly, in-place means that the algorithm does not use extra space for manipulating the input but may require a small though non-constant extra space for its operation. Usually, this space is O(log n), though sometimes anything in o(n) is allowed. Note that space complexity also has varied choices in whether or not to count the index lengths as part of the space used. Often, the space complexity is given in terms of the number of indices or pointers needed, ignoring their length. In this article, we refer to total space complexity (DSPACE), counting pointer lengths. Therefore, the space requirements here have an extra log n factor compared to an analysis that ignores the lengths of indices and pointers. An algorithm may or may not count the output as part of its space usage. Since in-place algorithms usually overwrite their input with output, no additional space is needed. When writing the output to write-only memory or a stream, it may be more appropriate to only consider the working space of the algorithm. In theoretical applications such as log-space reductions, it is more typical to always ignore output space (in these cases it is more essential that the output is write-only). == Examples == Given an array a of n items, suppose we want an array that holds the same elements in reversed order and to dispose of the original. One seemingly simple way to do this is to create a new array of equal size, fill it with copies from a in the appropriate order and then delete a. function reverse(a[0..n - 1]) allocate b[0..n - 1] for i from 0 to n - 1 b[n − 1 − i] := a[i] return b Unfortunately, this requires O(n) extra space for having the arrays a and b available simultaneously. Also, allocation and deallocation are often slow operations. Since we no longer need a, we can instead overwrite it with its own reversal using this in-place algorithm which will only need constant number (2) of integers for the auxiliary variables i and tmp, no matter how large the array is. function reverse_in_place(a[0..n-1]) for i from 0 to floor((n-2)/2) tmp := a[i] a[i] := a[n − 1 − i] a[n − 1 − i] := tmp As another example, many sorting algorithms rearrange arrays into sorted order in-place, including: bubble sort, comb sort, selection sort, insertion sort, heapsort, and Shell sort. These algorithms require only a few pointers, so their space complexity is O(log n). Quicksort operates in-place on the data to be sorted. However, quicksort requires O(log n) stack space pointers to keep track of the subarrays in its divide and conquer strategy. Consequently, quicksort needs O(log2 n) additional space. Although this non-constant space technically takes quicksort out of the in-place category, quicksort and other algorithms needing only O(log n) additional pointers are usually considered in-place algorithms. Most selection algorithms are also in-place, although some considerably rearrange the input array in the process of finding the final, constant-sized result. Some text manipulation algorithms such as trim and reverse may be done in-place. == In computational complexity == In computational complexity theory, the strict definition of in-place algorithms includes all algorithms with O(1) space complexity, the class DSPACE(1). This class is very limited; it equals the regular languages. In fact, it does not even include any of the examples listed above. Algorithms are usually considered in L, the class of problems requiring O(log n) additional space, to be in-place. This class is more in line with the practical definition, as it allows numbers of size n as pointers or indices. This expanded definition still excludes quicksort, however, because of its recursive calls. Identifying the in-place algorithms with L has some interesting implications; for example, it means that there is a (rather complex) in-place algorithm to determine whether a path exists between two nodes in an undirected graph, a problem that requires O(n) extra space using typical algorithms such as depth-first search (a visited bit for each node). This in turn yields in-place algorithms for problems such as determining if a graph is bipartite or testing whether two graphs have the same number of connected components. == Role of randomness == In many cases, the space requirements of an algorithm can be drastically cut by using a randomized algorithm. For example, if one wishes to know if two vertices in a graph of n vertices are in the same connected component of the graph, there is no known simple, deterministic, in-place algorithm to determine this. However, if we simply start at one vertex and perform a random walk of about 20n3 steps, the chance that we will stumble across the other vertex provided that it is in the same component is very high. Similarly, there are simple randomized in-place algorithms for primality testing such as the Miller–Rabin primality test, and there are also simple in-place randomized factoring algorithms such as Pollard's rho algorithm. == In functional programming == Functional programming languages often discourage or do not support explicit in-place algorithms that overwrite data, since this is a type of side effect; instead, they only allow new data to be constructed. However, good functional language compilers will often recognize when an object very similar to an existing one is created and then the old one is thrown away, and will optimize this into a simple mutation "under the hood". Note that it is possible in principle to carefully construct in-place algorithms that do not modify data (unless the data is no longer being used), but this is rarely done in practice.

    Read more →
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS. == History == Amazon announced a limited public beta test of EC2 on August 25, 2006, offering access on a first-come, first-served basis. Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007. On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large. There were twelve types of instances available. Amazon added three new features on March 27, 2008: static IP addresses, availability zones, and user-selectable kernels. On August 20, 2008, Amazon added Elastic Block Store (EBS). This provides persistent storage, a feature that had been lacking since the service was introduced. Amazon EC2 went into full production when it dropped the beta label on October 23, 2008. On the same day, Amazon announced the following features: a service level agreement for EC2, Microsoft Windows in beta form on EC2, Microsoft SQL Server in beta form on EC2, plans for an AWS management console, and plans for load balancing, autoscaling, and cloud monitoring services. These features were subsequently added on May 18, 2009. Amazon EC2 was developed mostly by a team in Cape Town, South Africa led by Chris Pinkham. Pinkham provided the initial architecture guidance for EC2 and then built the team and led the development of the project along with Willem van Biljon. == Instance types == Initially, EC2 used Xen virtualization exclusively. However, on November 6, 2017, Amazon announced the new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the KVM hypervisor, called Nitro. Each virtual machine, called an "instance", functions as a virtual private server. Amazon sizes instances based on "Elastic Compute Units". The performance of otherwise identical virtual machines may vary. On November 28, 2017, AWS announced a bare-metal instance, a departure from exclusively offering virtualized instance types. As of January 2019, the following instance types were offered: General Purpose: A1, T3, T2, M5, M5a, M4, T3a Compute Optimized: C5, C5n, C4 Memory Optimized: R5, R5a, R4, X1e, X1, High Memory, z1d Accelerated Computing: P3, P2, G3, F1 Storage Optimized: H1, I3, D2 As of April 2018, the following payment methods by instance were offered: On-demand: pay by the hour without commitment. Reserved: rent instances with one-time payment receiving discounts on the hourly charge. Spot: bid-based service: runs the jobs only if the spot price is below the bid specified by bidder. The spot price is claimed to be supply-demand based, however a 2011 study concluded that the price was generally not set to clear the market, but was dominated by an undisclosed reserve price. In 2025, AWS expanded EC2 with the compute-optimized C8gn family, powered by Graviton4 and offering up to 600 Gbit/s network bandwidth (about 30% higher compute performance than C7gn), and introduced G6f fractional-GPU instances that let customers provision one-eighth, one-quarter, or one-half of an NVIDIA L4 GPU for right-sized graphics/ML workloads. === Cost === As of April 2018, Amazon charged about $0.0058 per hour ($4.176 per month) for the smallest "Nano Instance" (t2.nano) virtual machine running Linux or Windows. Storage-optimized instances cost as much as $4.992 per hour (i3.16xlarge). "Reserved" instances can go as low as $2.50 per month for a three-year prepaid plan. The data transfer charge ranges from free to $0.12 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume (inbound data transfer is free on all AWS services). EC2 costs can be analyzed using the Amazon Cost and Usage Report. There are many different cost categories for EC2 including: hourly Instance Charges, Data Transfer, EBS Volumes, EBS Volume Snapshots, and Nat Gateway. === Free tier === As of December 2010 Amazon offered a bundle of free resource credits to new account holders. The credits are designed to run a "micro" sized server, storage (EBS), and bandwidth for one year. Unused credits cannot be carried over from one month to the next. === Reserved instances === Reserved instances enable EC2 or RDS service users to reserve an instance for one or three years. The corresponding hourly rate charged by Amazon to operate the instance is 35 to 75% lower than the rate charged for on-demand instances. Reserved instances can be purchased with three different payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront and No Upfront. The different purchase options allow for different structuring of payment models, with a larger discount given to customers that pay their reservation upfront. Reserved Instances are purchased based on a resource commitment. These reservations are made based on an instance type and a count of that instance type. For example, you could reserve 100 i3.large instances for a 3-year term. In September 2016, AWS announced several enhancements to Reserved instances, introducing a new feature called scope and a new reservation type called a Convertible. In October 2017, AWS announced the allowance to subdivide the instances purchased for more flexibility. === Spot instances === Cloud providers maintain large amounts of excess capacity they have to sell or risk incurring losses. Amazon EC2 Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. As a trade-off, AWS offers no SLA on these instances and customers take the risk that it can be interrupted with only two minutes of notification when Amazon needs the capacity back. Researchers from the Israeli Institute of Technology found that "they (Spot instances) are typically generated at random from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price". Some companies, like Spotinst, are using machine learning to predict spot interruptions up to 15 minutes in advance. === Savings Plans === In November 2019, Amazon announced Savings Plans. Savings Plans are an alternative to Reserved Instances that come in two different plan types: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instances Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans allow an organization to commit to EC2 and Fargate usage with the freedom to change region, family, size, availability zone, OS and tenancy inside the lifespan of the commitment. EC2 Instance Savings plans provide a larger discount than Compute Savings Plans but are less flexible meaning a user must commit to individual instance families within a region to take advantage, but with the freedom to change instances within the family in that region. AWS uses the Cost Explorer to automatically calculate recommendations for the commitments you should make how that commitment will look like as a monthly charge on your AWS bill. AWS Savings Plans are purchased based on hourly spend commitment. This hourly commitment is made using the discounted pricing of the savings plan you are purchasing. For example, you could commit to spending $5 per hour, on a Compute Savings Plan, for a 3-year term. == Features == === Operating systems === When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered Linux and later Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition. In October 2008, EC2 added the Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems to the list of available operating systems. In March 2011, NetBSD AMIs became available. In November 2012, Windows Server 2012 support was added. Since 2006, Colin Percival, a FreeBSD developer and Security Officer, solicited Amazon to add FreeBSD. In November 2012, Amazon officially supported running FreeBSD in EC2. The FreeBSD/EC2 platform is maintained by Percival who also developed the secure deduplicating Amazon S3-cloud based backup service Tarsnap. Amazon has their own Linux distribution based on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a low cost offering known as the Amazon Linux AMI. Version 2013.03 included: Linux kernel, Java OpenJDK Runtime Environment and GNU Compiler Collection. On November 30, 2020, Amazon announced that it would be adding macOS to the EC2 service. Initial support was announced for macOS Mojave and macOS Catalina running on Mac Mini. === Managed Container and Kubernetes Services === Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a Docker registry service for Amazon EC2

    Read more →
  • Principles for a Data Economy

    Principles for a Data Economy

    The Principles for a Data Economy – Data Rights and Transactions is a transatlantic legal project carried out jointly by the American Law Institute (ALI) and the European Law Institute (ELI). The Principles for a Data Economy deals with a range of different legal questions that arise in the data economy. Since data is different from other tradeable items, the Principles draw up legal rules for data transactions and data rights that take into account the interests of different stakeholders involved in the data economy. The Principles are designed to facilitate contractual relations as well as the drafting of model agreements and can guide courts and legislators worldwide. The project proposes a set of principles that can be implemented in any legal system and is designed to work in conjunction with any kind of data privacy/data protection law, intellectual property law or trade secret law. The Principles do not address or seek to change any of the substantive rules of these bodies of law. The Project Team consists of Neil B Cohen and Christiane Wendehorst (as Project Reporters) and Lord John Thomas as well as Steven O. Weise (as Project Chairs). == Characteristics of data == The law governing trades in commerce has historically focused on trade in items that are tangible like goods or on intangible assets, such as shares or licenses. However, data does not fit into any of these traditional categories, nor does it qualify as a service. It is often unclear how traditional legal rules and doctrines can apply to data, as data is different from other assets in many ways. For example, data can be multiplied at basically no cost and can be used in parallel for a variety of different purposes by many different people at the same time (data is a “non-rivalrous” resource). Uncertainty regarding the applicable rules to govern the data economy may inhibit innovation and growth and trouble stakeholders like data-driven industries, start-ups, and consumers. == Stakeholders in the data economy == The Principles have taken the basic types of players and relations which can be found in data ecosystems as a starting point to provide guidance in different situations. The central actors in the data economy are data controllers (also called “data holders”). They are in a position to access the data and decide for which purposes and means this data should be processed. A controller may exercise control all by itself or share it with co-controllers, such as under a data pooling arrangement. Data processors provide the processing of data on a controller’s behalf as a service. Another important group of stakeholders includes those that contribute to the generation of data (e.g. data subjects). Other players in the data economy include data assemblers or data intermediaries (e.g. data trusts). == History of the project and timeline == Before the official adoption of the project by ALI and ELI bodies in 2018, the project team carried out a Feasibility Study from October 2016 to February 2018. In the following years, the project team produced a number of drafts (e.g. “Preliminary Drafts” No. 1 to 4, “Tentative Draft No. 1”) and project progress were regularly discussed with advisory bodies and members of both the ALI and the ELI. The project reporters also included feedback and insights from industry stakeholders and experts that was gained after several meetings and workshops, hosted, inter alia by UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT and several national governmental institutions. Tentative Draft No. 2 was presented at the ALI Annual Meeting in May 2021 and approved by ALI membership. The latest draft ("Final Council Draft") was also approved by the ELI Council and ELI Membership. The Principles for a Data Economy were presented at an international conference with representatives from institutions such as the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), the European Commission, UNIDROIT, the OECD, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in October 2021. == Project structure == The current draft (“Tentative Draft No. 2”) of the Principles consists of five Parts that each governs different aspects of the data economy: General Provisions, Data Contracts, Data Rights, Third Party Aspects of Data Activities, and Multi-State Issues. === General Provisions === Part I includes general provisions that apply to all other Parts of the Principles for a Data Economy. This Part sets out the purpose of the Principles: they aim to make existing law in the field of the data economy more coherent and support the development of the law in this field by courts and legislators worldwide. It is also clarified that the Principles have a wide scope of application and can be used in a variety of ways by stakeholders in the data economy. The Principles may, for example, serve private parties as a basis for contract formation, guide the deliberations of arbitral tribunals or inspire national legislation. Part I then defines several key terms, such as ‘digital data’ and ‘data right’. The scope of the Principles is limited to matters where information is recorded as an asset, resource or tradeable commodity and where large amounts of data, rather than single pieces of information, are concerned. This Part also clarifies that remedies with respect to data contracts and data rights are left to the applicable national law. === Data Contracts === Part II lists different types of contracts that often occur in the data economy and establishes two broad categories, namely contracts for the supply and sharing of data and contracts for services with regard to data. Contracts for the supply and sharing of data include, e.g. data transfer contracts or data pooling arrangements, while contracts for services with regard to data cover contracts for the processing of data or data intermediary contracts. The Principles provide default terms for each contract type, on issues such as the manner in which data should supply or which characteristics the data supplied should meet. These default terms 'automatically' become part of the contract unless the parties agree otherwise. === Data Rights === Part III governs legally protected interests of players in the data economy that stem from the characteristics of data as a resource (e.g. its non-rivalrous nature) or from public interest considerations. Such data rights may include the right to data access, the right to require the controller to desist from data activities or to correct incorrect/incomplete data, or even to receive an economic share in profits derived from the use of data. For example, the Principles deal with data rights of stakeholders that had a share in the co-generation of data and identify different factors to be considered in determining whether to afford a party a data right. The underlying idea that parties who have contributed to the generation of data should have some rights in the utilization of the data is also recognized by governmental institutions, such as by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and the term co-generated data, which was coined by the Principles for a Data Economy, has been adopted, inter alia by the European Commission, the German Data Ethics Commission and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). This Part also deals with data rights for the public interest, such as data sharing rights in the field of innovation. === Third Party Aspects === Part IV governs different situations in which data transactions interfere with the rights of third parties. Such rights include intellectual property rights or rights derived from data privacy or data protection law. This Part sets out under which circumstances data activities should be considered wrongful vis à vis another party. For example, a data activity (like data processing or the onward supply of data) could be considered wrongful, if a controller interferes with the rights of data subjects that are protected by data-protection law. A data activity could also be wrongful if the controller is non-compliant with contractual limitations on data activities, enforceable by the protected party (e.g. a controller may only process data for a certain purpose). If someone obtained access to data by unauthorized means (i.e. data “theft”) this could also be considered wrongful. The Part on Third-Party Aspects also takes a detailed look at the effects of the onward supply of data can have on third parties, while balancing the protection of third parties on the one hand, with the interests of data recipients and the desire to encourage data sharing on the other. === Multi-State Issues === As transactions in the data economy are international by nature and hardly occur within one legal system alone, the Part V of the Principles also briefly touches upon the applicability of the rules and doctrines of private international law to such transactions. == Links == Website of the “Principles for a Data Economy – Data Rights and Transaction

    Read more →
  • Algorithms and Combinatorics

    Algorithms and Combinatorics

    Algorithms and Combinatorics (ISSN 0937-5511) is a book series in mathematics, and particularly in combinatorics and the design and analysis of algorithms. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media, and was founded in 1987. == Books == The books published in this series include: The Simplex Method: A Probabilistic Analysis (Karl Heinz Borgwardt, 1987, vol. 1) Geometric Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization (Martin Grötschel, László Lovász, and Alexander Schrijver, 1988, vol. 2; 2nd ed., 1993) Systems Analysis by Graphs and Matroids (Kazuo Murota, 1987, vol. 3) Greedoids (Bernhard Korte, László Lovász, and Rainer Schrader, 1991, vol. 4) Mathematics of Ramsey Theory (Jaroslav Nešetřil and Vojtěch Rödl, eds., 1990, vol. 5) Matroid Theory and its Applications in Electric Network Theory and in Statics (Andras Recszki, 1989, vol. 6) Irregularities of Partitions: Papers from the meeting held in Fertőd, July 7–11, 1986 (Gábor Halász and Vera T. Sós, eds., 1989, vol. 8) Paths, Flows, and VLSI-Layout: Papers from the meeting held at the University of Bonn, Bonn, June 20–July 1, 1988 (Bernhard Korte, László Lovász, Hans Jürgen Prömel, and Alexander Schrijver, eds., 1990, vol. 9) New Trends in Discrete and Computational Geometry (János Pach, ed., 1993, vol. 10) Discrete Images, Objects, and Functions in Z n {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{n}} (Klaus Voss, 1993, vol. 11) Linear Optimization and Extensions (Manfred Padberg, 1999, vol. 12) The Mathematics of Paul Erdős I (Ronald Graham and Jaroslav Nešetřil, eds., 1997, vol. 13) The Mathematics of Paul Erdős II (Ronald Graham and Jaroslav Nešetřil, eds., 1997, vol. 14) Geometry of Cuts and Metrics (Michel Deza and Monique Laurent, 1997, vol. 15) Probabilistic Methods for Algorithmic Discrete Mathematics (M. Habib, C. McDiarmid, J. Ramirez-Alfonsin, and B. Reed, 1998, vol. 16) Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs and Pseudorandomness (Oded Goldreich, 1999, vol. 17) Geometric Discrepancy: An Illustrated Guide (Jiří Matoušek, 1999, vol. 18) Applied Finite Group Actions (Adalbert Kerber, 1999, vol. 19) Matrices and Matroids for Systems Analysis (Kazuo Murota, 2000, vol. 20; corrected ed., 2010) Combinatorial Optimization (Bernhard Korte and Jens Vygen, 2000, vol. 21; 5th ed., 2012) The Strange Logic of Random Graphs (Joel Spencer, 2001, vol. 22) Graph Colouring and the Probabilistic Method (Michael Molloy and Bruce Reed, 2002, Vol. 23) Combinatorial Optimization: Polyhedra and Efficiency (Alexander Schrijver, 2003, vol. 24. In three volumes: A. Paths, flows, matchings; B. Matroids, trees, stable sets; C. Disjoint paths, hypergraphs) Discrete and Computational Geometry: The Goodman-Pollack Festschrift (B. Aronov, S. Basu, J. Pach, and M. Sharir, eds., 2003, vol. 25) Topics in Discrete Mathematics: Dedicated to Jarik Nešetril on the Occasion of his 60th birthday (M. Klazar, J. Kratochvíl, M. Loebl, J. Matoušek, R. Thomas, and P. Valtr, eds., 2006, vol. 26) Boolean Function Complexity: Advances and Frontiers (Stasys Jukna, 2012, Vol. 27) Sparsity: Graphs, Structures, and Algorithms (Jaroslav Nešetřil and Patrice Ossona de Mendez, 2012, vol. 28) Optimal Interconnection Trees in the Plane (Marcus Brazil and Martin Zachariasen, 2015, vol. 29) Combinatorics and Complexity of Partition Functions (Alexander Barvinok, 2016, vol. 30)

    Read more →