ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Central bank digital currencies - the future backbone of the international payment system?

Due to the increasing role of digital payments, demand for commercial bank money and nonbank money is expanding, while that for physical cash is sharply diminishing. The retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) is considered the only safe alternative to compensate for this decrease, as a public good complementary to cash that can be used by the general public. It is seen also as a response to the surge of private digital currencies, which could threaten national monetary sovereignty. Complementarily, in parallel to the retail public digital currency, wholesale CBDC targets large-value interbank transactions, limited to selected financial institutions, focused on efficiency, security and lowering transactions costs for cross-border transactions. Based on the extensive literature review and a qualitative synthesis, the present paper has as a key objective the interpretation of the main approaches to the retail CBDC adoption, justified by specific motivations. The research question is “in which circumstances should a retail CBDC be adopted?”. The historical perspective of failed projects, combined with current experiences, offers a clear overview of the CBDC as a potential dominant currency of the digital economy, but in the presence of a cautious approach.
The Right Not to be Subject to Automated Decisions Based on Profiling

In this chapter, a critical analysis is undertaken of the provisions of Art. 22 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation of 2016, with lines of comparison drawn to the predecessor for these provisions—namely Art. 15 of the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Article 22 places limits on the making of fully automated decisions based on profiling when the decisions incur legal effects or similarly significant consequences for the persons subject to them. The basic argument advanced in the chapter is that Art. 22 on its face provides persons with stronger protections from such decision making than Art. 15 of the Directive does. However, doubts are raised as to whether Art. 22 will have a significant practical impact on automated profiling.
Abuse of the Journalist's Shield: A State-by-State Survey of Blogger Liability for Trade Secret Misappropriation and Texas's Shield Statutes as a Model for Federal Preemption

This Comment addresses the tension between the maintenance of trade secrets and the potential liability issues that arise when a reporter/blogger disseminates those trade secrets. Specifically, this Comment focuses on whether third party bloggers should be subject to criminal sanctions under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996.For the proposal and solution sections, this Comment focuses on three dynamics that currently make trade secret law difficult to enforce. First, unlike all other forms of intellectual property, trade secrets are civilly enforced under state laws and do not benefit from a uniform, federal system of laws like copyrights, trademarks, and patents. With the advent of the Internet and modern commerce, business is no longer carried out only on a local scale. It is carried out in a national and international marketplace and should be afforded the standardized federal court jurisdiction that all other intellectual property rights are given. Second, courts today have placed too onerous of a burden on a corporation to establish whether that corporation has adequately guarded the secret. Only sufficiently guarded secrets are afforded trade secret status and protection. Third, The use of the Economic Espionage Act has been almost nonexistent since its enactment in 1996. Under the Economic Espionage Act, some trade secret infringement claims are actionable as a criminal offense. In certain bad faith infringement claims, use of the Economic Espionage Act may be the only deterrent to preventing misappropriation of an owner’s trade secret.The background section of this Comment begins with a historical look at trade secret protection, analyzes the depths and application of modern trade secret jurisprudence, closely uses the framework of a 2012 trade secret case as a framework for an in-depth analysis of the Economic Espionage Act. Next, the background section closely examines state reporter’s shield laws, and compares them with state trade secret laws. This Comment includes a detailed survey of all trade secret laws and reporter’s shield statutes for all fifty states and the District of Columbia and proposes Texas's journalist's shield statutes as a model for if or when federal court jurisdiction is provided for trade secret claims.
Self-supervised Contrastive Representation Learning for Machinery Fault Diagnosis

Supervised deep learning methods have been widely applied in the field of machinery fault diagnosis in recent years, which learns quite well the mapping relationship between the monitoring data and the corresponding labels. In many practical industrial applications, however, the monitoring data are unlabeled due to the requirement of expert knowledge and a large amount of labor, which limits the use of supervised methods for fault diagnosis. In view of this problem, in this work a self-supervised representation learning method named contrastive predicting coding (CPC) is employed to automatically extract high-quality features from one-dimensional machinery monitoring signals without the requirement of labels. The method is validated on a benchmark dataset for bearing fault diagnosis, and the quality of extracted features of different classes is quantitatively evaluated. The results show that features extracted by the CPC method are more representative than those obtained by autoencoders and statistics.
The Gaia-ESO Survey: calibration strategy

The Gaia-ESO survey (GES) is now in its fifth and last year of observations, and has already produced tens of thousands of high-quality spectra of stars in all Milky Way components. This paper presents the strategy behind the selection of astrophysical calibration targets, ensuring that all GES results on radial velocities, atmospheric parameters, and chemical abundance ratios will be both internally consistent and easily comparable with other literature results, especially from other large spectroscopic surveys and from Gaia. The calibration of GES is particularly delicate because of: (i) the large space of parameters covered by its targets, ranging from dwarfs to giants, from O to M stars, and with a large range of metallicities, as well as including fast rotators, emission line objects, stars affected by veiling and so on; (ii) the variety of observing setups, with different wavelength ranges and resolution; and (iii) the choice of analyzing the data with many different state-of-the art methods, each stronger in a different region of the parameter space, which ensures a better understanding of systematic uncertainties. An overview of the GES calibration and homogenization strategy is also given, along with some examples of the usage and results of calibrators in GES iDR4 - the fourth internal GES data release, that will form the basis of the next GES public data release. The agreement between GES iDR4 recommended values and reference values for the calibrating objects are very satisfactory. The average offsets and spreads are generally compatible with the GES measurement errors, which in iDR4 data already meet the requirements set by the main GES scientific goals.
Global Heliospheric Parameters and Cosmic-Ray Modulation: An Empirical Relation for the Last Decades

We study empirical relations between the modulation of galactic cosmic rays quantified in terms of the modulation potential and the following global heliospheric parameters: the open solar magnetic flux, the tilt angle of the heliospheric current sheet, and the polarity of the heliospheric magnetic field. We show that a combination of these parameters explains the majority of the modulation potential variations during the neutron monitor era 1951 – 2005. Two empirical models are discussed: a quasi-linear model and a model assuming a power-law relation between the modulation potential and the magnetic flux. Both models describe the data fairly well. These empirical models provide a simple tool for evaluating various cosmic-ray related effects on different time scales. The models can be extended backwards in time or used for predictions, if the corresponding global heliospheric variables can be independently estimated.
Polarizable Atomic Multipole-Based Force Field for Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Anionic Lipids

Polarizable Atomic Multipole-Based Force Field for Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Anionic Lipids
Are we all on the same boat? The challenge of adaptation facing Portuguese coastal communities: Risk perception, trust-building and genuine participation

Abstract   The Portuguese coast is experiencing severe erosion and loss of beachfront, processes which are expected to become worse with climate change impacts. These additional alterations are beginning to show at a time when financing for conventional coastal protection is no longer guaranteed at scales of investment which are likely to be required if future coastlines are to be maintained. This paper looks at how residents and key stakeholders of three coastal communities in Portugal perceive such possible changes, how far they judge and trust current coastal management, and how they perceive their current participation and foresee future forms of involvement on adaptive coastal change. The evidence from these surveys and interviews suggests that there is a strong commitment in each location to maintaining current levels of coastal protection, and to preserving the integrity of local societies and economies, even though there is also recognition that adaptation in some form will eventually be required. However, our research reveals that there is not yet sufficient trust between coastal stakeholders, especially towards public institutions and policies, for any degree of progressive coastal adaptation to take place. Building trust in creative learning processes of progressive adaptation could lead to improved science and participation along with a meaningful dialogue over cooperative coastal planning and financing. The research undertaken for this paper lays the groundwork for such a process of trust-building to begin.
Inside-out planet formation – VII. Astrochemical models of protoplanetary discs and implications for planetary compositions

ABSTRACT                Inside-out planet formation (IOPF) proposes that the abundant systems of close-in Super-Earths and Mini-Neptunes form in situ at the pressure maximum associated with the dead zone inner boundary (DZIB). We present a model of physical and chemical evolution of protoplanetary disc midplanes that follows gas advection, radial drift of pebbles, and gas-grain chemistry to predict abundances from ∼300 au down to the DZIB near 0.2 au. We consider typical disc properties relevant for IOPF, i.e. accretion rates $10^{-9}\lt \dot{m}/ (\mathrm{ M}_\odot \:{\rm {yr}}^{-1})\lt 10^{-8}$ and viscosity parameter α = 10−4, and evolve for fiducial duration of 105 yr. For outer, cool disc regions, we find that C and up to $90{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of O nuclei start locked in CO and $\rm O_2$ ice, which keeps abundances of $\rm CO_2$ and $\rm H_2O$ one order of magnitude lower. Radial drift of icy pebbles is influential, with gas-phase abundances of volatiles enhanced up to two orders of magnitude at icelines, while the outer disc becomes depleted of dust. Discs with decreasing accretion rates gradually cool, which draws in icelines closer to the star. At ≲ 1 au, advective models yield water-rich gas with C/O ratios ≲ 0.1, which may be inherited by atmospheres of planets forming here via IOPF. For planetary interiors built by pebble accretion, IOPF predicts volatile-poor compositions. However, advectively enhanced volatile mass fractions of $\sim 10{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ can occur at the water iceline.
Banning Genetic Discrimination in Life Insurance — Time to Follow Florida’s Lead

Banning Genetic Discrimination in Life Insurance Fear of discrimination by life insurance companies has been an obstacle to progress in the use of genetic technologies in medicine and research. A n...
Extraction of Geriatric Syndromes From Electronic Health Record Clinical Notes: Assessment of Statistical Natural Language Processing Methods (Preprint)

BACKGROUND                         Geriatric syndromes in older adults are associated with adverse outcomes. However, despite being reported in clinical notes, these syndromes are often poorly captured by diagnostic codes in the structured fields of electronic health records (EHRs) or administrative records.                                                                       OBJECTIVE                         We aim to automatically determine if a patient has any geriatric syndromes by mining the free text of associated EHR clinical notes. We assessed which statistical natural language processing (NLP) techniques are most effective.                                                                       METHODS                         We applied conditional random fields (CRFs), a widely used machine learning algorithm, to identify each of 10 geriatric syndrome constructs in a clinical note. We assessed three sets of features and attributes for CRF operations: a base set, enhanced token, and contextual features. We trained the CRF on 3901 manually annotated notes from 85 patients, tuned the CRF on a validation set of 50 patients, and evaluated it on 50 held-out test patients. These notes were from a group of US Medicare patients over 65 years of age enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Health Maintenance Organization and cared for by a large group practice in Massachusetts.                                                                       RESULTS                         A final feature set was formed through comprehensive feature ablation experiments. The final CRF model performed well at patient-level determination (macroaverage F1=0.834, microaverage F1=0.851); however, performance varied by construct. For example, at phrase-partial evaluation, the CRF model worked well on constructs such as absence of fecal control (F1=0.857) and vision impairment (F1=0.798) but poorly on malnutrition (F1=0.155), weight loss (F1=0.394), and severe urinary control issues (F1=0.532). Errors were primarily due to previously unobserved words (ie, out-of-vocabulary) and a lack of context.                                                                       CONCLUSIONS                         This study shows that statistical NLP can be used to identify geriatric syndromes from EHR-extracted clinical notes. This creates new opportunities to identify patients with geriatric syndromes and study their health outcomes.
Universal Object Detection with Large Vision Model

Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in developing a broad, universal, and general-purpose computer vision system. Such systems have the potential to address a wide range of vision tasks simultaneously, without being limited to specific problems or data domains. This universality is crucial for practical, real-world computer vision applications. In this study, our focus is on a specific challenge: the large-scale, multi-domain universal object detection problem, which contributes to the broader goal of achieving a universal vision system. This problem presents several intricate challenges, including cross-dataset category label duplication, label conflicts, and the necessity to handle hierarchical taxonomies. To address these challenges, we introduce our approach to label handling, hierarchy-aware loss design, and resource-efficient model training utilizing a pre-trained large vision model. Our method has demonstrated remarkable performance, securing a prestigious second-place ranking in the object detection track of the Robust Vision Challenge 2022 (RVC 2022) on a million-scale cross-dataset object detection benchmark. We believe that our comprehensive study will serve as a valuable reference and offer an alternative approach for addressing similar challenges within the computer vision community. The source code for our work is openly available at https://github.com/linfeng93/Large-UniDet.
Antimicrobial Consumption and Resistance Dynamics Across Healthcare Level: Global Evidence and Stewardship Implications

Background/Objectives: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a critical global public health challenge driven by inappropriate and excessive antimicrobial use (AMU) across human, animal, and environmental sectors. Method: This narrative review synthesizes recent evidence on antimicrobial utilization and resistance patterns. A structured search of PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science was conducted for studies published between 2015 and 2025. Eligible sources included surveillance reports, registry-based analyses, and clinical studies. Data were qualitatively analyzed to identify key trends and regional variations. Result: Marked geographical variation in AMR was observed. Carbapenem resistance in Escherichia coli remains low globally (2–3%) but is higher in Southeast Asia (17–18%) and India (~40%). Klebsiella pneumoniae shows consistently high resistance (&gt;40% globally; ~54% in India), while Pseudomonas aeruginosa exhibits stable resistance levels (35–45%). Resistance prevalence increases from primary to tertiary care settings, reflecting greater antimicrobial exposure. Vulnerable populations—including pediatric, elderly, pregnant, and immunocompromised patients—face higher risks of antimicrobial exposure and adverse outcomes, including nephrotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, and microbiome disruption. WHO AWaRe data indicate a global shift toward increased use of Watch-category antibiotics. Stewardship interventions, such as audit and feedback, prescribing restrictions, rapid diagnostics, and decision support systems, effectively reduce inappropriate AMU. Conclusions: Integrated, data-driven antimicrobial stewardship and robust surveillance systems are essential to mitigate the global burden of AMR.
Blood-Based Genomic Alteration Signature for Predicting Progression-Free Survival in                     <i>De Novo</i>                     Metastatic Hormone-Sensitive Prostate Cancer: A Real-World Study

Abstract                                                             Metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) often progresses to castration-resistant prostate cancer despite current therapies, necessitating the use of reliable biomarkers. This study aimed to develop a novel model for predicting progression-free survival (PFS) using ctDNA sequencing. We analyzed 127 patients with mHSPC and compared ctDNA mutations with those in matched primary tumor tissues. A four-gene signature (TRPC: TP53, RB1, PTEN, and CDK12) was identified, forming the basis of the blood-based TRPC (b.TRPC) model. The b.TRPC model demonstrated high specificity and sensitivity in predicting PFS, outperforming ctDNA markers. Internal and external validation confirmed that b.TRPC is an independent prognostic factor with superior predictive performance for 0.5-, 1-, and 2-year PFS. The model also showed significant clinical relevance, with b.TRPC-positive patients exhibiting shorter survival times under androgen deprivation therapy and doublet therapy, although this disparity diminished with triplet therapy. These findings highlight the potential of ctDNA-based gene mutation analysis to guide personalized treatment strategies for mHSPC, offering a noninvasive alternative to tissue-based analyses and improving prognostic accuracy.                                                           Significance:                     This study identified a novel noninvasive blood-based biomarker model (b.TRPC) using ctDNA to predict PFS in mHSPC. Analyzing TP53, RB1, PTEN, and CDK12 alterations, it outperformed traditional ctDNA% markers. Findings highlight ctDNA-based biomarkers’ potential to guide personalized treatment, bridging real-world and trial data to aid mHSPC management.
Design of a wireless sensor network (WSN) using bluetooth low energy (BLE) for Internet of Things (IoT)

Several of the actual devices, such as mobile phones, use Bluetooth Low Energy, a wireless technology that is able to establish a connection between devices producing a low energy consumption. Therefore, in this project this technology has been applied in low resources and low consumption nodes. The objective is to analyze these nodes, know their characteristics and to be able to develop different applications in different sensor networks, for instance biological measures in human beings or environmental measures. To achieve this objective a first design was made, where the Bluetooth Low Energy was studied and the node used, the device CC1352R. Subsequently, in order to implement the pertinent functions, the code for each node was elaborated. The final scene that has been developed consists on two CC1352R devices that utilize this technology to be able to establish a connection, receive data, transfer it between nodes and store it in the central node. In this project a study of the current state of the Bluetooth Low Energy technology was elaborated, in addition to the description of the development of the functions used in the CC1352R devices. Furthermore, an experimental study was made about the lecture of data and limitations of the nodes. The study and development of this work serve as collateral to accomplish new projects, as in creating different applications related to the Internet of Things an the ability to create different kinds of sensor networks.
THE PROTOPLANETARY DISK AROUND THE M4 STAR RECX 5: WITNESSING THE INFLUENCE OF PLANET FORMATION?

We present Spitzer Space Telescope low-resolution spectroscopy of the protoplanetary disk around the M4 star RECX 5, a low-mass member of the approximate to 8 Myr old eta Chamaeleontis star cluster. Two features of the disk around RECX 5 set it apart from other young, low-mass stars with protoplanetary disks: its mineralogy and its disk geometry. Band strengths of the crystalline silicate forsterite are a factor of two higher than that typically observed in T Tauri star disks, indicative of a high forsterite mass fraction. Continuum fluxes of the disk are inconsistent with either a flaring or flattened structure, suggesting a complex disk geometry. Radiative transfer modeling of the spectrum suggests that the disk has a gap at a radius of r = 0.6 AU, and that the disk density at r &lt; 33 AU is a factor of 100 lower than that of a continuous disk. A second disk gap might be centered at r = 24 AU. The RECX 5 disk has properties that are remarkably similar to the disk surrounding the Herbig Be star HD 100546, which is noted for having extreme mineralogy and geometry among Herbig star disks. Similar to a solution proposed for HD 100546, we speculate that the clearance of the RECX 5 disk at r &lt; 33 AU is a consequence of the formation of a Saturn-mass planet, with the planet being responsible for the striking difference in both the spectral energy distribution and chemical composition of the dust around RECX 5.