ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Role of Biological Control Agents in Integrated Pest Management

The global population is projected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050, and exceed 11 billion in 2100. There is continued need for pest management in agriculture, with pressure continuously increasing on agriculture to achieve higher yield from limited or even lesser land. Negative impact of pesticides has brought into focus the need for safer and effective alternative such as bio agents/bio pesticides. Biological control is successful management of a pests by means of another living organisms (parasitoids, predators, pathogens) that is disseminated by human. The biocontrol agents are not only safer and specific to handle but are gifted with the self-perpetuating ability, which is more sustainable in nature than the repeated applications by chemical pesticides.
Analysis of the Determinants of Workplace Occupational Safety and HealtH Practice in Cyprus

AbstractThis paper is a part of a wider study — funded by EU-OSHA — that has the central aim of describing how the characteristics of the regulatory framework and employment relations tradition affect establishments’ management of health and safety at work. In this quest, a number of countries have been chosen, among them Cyprus, and this paper attempts to present an answer to the aforementioned question in Cyprus. The Cypriot economy is made up of a large number of micro firms (employing fewer than 10 workers). A number of these firms are family owned, creating an unusual and particular economic and work landscape. Also, a relatively large number of workers remain undeclared. By considering and comparing secondary data at the local, national and EU level, the paper attempts to identify and explore the determinants of workplace occupational safety and health within the particular context and conditions in Cyprus.
The Fluid Evolution and Metallogenic Processes of the Liba Gold Deposit, West Qinling, China: Insights from the Texture, Trace Elements, and H-O Isotope Geochemistry of Quartz

The evolution of ore-forming fluids in gold precipitation is a key aspect in understanding the genesis of orogenic gold deposits. Traditional fluid inclusion analyses are often limited in revealing the fluid property changes during mineralization, leading to significant debates on the mineralization temperature and fluid sources. In this study, we selected the Liba gold deposit in the West Qinling orogen and employed scanning electron microscope–cathodoluminescence (SEM-CL) and laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) to analyze the microstructure and trace element characteristics of quartz veins, revealing the multi-stage evolution of ore-forming fluids and the mineralization mechanisms. SEM-CL imaging identified five distinct quartz stages. The pre-mineralization (Qz0) and early-stage mineralization (Qz1) fluids were predominantly magmatic–metamorphic in origin, as indicated by relatively high δ18O and δD values. During the primary metallogenic (Qz2a, Qz2b) and late-stage mineralization (Qz3), temperatures progressively decreased, and the gradual mixing of meteoric water and formation water was observed, which promoted gold precipitation. And the content of trace elements in post-mineralization quartz (Qz4) is significantly lower and similar to that in the Qz0 stage. Through the analysis of quartz trace elements (e.g., Al/Ti, Ge/Al ratios) and isotope data (δ18O = 8.25‰ to 12.67‰, δD = −119.1‰ to −79.8‰), the results indicate that the Liba gold deposit is a medium- to low-temperature orogenic gold deposit. Furthermore, the gold enrichment process was primarily driven by a hydrothermal system, with variations in the fluid composition during mineralization contributing to the concentration of gold.
DIRECT 1.0: A diffusion-based generative model for dense sea surface temperature reconstructions from sparse satellite observations

Satellite sea surface temperature (SST) observations are frequently obscured by cloud cover, creating large gaps that must be reconstructed for many oceanographic and climate applications. Because multiple high-resolution SST fields may be consistent with the same sparse observations, this reconstruction problem is inherently ambiguous. Nevertheless, most existing approaches remain deterministic, producing a single estimate that is often overly smooth, may contain unrealistic artifacts, and provides limited or unreliable uncertainty estimates. To address these limitations, we introduce DIRECT, a conditional generative framework for dense SST reconstruction that models the full distribution of plausible solutions rather than a single deterministic estimate. DIRECT is based on a rectified flow-matching formulation, conditioned on temporal context and day-of-year seasonality, and presents an observation-guided rectification that anchors the generative trajectory to measured pixels at every integration step. By sampling multiple reconstructions, DIRECT produces an ensemble of physically plausible SST fields, enabling both an accurate mean reconstruction and spatially resolved uncertainty estimates that are calibrated using a lightweight post-hoc variance correction. Experiments on three Level-3 SST datasets (Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Atlantic) show that DIRECT sets a new state-of-the-art, reducing Root Mean Square Error (RMSE, in &deg;C) by 6&ndash;14 % compared with the strongest published method, while better preserving mesoscale structure. Further analysis of spatial scale correlations indicates that DIRECT maintains physically consistent textures even when reconstructing large, completely unobserved regions. Performance improvements remain robust across a wide range of cloud-coverage conditions, enabling reliable SST reconstruction from sparse satellite observations over much of the global ocean.
General-Purpose Multicore Architectures

The first years of the 2000s led to an inflection point in computer architectures: while the number of available transistors on a chip continued to grow, crucial transistor scaling properties started to break down and result in increasing power consumption, while aggressive single-core performance optimizations were resulting in diminishing returns due to inherent limits in instruction-level parallelism. This led to the rise of multicore CPU architectures, which are now commonplace in modern computers at all scales. In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of multicore CPUs since their introduction. Starting with a historic overview of multiprocessing, we explore the basic microarchitecture of a multicore CPU, key challenges resulting from shared memory resources, operating system modifications to optimize multicore CPU support, popular metrics for multicore evaluation, and recent trends in multicore CPU design.
Clinical Legal Education and the Future of Pro-Bono in Nigeria: A Guarantee for Access to Justice for Accused Persons Awaiting Trial

The idea of access to justice is strongly related to the doctrine of the rule of law, and the effectiveness of a nation’s judicial system is mostly evaluated by its citizens' access to justice. Human rights are guaranteed and protected by instruments including the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended). However, when these rights are not protected (fair hearing, access to court) owing to financial constraints and lack of access to legal counsel, justice cannot be guaranteed. The large number of accused persons awaiting trial in Nigeria is ascribed to several factors, including missing files, inability to post a bond or provide surety, delay in the DPP's advice to the police over which case to pursue, the police's failure to promptly investigate and prosecute, among others. In Nigeria, despite the voluntary legal services provided by the government, lawyers, and clinical law students, the legal system towards indigents does not abate. This article explores the problems and potential solutions to providing increased legal aid services to accused persons awaiting trial in Nigeria. An interdisciplinary approach was adopted in this study, where primary data was gathered from prison visits made by Nigerian Law School, Yola Campus Law Clinic to the Yola and Jimeta medium security correctional centres. The barriers to accessing legal aid in light of the available legal aid services are critically examined here.
Dark Matter and Potential fields

A general concept of potential field is introduced. The potential field that one puts in correspondence with dark matter, has fundamental geometrical interpretation (parallel transport) and has intrinsically inherent in local symmetry. The equations of dark matter field are derived that are invariant with respect to the local transformations. It is shown how to reduce these equations to the Maxwell equations. Thus, the dark matter field may be considered as generalized electromagnetic field and a simple solution is given of the old problem to connect electromagnetic field with geometrical properties of the physical manifold itself. It is shown that gauge fixing renders generalized electromagnetic field effectively massive while the Maxwell electromagnetic field remains massless. To learn more about interactions between matter and dark matter on the microscopical level (and to recognize the fundamental role of internal symmetry) the general covariant Dirac equation is derived in the Minkowski space--time which describe the interactions of spinor field with dark matter field.
Optimization and Convergence of Observation Channels in Stochastic Control

This paper studies the optimization of observation channels (stochastic kernels) in partially observed stochastic control problems. In particular, existence and continuity properties are investigated mostly (but not exclusively) concentrating on the single-stage case. Continuity properties of the optimal cost in channels are explored under total variation, setwise convergence, and weak convergence. Sufficient conditions for compactness of a class of channels under total variation and setwise convergence are presented and applications to quantization are explored.
Ore fluid evolution in the giant Marcona Fe-(Cu) deposit, Perú: Evidence from in-situ sulfur isotope and trace element geochemistry of sulfides

The Marcona magnetite deposit, located in the iron oxide copper-gold (IOCG) province of southern Peru, is an important Fe deposit with sub-economic Cu and Zn mineralization. Three generations of sulfides were identified at the Marcona alteration/mineralization Stages IV, V and VII. Magnetite, pyrrhotite, pyrite and minor chalcopyrite started to form at Stage IV. Sulfides in Stage V are dominated by chalcopyrite and pyrite, whereas only pyrite was present in Stage VII. In-situ SIMS sulfur isotope and LA-ICP-MS trace element analyses were conducted on the sulfides of these stages. Stage IV sulfides contain δ34S largely in the range of 0 to +4.0‰, indicating a dominantly magmatic origin. In particular, δ34S values of Stage IV pyrite increase from core to rim, and the corresponding trace elements concentrations vary along with δ34S. Positive δ34S vs. Se/S correlation of Stage IV pyrite indicates that the ore-forming system was open. The Stage V pyrite are rich in Mn, Cu, Ag, Sb, Te, Pb and Bi, and all Stage V sulfides have also elevated δ34S (up to +7.8‰), indicative of possible seawater incursion during its formation. The δ34S values of Stage VII pyrite are highly variable from −13.4 to 5.4‰. This, together with ubiquitous disseminated voids, low Co/Ni ratios and enrichments of Mn, Se, Sb, Te, Tl and Pb, suggests that Stage VII pyrite may have formed by sulfate reduction associated with organic materials. We propose that the ore-forming fluids of Stage IV are initially magmatic with involvement of external (e.g., seawater) at late, where the fluids of Stage V are likely mainly exotic. The external fluids, together with organic matter, may have contributed to the ore-forming fluids of Stage VII, indicating a complex fluid evolution history for this giant Fe (-Cu) deposit.
On Robustness of Vision-Language-Action Model against Multi-Modal Perturbations

In Vision-Language-Actionf(VLA) models, robustness to real-world perturbations is critical for deployment. Existing methods target simple visual disturbances, overlooking the broader multi-modal perturbations that arise in actions, instructions, environments, and observations. Here, we first evaluate the robustness of mainstream VLAs under 17 perturbations across four modalities. We find (1) actions as the most fragile modality, (2) Existing visual-robust VLA do not gain robustness in other modality, and (3) pi0 demonstrates superior robustness. To build multi-modal robust VLAs, we propose RobustVLA against perturbations in VLA inputs and outputs. For output robustness, we perform offline robust optimization against worst-case action noise that maximizes mismatch in flow matching objective. This can be seen as adversarial training, label smoothing, and outlier penalization. For input robustness, we enforce consistent actions across input variations that preserve task semantics. To account for multiple perturbations, we formulate robustness as a multi-armed bandit problem and apply an upper confidence bound algorithm to automatically identify the most harmful noise. Experiments on LIBERO demonstrate our RobustVLA delivers absolute gains over baselines of 12.6% on the pi0 backbone and 10.4% on the OpenVLA backbone across all 17 perturbations, achieving 50.6x faster inference than existing visual-robust BYOVLA that requires external LLMs, and a 10.4% gain under mixed perturbations. On the real-world FR5 robot, under four types of multimodal perturbations, RobustVLA shows strong low-data performance, outperforming pi0 by 65.6% success rate with 25 demonstrations. Even with abundant demos, our method still outperform pi0 by 30% success rate. Code and demo videos available at https://github.com/gakakulicc/RobustVLA.
End-to-End Exactly-Once Processing In Distributed Stream Pipelines: Integrating Apache Flink State Snapshots With Kafka Transactions

Stream processing systems increasingly underpin mission-critical applications in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and real-time analytics, where correctness requirements extend far beyond low latency and high throughput to include strong and formally defined processing guarantees. In these domains, even rare duplication or loss of events can lead to financial inconsistencies, regulatory violations, or incorrect real-time decisions, making exactly-once processing semantics the de facto gold standard for reliable stream processing. Exactly-once guarantees ensure that every input event contributes to system state transitions and downstream outputs precisely once, despite failures such as node crashes, network partitions, or message replays. This article examines how such guarantees can be realized in modern streaming architectures by combining Apache Flink’s stateful stream processing model with Apache Kafka’s transactional messaging capabilities, a pairing that emerged as a practical and scalable solution prior to 2019. Drawing on foundational research and engineering contributions published before 2019, the paper explains the theoretical underpinnings of consistent distributed state snapshots, barrier-based checkpointing, and transactional sink coordination, which together form the backbone of end-to-end exactly-once semantics. Using publicly available diagrams from Flink’s state-management research, we illustrate how coordinated checkpoints and two-phase commit protocols align stream state, message offsets, and external side effects into a single atomic unit of progress. The discussion further highlights real-world operational trade-offs, including checkpoint overhead, transaction latency, and configuration complexity, and distils lessons learned from early production deployments that demonstrate how strong correctness guarantees can be achieved without sacrificing scalability or performance in large-scale distributed stream processing systems.
Clifford theory for glider representations

Classical Clifford theory studies the decomposition of simple $G$-modules into simple $H$-modules for some normal subgroup $H \triangleleft G$. In this paper we deal with chains of normal subgroups $1 \triangleleft G_1 \triangleleft \cdots \triangleleft G_d =G$, which allow to consider fragments and in particular glider representations. These are given by a descending chain of vector spaces over some field $K$ and relate different representations of the groups appearing in the chain. Picking some normal subgroup $H \triangleleft G$ one obtains a normal subchain and one can construct an induced fragment structure. Moreover, a notion of irreducibility of fragments is introduced, which completes the list of ingredients to perform a Clifford theory.
Environmental human rights defenders, the rule of law and the human right to a healthy, clean, and sustainable environment: last trends and challenges

Recently, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly has recognised the universality of the human right to a healthy, clean and sustainable environment. However, for decades, environmental human rights defenders have struggled for this right and have paid a high price for it: threats, reprisals, penalisation, and even their lives. The strengthening of the environmental rule of law correlates with the reciprocal synergy and interdependence on environmental rights and human rights as highlighted by the Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations under the scope of the 1998 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. The Escazú Agreement and the Aarhus Convention are among the latest developments of legal and institutional guarantees for environmental defenders: a legal protection clause in the Escazú Agreement for human rights defenders in environmental matters and the setting of a new Special Rapporteur on environmental defenders for the Aarhus parties as a rapid response mechanism, under Article 3(8). The most recent trends on climate litigation have reached the European Court of Human Rights with several pending applications on greenhouse emissions and compliance with the Paris Agreement that merits attention, as well as the protection of human rights defenders in the case-law and the third-party interventions of the Council of Europe (COE) Commissioner for Human Rights.
A systematic literature review of researchers’ and healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards the secondary use and sharing of health administrative and clinical trial data

Abstract                 A systematic literature review of researchers and healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards the secondary use and sharing of health administrative and clinical trial data was conducted using electronic data searching. Eligible articles included those reporting qualitative or quantitative original research and published in English. No restrictions were placed on publication dates, study design, or disease setting. Two authors were involved in all stages of the review process; conflicts were resolved by consensus. Data was extracted independently using a pre-piloted data extraction template. Quality and bias were assessed using the QualSyst criteria for qualitative studies. Eighteen eligible articles were identified, and articles were categorised into four key themes: barriers, facilitators, access, and ownership; 14 subthemes were identified. While respondents were generally supportive of data sharing, concerns were expressed about access to data, data storage infrastructure, and consent. Perceptions of data ownership and acknowledgement, trust, and policy frameworks influenced sharing practice, as did age, discipline, professional focus, and world region. Young researchers were less willing to share data; they were willing to share in circumstances where they were acknowledged. While there is a general consensus that increased data sharing in health is beneficial to the wider scientific community, substantial barriers remain.                                Systematic review registration                 PROSPERO CRD42018110559
Digraph Signal Processing with Generalized Boundary Conditions

Signal processing on directed graphs (digraphs) is problematic, since the graph shift, and thus associated filters, are in general not diagonalizable. Furthermore, the Fourier transform in this case is now obtained from the Jordan decomposition, which may not be computable at all for large graphs. We propose a novel and general solution for this problem based on matrix perturbation theory: We design an algorithm that adds a small number of edges to a given digraph to destroy nontrivial Jordan blocks. The obtained digraph is then diagonalizable and yields, as we show, an approximate eigenbasis and Fourier transform for the original digraph. We explain why and how this construction can be viewed as generalized form of boundary conditions, a common practice in signal processing. Our experiments with random and real world graphs show that we can scale to graphs with a few thousands nodes, and obtain Fourier transforms that are close to orthogonal while still diagonalizing an intuitive notion of convolution. Our method works with adjacency and Laplacian shift and can be used as preprocessing step to enable further processing as we show with a prototypical Wiener filter application.
Structuring electronic health records of breast cancer with Natural Language Processing

Clinical records are written in natural language and, therefore, they consist of unstructured information. The objective of the project is to structure the information from clinical records of breast cancer patients in a public hospital in Madrid in order to obtain useful information for physicians. In this way, the proposal is to perform the structuring process using deep neural networks for entity classification, specifically Named Entity Recognition (NER), in combination with other NLP techniques. Ultimately, a semi-structured database in JSON format will be generated, containing the structured clinical records, which can be further processed for various purposes.
Replacing The Responsibility to Protect: The Equitable Theory of Humanitarian Intervention

In this article, Ciarán J. Burke argues that the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ initiative has failed. Burke presents a series of fundamental flaws, both with the doctrine advanced by the ICISS, and with the subsequent attempts to incorporate it into the international legal framework. Burke opines that equity, as a source of international law, should instead be used to shed fresh light on the debate, keeping the discourse within the law and away from subjective ethics, and drafting a novel framework which he dubs ‘equitable humanitarian intervention’.
Melting in large sodium clusters: An orbital-free molecular dynamics study

The melting-like transition in sodium clusters Na_N, with N=55, 92, and 142 is studied by using constant-energy molecular dynamics simulations. An orbital-free version of the Car-Parrinello technique is used which scales linearly with system size allowing investigation of the thermal behaviour of large clusters. The ground state isomer of Na_142 (an uncomplete three-shell icosahedron) melts in two steps: the first one (at approx. 240 K) is characterized by the high mobility of the atoms located on the cluster surface; the second, homogeneous melting (at approx. 270 K), involves diffusive motion of all the atoms across the cluster. For the case of Na_92, the icosahedral structure has a larger number of surface vacancies, and melts in two well separated steps, surface melting at approx. 130 K and homogeneous melting at approx. 240 K. Na_55, a complete two-shell icosahedron, melts in a single stage at approx. 190 K. Our results on homogeneous melting for Na_142 and Na_92 are in excellent agreement with recent experimental determinations of melting temperatures and latent heats. However, the experimentally observed enhancement of the melting temperature around N=55 is not reproduced by the calculations.
Real-time measurement error mitigation for one-way quantum computation

11 pages, 10 figures