ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Improving AlphaFold Predicted Contacts for Alpha-Helical Transmembrane Proteins Using Structural Features

Residue contact maps provide a condensed two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional protein structures, serving as a foundational framework in structural modeling but also as an effective tool in their own right in identifying inter-helical binding sites and drawing insights about protein function. Treating contact maps primarily as an intermediate step for 3D structure prediction, contact prediction methods have limited themselves exclusively to sequential features. Now that AlphaFold2 predicts 3D structures with good accuracy in general, we examine (1) how well predicted 3D structures can be directly used for deciding residue contacts, and (2) whether features from 3D structures can be leveraged to further improve residue contact prediction. With a well-known benchmark dataset, we tested predicting inter-helical residue contact based on AlphaFold2’s predicted structures, which gave an 83% average precision, already outperforming a sequential features-based state-of-the-art model. We then developed a procedure to extract features from atomic structure in the neighborhood of a residue pair, hypothesizing that these features will be useful in determining if the residue pair is in contact, provided the structure is decently accurate, such as predicted by AlphaFold2. Training on features generated from experimentally determined structures, we leveraged knowledge from known structures to significantly improve residue contact prediction, when testing using the same set of features but derived using AlphaFold2 structures. Our results demonstrate a remarkable improvement over AlphaFold2, achieving over 91.9% average precision for a held-out subset and over 89.5% average precision in cross-validation experiments.
Artificial iintelligence facial recognition surveillance and the breach of privacy rights: The ‘Clearview AI’ and ‘Rite Aid’ case studies

The increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition models and the accessibility of photos online by companies and governments have amounted to the excessive misuse of facial surveillance systems. The government, the police and organisations have a long history of using AI facial recognition technologies to gather data on citizens without respecting their data and privacy rights. The government relies on national security and public safety to justify such gathering of data. Marginalised groups and people of colour are disproportionately affected by such surveillance. Data protection and privacy rights activists have called on governments to regulate facial recognition systems. It is also essential to establish AI oversight agencies with the responsibility to monitor the use of AI models and to ban such use when it breaches citizens’ data and privacy rights, and any other human rights.  The European Union’s AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation on AI. It provides a risk management framework with different rules for different risk levels: unacceptable risks, high risks; and limited or low-risk applications. In June 2023, the European Parliament voted in favour of a total ban on live facial recognition in public spaces. Although the new Act did not stipulate a full ban on live facial recognition surveillance, it provides that all high-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market and throughout their lifecycle.  African governments have caught the AI bug but only a few African countries have an existing AI strategy; these include Mauritius, Egypt and Rwanda. It has been argued that international AI technologies and ethical deliberations are modelled without Africa in mind. Against this backdrop, it is more likely that Africans as people of colour will be subjected to AI ethical bias, privacy and data protection concerns, risks and harms. It is essential that African countries develop AI policies. Additionally, Africa should also take a strategic place in the ongoing debate on global AI regulation.
Sr-Nd-Hf-Pb isotope and trace element geochemistry of the Natkusiak Formation continental flood basalts of the Neoproterozoic Franklin large igneous province, Victoria Island, Canada

The Neoproterozoic (ca. 723 Ma) Franklin large igneous province (LIP) located on Victoria Island, Arctic Canada, consists of the Natkusiak Formation continental flood basalts and a sill-dominated feeder system exposed in the Minto Inlier. The Franklin LIP is temporally linked with the breakup of Laurentia from Siberia and the Sturtian glaciation or “Snowball Earth”. Recent mapping shows that the Natkusiak Formation, preserved in two lobes (northern and southern), has a thin basal unit, ~50 m thick, followed by two ~500 m thick cycles (1 and 2) of basaltic sheet-flows. Sr-Nd-Pb-Hf isotopic compositions, major element oxides, and trace element concentrations of the Natkusiak basalts allow for the characterization of mantle source components and the extent of crustal contamination. Four geochemical groups (southern low- and high-Ti basalts; northern low- and high-Ti basalts) are defined. The basal basalts (low-Ti, 1.0-1.2 wt.% TiO₂) are distinguished from the overlying cycle 1 and 2 basalts (high-Ti, 1.2-1.8 wt.% TiO₂). The high-Ti basalts are characterized by a narrow range in ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sri (0.7027-0.7045), high εNdi and εHfi, and relatively low ²⁰⁶Pb/²⁰⁴Pbi, ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁴Pbi, and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁴Pbi compared to the low-Ti basalts (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sri = 0.7033-0.7057). The northern (low- and high-Ti) basalts are isotopically distinct from the southern (low- and high-Ti) basalts with lower εNdi values for a given ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sri. The chemistry of the coeval Franklin intrusions mainly overlaps that of the northern basalts and they show only limited isotopic correlation with the southern basalts, which indicates that the southern basalts were fed from a separate feeder system. Significant major and trace element and isotopic differences between the low- and high-Ti basalts are inconsistent with the effects of crustal contamination and are related to different mantle source compositions, with a garnet-bearing source for the low-Ti basalts and a spinel-bearing source for the high-Ti basalts. A shift in mantle source region, likely reflected by an episode of syn-volcanic extension, occurred after the emplacement of the low-Ti basalts, which represent the earliest volcanic products of the Franklin LIP.
The impact of the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on the welfare society: a study of the special case of the digital euro

Treball de Fi de Grau en Estudis Internacionals d'Economia i Empresa. Curs 2022-2023
Ethical Leadership Effect on the Regulation of AI in Cyber Security by Mediating OCB by Collaborative Governance in Ethiopia

This chapter addresses the effects of ethical leadership to the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) on cyber-security and the mediating role of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) as a part of the collaborative governance context in Ethiopia. The results could indicate a significant impact of ethical leadership on the effective control of AI in the field of cyber-security; OCB may also play a mediating role. This implies that leaders with ethics embedded in them facilitate citizenship culture amongst employees, hence creating harmonious relationship in collaborative governance. The shortcomings of these findings are broken down into the discussion of Ethiopia and its changing cyber-security system, whereby ethical leadership is important in the formulation of regulatory policies that maximize AI technologies. The chapter ends with the recommendations that policymakers and leaders in organizations may implement to ensure the facilitation of ethical governance behaviors that may stimulate OCB, which would eventually result in better AI regulation in the cyber-security.
User Stories and Natural Language Processing: A Systematic Literature Review

Context: User stories have been widely accepted as artifacts to capture the user requirements in agile software development. They are short pieces of texts in a semi-structured format that express requirements. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques offer a potential advantage in user story applications. Objective: Conduct a systematic literature review to capture the current state-of-the-art of NLP research on user stories. Method: The search strategy is used to obtain relevant papers from SCOPUS, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied to filter the search results. We also use the forward and backward snowballing techniques to obtain more comprehensive results. Results: The search results identified 718 papers published between January 2009 to December 2020. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria and the snowballing technique, we identified 38 primary studies that discuss NLP techniques in user stories. Most studies used NLP techniques to extract aspects of who, what, and why from user stories. The purpose of NLP studies in user stories is broad, ranging from discovering defects, generating software artifacts, identifying the key abstraction of user stories, and tracing links between model and user stories. Conclusion: NLP can help system analysts manage user stories. Implementing NLP in user stories has many opportunities and challenges. Considering the exploration of NLP techniques and rigorous evaluation methods is required to obtain quality research. As with NLP research in general, the ability to understand a sentence&#x2019;s context continues to be a challenge.
Beyond Feature Relevance: Incorporating Rich User Feedback Into Interactive Machine Learning Applications

Engineering and Applied Sciences
Paramfit: Automated optimization of force field parameters for molecular dynamics simulations

The generation of bond, angle, and torsion parameters for classical molecular dynamics force fields typically requires fitting parameters such that classical properties such as energies and gradients match precalculated quantum data for structures that scan the value of interest. We present a program, Paramfit, distributed as part of the AmberTools software package that automates and extends this fitting process, allowing for simplified parameter generation for applications ranging from single molecules to entire force fields. Paramfit implements a novel combination of a genetic and simplex algorithm to find the optimal set of parameters that replicate either quantum energy or force data. The program allows for the derivation of multiple parameters simultaneously using significantly fewer quantum calculations than previous methods, and can also fit parameters across multiple molecules with applications to force field development. Paramfit has been applied successfully to systems with a sparse number of structures, and has already proven crucial in the development of the Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement Lipid14 force field. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Accountability, anti-corruption and transparency policies in Public-Owned Enterprises (POEs) in Albania

Public-Owned Enterprises (POEs) are generally large economic enterprises owned and governed by state institutions. POEs generally are the sole or the main provider of the key public goods and services as water, electricity, transport, telecommunications, and postal services. If administered efficiently, the POEs are important for national development and perspective of natural economic resources. The concern is how accurately these monopolistic enterprises are organized in aspects of administrative and managerial perspectives to function as effectively as possible for the objectives they are created. Therefore an overall summary of the public-owned enterprises is presented through their process of emerging, privatization, and evolution in Albania, southeast Europe. The process was accompanied by shortcomings due to its ad-hoc nature; and associated with negative effects of bad management, governance corruption, and low efficiency of the operational activities and results.
Penyelesaian Sengketa Perdagangan Internasional Melalui Dispute Settlement Body Di World Trade Organization

Perkembangan globalisasi dan integrasi ekonomi internasional telah meningkatkan kompleksitas hubungan dagang antarnegara, sehingga memunculkan potensi sengketa yang lebih beragam, termasuk dalam ranah perdagangan digital. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis mekanisme penyelesaian sengketa perdagangan internasional melalui Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) pada World Trade Organization (WTO), serta mengevaluasi efektivitasnya dalam merespons dinamika ekonomi global. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah kualitatif deskriptif dengan pendekatan studi dokumen hukum internasional, analisis studi kasus, serta tinjauan literatur yang relevan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa DSB berperan penting dalam menjaga stabilitas sistem perdagangan multilateral, namun efektivitasnya mengalami tekanan akibat krisis pada Badan Banding (Appellate Body), yang menyebabkan terhambatnya proses penyelesaian sengketa. Di sisi lain, munculnya sengketa yang berkaitan dengan perdagangan digital lintas negara mengindikasikan perlunya pembaruan mekanisme penyelesaian yang lebih adaptif terhadap perkembangan teknologi dan ekonomi digital global. Temuan ini menegaskan pentingnya reformasi kelembagaan dalam sistem penyelesaian sengketa WTO agar tetap relevan dan responsif terhadap tantangan kontemporer.
Access to essential medicines to guarantee women's rights to health: The pharmaceutical patents connection

AbstractIndubitably, everyone is entitled to the right to a standard of health. While women's rights to health and life are clearly established in legal instruments, having these laws without the fulfilling them will not serve the people they are meant to safeguard. For this reason, this article argues that the right to health and life includes the right to an effective access to available, good quality, safe and effective medicines that are equally affordable to everyone. Essentially, human rights principles, norms and standards provide strong moral support for the consideration of women's access to medicines, in view of the adverse impact of international and national patent law on public health. It is also submitted that ensuring this access to a choice of essential medicines at an affordable price requires the state to ensure that the granting of patent rights to inventors and pharmaceutical companies does not hinder access to essential drugs. In the same vein, the article argues for the design, interpretation and implementation of patent rights to respond to the right to health, life and access to medicines.
Making Sense of Root Cause Analysis Investigations of Surgery-Related Adverse Events

This article discusses the limitations of root cause analysis (RCA) for surgical adverse events. Making sense of adverse events involves an appreciation of the unique features in a problematic situation, which resist generalization to other contexts. The top priority of adverse event investigations must be to inform the design of systems that help clinicians to adapt and respond effectively in real time to undesirable combinations of design, performance, and circumstance. RCAs can create opportunities in the clinical workplace for clinicians to reflect on local barriers and identify enablers of safe and reliable outcomes.
Morphological Classification of Galaxies with Different Grayscale Images Using Deep Learning

In recent years, several images of galaxies have been collected by telescopes, so that they could be morphologically analyzed using artificial intelligence devices. Thus, this work aims to analyze new image processing approaches, using grayscale conversion algorithms, in order to explore their influence on CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks). Images from the Galaxies10 DECals dataset of two different types of galaxies were used, which were grayscaled and analyzed separately on the CNN. Aspects such as the influence of redshift and the average pixel value have been studied, since grayscale conversions depend on the influence of each channel. It was concluded that, besides altering the assertiveness of the CNN, the applied grayscales also facilitate recognition by the CNN in specific cases.
Modelling the impacts of projected future climate change on water resources in north-west England

Over the last two decades, the frequency of water resource drought in the UK, coupled with the more recent pan-European drought of 2003, has increased concern over changes in climate. Using the UKCIP02 Medium-High (SRES A2) scenario for 2070–2100, this study investigates the impact of climate change on the operation of the Integrated Resource Zone (IRZ), a complex conjunctive-use water supply system in north-western England. The results indicate that the contribution of individual sources to yield may change substantially but that overall yield is reduced by only 18%. Notwithstanding this significant effect on water supply, the flexibility of the system enables it to meet modelled demand for much of the time under the future climate scenario, even without a change in system management, but at significant expense for pumping additional abstraction from lake and borehole sources. This research provides a basis for the future planning and management of the complex water resource system in the north-west of England.
Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning through Model Growth

Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual learning, as retaining performance across diverse domains is important for their general utility. In this paper, we explore model growth, a promising strategy that leverages smaller models to expedite and structure the training of larger ones for mitigating the catastrophic forgetting problem. Although growth-based pretraining, particularly via transformer stacking, has shown promise in accelerating convergence, its impact on forgetting remains under-explored. Therefore, we evaluate whether growth-based models can retain previously learned capabilities more effectively across a sequence of fine-tuning tasks involving domain knowledge, reasoning, reading comprehension, and bias. Our findings show that both models -- one trained with growth (Stack LLM) and one without (LLM) -- exhibit improvements in domain knowledge. However, reasoning and reading comprehension degrade over time, indicating signs of catastrophic forgetting. Stack LLM consistently shows less degradation, especially in reading comprehension, suggesting enhanced retention capabilities. Interestingly, in bias evaluation, the baseline LLM becomes progressively more neutral with continued fine-tuning, while Stack LLM maintains a steady bias ratio around 60--61\%. These results indicate that growth-based pretraining may deliver modest improvements in resisting catastrophic forgetting, though trade-offs remain in handling social biases.
The role of forests in biodiversity conservation on the landscape level - some starting points for landscape ecological typifying

Koncept biotske pestrosti v naravoslovju ni nov. Tudi v gozdarstvu je prisotenše toliko časa, da je včasih potreben redefiniranja. Jasne definicije so pogoj za učinkovito integracijo ideje biotske pestrosti v sodobno gozdarstvo. Kot kulturna krajina je tudi večina biotske pestrosti dinami~na, antropogena tvorba - od genske do ekosistemske in vi{jih ravni. Gozdarstvo je doslej posvečalo pozornost vrstni, delno genski pestrosti, nekoliko zanemarilopa je vi{je ravni, ki jih v novejšem času odkriva ideja krajinskega gozdarstva. To dokazuje tudi vrsta mednarodnih dokumentov - od helsin{kih do lizbonskih resolucij. Vendar moramo sprejeti dejstvo, da so ravni biotske pestrosti in njihovo ohranjanje neločljivo povezane. Tipizacijo gozdnih in gozdnatih krajin lahko obravnavamo tudi kot sredstvo ohranjanja na gozd vezanebiotske pestrosti. Za razliko od dosedanjih taka tipizacija ne temelji zgolj na fizični prisotnosti gozda (koli~ini, razporedu), ampak predvsem na lastnostih gozda, ki so biotski pestrosti prijazne in omogo~ajo komuniciranje organizmov - od genske ravni do migracijskih gibanj. Za novo paradigmo trajnostnega gospodarjenja za biotsko pestrost se bo moralo gozdarstvo aktivnovklju~iti v izpolnjevanje teh mednarodnih dokumentov.
Preventing the dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) with surveillance technologies: the case of EU Regulation 2021/1232

Online services are increasingly being used to distribute child sexual abuse material. Recognising this problem and responding to public pressure, legislators are introducing new electronic surveillance measures – to be used by private service providers in the performance of public tasks. An example of such a measure is EU Regulation 2021/1232, which provides the legal framework for technology providers to monitor electronic correspondence in order to identify cases of child sexual abuse and subsequently report them to law enforcement authorities. Creating a legal framework for monitoring a large share of electronic communications causes such provisions to be part of a general norm instead of an exception – which is what interference with the secrecy of communications should be. This leads to questions about the necessity and proportionality of such a practice. This article examines the genesis and purpose of the introduction of the Regulation, as well as the key concerns regarding its compatibility with EU law. It also explores the fundamental dilemma of whether modern surveillance measures are the right and necessary tools to not only fight but also to prevent the most serious crimes.
Professor Bruno Simma To Be Judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague

To introduce Bruno Simma to the readers of German Law Journal is both an easy and a difficult task. An easy one because it will hardly be necessary to introduce his writings to those who have done only the slightest research in public international law– from his textbook “Universelles Völkerrecht” of 1976, co-authored with his teacher and mentor Alfred Verdross and still widely cited in German literature and jurisprudence, to the Commentary of the Charter of the United Nations which he first edited (in German) in 1991, the second English edition of which was published last year by Oxford University Press. On the other hand, writing on Bruno Simma is a difficult task because many of you will already have got a personal impression already – meeting him in Munich, where he has been teaching international and European law for no less than thirty years, in Ann Arbor/Michigan, where he is member of the affiliate overseas faculty of the University of Michigan Law School (since 1997) after teaching there for more than ten years, or at the Academies in The Hague or Florence, where he has taught much-acclaimed and -cited lectures on the move of international law “from bilateralism to community interest” and the relationship between human rights law and general international law. An even broader audience has come to know him for his public appearances in the press, the radio or television, in particular for his characterization of the dilemma of the Kosovo intervention as a “thin red line” between legality and morality. His article on “NATO, the UN and the Use of Force” appeared on the Webpages of the European Journal of International Law – the leading European international law journal he co-founded in 1990 and still co-edits – even before the first shots were fired.