The thesis of a capitalist road to communism (van der Veen and Van Parijs, 1986) asserts that Marx realm of freedom can be reached from within welfare capitalism, skipping socialism, by using a tax-financed unconditional basic income until it is close to disposable income per head, so that the very distinction between paid work and free time is cancelled as a result. We revisit and update this thesis for two reasons: the recent prospect of a post-labor society following the automation revolution in technology, and that welfare capitalism has become more inegalitarian and less hospitable to basic income. We use a simple economic model which incorporates an upward adjustment of basic income to labor-saving technical change and distinguishes between capital that complements labor and capital that is fully substitutable with labor. A baseline simulation of the model shows the economic feasibility of a capitalist transition to communism. Two versions of a scenario incorporating interplay between technical change and market socialist institutional reforms are set out which make the transition politically viable to some extent, depending on the social distribution of power over technology
The Foundations of Future Communication Systems (FFCS) conference brought together leading researchers from information theory, quantum communication, molecular communication, semantic communication, and secure network design to explore the fundamental principles shaping next-generation communication systems. The event serves as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange, bridging classical Shannon theory, post-Shannon paradigms, quantum information science, and emerging physically grounded communication models. This report compiles the abstracts of all invited talks, contributed presentations, and poster contributions presented at FFCS. The collected works reflect the breadth of contemporary research directions, including identification-based communication, entanglement-assisted networks, semantic and goal-oriented communication, coding for molecular and nanoscale systems, secure authentication mechanisms, and information-theoretic limits of novel physical-layer architectures. A central theme of the conference was the re-examination of foundational limits under realistic physical, architectural, and security constraints. Many contributions move beyond traditional rate-centric persp
In the study of time-dependent (i.e., temporal) networks, researchers often examine the evolution of communities, which are sets of densely connected sets of nodes that are connected sparsely to other nodes. An increasingly prominent approach to studying community structure in temporal networks is statistical inference. In the present paper, we study the performance of a class of statistical-inference methods for community detection in temporal networks. We represent temporal networks as multilayer networks, with each layer encoding a time step, and we illustrate that statistical-inference models that generate community assignments via either a uniform distribution on community assignments or discrete-time Markov processes are biased against generating communities with large or small numbers of nodes. In particular, we demonstrate that statistical-inference methods that use such generative models tend to poorly identify community structure in networks with large or small communities. To rectify this issue, we introduce a novel statistical model that generates the community assignments of the nodes in given layer (i.e., at a given time) using all of the community assignments in the
Semantic communications have emerged as a crucial research direction for future wireless communication networks. However, as wireless systems become increasingly complex, the demands for computation and communication resources in semantic communications continue to grow rapidly. This paper investigates the trade-off between computation and communication in wireless semantic communications, taking into consideration transmission task delay and performance constraints within the semantic communication framework. We propose a novel tradeoff metric to analyze the balance between computation and communication in semantic transmissions and employ the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to minimize this metric, thereby reducing the cost associated with balancing computation and communication. Through simulations, we analyze the tradeoff between computation and communication and demonstrate the effectiveness of optimizing this trade-off metric.
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. S
Little research has explored the communication needs of autistic adults. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can support these communication needs, but more guidance is needed on how to design AAC systems to support this population. We conducted an online, asynchronous, text-based focus group with five autistic adults to explore their social communication and community engagement and how AAC might support them. Our analysis found 1) participants' emotional experiences impact the communication methods they use, 2) speaking autistic adults can benefit from AAC use, and 3) autistic shutdown creates dynamic communication needs. We present implications for AAC interface design: supporting communication during shutdown, indicating communication ability, and addressing the fear of using AAC. We provide themes for future autism research: exploring the impact of a late diagnosis, understanding communication needs during shutdown, and researching the social and environmental factors that impact communication. Finally, we provide guidance for future online focus groups.
Social recommendation, which seeks to leverage social ties among users to alleviate the sparsity issue of user-item interactions, has emerged as a popular technique for elevating personalized services in recommender systems. Despite being effective, existing social recommendation models are mainly devised for recommending regular items such as blogs, images, and products, and largely fail for community recommendations due to overlooking the unique characteristics of communities. Distinctly, communities are constituted by individuals, who present high dynamicity and relate to rich structural patterns in social networks. To our knowledge, limited research has been devoted to comprehensively exploiting this information for recommending communities. To bridge this gap, this paper presents CASO, a novel and effective model specially designed for social community recommendation. Under the hood, CASO harnesses three carefully-crafted encoders for user embedding, wherein two of them extract community-related global and local structures from the social network via social modularity maximization and social closeness aggregation, while the third one captures user preferences using collaborati
Strategic Communication Protocols provide a structured approach for first contact with interstellar objects that demonstrate technological characteristics and high levels of threat. The protocols find their starting point in an ISO Information-Communication Paradox, namely, as our knowledge of an ISO's threatening capabilities increases, the probability of successful communication decreases while the urgency of communication attempts simultaneously intensifies. From this paradox, a Threat-Communication Viability Index is created to describe when the value of communication attempts outweighs strategic silence. The index scores the situation and operates as a decision-making tool for stakeholders tracking an ISO. The communication protocols subsequently outline several diplomatic strategies in cases where the index recommends communication.
Community detection methods play a central role in understanding complex networks by revealing highly connected subsets of entities. However, most community detection algorithms generate partitions of the nodes, thus (i) forcing every node to be part of a community and (ii) ignoring the possibility that some nodes may be part of multiple communities. In our work, we investigate three simple community association strength (CAS) scores and their usefulness as post-processing tools given some partition of the nodes. We show that these measures can be used to improve node partitions, detect outlier nodes (not part of any community), and help find nodes with multiple community memberships.
Since the early 2010s, social network-based influence technologies have grown almost exponentially. Initiated by the U.S. Army's early OEV system in 2011, a number of companies specializing in this field have emerged. The most (in)famous cases are Bell Pottinger, Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate-IQ and, more recently, Team Jorge. In this paper, we consider the use-case of sock puppet master activities, which consist in creating hundreds or even thousands of avatars, in organizing them into communities and implement influence operations. On-purpose software is used to automate these operations (e.g. Ripon software, AIMS) and organize these avatar populations into communities. The aim is to organize targeted and directed influence communication to rather large communities (influence targets). The goal of the present research work is to show how these community management techniques (social networks) can also be used to communicate/disseminate relatively large volumes (up to a few tens of Mb) of multi-level encrypted information to a limited number of actors. To a certain extent, this can be compared to a Dark Post-type function, with a number of much more powerful potentialities. As a
Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians) we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.
Deep learning enabled semantic communications have shown great potential to significantly improve transmission efficiency and alleviate spectrum scarcity, by effectively exchanging the semantics behind the data. Recently, the emergence of large models, boasting billions of parameters, has unveiled remarkable human-like intelligence, offering a promising avenue for advancing semantic communication by enhancing semantic understanding and contextual understanding. This article systematically investigates the large model-empowered semantic communication systems from potential applications to system design. First, we propose a new semantic communication architecture that seamlessly integrates large models into semantic communication through the introduction of a memory module. Then, the typical applications are illustrated to show the benefits of the new architecture. Besides, we discuss the key designs in implementing the new semantic communication systems from module design to system training. Finally, the potential research directions are identified to boost the large model-empowered semantic communications.
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) needs to sense the environment to ensure safe flight, and the sensing accuracy and communication delay performance are two important indicators of safe flight. The strategy of using integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology to improve the sensing and communication performance is proposed in this paper. On the one hand, the extended kalman filter (EKF) algorithm is adopted to achieve the fusion of communication location information and sensing information to improve the accuracy of target sensing. On the other hand, a Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) method based on ISAC is proposed to reduce communication delay. Compared with the traditional IFF method, the integrated technology used for IFF can realize the radar sensing and communication interrogating functions in parallel, greatly shortening the sensing time. Simulation results show that using ISAC technology, the sensing performance of UAV has been greatly improved, the communication delay can be reduced by up to 50%, the accuracy of target sensing can be improved by 24.2% when communication location information and radar sensing information have the same sensing accuracy.
The communities who develop and support open source scientific software packages are crucial to the utility and success of such packages. Moreover, these communities form an important part of the human infrastructure that enables scientific progress. This paper discusses aspects of the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) community, its organization, and technical approaches that enable community members to help each other efficiently.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has entered a Martian valley covered by an astonishing “sea” of tiny polygon-shaped fractures。 The honeycomb patterns, each only a few inches wide, stretch across the landscape and even wrap around a nearby 20-foot-tall butte
A person’s sleeping brain may reveal warning signs of dementia long before memory problems begin。 Researchers used machine learning to analyze EEG recordings from about 7,000 adults and found that an older-than-expected “brain age” was tied to a sharply higher dementia risk。 Every additional 10 years of brain aging raised that risk by nearly 40%
Scientists traced a mysterious surge of low-energy gamma rays from zinc-70 to magnetic changes occurring inside its nucleus。 The breakthrough could improve models of how stars, supernovae, and neutron star mergers create heavy elements
Primordial black holes may occasionally pass through white dwarf stars and trigger enormous Type Ia supernova explosions。 Researchers found that these events could explain chemical patterns seen in supernova remnants, nearby explosions, and stars across the Milky Way