This study examines whether there is any evidence of bias in two areas of common critique of open, non-anonymous peer review - and used in the post-publication, peer review system operated by the open-access scholarly publishing platform F1000Research. First, is there evidence of bias where a reviewer based in a specific country assesses the work of an author also based in the same country? Second, are reviewers influenced by being able to see the comments and know the origins of previous reviewer? Methods: Scrutinising the open peer review comments published on F1000Research, we assess the extent of two frequently cited potential influences on reviewers that may be the result of the transparency offered by a fully attributable, open peer review publishing model: the national affiliations of authors and reviewers, and the ability of reviewers to view previously-published reviewer reports before submitting their own. The effects of these potential influences were investigated for all first versions of articles published by 8 July 2019 to F1000Research. In 16 out of the 20 countries with the most articles, there was a tendency for reviewers based in the same country to give a more po
LLM-generated reviews for scientific papers are gaining considerable traction and are even being officially piloted by major conferences. We have to assume that not only reviewers are using LLM-assistance, but also that authors use LLMs to revise their papers before submitting. In this work, we perform empirical experiments on papers from the 2025 ACL Rolling Review (ARR) to evaluate LLM reviews from both the author and the reviewer perspective. First, we identify a limited alignment of LLM reviews with human ones. In the best-case scenario, the alignment is reasonable. However, we also find that LLM-human alignment varies substantially across prompts and models. Finally, we investigate the scenario in which the author uses an iterative draft-revise workflow to improve the submission according to the LLM review. We find that this "gaming" of LLM reviews can be effective in specific scenarios, leading to a statistically significant increase of overall scores for up to 35\% of papers. We publish our code: https://github.com/uhh-hcds/reviewarcade.
We propose an aspect-guided, multi-level perturbation framework to evaluate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automated peer review. Our framework explores perturbations in three key components of the peer review process-papers, reviews, and rebuttals-across several quality aspects, including contribution, soundness, presentation, tone, and completeness. By applying targeted perturbations and examining their effects on both LLM-as-Reviewer and LLM-as-Meta-Reviewer, we investigate how aspect-based manipulations, such as omitting methodological details from papers or altering reviewer conclusions, can introduce significant biases in the review process. We identify several potential vulnerabilities: review conclusions that recommend a strong reject may significantly influence meta-reviews, negative or misleading reviews may be wrongly interpreted as thorough, and incomplete or hostile rebuttals can unexpectedly lead to higher acceptance rates. Statistical tests show that these biases persist under various Chain-of-Thought prompting strategies, highlighting the lack of robust critical evaluation in current LLMs. Our framework offers a practical methodology for diagnosin
Charting the intellectual evolution of a scientific discipline is crucial for identifying its core contributions, challenges, and future directions. The IISE Annual Conference proceedings offer a rich longitudinal archive of the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) community's development, but the sheer volume of scholarship produced over two decades makes a holistic analysis difficult. Traditional reviews often fail to capture the full scale of thematic shifts and complex collaboration networks that define the community's growth. This paper presents a computational analysis of IISE proceedings from 2002 to 2025, drawing on an initial dataset of 9,350 titles from ProQuest for thematic analysis and 8,958 titles from Google Scholar for citation analysis, to deliver a cartography of the ISE field's intellectual history. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-aware classification, Natural Language Processing, and Network Science, our study systematically maps thematic evolution to identify dominant, emerging, and receding research topics. We analyze citation data and co-authorship networks to uncover influential papers and authors, providing critical insights into knowl
Direct detection experiments, which are designed to detect the scattering of dark matter off nuclei in detectors, are a critical component in the search for the Universe's missing matter. The count rate in these experiments should experience an annual modulation due to the relative motion of the Earth around the Sun. This modulation, not present for most known background sources, is critical for solidifying the origin of a potential signal as dark matter. In this article, we review the physics of annual modulation, discussing the practical formulae needed to interpret a modulating signal. We focus on how the modulation spectrum changes depending on the particle and astrophysics models for the dark matter. For standard assumptions, the count rate has a cosine dependence with time, with a maximum in June and a minimum in December. Well-motivated generalizations of these models, however, can affect both the phase and amplitude of the modulation. We show how a measurement of an annually modulating signal could teach us about the presence of substructure in the Galactic halo or about the interactions between dark and baryonic matter. Although primarily a theoretical review, we briefly d
The development of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models is influencing neuroscience research by enabling end-to-end learning from raw brain signals and neural data. In this paper, we review applications of large-scale AI models across four major neuroscience domains: neuroimaging and data processing, brain-computer interfaces and neural decoding, clinical decision support and translational frameworks, and disease-specific applications across neurological and psychiatric disorders. These models show potential to address major computational neuroscience challenges, including multimodal neural data integration, spatiotemporal pattern interpretation, and the development of translational frameworks for clinical research. Moreover, the interaction between neuroscience and AI has become increasingly reciprocal, as biologically informed architectural constraints are now incorporated to develop more interpretable and computationally efficient models. This review highlights both the promise of such technologies and critical implementation considerations, with particular emphasis on rigorous evaluation frameworks, effective integration of domain knowledge, prospective clinical vali
Despite the centrality of the notion of representation in neuroscience, the field lacks a unified framework for the concepts used to characterize representation, leading to disparate use of both terminology and measures associated with it. To offer clarification, we propose a core set of conceptual dimensions that characterize representations in neuroscience. These dimensions describe relations between a neural response, features that may be represented, and downstream effects of the neural response. A neural response may be shown to be sensitive or specific to a feature, invariant to other features, or functional (it is used downstream in the brain). We use information-theoretic measures to illustrate these conceptual dimensions and explain how they relate to data analysis methods such as correlational analyses, decoding and encoding models, representational similarity analysis, and tests of statistical dependence or adaptation. We consider several canonical examples, including models of the representation of orientation, numerosity, and spatial location, which illustrate how the evidence put forth in support or criticism of these models is systematized by our framework. By offeri
Overwhelmed courts in the United States review millions of default judgments each year. Unfortunately, such manual reviews are time-consuming and prone to error. In an audit of 188 debt collection cases granted default judgment by the Superior Court of Los Angeles, we find that 4% contained major defects that should have entirely prevented default judgment, 10% contained inconsistencies requiring reduced judgments, and 32% contained errors requiring amendment prior to judgment. To support courthouses in default judgment review, we collaborated with courthouse attorneys and judges in designing a Default Assistant. The Default Assistant employs large language models to evaluate a case with respect to predetermined legal requirements and provide cited recommendations for an expert user's review. We equip users to verify these recommendations by grounding the assistant's explanations in cited quotes and tables from the original case filings. We conduct a controlled study with 66 law students that conservatively simulates court review, with more time and resources than court staff. We nevertheless find users aided by the Default Assistant were 6.0% more accurate on the average requireme
An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these. Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed. This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews. While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce. We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of intere
This review aims to contribute to the quest for artificial general intelligence by examining neuroscience and cognitive psychology methods for potential inspiration. Despite the impressive advancements achieved by deep learning models in various domains, they still have shortcomings in abstract reasoning and causal understanding. Such capabilities should be ultimately integrated into artificial intelligence systems in order to surpass data-driven limitations and support decision making in a way more similar to human intelligence. This work is a vertical review that attempts a wide-ranging exploration of brain function, spanning from lower-level biological neurons, spiking neural networks, and neuronal ensembles to higher-level concepts such as brain anatomy, vector symbolic architectures, cognitive and categorization models, and cognitive architectures. The hope is that these concepts may offer insights for solutions in artificial general intelligence.
Traffic accidents pose a severe global public health issue, leading to 1.19 million fatalities annually, with the greatest impact on individuals aged 5 to 29 years old. This paper addresses the critical need for advanced predictive methods in road safety by conducting a comprehensive review of recent advancements in applying machine learning (ML) techniques to traffic accident analysis and prediction. It examines 191 studies from the last five years, focusing on predicting accident risk, frequency, severity, duration, as well as general statistical analysis of accident data. To our knowledge, this study is the first to provide such a comprehensive review, covering the state-of-the-art across a wide range of domains related to accident analysis and prediction. The review highlights the effectiveness of integrating diverse data sources and advanced ML techniques to improve prediction accuracy and handle the complexities of traffic data. By mapping the current landscape and identifying gaps in the literature, this study aims to guide future research towards significantly reducing traffic-related deaths and injuries by 2030, aligning with the World Health Organization (WHO) targets.
Research suggests that the duration of a VR session modulates the presence and intensity of VRISE, but there are no suggestions regarding the appropriate maximum duration of VR sessions. The implementation of high-end VR HMDs in conjunction with ergonomic VR software seems to mitigate the presence of VRISE substantially. However, a brief tool does not currently exist to appraise and report both the quality of software features and VRISE intensity quantitatively. The VRNQ was developed to assess the quality of VR software in terms of user experience, game mechanics, in-game assistance, and VRISE. Forty participants aged between 28 and 43 years were recruited (18 gamers and 22 non-gamers) for the study. They participated in 3 different VR sessions until they felt weary or discomfort and subsequently filled in the VRNQ. Our results demonstrated that VRNQ is a valid tool for assessing VR software as it has good convergent, discriminant, and construct validity. The maximum duration of VR sessions should be between 55-70 minutes when the VR software meets or exceeds the parsimonious cut-offs of the VRNQ and the users are familiarized with the VR system. Also. the gaming experience does n
We extracted and processed abstract data from the SFN annual meeting abstracts during the period 2001-2006, using techniques and software from natural language processing, database management, and data visualization and analysis. An important first step in the process was the application of data cleaning and disambiguation methods to construct a unified database, since the data were too noisy to be of full utility in the raw form initially available. The resulting co-author graph in 2006, for example, had 39,645 nodes (with an estimated 6% error rate in our disambiguation of similar author names) and 13,979 abstracts, with an average of 1.5 abstracts per author, 4.3 authors per abstract, and 5.96 collaborators per author (including all authors on shared abstracts). Recent work in related areas has focused on reputational indices such as highly cited papers or scientists and journal impact factors, and to a lesser extent on creating visual maps of the knowledge space. In contrast, there has been relatively less work on the demographics and community structure, the dynamics of the field over time to examine major research trends and the structure of the sources of research funding. I
This paper reviews the current progress in applying machine learning (ML) tools to solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, with a focus on routing problems such as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Due to the inherent complexity of these problems, exact algorithms often require excessive computational time to find optimal solutions, while heuristics can only provide approximate solutions without guaranteeing optimality. With the recent success of machine learning models, there is a growing trend in proposing and implementing diverse ML techniques to enhance the resolution of these challenging routing problems. We propose a taxonomy categorizing ML-based routing methods into construction-based and improvement-based approaches, highlighting their applicability to various problem characteristics. This review aims to integrate traditional OR methods with state-of-the-art ML techniques, providing a structured framework to guide future research and address emerging VRP variants.
A review of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics Volume 52, 2014 (Ed. S.M. Faber, Ewine van Dishoeck, and John Kormendy) is given, with a perspective of understanding the current trends in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The impact of high volume data, high connectivity, and fast computations is clearly seen in the various research areas discussed in this volume. This has provided unprecedented development in the understanding of various astrophysical phenomena. At the same time, some negative trends like commodification of science, ignoring dissenting views are also evident.
We review different aspects of the simulation of spiking neural networks. We start by reviewing the different types of simulation strategies and algorithms that are currently implemented. We next review the precision of those simulation strategies, in particular in cases where plasticity depends on the exact timing of the spikes. We overview different simulators and simulation environments presently available (restricted to those freely available, open source and documented). For each simulation tool, its advantages and pitfalls are reviewed, with an aim to allow the reader to identify which simulator is appropriate for a given task. Finally, we provide a series of benchmark simulations of different types of networks of spiking neurons, including Hodgkin-Huxley type, integrate-and-fire models, interacting with current-based or conductance-based synapses, using clock-driven or event-driven integration strategies. The same set of models are implemented on the different simulators, and the codes are made available. The ultimate goal of this review is to provide a resource to facilitate identifying the appropriate integration strategy and simulation tool to use for a given modeling pro
Immersive virtual reality (VR) emerges as a promising research and clinical tool. However, several studies suggest that VR induced adverse symptoms and effects (VRISE) may undermine the health and safety standards, and the reliability of the scientific results. In the current literature review, the technical reasons for the adverse symptomatology are investigated to provide suggestions and technological knowledge for the implementation of VR head-mounted display (HMD) systems in cognitive neuroscience. The technological systematic literature indicated features pertinent to display, sound, motion tracking, navigation, ergonomic interactions, user experience, and computer hardware that should be considered by the researchers. Subsequently, a meta-analysis of 44 neuroscientific or neuropsychological studies involving VR HMD systems was performed. The meta-analysis of the VR studies demonstrated that new generation HMDs induced significantly less VRISE and marginally fewer dropouts.Importantly, the commercial versions of the new generation HMDs with ergonomic interactions had zero incidents of adverse symptomatology and dropouts. HMDs equivalent to or greater than the commercial versio
A new scientific field is introduced and discussed, named cybernetical neuroscience, which studies mathematical models adopted in computational neuroscience by methods of cybernetics -- the science of control and communication in a living organism, machine and society. It also considers the practical application of the results obtained when studying mathematical models. The main tasks and methods, as well as some results of cybernetic neuroscience are considered.
This review systematically examines the progression of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithms from YOLOv1 to the recently unveiled YOLOv12. Employing a reverse chronological analysis, this study examines the advancements introduced by YOLO algorithms, beginning with YOLOv12 and progressing through YOLO11 (or YOLOv11), YOLOv10, YOLOv9, YOLOv8, and subsequent versions to explore each version's contributions to enhancing speed, detection accuracy, and computational efficiency in real-time object detection. Additionally, this study reviews the alternative versions derived from YOLO architectural advancements of YOLO-NAS, YOLO-X, YOLO-R, DAMO-YOLO, and Gold-YOLO. Moreover, the study highlights the transformative impact of YOLO models across five critical application areas: autonomous vehicles and traffic safety, healthcare and medical imaging, industrial manufacturing, surveillance and security, and agriculture. By detailing the incremental technological advancements in subsequent YOLO versions, this review chronicles the evolution of YOLO, and discusses the challenges and limitations in each of the earlier versions. The evolution signifies a path towards integrating
Hypernetworks, or hypernets for short, are neural networks that generate weights for another neural network, known as the target network. They have emerged as a powerful deep learning technique that allows for greater flexibility, adaptability, dynamism, faster training, information sharing, and model compression. Hypernets have shown promising results in a variety of deep learning problems, including continual learning, causal inference, transfer learning, weight pruning, uncertainty quantification, zero-shot learning, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. Despite their success across different problem settings, there is currently no comprehensive review available to inform researchers about the latest developments and to assist in utilizing hypernets. To fill this gap, we review the progress in hypernets. We present an illustrative example of training deep neural networks using hypernets and propose categorizing hypernets based on five design criteria: inputs, outputs, variability of inputs and outputs, and the architecture of hypernets. We also review applications of hypernets across different deep learning problem settings, followed by a discussion of general