The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such "adaptive habitability" through astro-ecological models. We study the interplay between temperature adaptation and environmental fluctuations, particularly those induced by solar activity and orbital dynamics. We present a simplified ecological-evolutionary model to investigate the limits of life's adaptability on a planetary scale. By incorporating complexities such as multiple niches, migration, species interactions, and realistic temperature variations, we demonstrate the potential for adaptive habitability in the face of both gradual and abrupt environmental changes. Through simulations encompassing monotonic, periodic, and secular dynamical evolution-induced temperature profiles, we identify critical thresholds for survival and extinction, highlighting the importance of phenotypic variance and dispersal rates in adapting to varying environmental conditions. These findings underscore the significance of considering temporal variations in assessin
The 'Problematic Paper Screener' (PPS, WCRI'22, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.04895) flagged 12k+ questionable articles featuring tortured phrases, such as 'glucose bigotry' instead of 'glucose intolerance.' It daily screens the literature for 'fingerprints' from a list of 4k tortured phrases known to reflect nonsensical paraphrasing with synonyms. We identified a concentration of 'tortured articles' in IEEE conferences and reported our concerns in November 2022 (https://retractionwatch.com/?p=127299). This WCRI submission unveils 'tortured conference series': questionable articles that keep being accepted in successive conference editions.
In March 2020, college campuses underwent a sudden transformation to online learning due to the COVID-19 outbreak. To understand the impact of COVID-19 on students' expectations, this study conducted a three-year survey from ten core courses within the Project Management Center for Excellence at the University of Maryland. The study involved two main steps: 1) a statistical analysis to evaluate students' expectations regarding "student," "class," "instructor," and "effort;" and 2) a lexical salience-valence analysis (LSVA) through the lens of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to show the changes of students' expectations. The results revealed that students' overall evaluations maintained relatively consistent amid the COVID-19 teaching period. However, there were significant shifts of the student expectations toward Cognitive, Social and Teaching Presence course elements based on LSVA results. Also, clear differences emerged between under-graduates and graduates in their expectations and preferences in course design and delivery. These insights provide practical recommendations for course instructors in designing effective online courses.
Generating images with both photorealism and multiview 3D consistency is crucial for 3D-aware GANs, yet existing methods struggle to achieve them simultaneously. Improving the photorealism via CNN-based 2D super-resolution can break the strict 3D consistency, while keeping the 3D consistency by learning high-resolution 3D representations for direct rendering often compromises image quality. In this paper, we propose a novel learning strategy, namely 3D-to-2D imitation, which enables a 3D-aware GAN to generate high-quality images while maintaining their strict 3D consistency, by letting the images synthesized by the generator's 3D rendering branch to mimic those generated by its 2D super-resolution branch. We also introduce 3D-aware convolutions into the generator for better 3D representation learning, which further improves the image generation quality. With the above strategies, our method reaches FID scores of 5.4 and 4.3 on FFHQ and AFHQ-v2 Cats, respectively, at 512x512 resolution, largely outperforming existing 3D-aware GANs using direct 3D rendering and coming very close to the previous state-of-the-art method that leverages 2D super-resolution. Project website: https://seanc
An innovation ecosystem is a multi-stakeholder environment, where different stakeholders interact to solve complex socio-technical challenges. We explored how stakeholders use digital tools, human resources, and their combination to gather information and make decisions in innovation ecosystems. To comprehensively understand stakeholders' motivations, information needs and practices, we conducted a three-part interview study across five stakeholder groups (N=13) using an interactive digital dashboard. We found that stakeholders were primarily motivated to participate in innovation ecosystems by the potential social impact of their contributions. We also found that stakeholders used digital tools to seek "high-level" information to scaffold initial decision-making efforts but ultimately relied on contextual information provided by human networks to enact final decisions. Therefore, people, not digital tools, appear to be the key source of information in these ecosystems. Guided by our findings, we explored how technology might nevertheless enhance stakeholders' decision-making efforts and enable robust and equitable innovation ecosystems.
Frameworks such as SPACE, DevEx, and DORA established that developer productivity is inherently multidimensional, but left practitioners with a practical question: what should we measure, and how should we use it to improve? This paper introduces Engineering Thrive (EngThrive), a measurement and improvement system developed and deployed across Microsoft's engineering organization. EngThrive organizes productivity around three dimensions - Speed, Ease, and Quality - with Thriving as a guardrail to ensure developer wellbeing improves alongside performance. Within each dimension, outcome-oriented North Star metrics are paired with diagnostic submetrics, combining system telemetry with developer surveys to provide both scale and context. We describe the design principles that guide metric selection, including an approach in which well-chosen metrics align "gaming" behavior with genuine improvement. We also outline the data platform, survey program, and dashboard ecosystem required to operationalize this approach in practice, and present case studies demonstrating how outcome-oriented measurement enables sustained, system-level improvements. Finally, we show that EngThrive functions as
The heterogeneity in the organization of software engineering (SE) research historically exists, i.e., funded research model and hands-on model, which makes software engineering become a thriving interdisciplinary field in the last 50 years. However, the funded research model is becoming dominant in SE research recently, indicating such heterogeneity has been seriously and systematically threatened. In this essay, we first explain why the heterogeneity is needed in the organization of SE research, then present the current trend of SE research nowadays, as well as the consequences and potential futures. The choice is at our hands, and we urge our community to seriously consider maintaining the heterogeneity in the organization of software engineering research.
A habitat that is moving due to environmental change may result in tipping to extinction if the rate at which it moves is too great. We use a scalar reaction-diffusion equation with a non-autonomous reaction term, representing a spatially localized habitat moving from one asymptotic location to another, as a context for studying this phenomenon. The movement is characterized by displacement $d$ and rate parameter $r$. The system admits three steady states in both asymptotic habitat locations: a stable extinction state $u_0^*=0$, an unstable pulse (so-called edge state) $u_1^*(x)>0$, which gives rise to the Allee effect, and a stable pulse (populated base state) $u_2^*(x)>u_1^*(x)$, which corresponds to a thriving population at its carrying capacity. Numerical simulations for a specific model identify a critical displacement $d^*$ and, for $d > d^*$, demonstrate the existence of a \textit{critical rate} $r_c(d)$ at which rate-induced tipping occurs: for $r> r_c$ an initially thriving population becomes extinct due to habitat movement being too rapid. We provide analytical results for two limiting cases. For $r\ll 1$, solutions track the moving base state with error $O(r)
Processing-In-Memory (PIM) has emerged as a promising technology for accelerating machine learning (ML) workloads. Specifically, non-volatile memory-based PIM architectures have enabled effective ML acceleration due to their ability to perform energy-efficient matrix-vector multiplication operations. However, these devices suffer from non-idealities such as thermal noise. This noise alters the stored values in the memory cells which correspond to actual model weights, compromising the inference accuracy. In this work, we introduce ThRIve, a noise-aware training methodology that leverages low-rank adaptation to enable thermally robust inference on heterogeneous PIM architectures. ThRIve selectively stores these low-rank noise-aware parameters on a hardware that is less susceptible to thermal noise, enabling robustness against temperature-induced noise variations. ThRIve mitigates the effects of thermal-noise and prevent the drop in inference accuracy across the entire operating temperature range. Experimental results demonstrate that ThRIve-enabled architectures maintain consistent inference accuracy, with the mean accuracy staying within 2% of the ideal (i.e., noise-free) accuracy,
TikTok has gradually become one of the most pervasive social media platforms in our daily lives. While much can be said about the merits of platforms such as TikTok, there is a different kind of attention paid towards the political affect of social media today compared to its impact on other aspects of modern networked reality. I explored how users on TikTok discussed the crisis in Palestine that worsened in 2023. Using network analysis, I situate keywords representing the conflict and categorize them thematically based on a coding schema derived from politically and ideologically differentiable stances. I conclude that activism and propaganda are contending amongst themselves in the thriving space afforded by TikTok today.
Thirty years after the first observation of on-shell top quarks the investigation of the heaviest elementary particle remains a thriving field of basic research, as was illustrated by the 18th edition of the annual Workshop on Top-Quark Physics hosted by Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea. Observing new scattering processses involving top quarks, precision measurements of top-quark properties, and the usage of top quarks as a means of exploration remain key elements of research, but are most recently complemented by the observation of even more subtle effects based on the application of refined experimental techniques. Based on the selection made in the experimental summary talk, this article highlights the most striking experimental results presented at the conference.
Conversational AI (CAI) systems offer opportunities to scale service provision to unprecedented levels and governments and corporations are already beginning to deploy them across services. The economic argument is similar across domains: use CAI to automate the time-consuming conversations required for customer, client or patient support. Herein we draw on our work in dementia care to explore some of the challenges and opportunities for CAI, and how a new way of conceptualising these systems could help ensure essential aspects for human thriving are not lost in the process of automation.
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time, coordination is also core to effective disinformation, manipulation, and hate campaigns. This survey collects, categorizes, and critically discusses the body of work produced as a result of the growing interest on coordinated online behavior. We reconcile industry and academic definitions, propose a comprehensive framework to study coordinated online behavior, and review and critically discuss the existing detection and characterization methods. Our analysis identifies open challenges and promising directions of research, serving as a guide for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in understanding and addressing the complexities inherent to online coordination.
The Monte Carlo method is a thriving and mathematically beautiful numerical technique used extensively, nowadays, to deal with many demanding problems in diverse fields. Here, we present an iterative Monte Carlo algorithm to work out very general nonlinear second-order differential equations, with Dirichlet boundary conditions. An example of its usage is, also, reported.
The multi-modal perception methods are thriving in the autonomous driving field due to their better usage of complementary data from different sensors. Such methods depend on calibration and synchronization between sensors to get accurate environmental information. There have already been studies about space-alignment robustness in autonomous driving object detection process, however, the research for time-alignment is relatively few. As in reality experiments, LiDAR point clouds are more challenging for real-time data transfer, our study used historical frames of LiDAR to better align features when the LiDAR data lags exist. We designed a Timealign module to predict and combine LiDAR features with observation to tackle such time misalignment based on SOTA GraphBEV framework.
The intense debate about the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere has stimulated the study of methanogens adapted to terrestrial habitats that mimic Martian environments. We examinate the environmental conditions, energy sources and ecology of terrestrial methanogens thriving in deep crystalline fractures, sub-sea hypersaline lakes and subglacial water bodies considered as analogs of a hypothetical habitable Martian subsurface. We combine this information with recent data on the distribution of buried water or ice and radiogenic elements on Mars and with models of the subsurface thermal regime of this planet to identify a 4.3-8.8 km-deep regolith habitat at the mid-latitude location of Acidalia Planitia, that might fit the requirements for hosting putative Martian methanogens analogous to the methanogenic families Methanosarcinaceae and Methanomicrobiaceae.
Charging station availability is crucial for a thriving electric vehicle market. Due to budget constraints, locating these stations usually proceeds in phases, which calls for careful consideration of the (random) charging demand growth throughout the planning horizon. This paper integrates user choice behavior into two-stage and multi-stage stochastic programming models for intracity charging station planning under demand uncertainty. We derive a second-order conic representation for the nonlinear, nonconvex formulation by taking advantage of the binary nature of location variables and propose subgradient inequalities to accelerate computation. Numerical results demonstrate the value of employing multi-stage models, particularly in scenarios of high demand fluctuations, increased demand dispersion, and high user sensitivity to the distance-to-recharge.
Rough sets (RS)proved a thriving realm with successes inn many fields of ML and AI. In this note, we expand RS to RM - rough mereology which provides a measurable degree of uncertainty to those areas.
Can the right requirements boost developer satisfaction and happiness? We believe they can. In keeping with this issue's theme, "Well-Being for Resilience: Developers Thrive," we discuss the connection between the three keywords, well-being, resilience, and thriving. How could requirements engineering foster these qualities? While there hasn't been much research on this topic, we see opportunities for future work. Let's initiate the discussion!
What happens when generative machine learning models are pretrained on web-scale datasets containing data generated by earlier models? Some prior work warns of "model collapse" as the web is overwhelmed by synthetic data; other work suggests the problem can be contained (i.e. collapse can be avoided) by managing how available data are used in pretraining. In this paper, we report experiments on three ways of using data (training-workflows), across three generative model task-settings (multivariate Gaussian estimation, kernel density estimation, and language-model fine-tuning) to further confirm the possibility of containment: (a) we confirm that the training-workflow of {\it replacing} all real data by successive generations of purely synthetic data indeed suffers model collapse in all task-settings studied; (b) we consider the training-workflow of {\it accumulating} synthetic data alongside real data and training on all data combined and confirming that, although the proportion of real data eventually becomes zero, models remain stable and their test losses do not diverge under this training-workflow; (c) we consider a training-workflow where real and synthetic data accumulate tog