Grounded Task Prioritization with Context-Aware Sequential Ranking

People rely on task management applications and digital assistants to capture and track their tasks, and help with executing them. The burden of organizing and scheduling time for tasks continues to reside with users of these systems, despite the high cognitive load associated with these activities. Users stand to benefit greatly from a task management system capable of prioritizing their pending tasks, thus saving them time and effort. In this article, we make three main contributions. First, we propose the problem of task prioritization, formulating it as a ranking over a user’s pending tasks given a history of previous interactions with a task management system. Second, we perform an extensive analysis on the large-scale anonymized, de-identified logs of a popular task management application, deriving a dataset of grounded, real-world tasks from which to learn and evaluate our proposed system. We also identify patterns in how people record tasks as complete, which vary consistently with the nature of the task. Third, we propose a novel contextual deep learning solution capable of performing personalized task prioritization. In a battery of tests, we show that this approach outperforms several operational baselines and other sequential ranking models from previous work. Our findings have implications for understanding the ways people prioritize and manage tasks with digital tools, and in the design of support for users of task management applications.

Inflated 3D ConvNet context analysis for violence detection

According to the Wall Street Journal, one billion surveillance cameras will be deployed around the world by 2021. This amount of information can be hardly managed by humans. Using a Inflated 3D ConvNet as backbone, this paper introduces a novel automatic violence detection approach that outperforms state-of-the-art existing proposals. Most of those proposals consider a pre-processing step to only focus on some regions of interest in the scene, i.e., those actually containing a human subject. In this regard, this paper also reports the results of an extensive analysis on whether and how the context can affect or not the adopted classifier performance. The experiments show that context-free footage yields substantial deterioration of the classifier performance (2% to 5%) on publicly available datasets. However, they also demonstrate that performance stabilizes in context-free settings, no matter the level of context restriction applied. Finally, a cross-dataset experiment investigates the generalizability of results obtained in a single-collection experiment (same dataset used for training and testing) to cross-collection settings (different datasets used for training and testing).

Concept MSBS GROT Rifle Upper Receiver Shield to Protect Against Foreign Objects

This paper presents a concept for shielding the MSBS (Modular Firearms System) Grot rifle upper receiver against foreign objects. The concept guidelines involve feedback from Grot operators concerning the regular operation of the rifle plus an extensive analysis of desktop patent research into foreign debris shields (or dust shields) for protection of the upper receiver interior in firearms. The completed patent desktop research included solutions used with automatic, semi-automatic and non-automatic firearms. The research work drove the formulation of the requirements for an upper receiver dust shield for the 5.56 mm calibre MSBS Grot rifle as part of the ongoing improvement process. This paper presents three concepts of the carrier charging handle assembly dust shield (for the protection of the upper receiver against foreign objects) for the MSBS-5.56 rifle system. The concepts described vary in terms of the level of structural complexity of the dust shield, and the extent of the modifications required to the upper receiver of the rifle. With test units of the upper receiver dust shield manufactured and comparative tests completed on the three concepts, the version selected should be the one which improves the protection of the rifle internals from foreign objects found in the local environment, including sand, clay, silt, and mud, the latter being an aqueous suspension of these particles.

PERKEMBANGAN ILMU SYARAH HADITH: SUATU TELAAH RINGKAS

This paper discusses the development of science of hadith commentary since early century of Hijrah. It traces its historical development and instrumental role in expanding the dynamic understanding of hadith and its science. The paper attempts to illustrate the principle and discipline of usul al-sharh as set forth in the major works of hadith commentary underlying its principle, context and method. The discussion focusses on the method and approaches (ittijahat al-sharh) of traditionalist in interpreting and commenting the texts. The study is based on qualitative method in the form of library research, focusing on content analysis. The sources of documentation was primarily derived from traditional and classical works of hadith and contemporary references that provide extensive analysis of hadith commentary. The study found that the science of hadith commentary was originated in the classical and medieval hadith works that extensively articulated its rigorous and underlying principle. This tradition was continued in modern context in the highly authoritative works of hadith commentary that brought forth modern and contextual approaches in analyzing hadith texts.

Piast castle on Ostrów Tumski island in Wrocław

The article briefly presents the author’s hypothesis of architectural changes in the ducal castle on Ostrów Tumski in Wrocław, which was developed based on the results of architectural studies of the relics of the castle walls uncovered in excavations in 2011–2012 and 2014, in combination with the results of laboratory tests such as petrographic and mineralogical analysis of mortars, 14C analysis of charcoal contained in mortars and extensive analysis of brick dimensions using statistical methods. As a result, a chronological stratification into eight phases from the 12th to 15th centuries is proposed. Absolute dating was addressed through radiocarbon analyses and historical context.

CSR in Management Sciences: Is It “a Road to Nowhere”?

Over the years, the idea of corporate social responsibility has attracted the interest both of practitioners and researchers. While a discourse has occurred in the context of the meaning of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), there is no extensive analysis of the latest contributions. To address this gap, three objectives have been formulated for the purpose of this paper: to analyse development trends in CSR definitions, to assess the applicability of scientific efforts in the above-mentioned area and to demonstrate future research opportunities and threats based on the state-of-the-art in CSR. An organized literature review and bibliometric methods have been proposed based on 55 articles published in the “Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Journal”, the top ranked periodical with the highest Impact Factor, from its beginnings to January 2021. This research provides a clear overview of the recent CSR trends that are present in the literature, by pinpointing those works that refer to significant characteristics and indicate future trajectories of CSR in a managerial practical context, particularly important for the effectiveness of future CSR-oriented organizational activities. This paper summarises the existing CSR-related knowledge and constitutes the first attempt to investigate the process of the creation and development of the corporate social responsibility concept from its origins to its contemporary multidimensionality.

Interpreting Mass Spectra Differing from Their Peptide Models by Several Modifications

Background: In proteomics, mass spectra representing peptides carrying multiple unknown modifications are particularly difficult to interpret. This issue results in a large number of unidentified spectra.Methods: We developed SpecGlob, a dynamic programming algorithm that aligns pairs of spectra – each pair given by a Peptide-Spectrum Match (PSM) – provided by any Open Modification Search (OMS) method. For each PSM, SpecGlob computes the best alignment according to a given score system, interpreting the mass delta within the PSM as one or several unspecified modification(s). All the alignments are provided in a file, using a specific syntax. These alignments are then post-processed by an additional algorithm, which aims at interpreting the detected modifications.Results: Using a large collection of theoretical spectra generated from the human proteome, we demonstrate that running SpecGlob as a post-analysis of an OMS method can significantly increase the number of correctly interpreted spectra, since SpecGlob is able to infer several, and possibly many, modifications. The post-processing algorithm is able to interpret unambiguously most of the modifications detected by SpecGlob in PSMs. In addition, we performed an extensive analysis to provide insight into the potential reasons for incomplete or erroneous interpretations that may remain after alignments of PSMs.Conclusion: SpecGlob is able to correctly align spectra that differ by one or more modification(s) without any a priori. Since SpecGlob explores all possible alignments that may explain the mass delta within a PSM, it reduces interpretation errors generated by incorrect assumptions about the modifications present in the sample or the number and the specificity of modifications carried by peptides. Our results demonstrate that SpecGlob should be relevant to align experimental spectra, even if this consists in a more challenging task.

Epistemic Injustice

<p>“Epistemic injustice” is a fairly new concept in philosophy, which, loosely speaking, describes a kind of injustice that occurs at the intersection of structures of the social world and knowledge. While the concept was first put forward in the 1990’s, the most significant publication on the topic is Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, which was published in 2007. Since then, there has been something of an explosion of literature on the topic of epistemic injustice. However, the concept of epistemic injustice is one that is poorly understood. While Epistemic Injustice offers extensive analysis of some aspects of epistemic injustice, it does a poor job of explaining, overall, what epistemic injustice actually is, limiting most of that explanation to a small section in the introduction of the book. The way that epistemic injustice is presented in this section is highly ambiguous, with key terms being loosely defined (if at all), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of something being an epistemic injustice are left unclear. This remains unresolved in the literature beyond Fricker’s account: while there has been some progression in how we think about epistemic injustice beyond what Fricker’s work provides us with, there has been a general failure to adequately recognize and address the ambiguities of the Frickerian account of epistemic injustice. In this thesis, I aim to show that, despite superficial impressions to the contrary, the Frickerian account is fundamentally ambiguous and incomplete. Moreover, later attempts to address these issues by subsequent theorists have failed. This project, however, is not in vain. I conclude by proposing a new account of epistemic injustice that overcomes these problems with the Frickerian account, offering a way of understanding epistemic injustice that is both philosophically satisfying and practically useful.</p>

Epistemic Injustice

<p>“Epistemic injustice” is a fairly new concept in philosophy, which, loosely speaking, describes a kind of injustice that occurs at the intersection of structures of the social world and knowledge. While the concept was first put forward in the 1990’s, the most significant publication on the topic is Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, which was published in 2007. Since then, there has been something of an explosion of literature on the topic of epistemic injustice. However, the concept of epistemic injustice is one that is poorly understood. While Epistemic Injustice offers extensive analysis of some aspects of epistemic injustice, it does a poor job of explaining, overall, what epistemic injustice actually is, limiting most of that explanation to a small section in the introduction of the book. The way that epistemic injustice is presented in this section is highly ambiguous, with key terms being loosely defined (if at all), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of something being an epistemic injustice are left unclear. This remains unresolved in the literature beyond Fricker’s account: while there has been some progression in how we think about epistemic injustice beyond what Fricker’s work provides us with, there has been a general failure to adequately recognize and address the ambiguities of the Frickerian account of epistemic injustice. In this thesis, I aim to show that, despite superficial impressions to the contrary, the Frickerian account is fundamentally ambiguous and incomplete. Moreover, later attempts to address these issues by subsequent theorists have failed. This project, however, is not in vain. I conclude by proposing a new account of epistemic injustice that overcomes these problems with the Frickerian account, offering a way of understanding epistemic injustice that is both philosophically satisfying and practically useful.</p>

Data Analysis and Visualization Tools for GeoHumanities

This review paper's aim is to assess some of the digital tools available to the social science and GeoHumanities scholarsand evaluate to what degree these digital tools can support investigation of varioussocial science and humanities questions and issues via visualizationtechniques. To this end, after an extensive analysis of the existing software packages, three software were identified and evaluated.&nbsp;