Beyond surveillance: privacy, ethics, and regulations in face recognition technology.

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has emerged as a powerful tool for public governance and security, but its rapid adoption has also raised significant concerns about privacy, civil liberties, and ethical implications. This paper critically examines the current rules and policies governing FRT, highlighting the tensions between state and corporate interests on one hand, and individual rights and ethical considerations on the other. The study also investigates international legal frameworks aimed at protecting individual rights and privacy, arguing that current legislative measures often fall short of robust scholarly standards and international human rights norms.

Algorithmic discrimination: examining its types and regulatory measures with emphasis on US legal practices.

Introduction: Algorithmic decision-making systems are widely used in various sectors, including criminal justice, employment, and education. While these systems are celebrated for their potential to enhance efficiency and objectivity, they also pose risks of perpetuating and amplifying societal biases and discrimination. This paper aims to provide an indepth analysis of the types of algorithmic discrimination, exploring both the challenges and potential solutions.

Unlabeled data selection for active learning in image classification.

Active Learning has emerged as a viable solution for addressing the challenge of labeling extensive amounts of data in data-intensive applications such as computer vision and neural machine translation. The main objective of Active Learning is to automatically identify a subset of unlabeled data samples for annotation. This identification process is based on an acquisition function that assesses the value of each sample for model training.

Value of Pretreatment Inflammation-nutrition Score to Predict Non-response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer.

Objective: To investigate the value of pretreatment inflammatory-nutritional biomarkers in predicting the pathological response of locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (nCT).

Methods: This retrospective study included eligible participants who underwent nCT followed by radical surgery. Pretreatment inflammatory nutritional biomarkers were calculated within one week prior to nCT.

Digital intervention in improving the outcomes of mental health among LGBTQ+ youth: a systematic review.

LGBTQ+ youth experience mental health disparities and higher rates of mental disorders due to barriers to accessing care, including insufficient services and the anticipated stigma of revealing their identities. This systematic review incorporated 15 empirical studies on digital interventions' impact on LGBTQ+ youth mental health, examining their potential to address these inequities. This study innovatively categorized existing digital interventions into four streams: Structured Formal (telehealth, online programs), Structured Informal (serious games), Unstructured Formal (mobile applications), and Unstructured Informal (social media).

The Promises and Pitfalls of Virtual Reality.

Increasingly, Virtual Reality technologies are finding a place in psychology and behavioral neuroscience labs. Immersing participants in virtual worlds enables researchers to investigate empirical questions in realistic or imaginary environments while measuring a wide range of behavioral responses, without sacrificing experimental control. In this chapter, we aim to provide a balanced appraisal of VR research methods.

Launching Your VR Neuroscience Laboratory.

The proliferation and refinement of affordable virtual reality (VR) technologies and wearable sensors have opened new frontiers in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. This chapter offers a broad overview of VR for anyone interested in leveraging it as a research tool. In the first section, it examines the fundamental functionalities of VR and outlines important considerations that inform the development of immersive content that stimulates the senses.

Phonological Underspecification: An Explanation for How a Rake Can Become Awake.

Neural markers, such as the mismatch negativity (MMN), have been used to examine the phonological underspecification of English feature contrasts using the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model. However, neural indices have not been examined within the approximant phoneme class, even though there is evidence suggesting processing asymmetries between liquid (e.g.

Event related spectral perturbations of gesture congruity: Visuospatial resources are recruited for multimodal discourse comprehension.

Here we examine the role of visuospatial working memory (WM) during the comprehension of multimodal discourse with co-speech iconic gestures. EEG was recorded as healthy adults encoded either a sequence of one (low load) or four (high load) dot locations on a grid and rehearsed them until a free recall response was collected later in the trial. During the rehearsal period of the WM task, participants observed videos of a speaker describing objects in which half of the trials included semantically related co-speech gestures (congruent), and the other half included semantically unrelated gestures (incongruent).

Evidence for [Coronal] Underspecification in Typical and Atypical Phonological Development.

The Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) theory predicts that [coronal] is the language universal default place of articulation for phonemes. This assumption has been consistently supported with adult behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data; however, this underspecification claim has not been tested in developmental populations. The purpose of this study was to determine whether children demonstrate [coronal] underspecification patterns similar to those of adults.

Multi-omics analysis reveals the genetics and immune landscape of dexamethasone responsive genes in cancer microenvironment.

Background: Glucocorticoids, such as dexamethasone, are widely used for prevent vomiting and allergic reactions associated with cancer immunotherapy and chemotherapy. Although such use is reported to reduce the immunotherapy's efficacy, nevertheless, how dexamethasone associates with specific immune cells, particularly inside the tumor microenvironment, still remains unclear.

Methods: We integrate multi-omics data, including transcriptome, mutation, copy number variation (CNV), and methylation, to explore the dexamethasone responsive genes.

Verbal working memory and co-speech gesture processing.

Multimodal discourse requires an assembly of cognitive processes that are uniquely recruited for language comprehension in social contexts. In this study, we investigated the role of verbal working memory for the online integration of speech and iconic gestures. Participants memorized and rehearsed a series of auditorily presented digits in low (one digit) or high (four digits) memory load conditions.

Chinese herbal medicine SS-1 inhibits T cell activation and abrogates T responses in Sjögren's syndrome.

Background/purpose: Sjögren's syndrome (SS) is an autoimmune disease and its conventional treatment has exhibited limited therapeutic efficacy. Traditional Chinese medicine has been demonstrated to ameliorate the sicca symptoms of SS by decreasing the level of T1 and T2 cytokines and increasing salivary flow rate. A newly designed traditional Chinese medicine, SS-1, showed improved efficacy in alleviating the dryness symptoms of SS patients in the National Taiwan SS cohort investigation.

Determination of the quality of stripe-marked and cracked eggs during storage.

Objective: Stripe marks, which occasionally occur on the shell, do not cause breakage to the shell and shell membranes of eggs. This study investigated the quality of intact eggs (IEs), minor stripe-marked eggs (MEs), severe stripe-marked eggs (SEs), and cracked eggs (CEs) during 3-week storage at 25°C.

Methods: Shell eggs were collected the day after being laid and were washed.

Iconic Gestures Facilitate Discourse Comprehension in Individuals With Superior Immediate Memory for Body Configurations.

To understand a speaker's gestures, people may draw on kinesthetic working memory (KWM)-a system for temporarily remembering body movements. The present study explored whether sensitivity to gesture meaning was related to differences in KWM capacity. KWM was evaluated through sequences of novel movements that participants viewed and reproduced with their own bodies.

Neural correlates of mathematical problem solving.

This study explores electroencephalography (EEG) brain dynamics associated with mathematical problem solving. EEG and solution latencies (SLs) were recorded as 11 neurologically healthy volunteers worked on intellectually challenging math puzzles that involved combining four single-digit numbers through basic arithmetic operators (addition, subtraction, division, multiplication) to create an arithmetic expression equaling 24. Estimates of EEG spectral power were computed in three frequency bands - θ (4-7 Hz), α (8-13 Hz) and β (14-30 Hz) - over a widely distributed montage of scalp electrode sites.

Resting state and task-related brain dynamics supporting insight.

Problems can be solved in a variety of ways. One might systematically evaluate a known space of possible solutions until the right one is found. Alternatively, it may prove necessary to enlarge or restructure the expected problem space - so called "thinking outside the box.

Co-speech iconic gestures and visuo-spatial working memory.

Three experiments tested the role of verbal versus visuo-spatial working memory in the comprehension of co-speech iconic gestures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed congruent discourse primes in which the speaker's gestures matched the information conveyed by his speech, and incongruent ones in which the semantic content of the speaker's gestures diverged from that in his speech. Discourse primes were followed by picture probes that participants judged as being either related or unrelated to the preceding clip.

A psychometric measure of working memory capacity for configured body movement.

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The movement span task assesses individuals' ability to remember and reproduce meaningless configurations of the body.

Brain dynamics of mathematical problem solving.

The purpose of this study is to examine brain activities of participants solving mental math problems. The research investigated how problem difficulty affected the subjects' responses and electroencephalogram (EEG) in different brain regions. In general, it was found that solution latencies (SL) to the math problems increased with difficulty.

Are depictive gestures like pictures? commonalities and differences in semantic processing.

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent and incongruent contexts. Gestures were presented either dynamically in short, soundless video-clips, or statically as freeze frames extracted from gesture videos.

Hydrodynamic behaviors in fermentative hydrogen bioreactors by pressure fluctuation analysis.

Three bioreactor configurations were employed in these investigations, which consisted of working volumes of 10, 1.2 and 1.2L.

Gestures modulate speech processing early in utterances.

Electroencephalogram was recorded as healthy adults viewed short videos of spontaneous discourse in which a speaker used depictive gestures to complement information expressed through speech. Event-related potentials were computed time-locked to content words in the speech stream and to subsequent related and unrelated picture probes. Gestures modulated event-related potentials to content words co-timed with the first gesture in a discourse segment, relative to the same words presented with static freeze frames of the speaker.

Iconic gestures prime related concepts: an ERP study.

To assess priming by iconic gestures, we recorded EEG (at 29 scalp sites) in two experiments while adults watched short, soundless videos of spontaneously produced, cospeech iconic gestures followed by related or unrelated probe words. In Experiment 1, participants classified the relatedness between gestures and words. In Experiment 2, they attended to stimuli, and performed an incidental recognition memory test on words presented during the EEG recording session.