近年来，苏格兰的参与式预算（PB）已从少数社区主导的过程中成长为当地和国家政府支持的运动。这是苏格兰政府与苏格兰地方当局（COSLA）之间的协议介绍，至少1％的地方当局预算将受到PB。这个正在进行的研究论文探讨了从苏格兰的32名地方当局“缩放”或“主流”出现的挑战。主要目标是评估当地的管理局使用数字平台领事，这适用自然语言处理（NLP）来解决这些挑战。该项目采用采访，对PB流程的观察以及数字平台数据的分析来采用定性纵向设计。采用主题分析来捕捉出现的主要问题和主题。然后纵向分析探讨这些随着时间的推移方式。 32个直播学习网站的潜力提供了一个独特的机会，探索离散的政治和社会背景，这些环境变化，允许更深层次的潜水到可能存在的挑战和问题，更广泛的横断面研究会错过。初始结果表明，可以使用NLP技术来解决缩放的问题和挑战，在先前的受控用案例的评估中，已显示提高公民参与的有效性。

当今的冲突变得越来越复杂，流畅和分散，通常涉及许多具有多重且经常发散利益的国家和国际参与者。随着调解员努力使冲突动态有理由，例如冲突政党的范围和政治立场的演变，相关与较少相关的参与者在和平建立和认同之间的区别或身份证明，这一发展构成了冲突调解的重大挑战。关键冲突问题及其相互依存。国际和平努力似乎不足以成功应对这些挑战。尽管技术已经在与冲突相关的领域进行了试验和使用，例如预测冲突或信息收集，但对技术如何促进冲突调解的关注较少。该案例研究有助于有关在冲突调解过程中使用最先进的机器学习技术和技术的新兴研究。本研究使用也门和平谈判中的对话成绩单，通过为他们提供知识管理，提取和冲突分析的工具来有效地支持中介团队。除了说明冲突调解中的机器学习工具的潜力外，本文还强调了跨学科和参与性的共同创造方法对开发上下文敏感和有针对性的工具的重要性，并确保有意义和负责任的实施。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

We present the interpretable meta neural ordinary differential equation (iMODE) method to rapidly learn generalizable (i.e., not parameter-specific) dynamics from trajectories of multiple dynamical systems that vary in their physical parameters. The iMODE method learns meta-knowledge, the functional variations of the force field of dynamical system instances without knowing the physical parameters, by adopting a bi-level optimization framework: an outer level capturing the common force field form among studied dynamical system instances and an inner level adapting to individual system instances. A priori physical knowledge can be conveniently embedded in the neural network architecture as inductive bias, such as conservative force field and Euclidean symmetry. With the learned meta-knowledge, iMODE can model an unseen system within seconds, and inversely reveal knowledge on the physical parameters of a system, or as a Neural Gauge to "measure" the physical parameters of an unseen system with observed trajectories. We test the validity of the iMODE method on bistable, double pendulum, Van der Pol, Slinky, and reaction-diffusion systems.

We propose Hierarchical ProtoPNet: an interpretable network that explains its reasoning process by considering the hierarchical relationship between classes. Different from previous methods that explain their reasoning process by dissecting the input image and finding the prototypical parts responsible for the classification, we propose to explain the reasoning process for video action classification by dissecting the input video frames on multiple levels of the class hierarchy. The explanations leverage the hierarchy to deal with uncertainty, akin to human reasoning: When we observe water and human activity, but no definitive action it can be recognized as the water sports parent class. Only after observing a person swimming can we definitively refine it to the swimming action. Experiments on ActivityNet and UCF-101 show performance improvements while providing multi-level explanations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of deep learning bears promise for drug discovery and chemical biology, $\textit{e.g.}$, to predict protein structure and molecular bioactivity, plan organic synthesis, and design molecules $\textit{de novo}$. While most of the deep learning efforts in drug discovery have focused on ligand-based approaches, structure-based drug discovery has the potential to tackle unsolved challenges, such as affinity prediction for unexplored protein targets, binding-mechanism elucidation, and the rationalization of related chemical kinetic properties. Advances in deep learning methodologies and the availability of accurate predictions for protein tertiary structure advocate for a $\textit{renaissance}$ in structure-based approaches for drug discovery guided by AI. This review summarizes the most prominent algorithmic concepts in structure-based deep learning for drug discovery, and forecasts opportunities, applications, and challenges ahead.

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

Prevailing methods for assessing and comparing generative AIs incentivize responses that serve a hypothetical representative individual. Evaluating models in these terms presumes homogeneous preferences across the population and engenders selection of agglomerative AIs, which fail to represent the diverse range of interests across individuals. We propose an alternative evaluation method that instead prioritizes inclusive AIs, which provably retain the requisite knowledge not only for subsequent response customization to particular segments of the population but also for utility-maximizing decisions.

We study the problem of combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning. Recently introduced frameworks for Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (PNL), such as DeepProbLog, perform exponential-time exact inference, limiting the scalability of PNL solutions. We introduce Approximate Neurosymbolic Inference (A-NeSI): a new framework for PNL that uses neural networks for scalable approximate inference. A-NeSI 1) performs approximate inference in polynomial time without changing the semantics of probabilistic logics; 2) is trained using data generated by the background knowledge; 3) can generate symbolic explanations of predictions; and 4) can guarantee the satisfaction of logical constraints at test time, which is vital in safety-critical applications. Our experiments show that A-NeSI is the first end-to-end method to scale the Multi-digit MNISTAdd benchmark to sums of 15 MNIST digits, up from 4 in competing systems. Finally, our experiments show that A-NeSI achieves explainability and safety without a penalty in performance.

Generic Object Tracking (GOT) is the problem of tracking target objects, specified by bounding boxes in the first frame of a video. While the task has received much attention in the last decades, researchers have almost exclusively focused on the single object setting. Multi-object GOT benefits from a wider applicability, rendering it more attractive in real-world applications. We attribute the lack of research interest into this problem to the absence of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale GOT benchmark, LaGOT, containing multiple annotated target objects per sequence. Our benchmark allows researchers to tackle key remaining challenges in GOT, aiming to increase robustness and reduce computation through joint tracking of multiple objects simultaneously. Furthermore, we propose a Transformer-based GOT tracker TaMOS capable of joint processing of multiple objects through shared computation. TaMOs achieves a 4x faster run-time in case of 10 concurrent objects compared to tracking each object independently and outperforms existing single object trackers on our new benchmark. Finally, TaMOs achieves highly competitive results on single-object GOT datasets, setting a new state-of-the-art on TrackingNet with a success rate AUC of 84.4%. Our benchmark, code, and trained models will be made publicly available.