Since 2012, tetrodotoxin (TTX) has been found in seafoods such as bivalve mollusks in temperate European waters. TTX contamination leads to food safety risks and economic losses, making early prediction of TTX contamination vital to the food industry and competent authorities. Recent studies have pointed to shallow habitats and water temperature as main drivers to TTX contamination in bivalve mollusks. However, the temporal relationships between abiotic factors, biotic factors, and TTX contamination remain unexplored. We have developed an explainable, deep learning-based model to predict TTX contamination in the Dutch Zeeland estuary. Inputs for the model were meteorological and hydrological features; output was the presence or absence of TTX contamination. Results showed that the time of sunrise, time of sunset, global radiation, water temperature, and chloride concentration contributed most to TTX contamination. Thus, the effective number of sun hours, represented by day length and global radiation, was an important driver for tetrodotoxin contamination in bivalve mollusks. To conclude, our explainable deep learning model identified the aforementioned environmental factors (number of sun hours, global radiation, water temperature, and water chloride concentration) to be associated with tetrodotoxin contamination in bivalve mollusks; making our approach a valuable tool to mitigate marine toxin risks for food industry and competent authorities.

The 'keyword method' is an effective technique for learning vocabulary of a foreign language. It involves creating a memorable visual link between what a word means and what its pronunciation in a foreign language sounds like in the learner's native language. However, these memorable visual links remain implicit in the people's mind and are not easy to remember for a large set of words. To enhance the memorisation and recall of the vocabulary, we developed an application that combines the keyword method with text-to-image generators to externalise the memorable visual links into visuals. These visuals represent additional stimuli during the memorisation process. To explore the effectiveness of this approach we first run a pilot study to investigate how difficult it is to externalise the descriptions of mental visualisations of memorable links, by asking participants to write them down. We used these descriptions as prompts for text-to-image generator (DALL-E2) to convert them into images and asked participants to select their favourites. Next, we compared different text-to-image generators (DALL-E2, Midjourney, Stable and Latent Diffusion) to evaluate the perceived quality of the generated images by each. Despite heterogeneous results, participants mostly preferred images generated by DALL-E2, which was used also for the final study. In this study, we investigated whether providing such images enhances the retention of vocabulary being learned, compared to the keyword method only. Our results indicate that people did not encounter difficulties describing their visualisations of memorable links and that providing corresponding images significantly improves memory retention.

Current postprocessing techniques often require separate models for each lead time and disregard possible inter-ensemble relationships by either correcting each member separately or by employing distributional approaches. In this work, we tackle these shortcomings with an innovative, fast and accurate Transformer which postprocesses each ensemble member individually while allowing information exchange across variables, spatial dimensions and lead times by means of multi-headed self-attention. Weather foreacasts are postprocessed over 20 lead times simultaneously while including up to twelve meteorological predictors. We use the EUPPBench dataset for training which contains ensemble predictions from the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts' integrated forecasting system alongside corresponding observations. The work presented here is the first to postprocess the ten and one hundred-meter wind speed forecasts within this benchmark dataset, while also correcting the two-meter temperature. Our approach significantly improves the original forecasts, as measured by the CRPS, with 17.5 % for two-meter temperature, nearly 5% for ten-meter wind speed and 5.3 % for one hundred-meter wind speed, outperforming a classical member-by-member approach employed as competitive benchmark. Furthermore, being up to 75 times faster, it fulfills the demand for rapid operational weather forecasts in various downstream applications, including renewable energy forecasting.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly pivotal in various domains due the recent advancements in their performance capabilities. However, concerns persist regarding biases in LLMs, including gender, racial, and cultural biases derived from their training data. These biases raise critical questions about the ethical deployment and societal impact of LLMs. Acknowledging these concerns, this study investigates whether LLMs accurately reflect cross-cultural variations and similarities in moral perspectives. In assessing whether the chosen LLMs capture patterns of divergence and agreement on moral topics across cultures, three main methods are employed: (1) comparison of model-generated and survey-based moral score variances, (2) cluster alignment analysis to evaluate the correspondence between country clusters derived from model-generated moral scores and those derived from survey data, and (3) probing LLMs with direct comparative prompts. All three methods involve the use of systematic prompts and token pairs designed to assess how well LLMs understand and reflect cultural variations in moral attitudes. The findings of this study indicate overall variable and low performance in reflecting cross-cultural differences and similarities in moral values across the models tested, highlighting the necessity for improving models' accuracy in capturing these nuances effectively. The insights gained from this study aim to inform discussions on the ethical development and deployment of LLMs in global contexts, emphasizing the importance of mitigating biases and promoting fair representation across diverse cultural perspectives.

When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to novel constructions that have never been uttered before. Language models are powerful tools that create representations of language by incrementally predicting the next word in a sentence, and they have had a tremendous societal impact in recent years. The central research question of this thesis is whether these models possess a deep understanding of grammatical structure similar to that of humans. This question lies at the intersection of natural language processing, linguistics, and interpretability. To address it, we will develop novel interpretability techniques that enhance our understanding of the complex nature of large-scale language models. We approach our research question from three directions. First, we explore the presence of abstract linguistic information through structural priming, a key paradigm in psycholinguistics for uncovering grammatical structure in human language processing. Next, we examine various linguistic phenomena, such as adjective order and negative polarity items, and connect a model's comprehension of these phenomena to the data distribution on which it was trained. Finally, we introduce a controlled testbed for studying hierarchical structure in language models using various synthetic languages of increasing complexity and examine the role of feature interactions in modelling this structure. Our findings offer a detailed account of the grammatical knowledge embedded in language model representations and provide several directions for investigating fundamental linguistic questions using computational methods.

We present a novel Bayesian tomography approach for Coherence Imaging Spectroscopy (CIS) that simultaneously reconstructs ion temperature and velocity distributions in plasmas. Utilizing nonlinear Gaussian Process Tomography (GPT) with the Laplace approximation, we model prior distributions of log-emissivity, temperature, and velocity as Gaussian processes. This framework rigorously incorporates nonlinear effects and temperature dependencies often neglected in conventional CIS tomography, enabling robust reconstruction even in the region of high temperature and velocity. By applying a log-Gaussian process, we also address issues like velocity divergence in low-emissivity regions. Validated with phantom simulations and experimental data from the RT-1 device, our method reveals detailed spatial structures of ion temperature and toroidal ion flow characteristic of magnetospheric plasma. This work significantly broadens the scope of CIS tomography, offering a robust tool for plasma diagnostics and facilitating integration with complementary measurement techniques.

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports on how autonomous weapons used in Ukraine have transformed the battlefield on'Special Report.' A series of scandals has blighted Denmark's Armed Forces at a time when the Scandinavian country and member of the NATO alliance is building up its defenses, chiefly as a response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The events have so far led to the dismissal this week of Denmark's top military chief, Gen. Flemming Lentfer, who failed to inform the defense minister about an incident on the frigate HDMS Iver Huitfeldt last month while deployed to the Red Sea, where it was part of a U.S.-led operation to defend commercial shipping against Houthi militants. On Thursday, a technical error onboard its sister ship, the frigate HDMS Niels Juel that was docked in a Danish harbor, led to the air space and maritime route being briefly closed due to fears a navy missile might launch unintentionally -- but not explode -- and send fragments falling into the busy shipping lane between the islands of Zeeland, where Copenhagen sits, and Funen. The Iver Huitfeldt, which returned from its Red Sea mission on Thursday, ahead of schedule, reportedly experienced a half-hour long malfunction of its missile and radar systems during a drone attack on March 9, according to the specialist defense news website Olfi.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is the primary data type used for sea ice mapping due to its spatio-temporal coverage and the ability to detect sea ice independent of cloud and lighting conditions. Automatic sea ice detection using SAR imagery remains problematic due to the presence of ambiguous signal and noise within the image. Conversely, ice and water are easily distinguishable using multispectral imagery (MSI), but in the polar regions the ocean's surface is often occluded by cloud or the sun may not appear above the horizon for many months. To address some of these limitations, this paper proposes a new tool trained using concurrent multispectral Visible and SAR imagery for sea Ice Detection (ViSual\_IceD). ViSual\_IceD is a convolution neural network (CNN) that builds on the classic U-Net architecture by containing two parallel encoder stages, enabling the fusion and concatenation of MSI and SAR imagery containing different spatial resolutions. The performance of ViSual\_IceD is compared with U-Net models trained using concatenated MSI and SAR imagery as well as models trained exclusively on MSI or SAR imagery. ViSual\_IceD outperforms the other networks, with a F1 score 1.60\% points higher than the next best network, and results indicate that ViSual\_IceD is selective in the image type it uses during image segmentation. Outputs from ViSual\_IceD are compared to sea ice concentration products derived from the AMSR2 Passive Microwave (PMW) sensor. Results highlight how ViSual\_IceD is a useful tool to use in conjunction with PMW data, particularly in coastal regions. As the spatial-temporal coverage of MSI and SAR imagery continues to increase, ViSual\_IceD provides a new opportunity for robust, accurate sea ice coverage detection in polar regions.