'It reflects and reinforces a culture where consent and respect for personal boundaries are undermined.' 'It reflects and reinforces a culture where consent and respect for personal boundaries are undermined.' The rise of deepfake pornography in schools: 'One girl was so horrified she vomited' The use of'nudify' apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. He didn't feel this was something he shouldn't be doing. It was in the open and people saw it.

Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pi...

While predictive accuracy is often prioritized in machine learning (ML) models, interpretability remains essential in scientific and high-stakes domains. However, diverse interpretability algorithms frequently yield conflicting explanations, highlighting the need for consensus to harmonize results. In this study, six ML models were trained on six synthetic datasets with known ground truths, utilizing various model-agnostic inter-pretability techniques. Consensus explanations were generated using established methods and a novel approach: WISCA (Weighted Scaled Consensus Attributions), which integrates class probability and normalized attributions. WISCA consistently aligned with the most reliable individual method, underscoring the value of robust consensus strategies in improving explanation reliability.

Federated Continual Learning (FCL) has emerged as a robust solution for collaborative model training in dynamic environments, where data samples are continuously generated and distributed across multiple devices. This survey provides a comprehensive review of FCL, focusing on key challenges such as heterogeneity, model stability, communication overhead, and privacy preservation. We explore various forms of heterogeneity and their impact on model performance. Solutions to non-IID data, resource-constrained platforms, and personalized learning are reviewed in an effort to show the complexities of handling heterogeneous data distributions. Next, we review techniques for ensuring model stability and avoiding catastrophic forgetting, which are critical in non-stationary environments. Privacy-preserving techniques are another aspect of FCL that have been reviewed in this work. This survey has integrated insights from federated learning and continual learning to present strategies for improving the efficacy and scalability of FCL systems, making it applicable to a wide range of real-world scenarios.

Artificial intelligence has been integrated into nearly every aspect of daily life, powering applications from object detection with computer vision to large language models for writing emails and compact models in smart homes. These machine learning models cater to individual users but are often detached from them, as they are typically stored and processed in centralized data centers. This centralized approach raises privacy concerns, incurs high infrastructure costs, and struggles with personalization. Federated and fully decentralized learning methods have been proposed to address these issues, but they still depend on centralized servers or face slow convergence due to communication constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose ML Mule, a approach that utilizes individual mobile devices as 'Mules' to train and transport model snapshots as they move through physical spaces, sharing these models with the physical 'Spaces' they inhabit. This method implicitly forms affinity groups among devices associated with users who share particular spaces, enabling collaborative model evolution, and protecting users' privacy. Our approach addresses several major shortcomings of traditional, federated, and fully decentralized learning systems. The proposed framework represents a new class of machine learning methods that are more robust, distributed, and personalized, bringing the field closer to realizing the original vision of intelligent, adaptive, and genuinely context-aware smart environments. The results show that ML Mule converges faster and achieves higher model accuracy compared to other existing methods.

This study examines the impact of lifelong learning on the professional lives of employed and unemployed individuals. Lifelong learning is a crucial factor in securing employment or enhancing one's existing career prospects. To achieve this objective, this study proposes the implementation of a multi-criteria decision support system for the evaluation of training courses in accordance with their capacity to enhance the employability of the students. The methodology is delineated in four stages. Firstly, a `working life curve' was defined to provide a quantitative description of an individual's working life. Secondly, an analysis based on K-medoids clustering defined a control group for each individual for comparison. Thirdly, the performance of a course according to each of the four predefined criteria was calculated using a t-test to determine the mean performance value of those who took the course. Ultimately, the unweighted TOPSIS method was used to evaluate the efficacy of the various training courses in relation to the four criteria. This approach effectively addresses the challenge of using extensive datasets within a system while facilitating the application of a multi-criteria unweighted TOPSIS method. The results of the multi-criteria TOPSIS method indicated that training courses related to the professional fields of administration and management, hostel and tourism and community and sociocultural services have positive impact on employability and improving the working conditions of citizens. However, courses that demonstrate the greatest effectiveness in ranking are the least demanded by citizens. The results will help policymakers evaluate the effectiveness of each training course offered by the regional government.

The 2008 financial crisis that hit the world's economies has had a particularly acute impact in Spain (Guardiola and Guillen-Royo, 2015). It is only since 2014 that Spain seemed to begin its recovery (Martí and Pérez, 2015). However, this recuperation is still far to be acceptable with regard to the labor landscape (Casares and Vázquez, 2018). One of the main Spanish weaknesses that the crisis exposed was the so-called duality of the labor market. Thus, Spain is characterized by the existence of two very different types of workers. On one hand, long term workers on indefinite contracts, having both a very high job security and a very high cost for companies (especially in terms of dismissals) and usually with university studies even for jobs that do not require them.

The acorn is the fruit of the oak and is an important crop in the Spanish dehesa extreme\~na, especially for the value it provides in the Iberian pig food to obtain the "acorn" certification. For this reason, we want to maximise the production of Iberian pigs with the appropriate weight. Hence the need to know the area covered by the crowns of the acorn trees, to determine the covered wooded area (CWA, from the Spanish Superficie Arbolada Cubierta SAC) and thereby estimate the number of Iberian pigs that can be released per hectare, as indicated by the royal decree 4/2014. In this work, we propose the automatic estimation of the CWA, through aerial digital images (orthophotos) of the pastureland of Extremadura, and with this, to offer the possibility of determining the number of Iberian pigs to be released in a specific plot of land. Among the main issues for automatic detection are, first, the correct identification of acorn trees, secondly, correctly discriminating the shades of the acorn trees and, finally, detect the arbuscles (young acorn trees not yet productive, or shrubs that are not oaks). These difficulties represent a real challenge, both for the automatic segmentation process and for manual segmentation. In this work, the proposed method for automatic segmentation is based on the clustering algorithm proposed by Gustafson-Kessel (GK) but the modified version of Babuska (GK-B) and on the use of real orthophotos. The obtained results are promising both in their comparison with the real images and when compared with the images segmented by hand. The whole set of orthophotos used in this work correspond to an approximate area of 142 hectares, and the results are of great interest to producers of certified "acorn" pork.

For robots to interact socially, they must interpret human intentions and anticipate their potential outcomes accurately. This is particularly important for social robots designed for human care, which may face potentially dangerous situations for people, such as unseen obstacles in their way, that should be avoided. This paper explores the Artificial Theory of Mind (ATM) approach to inferring and interpreting human intentions. We propose an algorithm that detects risky situations for humans, selecting a robot action that removes the danger in real time. We use the simulation-based approach to ATM and adopt the 'like-me' policy to assign intentions and actions to people. Using this strategy, the robot can detect and act with a high rate of success under time-constrained situations. The algorithm has been implemented as part of an existing robotics cognitive architecture and tested in simulation scenarios. Three experiments have been conducted to test the implementation's robustness, precision and real-time response, including a simulated scenario, a human-in-the-loop hybrid configuration and a real-world scenario.

The livestock industry faces several challenges, including labor-intensive management, the threat of predators and environmental sustainability concerns. Therefore, this paper explores the integration of quadruped robots in extensive livestock farming as a novel application of field robotics. The SELF-AIR project, an acronym for Supporting Extensive Livestock Farming with the use of Autonomous Intelligent Robots, exemplifies this innovative approach. Through advanced sensors, artificial intelligence, and autonomous navigation systems, these robots exhibit remarkable capabilities in navigating diverse terrains, monitoring large herds, and aiding in various farming tasks. This work provides insight into the SELF-AIR project, presenting the lessons learned.