Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word yet in their lexicon rather than to a meaning that already has a word attached. In previous research, the strategy was shown to be optimal from an information theoretic standpoint. In that framework, interpretation is hypothesized to be driven by the minimization of a cost function: the option of least communication cost is chosen. However, the information theoretic model employed in that research neither explains the weakening of that vocabulary learning bias in older children or polylinguals nor reproduces Zipf's meaning-frequency law, namely the non-linear relationship between the number of meanings of a word and its frequency. Here we consider a generalization of the model that is channeled to reproduce that law. The analysis of the new model reveals regions of the phase space where the bias disappears consistently with the weakening or loss of the bias in older children or polylinguals. The model is abstract enough to support future research on other levels of life that are relevant to biosemiotics. In the deep learning era, the model is a transparent low-dimensional tool for future experimental research and illustrates the predictive power of a theoretical framework originally designed to shed light on the origins of Zipf's rank-frequency law.

Quantum computing has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to its potential to solve complex problems which would take exponential time in classical computers. Most of the research efforts have been focused on constructing quantum computers based on qubits [1]. However, there has been a growing interest in building quantum computers based on qudits, i.e. machines that simulate and operate d-dimensional quantum states, with d > 2. Various physical implementations of high-dimensional quantum states have been proposed, such as photonic states integrated in chips [2, 3], photonic modes encoded in the orbital angular momentum (OAM) [4], ion traps [5], ququarts implemented on a quadrupolar nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) [6], and molecular quantum magnets [7]. Two of the main advantages of highdimensional quantum computers compared to their qubit-based counterparts are their larger information storage [8], and their higher resilience to noise [9]. One closely related field of quantum computing is quantum machine learning (QML). This field aims to develop novel quantum-inspired machine learning (ML) methods that may run on classical or quantum computers and to implement the existing ML algorithms on quantum computers. For instance, some classical machine learning algorithms like support vector machines and restricted Boltzmann machines can be implemented on qubit-based quantum computers [10, 11], and many of the ML methods have been reformulated in the language of quantum physics like quantum decision trees [12], quantum neural networks [13, 14], and quantum generative adversarial networks [15]. In contrast with QML methods built on qubits, less research has been done on QML based on qudits, i.e. algorithms that run in high-dimensional quantum computers. Some of these methods include protocols with qudits for reinforcement learning [16], and for training quantum neural networks [17, 18, 19].

In Internet of things (IoT), data is continuously recorded from different data sources and devices can suffer faults in their embedded electronics, thus leading to a high-dimensional data sets and concept drift events. Therefore, methods that are capable of high-dimensional non-stationary time series are of great value in IoT applications. Fuzzy Time Series (FTS) models stand out as data-driven non-parametric models of easy implementation and high accuracy. Unfortunately, FTS encounters difficulties when dealing with data sets of many variables and scenarios with concept drift. We present a new approach to handle high-dimensional non-stationary time series, by projecting the original high-dimensional data into a low dimensional embedding space and using FTS approach. Combining these techniques enables a better representation of the complex content of non-stationary multivariate time series and accurate forecasts. Our model is able to explain 98% of the variance and reach 11.52% of RMSE, 2.68% of MAE and 2.91% of MAPE.

The recent emergence of deepfakes, computerized realistic multimedia fakes, brought the detection of manipulated and generated content to the forefront. While many machine learning models for deepfakes detection have been proposed, the human detection capabilities have remained far less explored. This is of special importance as human perception differs from machine perception and deepfakes are generally designed to fool the human. So far, this issue has only been addressed in the area of images and video. To compare the ability of humans and machines in detecting audio deepfakes, we conducted an online gamified experiment in which we asked users to discern bonda-fide audio samples from spoofed audio, generated with a variety of algorithms. 200 users competed for 8976 game rounds with an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm trained for audio deepfake detection. With the collected data we found that the machine generally outperforms the humans in detecting audio deepfakes, but that the converse holds for a certain attack type, for which humans are still more accurate. Furthermore, we found that younger participants are on average better at detecting audio deepfakes than older participants, while IT-professionals hold no advantage over laymen. We conclude that it is important to combine human and machine knowledge in order to improve audio deepfake detection.

We present a new dataset of Wikipedia articles each paired with a knowledge graph, to facilitate the research in conditional text generation, graph generation and graph representation learning. Existing graph-text paired datasets typically contain small graphs and short text (1 or few sentences), thus limiting the capabilities of the models that can be learned on the data. Our new dataset WikiGraphs is collected by pairing each Wikipedia article from the established WikiText-103 benchmark (Merity et al., 2016) with a subgraph from the Freebase knowledge graph (Bollacker et al., 2008). This makes it easy to benchmark against other state-of-the-art text generative models that are capable of generating long paragraphs of coherent text. Both the graphs and the text data are of significantly larger scale compared to prior graph-text paired datasets. We present baseline graph neural network and transformer model results on our dataset for 3 tasks: graph -> text generation, graph -> text retrieval and text -> graph retrieval. We show that better conditioning on the graph provides gains in generation and retrieval quality but there is still large room for improvement.

The middle and working classes have seen a steady decline in their fortunes. Sending jobs to foreign countries, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, pivoting toward a service economy and the weakening of unions have been blamed for the challenges faced by a majority of Americans. According to a new academic research study, automation technology has been the primary driver in U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years. The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, claims that 50% to 70% of changes in U.S. wages, since 1980, can be attributed to wage declines among blue-collar workers who were replaced or degraded by automation. Artificial intelligence, robotics and new sophisticated technologies have caused a wide chasm in wealth and income inequality.

Current datasets to train social behaviors are usually borrowed from surveillance applications that capture visual data from a bird's-eye perspective. This leaves aside precious relationships and visual cues that could be captured through a first-person view of a scene. In this work, we propose a strategy to exploit the power of current game engines, such as Unity, to transform pre-existing bird's-eye view datasets into a first-person view, in particular, a depth view. Using this strategy, we are able to generate large volumes of synthetic data that can be used to pre-train a social navigation model. To test our ideas, we present DeepSocNav, a deep learning based model that takes advantage of the proposed approach to generate synthetic data. Furthermore, DeepSocNav includes a self-supervised strategy that is included as an auxiliary task. This consists of predicting the next depth frame that the agent will face. Our experiments show the benefits of the proposed model that is able to outperform relevant baselines in terms of social navigation scores.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used to capture volumetric image sequences of internal soft tissues, such as cardiac muscles. In comparison to X-Ray imaging (XR) and Computer Tomography (CT), MRI provides images with improved structural details via finer spatial resolutions. Cardiac MRI (CMR) focuses on the heart, allowing trained cardiologists to measure heart parameters, for example the mass of the cardiac muscle (myocardium mass), the volumes of blood cavities (atrial and ventricular volumes) and the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat (ejection fraction) [Peng et al., 2016]. Those parameters are used to assess how healthy is the heart, by recognizing early conditions and signs before the onset of infarcts and other complications. Due to the size and complexity of CMR sequences, complex techniques are required to produce detailed analyses; one of these techniques is deep learning (DL). Many of the tasks and goals related to the cardiac functional analysis - for example segmentation of structures [Bernard et al., 2018], estimation of heart parameters [Xue et al., 2018], and detection of diseases [Khened et al., 2017] - have benefited from DL methods. For even better results, research in DL has pointed out that models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have had a higher efficacy when provided with regions-of-interest (ROI) either explicitly or implicitly [Xue et al., 2018]. The detection of ROIs, usually named ROI proposal, is a preprocessing step whose goal is to identify the most prominent regions of an image (frame) for discovering clinically-relevant artifacts. The explicit ROI proposal approaches usually follow a combination of methods, for example: (a) pipelining a segmentation and a regression network; (b) preprocessing the input with a region proposal algorithm [He et al., 2015] or with a CNN [Wu et al., 2020]; or (c) by using manual cropping [Xue et al., 2017].

The present preprint specifies and defines all Terms, Properties, Relationships and Axioms of ThingFO (Thing Foundational Ontology) v1.2, which is a slightly updated version of its predecessor, ThingFO v1.1. It is an ontology for particular and universal Things placed at the foundational level in the context of a four-layered ontological architecture named FCD-OntoArch (Foundational, Core, and Domain Ontological Architecture for Sciences). This is a five-layered ontological architecture, which considers Foundational, Core, Domain and Instance levels. In turn, the domain level is split down in two sub-levels, namely: Top-domain and Low-domain. Ontologies at the same level can be related to each other, except for the foundational level where only the ThingFO ontology is. In addition, ontologies' terms and relationships at lower levels can be semantically enriched by ontologies' terms and relationships from the higher levels. ThingFO and ontologies at the core level such as SituationCO, ProcessCO, ProjectCO, among others, are domain independent. ThingFO is made up of three main concepts, namely: Thing with the semantics of Particular, Thing Category with the semantics of Universal, and Assertion that represents human statements about different aspects of Particulars and Universals. Note that annotations of updates from the previous version (v1.1) to the current one (v1.2) can be found in Appendix A.

Data-driven analysis and detection of abusive online content covers many different tasks, phenomena, contexts, and methodologies. This paper systematically reviews abusive language dataset creation and content in conjunction with an open website for cataloguing abusive language data. This collection of knowledge leads to a synthesis providing evidence-based recommendations for practitioners working with this complex and highly diverse data.