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Greece's 'war on Roma' is Europe's new blueprint for discrimination

Al Jazeera

Jonathan Lee is a Romani activist from Wales, working at the European Roma Rights Centre. For the Romani families living in Nea Zoi, an informal neighbourhood near Aspropyrgos, Greece, the pre-dawn hum of surveillance drones has become a regular soundtrack to their lives. By daybreak, K-9 units and tactical police have blocked narrow dirt roads, police in riot gear have formed a perimeter around the neighbourhood, and armed officers are breaking through doors to makeshift homes, all under the banner of "public order". Since late 2025, this routine has repeated with terrifying regularity: at least 76 raids in six months, involving 473 officers, targeting 152 Romani communities across Greece. Documented by the European Roma Rights Centre as the most extensive anti-Roma police operation in decades, these actions are presented by Greek politicians as a tactical response to organised crime.


Magnitude-Based Features for Multispecies Spatial Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multispecies spatial data arise in many applications where interactions between different entities are central to system behaviour, including biomedical imaging, geospatial analysis, and species ecology. Despite their importance, relatively few quantitative tools exist to capture such interactions. In this work, we propose magnitude-based features for the analysis of multispecies spatial data. Magnitude is a real-valued invariant of finite metric spaces that can be interpreted as an effective number of points, incorporating both spatial configuration and scale. We develop global and local magnitude feature vectors and demonstrate their utility on synthetic tumour microenvironment data, and in tissue microarray data from human colorectal cancer samples. Locally, the method identifies distinct neighbourhood types and reveals spatial heterogeneity; in the model, this includes radial patterns associated with different qualitative outcomes of the simulations, while in the real-world data it reflects the importance of tertiary lymphoid structure-like interactions between B and T cell populations. Globally, the approach recovers known classifications of long-term simulation outcomes across parameter regimes in synthetic data, and suggests important roles for CD4+ T cells and CD163+ macrophages in distinguishing patients with favourable Crohn's like reactions from unfavourable diffuse immune infiltration. Together, these results suggest that magnitude-based features provide a powerful and flexible tool for the analysis of multispecies spatial data.



Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence for Unimodal Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem specified by a set of one-dimensional family exponential distributions endowed with a unimodal structure. We introduce IMED-UB, an algorithm that optimally exploits the unimodal-structure, by adapting to this setting the Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) algorithm introduced by Honda and Takemura [2015]. Owing to our proof technique, we are able to provide a concise finite-time analysis of the IMED-UBalgorithm. Numerical experiments show that IMED-UBcompetes with the state-of-the-art algorithms.



Understanding the geometry of deep learning with decision boundary volume

arXiv.org Machine Learning

For classification tasks, the performance of a deep neural network is determined by the structure of its decision boundary, whose geometry directly affects essential properties of the model, including accuracy and robustness. Motivated by a classical tube formula due to Weyl, we introduce a method to measure the decision boundary of a neural network through local surface volumes, providing a theoretically justifiable and efficient measure enabling a geometric interpretation of the effectiveness of the model applicable to the high dimensional feature spaces considered in deep learning. A smaller surface volume is expected to correspond to lower model complexity and better generalisation. We verify, on a number of image processing tasks with convolutional architectures that decision boundary volume is inversely proportional to classification accuracy. Meanwhile, the relationship between local surface volume and generalisation for fully connected architecture is observed to be less stable between tasks. Therefore, for network architectures suited to a particular data structure, we demonstrate that smoother decision boundaries lead to better performance, as our intuition would suggest.


Appendix: Permutation-InvariantVariationalAutoencoderfor Graph-LevelRepresentationLearning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Remark Since we apply the row-wise softmax in Eq. (7), P jpij = 1 i and pij 0 (i,j) is alwaysfulfilled.If C(P)=0,allbutoneentryinacolumn pi, are0andtheotherentryis1. Hence,P ipij = 1 j isfulfilled. Synthetic random graph generation To generate train and test graph datasets we utilized the pythonpackage NetworkX[1]. Ego graphs extracted from Binominal graphs (p (0.2,0.6))selecting all neighbours of onerandomnode. Training Details We did not perform an extensive hyperparameter evaluation for the different experiments and mostly followed [2]for hyperparameter selection. We set the graph embedding dimension to 64.