Laura Schopp, Ambra DImperio, Jalal Etesami
et al.
While explainable AI (XAI) is often heralded as a means to enhance transparency and trustworthiness in closed-loop neurotechnology for psychiatric and neurological conditions, its real-world prevalence remains low. Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that the type of explanations provided by current XAI methods often fails to align with clinicians' end-user needs. In this viewpoint, we argue that clinically meaningful explainability (CME) is essential for AI-enabled closed-loop medical neurotechnology and must be addressed from an ethical, technical, and clinical perspective. Instead of exhaustive technical detail, clinicians prioritize clinically relevant, actionable explanations, such as clear representations of input-output relationships and feature importance. Full technical transparency, although theoretically desirable, often proves irrelevant or even overwhelming in practice, as it may lead to informational overload. Therefore, we advocate for CME in the neurotechnology domain: prioritizing actionable clarity over technical completeness and designing interface visualizations that intuitively map AI outputs and key features into clinically meaningful formats. To this end, we introduce a reference architecture called NeuroXplain, which translates CME into actionable technical design recommendations for any future neurostimulation device. Our aim is to inform stakeholders working in neurotechnology and regulatory framework development to ensure that explainability fulfills the right needs for the right stakeholders and ultimately leads to better patient treatment and care.
Managing technical quality in agile Research and Development (R&D) software projects represents a persistent challenge, particularly in contexts characterized by high technical uncertainty and experimental pressure. This exploratory pilot survey explores how agile R&D software teams report the use of practices and metrics related to technical quality control within Scrum-based environments. The study employed a structured questionnaire administered to professionals from Science and Technology Institutions (STIs) located in Manaus, Brazil, aiming to capture reported practices, perceptions of quality, and recurrent challenges. Quantitative data were complemented by qualitative responses to support contextual interpretation. The results indicate that although practices such as automated testing, code review, and continuous integration are widely acknowledged, their reported application is often inconsistent across iterations. Gaps were also observed in the monitoring of technical quality metrics and in the reporting of mechanisms for assessing technical debt from a business perspective. Rather than aiming for generalization, this study offers an exploratory baseline that describes how technical quality is managed in agile R&D projects within a regional innovation ecosystem.
Oussama Khemis, Gabriel Racovițeanu, Elena Vulpașu
Existence of pharmaceutical substances in water with different concentrations in natural ecosystems it poses a danger to humans and animals.
Conventional methods for water treatment have proven to be relatively ineffective in removing pharmaceutical contaminants, while the more effective process used for our research to eliminate pharmaceutical substance metoclopramid are ozone processes and adsorption process.
This study investigated the reduction of a pharmaceutical substance metoclopramid during two simultaneous processes (ozone process and adsorption process) applied in a large-scale drinking water treatment pilot with two different EBCTs (3 minutes and 6 minutes), and the initial concentrations used were 1.6 mg/l, 0.8 mg/l, and 0.4 mg/l. we chose ozonation, which produces many hydroxyl radicals to decompose the pharmaceutical substance metoclopramide to eliminate it, and for the adsorption process, we chose granular activated carbon with a high capacity for adsorption.
In this study, temperature and precipitation trends in Istanbul were analyzed using data from a ground-based station for the 1960–2019 interval, Integrated Multi-SatellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM IMERG) for 2000–2019, and Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) temperature reanalysis for 1980–2019. Single-duration analysis revealed significant increasing temperature trends with minor downward and major upward tendencies in precipitation. Multi-duration analysis resulted with dominant decreasing and increasing temperature trends, respectively, in 1980–1999 and 2000–2019, alongside decreasing precipitation trends in 1980–1999 winter and 2000–2019 spring, which were undetected in the single-duration analysis. As a novel attempt, trends based on MERRA-2 and IMERG data were compared with ground-based records in Istanbul and revealed better compatibility in MERRA-2, especially in 2000–2019 compared to IMERG data. By comparing various statistical methods and data sources, this study offers valuable insights into hydrometeorological trend analysis and aids transition from conventional to novel data sources.
James Zulfan, Bobby Minola Ginting, Ravi Anthony Tartandyo
Research on scale effects on flows over weirs has been conducted on a limited basis, primarily focusing on flows upstream of a single-type weir, such as ogee, broad-crested, and sharp-crested (linear and non-linear) weirs. However, the scale effects downstream of these single-type weirs have not been thoroughly investigated. This study examined the scale effects on flows over a combined weir system consisting of an ogee weir and a sharp-crested weir, both upstream and downstream, utilizing physical modeling at a 1:33.33 scale based on Froude similarity and three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. The sharp-crested weir in this study was represented by two sluice gates that remain closed and submerged during flood events. The experimental data confirmed that the equivalent discharge coefficients of the combined weir system behaved similarly to those of a sharp-crested weir across various H/P (where H is the total head, and P is the weir height) values. However, scale effects on the discharge rating curve due to surface tension and viscosity could only be minimized when H/P > 0.4, Re > 26 959, and We > 240 (where Re and We are the Reynolds and Weber numbers, respectively), provided that the water depth exceeded 0.042 m above the crest. Additionally, Re greater than 4 × 104 was necessary to minimize scale effects caused by viscosity in flows in the spillway channel and stilling basin (with baffle blocks). The limiting criteria aligned closely with existing literature. This study offers valuable insights for practical applications in hydraulic engineering in the future.
River, lake, and water-supply engineering (General)
The changing climatic conditions brought on by global climate change make it crucial to analyze hydrometeorological variations over several decades. Traditional methods of trend investigation may sometimes fall short in identifying current trends in hydroclimatological time series. This research focused on weather stations across Slovakia, specifically in Košice, Spisske Vlachy, Červený Kláštor, and Bardejov. Monthly records of precipitation and maximum and minimum air temperatures from 1971 to 2021 were examined. The Innovative Şen Trend test, a relatively new approach, was applied to analyze trends across the country. The analysis was conducted on monthly, seasonal, and annual scales. Investigations based solely on single stations are often insufficient for accurately determining regional trends. Furthermore, incorporating new yearly data into prior studies may alter recently observed trends. Considering these factors, the study analyzed four separate Slovakian stations using the Innovative Şen Trend test. When mixed trends were observed in the monthly and seasonal analyses for all three parameters, a generally significant increase in annual air temperature trends was noted. For precipitation, stations observed annual increases exceeding 10 % in the higher classes. In terms of maximum air temperature, a 6 % increase was recorded annually at both Košice and Spisske Vlachy stations. Likewise, Bardejov and Spisske Vlachy showed a 10 % annual increase in minimum air temperature at higher classes, while no significant trends were noted for Košice.
Planning and extension of water distribution systems (WDSs) plays a key role in the development of smart cities, driven by challenges such as urbanization and climate change. In this context, the correct estimation of physically correct hydraulic states, i.e., pressure heads, water demands and water flows, is of high interest. Hydraulic simulators such as EPANET or more recently, physic-informed surrogate models are used to solve this task. They require a subset of observed states, such as heads at reservoirs and water demands, as inputs to estimate the whole hydraulic state. In order to obtain reliable results of such simulators, but also to be able to give theoretical guarantees of their estimations, an important question is whether theoretically, the subset of observed states that the simulator requires as an input suffices to derive the whole state, purely based on the physical properties, also called hydraulic principles, it obeys. This questions translates to solving linear and non-linear systems of equations. Previous articles mainly investigate on the existence question under the term observability analysis, however, they rely on the approximation of the non-linear principles using Taylor approximation and on network-dependent numerical or algebraic algorithms. In this work, we provide purely theoretical guarantees on the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the non-linear hydraulic principles, and by this, the existence and uniqueness of physically correct states, given a variety of common subsets of them -- a result that seems to be common-sense in the water community but has never been rigorously proven. We show that previous existence results are special cases of our more general findings, and therefore lay the foundation for further analysis and theoretical guarantees of the before-mentioned hydraulic simulators.
Paris Avgeriou, Ipek Ozkaya, Heiko Koziolek
et al.
This is the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 manifesto on Reframing Technical Debt. The manifesto begins with a one-page summary of Values, Beliefs, and Principles. It then elaborates on each Value, Belief, and Principle to explain their rationale and clarify their meaning. Subsequently, the paper describes the current landscape of Technical Debt Management methods and tools and explains why the current practice is inadequate and where current research falls short. The current landscape is organized into five major topics: Technical Debt as Value-Creation, Tooling, Data Collection, the role of Architecture, and Socio-Technical Aspects. Finally, the paper outlines a roadmap to realize the stated principles, with concrete milestones to be addressed by researchers, software practitioners, and tool vendors. The manifesto is signed by the workshop participants.
This study integrates a data-driven model for estimating the unfrozen water content into the thermo-hydraulic coupling simulation of frozen soils. An artificial neural network (ANN) was employed to develop this data-driven model using a dataset from the literature. Thereafter, a numerical algorithm was developed to implement the data-driven model into the thermo-hydraulic simulation. In the numerical algorithm, the frozen and unfrozen zones are distinguished first according to the freezing temperature, where the unfrozen water at frozen nodes is updated using the ANN model. Subsequently, discretized hydraulic and thermal equations are solved sequentially and iteratively using Newton-Raphson method until the temperature and unfrozen water content satisfy the tolerance simultaneously. Horizontal and vertical freezing experiments are used to verify the reliability of the proposed algorithm. The computed variations in temperature, total water, unfrozen water, and ice content achieve good agreements with measured data. Some key features of frozen soils, such as water migration and ice formation, and the increase in total water content, are reproduced by the developed algorithm. Additionally, the comparison between the ANN model and existing empirical equations for determining unfrozen water content demonstrates that the ANN model offers a better performance.
The rapid development of AI systems poses unprecedented risks, including loss of control, misuse, geopolitical instability, and concentration of power. To navigate these risks and avoid worst-case outcomes, governments may proactively establish the capability for a coordinated halt on dangerous AI development and deployment. In this paper, we outline key technical interventions that could allow for a coordinated halt on dangerous AI activities. We discuss how these interventions may contribute to restricting various dangerous AI activities, and show how these interventions can form the technical foundation for potential AI governance plans.
Software testing is crucial for ensuring software quality, yet developers' engagement with it varies widely. Identifying the technical, organizational and social factors that lead to differences in engagement is required to remove barriers and utilize enablers for testing. While much research emphasizes the usefulness of software testing approaches and technical solutions, less is known about why developers do (not) test. This study investigates the first-hand experience of developers with software testing. The study illuminates how developers' opinions about testing and their testing behavior changes. Through analysis of personal evolutions of practice, we explore when and why testing is used. Employing socio-technical grounded theory (STGT), we construct a theory by systematically analyzing data from 19 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with software developers. Allowing interviewees to reflect on how and why they approach software testing, we explore perspectives that are rooted in their contextual experiences. We develop eleven categories of circumstances that act as conditions for the application and adaptation of testing practices and introduce three concepts that we then use to present a theory of emerging testing strategies (ETS) that explains why developers do (not) use testing practices. This study reveals a new perspective on the connection between testing artifacts and collective reflection of practitioners, and it embraces. It has direct implications for practice %and contributes to the groundwork of socio-technical research which embraces testing as an experience in which human- and social aspects are entangled with organizational and technical circumstances.
Hallucinations, the tendency to produce irrelevant/incorrect responses, are prevalent concerns in generative AI-based tools like ChatGPT. Although hallucinations in ChatGPT are studied for textual responses, it is unknown how ChatGPT hallucinates for technical texts that contain both textual and technical terms. We surveyed 47 software engineers and produced a benchmark of 412 Q&A pairs from the bug reports of two OSS projects. We find that a RAG-based ChatGPT (i.e., ChatGPT tuned with the benchmark issue reports) is 36.4% correct when producing answers to the questions, due to two reasons 1) limitations to understand complex technical contents in code snippets like stack traces, and 2) limitations to integrate contexts denoted in the technical terms and texts. We present CHIME (ChatGPT Inaccuracy Mitigation Engine) whose underlying principle is that if we can preprocess the technical reports better and guide the query validation process in ChatGPT, we can address the observed limitations. CHIME uses context-free grammar (CFG) to parse stack traces in technical reports. CHIME then verifies and fixes ChatGPT responses by applying metamorphic testing and query transformation. In our benchmark, CHIME shows 30.3% more correction over ChatGPT responses. In a user study, we find that the improved responses with CHIME are considered more useful than those generated from ChatGPT without CHIME.
Abstract The thermal hydraulics simulation of the reactor coolant system for a typical three-loop pressurized water reactor was conducted based on numerical solution of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations by commercial CFD software. This study aims to obtain the three-dimensional, global and localized flow features of the reactor coolant system. The completed model of the reactor coolant system is built including reactor pressure vessel and internals, core, steam generator, primary pump and linking pipe. The flow and the temperature have been investigated under normal steady operating condition with the full core thermal power and unbalanced operating condition with the failure of any primary pump during cold shutdown state. The local thermal hydraulic features of the reactor pressure vessel head dome, the thermal stratification in the reactor pressure vessel upper plenum and the hot legs, and the swirling flow of the primary pump are characterized to give reference to the reactor safety operation. This analysis practice provides an effective evaluation for the three-dimensional thermal hydraulics phenomena, and these encouraging results allow performing the comprehensive analysis for the reactor coolant system.
Alisher Fatxulloyev, Qudratjon Rakhimov, Davronjon Allayorov
et al.
When taking water from pre-mountain rivers, for transferring of large amounts of river sediments, rich in mineral fertilizers, along with water to crop fields through irrigation networks requires high sediment transport capacity and deformation resistance from irrigation networks. The projecting and construction of irrigation canals with these features in the foothills requires concreting the canal. The high content of river sediments in the Sokh River (5 kg∙m –3) and the low efficiency of the Right Bank Irrigation Reservoir (10–15%) require high hydraulic efficiency of water intake canals from this system. The main challenge is to reduce costs in concreted canals and ultimately ensure technical superiority. In the research were used generally accepted research methods in hydraulics, in particular field research and consequently, mathematical analysis. Kokandsay, Kartan and Bachkir irrigation canals were accepted as the object of research, the canals were designed on the basis of the best hydraulic section, the canal side slope was taken as a variable parameter and the technical and economic efficiency was checked using computer software. As a result, it was found that the consumption of concrete raw material for 1 running meter can save 0.2–0.3 m 3, depending on the adoption of the canal side slope, the acceptance of the slope of the canal wall at values 1–1.5 will increase up to sedimentation 10%.
River, lake, and water-supply engineering (General), Irrigation engineering. Reclamation of wasteland. Drainage
Sameena Hossain, Payal Kamboj, Aranyak Maity
et al.
Gestures that share similarities in their forms and are related in their meanings, should be easier for learners to recognize and incorporate into their existing lexicon. In that regard, to be more readily accepted as standard by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, technical gestures in American Sign Language (ASL) will optimally share similar in forms with their lexical neighbors. We utilize a lexical database of ASL, ASL-LEX, to identify lexical relations within a set of technical gestures. We use automated identification for 3 unique sub-lexical properties in ASL- location, handshape and movement. EdGCon assigned an iconicity rating based on the lexical property similarities of the new gesture with an existing set of technical gestures and the relatedness of the meaning of the new technical word to that of the existing set of technical words. We collected 30 ad hoc crowdsourced technical gestures from different internet websites and tested them against 31 gestures from the DeafTEC technical corpus. We found that EdGCon was able to correctly auto-assign the iconicity ratings 80.76% of the time.
Oytun Haçarız, Torsten Kleinow, Angus S. Macdonald
We revisit surplus on general life insurance contracts, represented by Markov models. We classify technical bases in terms of boundary conditions in Thiele's equation(s), allowing more general regulations than Scandinavian-style `first-order/second-order' regimes, and replacing the traditional retrospective policy value. We propose a `canonical' model with three technical bases (premium, valuation, accumulation) and show how each pair of bases defines premium loadings and surplus. Along with a `true' or `real-world' experience basis, this expands fundamental results of Ramlau-Hansen (1988a). We conclude with two applications: lapse-supported business; and the retrospectively-oriented regime proposed by Møller & Steffensen (2007).
In this article, we investigate the model based position control of soft hydraulic actuators arranged in an antagonistic pair. A dynamical model of the system is constructed by employing the port-Hamiltonian formulation. A control algorithm is designed with an energy shaping approach which accounts for the pressure dynamics of the fluid. A nonlinear observer is included to compensate the effect of unknown external forces. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and experiments achieve positioning accuracy of 0.043 mm with a standard deviation of 0.033 mm in the presence of constant external forces up to 1 N.
La frecuente ubicación de pozos mecánicos con presencia de agua con altos contenidos de sustancias que afectan la salud o al abastecimiento de agua potable que justifican la búsqueda de tecnologías alternativas que permitan lograr mayor efectividad en la remoción de diferentes sustancias cobra importancia. Una de estas tecnologías es la electrocoagulación, la cual se estudia en este articulo en cuanto a su eficiencia de remoción de Hierro (Fe) y Manganeso (Mn), realizando la construcción de un prototipo de celda electrolítica tipo Batch y con el apoyo de un modelo estadístico de desarrollo de experimentos, definiendo las condiciones optimas de funcionamiento del prototipo para aplicarlas en muestras de agua de dos fuentes subterráneas del municipio de Fraijanes y el nivel de factibilidad financiera de implementación del proceso.
Las aguas residuales producto del beneficiado de café, conocidas como agua miel, poseen un pH medio de 4.68 unidades, al ser descargadas en cuerpos receptores de agua modifican drásticamente la acidez natural, incrementan la turbiedad y ocasionan el agotamiento del oxígeno disuelto. Previo a realizar un tratamiento por vía biológica del agua miel, se hace necesario realizar la adición de alcalinidad que puede ser por medio de dos grupos de alcalinizantes: los que reaccionan con el gas carbónico para formar alcalinidad bicarbónica como el hidróxido de calcio y los que ofrecen alcalinidad bicarbónica directamente como es el bicarbonato de sodio. En ensayos de laboratorio, utilizando quince muestras diferentes de agua miel de un beneficio húmedo tecnificado, se adicionó diferentes concentraciones de bicarbonato de sodio e hidróxido de calcio. Para cada uno de los alcalinizantes y en cada concentración, se midió su pH al finalizar el ensayo y nuevamente 24 horas después. Con todos los valores de pH y mediante un análisis de estadística descriptiva, se concluyó que una concentración de 2.50 gramos de bicarbonato de sodio por litro de agua miel, neutraliza el pH en un valor medio de 6.23 unidades, además adiciona capacidad buffer, ya que 24 horas después, el valor medio de pH para esta concentración, fue de 6.27 unidades. Por el contrario, utilizando hidróxido de calcio en una concentración de 2.50 gramos por litro de agua miel; como tradicionalmente se hace en los beneficios húmedos tecnificados de café, el pH del agua miel se incrementa de forma brusca a 10.20 unidades y desciende a 8.75 unidades 24 horas después.