From the point of view of both curators, architects and designers, the challenges presented by travelling exhibitions are as unique as they are complex. As such, this interview with Peggy Re wants to give voice to her insights, gained during her curatorial experience with the exhibition A Designed Life: Contemporary American Textiles, Wallpapers and Containers & Packaging, 1951-1954, not only toward the historical retrospective of three showcases organized by the U.S. Traveling Exhibition Service between 1951 and 1954, but also in consideration of today design practice. We will explore how, throughout its historical evolution, the design of travelling exhibitions has always intersected with issues related to identity, soft power, technology, manufacturing and the relationship with the public.
Dmitry Ustalov, Egor Bogomolov, Alexander Bezzubov
et al.
The rapid advancement of workflows and methods for software engineering using AI emphasizes the need for a systematic evaluation and analysis of their ability to leverage information from entire projects, particularly in large code bases. In this challenge on optimization of context collection for code completion, organized by JetBrains in collaboration with Mistral AI as part of the ASE 2025 conference, participants developed efficient mechanisms for collecting context from source code repositories to improve fill-in-the-middle code completions for Python and Kotlin. We constructed a large dataset of real-world code in these two programming languages using permissively licensed open-source projects. The submissions were evaluated based on their ability to maximize completion quality for multiple state-of-the-art neural models using the chrF metric. During the public phase of the competition, nineteen teams submitted solutions to the Python track and eight teams submitted solutions to the Kotlin track. In the private phase, six teams competed, of which five submitted papers to the workshop.
Rune M. Jacobsen, Samuel Rhys Cox, Carla F. Griggio
et al.
Surveys are a widespread method for collecting data at scale, but their rigid structure often limits the depth of qualitative insights obtained. While interviews naturally yield richer responses, they are challenging to conduct across diverse locations and large participant pools. To partially bridge this gap, we investigate the potential of using LLM-based chatbots to support qualitative data collection through interview probes embedded in surveys. We assess four theory-based interview probes: descriptive, idiographic, clarifying, and explanatory. Through a split-plot study design (N=64), we compare the probes' impact on response quality and user experience across three key stages of HCI research: exploration, requirements gathering, and evaluation. Our results show that probes facilitate the collection of high-quality survey data, with specific probes proving effective at different research stages. We contribute practical and methodological implications for using chatbots as research tools to enrich qualitative data collection.
Marianna Marcella Bolognesi, Claudia Collacciani, Andrea Ferrari
et al.
Word Ladders is a free mobile application for Android and iOS, developed for collecting linguistic data, specifically lists of words related to each other through semantic relations of categorical inclusion, within the Abstraction project (ERC-2021-STG-101039777). We hereby provide an overview of Word Ladders, explaining its game logic, motivation and expected results and applications to nlp tasks as well as to the investigation of cognitive scientific open questions
Haoxing Liu, Fangzhou Shen, Haoshen Qin and
et al.
With the rapid development of civil aviation and the significant improvement of people's living standards, taking an air plane has become a common and efficient way of travel. However, due to the flight characteris-tics of the aircraft and the sophistication of the fuselage structure, flight de-lays and flight accidents occur from time to time. In addition, the life risk factor brought by aircraft after an accident is also the highest among all means of transportation. In this work, a model based on back-propagation neural network was used to predict flight accidents. By collecting historical flight data, including a variety of factors such as meteorological conditions, aircraft technical condition, and pilot experience, we trained a backpropaga-tion neural network model to identify potential accident risks. In the model design, a multi-layer perceptron structure is used to optimize the network performance by adjusting the number of hidden layer nodes and the learning rate. Experimental analysis shows that the model can effectively predict flight accidents with high accuracy and reliability.
This paper presents a revolutionary approach to the characterization, forecast, and control of collective systems. Collective systems are an ensemble of conservatively interacting entities. The evolution of the entities are determined by symmetries of the entities. Collective systems take many different forms. A plasma is a collective of charged particles, a fluid is a collective of molecules, a elementary field is a collective of elementary particles, and a cosmos is a collective of celestial bodies. Our new theory builds on the canonical transformation approach to dynamics. This approach recognizes that the symmetry leads to the conservation of a real function, that is the infinitesimal generator of a Lie group. The finite generator of the canonical transformation is derived from the infinitesimal generator by the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. This generating function is also known as the action, the entropy, and the logarithmic likelihood. The new theory generalizes this generating function to the generating functional of the collective field. Finally, this paper derives the formula for the Mayer Cluster Expansion, or the S-matrix expansion of the generating functional. We call it the Heisenberg Scattering Transformation (HST). Practically, this is a localized Fourier Transformation, whose principal components give the singularity spectrums, that is the solution to the Renormalization Group Equations. Limitations on the measurement of the system (that is the Born Rule and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) lead to quantization of the stochastic probabilities of the collective field. How different collective systems couple together to form systems-of-systems is formalized. The details of a practical implementation of the HST will be presented.
and the trafficking of bodily remains predated the Darwinian era by almost a century. Turnbull should be congratulated for his commitment to the evidence. He describes horrendous violence, grave robbing, racism, and cruelty and does not shirk from revealing the brutal realities of collection of Indigenous dead. At the same time, though, he tries to arrive at a better understanding of the motivations of collectors and build an accurate picture of how these collections were made. Chapter ten, for example, addresses claims that Indigenous Australians were deliberately murdered for their body parts and concludes that there is no ‘credible evidence that the remains of Indigenous Australians were murderously obtained’ but that historical records ‘do disclose that museum curators and scientists in colonial Australian and British institutions appear to have had no moral qualms about indirectly benefitting from the deaths of Indigenous men and women who had been killed by settlers or the Native Police’ (285). Elsewhere he provides a well-balanced discussion of the political and historical forces that have shaped current attitudes to repatriation, and the conclusion further deepens these discussions via an account of his personal experience as a scholar working within collecting institutions and alongside Indigenous parties. Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia is a superbly written and exemplary scholarly work that approaches these delicate, hurtful, and sensitive issues with integrity. I highly recommend this book, which is sure to become essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of museology, Australian history, repatriation studies, and the history of anthropology.
The Côa Valley, listed as a World Heritage site since 1998, presents over 1200 open-air engraved rock panels. The
Archaeological Park of the Côa Valley has meticulously documented these rock art motifs, employing various techniques including direct tracing processes on the rocks, using both natural and artificial lighting. However, this intensive work is highly demanding, especially considering that many of the rocks are not easily accessible. In the context of the "Open Access Rock Art Repository" (RARAA) project, this paper presents a methodology for the three-dimensional (3D) survey of rocks with rock art motifs, as well as the subsequent production of orthophotos from the resulting 3D models, accomplished through photogrammetry. These orthophotos serve as the foundation for the vector drawing of the motifs. Remarkably, the level of detail captured in these records has shown that most of the motifs are visible and can be accurately represented through the orthophotos. This has significantly reduced the time required for field surveys. However, in certain cases where specific small areas of the panel are affected by challenging lighting conditions, further fieldwork is still necessary, analogous to the direct tracing process. Additionally, this study introduces an information system designed to integrate the vector graphics and the motifs characterisation data; this supports enhanced research in the area and promotes improved open access for potential reuse in new interpretations or integration into future projects. By creating highly detailed 3D models, the authors complement the two-dimensional drawings of the surfaces and ensure the digital preservation of both the rocks and the associated iconography. These records serve as highly detailed digital surrogates that facilitate the monitoring efforts of the rocks and motifs; they also guarantee the availability of valuable resources for future research and analysis, even if natural or deliberate changes occur.
Resumo O presente trabalho objetiva ampliar as discussões sobre as Competências Infocomunicacionais, por meio de reflexões que buscam desnudar estigmas intrínsecos em seus distintos discursos. Pretende-se, por conseguinte, empreender um esforço para se fazer uma transposição lógica dos seus atributos constitutivos — competência em informação, em comunicação e habilidades operacionais —, para além da perspectiva instrumental. Com esse fim, o caminho metodológico, teórico-reflexivo, foi ancorado na dialógica. Destarte, refletiu-se sobre possibilidades de se proceder um alargamento conceitual acerca do tema, tomando-se o cuidado em não se eliminar as contradições discursivas envolvidas no processo em curso. Concluiu-se, portanto, que a expressão “competência”, considerando o seu aspecto provocador, que remete a uma imediata antítese da desqualificação e submissão, por outro lado, obriga à reflexão sobre as aberturas lógicas propiciadas por suas tensões, sendo, portanto, adequada e suficiente para o fortalecimento de um discurso epistêmico referente à infocomunicação no âmbito da Ciência da Informação.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Trajectory data collection is a common task with many applications in our daily lives. Analyzing trajectory data enables service providers to enhance their services, which ultimately benefits users. However, directly collecting trajectory data may give rise to privacy-related issues that cannot be ignored. Local differential privacy (LDP), as the de facto privacy protection standard in a decentralized setting, enables users to perturb their trajectories locally and provides a provable privacy guarantee. Existing approaches to private trajectory data collection in a local setting typically use relaxed versions of LDP, which cannot provide a strict privacy guarantee, or require some external knowledge that is impractical to obtain and update in a timely manner. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel trajectory perturbation mechanism that relies solely on an underlying location set and satisfies pure $ε$-LDP to provide a stringent privacy guarantee. In the proposed mechanism, each point's adjacent direction information in the trajectory is used in its perturbation process. Such information serves as an effective clue to connect neighboring points and can be used to restrict the possible region of a perturbed point in order to enhance utility. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to use direction information for trajectory perturbation under LDP. Furthermore, based on this mechanism, we present an anchor-based method that adaptively restricts the region of each perturbed trajectory, thereby significantly boosting performance without violating the privacy constraint. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms.
Abstract This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges.
In Pieter Wonder’s oil painting, Patrons and Lovers of Art (1830), considered to be an idealised prefiguration of London’s National Gallery, we can identify sixteen British gentlemen collectors and connoisseurs, and forty-four Old Master and British paintings which are today considered collection highlights of major art museums across Europe and North America. This essay focuses on the lives of two of Wonder’s sitters in order to better understand how transatlantic slavery is deeply ingrained in Britain’s cultural past. The painting provides a useful springboard for considering the cultural legacies of slave-ownership, highlighting the myriad connections between the brutal system of colonial slavery and the world of aesthetics and taste, and encouraging reflection about a history that has for so long remained silent. In uncovering the sources of wealth which helped to facilitate the development and lavish display of such grand collections, it becomes possible to reconsider our understanding of the history of art collecting in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The essay argues that today art museums across Europe and North America are faced with an urgent moral imperative to acknowledge and better understand the extent of their debt to transatlantic slavery.
Freshwater mussels are a guild of stationary, suspended-feeding species; they perform significant ecological functions like nitrogen cycling, bioturbation that gives oxygen and habitat that other creatures need to survive, and increasing water clearance by filtration. Knowledge of the freshwater mussel Unio tigridis Bourguignat, 1852, distribution, and molecular study in Iraq was inadequate. In the current study, this species of freshwater Mussels belonging to the family Unionidae was collected from different locations in the Greater Zab River, from April to August 2022. The average water temperature of the site was arranged between (17.8 to 36.1 C°). All previous studies in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq were based on morphological characters and the current study was the first report of Unio tigridis that was confirmed by molecular genetics and COI gene, analyzed phylogenetically using Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Parsimony Methods.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Natural history (General)
Razzaq Shalan Augul, Hanaa H. Al-Saffar, Haider Naeem Al-Ashbal
In the present investigation, 24 adult dipteran species with forensic importance belonging to 13 genera and 8 families that were collected from different localities of Iraq. The specimens were identified by different taxonomical keys;in addition the date and localities of collecting specimens were recorded.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Natural history (General)
El marketing como una disciplina de fomento, difusión y planeación abarca muchas esferas productivas de la sociedad, entre ellas, el sector cultural. El presente trabajo de investigación tuvo como objetivo la exploración respecto a la definición del marketing y la comunicación cultural en un marco geográfico español. La metodología del presente proyecto abarcó un análisis documental sobre el propio concepto de “marketing cultural” así como las implicaciones de la “comunicación cultural”. El trabajo presenta las novedades de la literatura del área, una muestra de buenas prácticas y oportunidades en la disciplina y la revaloración de la interdisciplinariedad de la gestión del sector de las artes y la cultura.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Collective motion is a manifestation of emergent phenomena in medium-heavy and heavy nuclei. A relatively large number of constituent nucleons contribute coherently to nuclear excitations (vibrations, rotations) that are characterized by large electromagnetic moments and transition rates. Basic features of collective excitations are reviewed, and a simple model introduced that describes large-amplitude quadrupole and octupole shape dynamics, as well as the dynamics of induced fission. Modern implementations of the collective Hamiltonian model are based on the microscopic framework of energy density functionals, that provide an accurate global description of nuclear ground states and collective excitations. Results of illustrative calculations are discussed in comparison with available data.
Collective memory is a common representation of the past shared by a group of people that modulates its identity. Recent literature on computational social science quantifies collective memories using expressions of those memories operationalized as the amount of collective attention focused on specific cultural icons, either artifacts or people. We model the temporal dynamics of collective memory using a two-step decay process, characterized by a short-lived and intense initial stage followed by a long-lived and milder decline of collective attention. Different collective memory mechanisms sustain the two-step process. The first is communicative memory, which corresponds to all memories supported by socializing acts. The second is cultural memory, which corresponds to all memories sustained by accessing records. Thus, this model predicts a transition time when cultural memory overcomes communicative memory. It has practical consequences related to shrinking or extending the time a specific topic is part of a community's conversation, i.e., communicative memory, empowering policymakers with valuable time to generate solutions and compromises for contingent and public problems.
Cooperative task execution, a hallmark of eusociality, is enabled by local interactions between the agents and the environment through a dynamically evolving communication signal. Inspired by the collective behavior of social insects whose dynamics is modulated by interactions with the environment, we show that a robot collective can successfully nucleate a construction site via a trapping instability and cooperatively build organized structures. The same robot collective can also perform de-construction with a simple change in the behavioral parameter. These behaviors belong to a two-dimensional phase space of cooperative behaviors defined by agent-agent interaction (cooperation) along one axis and the agent-environment interaction (collection and deposition) on the other. Our behavior-based approach to robot design combined with a principled derivation of local rules enables the collective to solve tasks with robustness to a dynamically changing environment and a wealth of complex behaviors.