Hasil untuk "History of the Greco-Roman World"

Animation and the Ancient World fills a gap among reception studies of ancient Greece and Rome by offering an extended chronological and thematic treatment of the vivid and diverse world of animation featuring the ancient world. It explores how ancient stories, handed down in mythology, history, and philosophy, have been remixed and revitalized in this unique medium in a guided selection of sixteen chapters, each of which engages directly with the ancient Mediterranean world broadly conceived, through a range of case studies from animated film and television. In the first section, “Heroes,” the chapters survey familiar figures from ancient mythology—Hercules, Odysseus, and Icarus—and reflect on the enduring popularity of these heroes and their journeys in animation. The second section, “Worlds,” expands outward from the heroic realm and contemplates how animation enables the re-creation of fantastical ancient landscapes, which in turn give rise to innovative retellings and reuse of ancient material. The last section, “Histories,” features five chapters that move into the realm of the real and utilize animation as a means of reconceiving the events of the Greco-Roman past in vivid, memorable, and sometimes subversive ways. The contributions adopt a global perspective, not limited to North America: each section includes chapters dedicated to animation in Europe and in East Asia as well. Animation and the Ancient World aims to become a foundational text for further work in this burgeoning area of Classical reception.

The Besiii, LHCb Collaborations M. Ablikim, M. N. Achasov et al.

A measurement of the CKM angle $\gamma$ is performed by applying a novel, unbinned, model-independent approach to datasets of electron-positron collisions collected by the BESIII experiment and proton-proton collisions by the LHCb experiment, corresponding to integrated luminosities of 8 fb$^{-1}$ and 9 fb$^{-1}$, respectively. The $C\!P$-violating phase $\gamma$ is determined from ${B^{\pm}\rightarrow D(\rightarrow K_{\rm S}^{0} h^{\prime+}h^{\prime-}) h^{\pm}}$ decays in LHCb data, where $h^{(\prime)}$ is either a pion or kaon, while the corresponding strong-phase parameters are measured using doubly tagged ${D\rightarrow K_{\rm S/L}^0 h^{\prime+} h^{\prime-}}$ decays in the quantum-correlated $D\overline{D}$ system present in BESIII data. A joint fit to both datasets, which allows for a simultaneous determination of the associated $C\!P$-violating observables and strong-phase parameters, yields ${\gamma = (71.3\pm 5.0)^{\circ}}$. The result is the most precise to date and consistent with previous measurements and world averages.

Ha Dao, Gaurav Chawla, Raghu Banda et al.

We introduce CallCenterEN, a large-scale (91,706 conversations, corresponding to 10448 audio hours), real-world English call center transcript dataset designed to support research and development in customer support and sales AI systems. This is the largest release to-date of open source call center transcript data of this kind. The dataset includes inbound and outbound calls between agents and customers, with accents from India, the Philippines and the United States. The dataset includes high-quality, PII-redacted human-readable transcriptions. All personally identifiable information (PII) has been rigorously removed to ensure compliance with global data protection laws. The audio is not included in the public release due to biometric privacy concerns. Given the scarcity of publicly available real-world call center datasets, CallCenterEN fills a critical gap in the landscape of available ASR corpora, and is released under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license for non-commercial research use.

Xiyue Zhu, Peng Tang, Haofu Liao et al.

Language models have led to a leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page states can result in long input sequences and sparse information, hampering the effective utilization of history states. In this paper, we propose a novel web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states. Our approach employs a history compressor module that distills the most task-relevant information from each history state into a fixed-length short representation, mitigating the challenges posed by the highly verbose history states. Experiments are conducted on the Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that our approach obtains 1.2-5.4% absolute accuracy improvements compared to the baseline approach without history inputs.

PAN Team, Jiannan Xiang, Yi Gu et al.

A world model enables an intelligent agent to imagine, predict, and reason about how the world evolves in response to its actions, and accordingly to plan and strategize. While recent video generation models produce realistic visual sequences, they typically operate in the prompt-to-full-video manner without causal control, interactivity, or long-horizon consistency required for purposeful reasoning. Existing world modeling efforts, on the other hand, often focus on restricted domains (e.g., physical, game, or 3D-scene dynamics) with limited depth and controllability, and struggle to generalize across diverse environments and interaction formats. In this work, we introduce PAN, a general, interactable, and long-horizon world model that predicts future world states through high-quality video simulation conditioned on history and natural language actions. PAN employs the Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture that combines an autoregressive latent dynamics backbone based on a large language model (LLM), which grounds simulation in extensive text-based knowledge and enables conditioning on language-specified actions, with a video diffusion decoder that reconstructs perceptually detailed and temporally coherent visual observations, to achieve a unification between latent space reasoning (imagination) and realizable world dynamics (reality). Trained on large-scale video-action pairs spanning diverse domains, PAN supports open-domain, action-conditioned simulation with coherent, long-term dynamics. Extensive experiments show that PAN achieves strong performance in action-conditioned world simulation, long-horizon forecasting, and simulative reasoning compared to other video generators and world models, taking a step towards general world models that enable predictive simulation of future world states for reasoning and acting.

ეკატერინე კობახიძე

It is widely known that in the "Life of Kartli" there is a lot of material related to the Greco-Roman world, which was studied by both the publishers of the text and other famous scientists. The relatively late text of "Life of Kartli" is particularly distinguished by its variety of depictions of antiquity, the author of which we know as the Anonymous Chronicler, and his work – under the conditional title "The Hundred Years’ Chronicle". Despite the fact that a number of important studies have been dedicated to commenting on passages depicting antiquity, the definition of several terms and contexts, by the scientists' own admission, could not be achieved due to the distortion of the text or the mistakes of copyists. The article presents an attempt to read and interpret just a few of these so-called an "obscure" passage in a new way, based on which the content of the text and the meaning of several terms related to antiquity become clear, which, naturally, is important for the correct understanding of the context of the works. These Passages are: 1. “Eristavi Samadavla, a man gifted with all kinds of military virtues and a chosen archer, like the Jew Mosomakhos, or the chosen Neoptolemeos Pighas of glorious tutor of the Myrmidons”. Until now, the meaning of the word "Pighas" was not determined, which made it difficult to fully understand the content of the sentence. We believe that "Pighas" is a scribal error and should be replaced by “Pighos” – in late Byzantine Greek pronunciation of word "Pyrrhus", the second name of the son of Achilles – Neoptolemus. My proposed reading of the text easily explains the moment why the author connects the name of Neoptolemos with "Pyrrhus" and also with such a phrase as "of glorious tutor of Myrmidons” (i.e. Achilles, E.K.), because another Neoptolemus is also known in history, in particular – the leading warriors in the army of Alexander the Great. Those Pyrrhus descended from the Aeacids, the kings of Epirus (Arr. Anab. ii.27). Also, it is noteworthy that there was another Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus (319/318-272 BC) and "Pyrrhus of Neoptolemus" without the special definition "of glorious tutor of the Myrmidons" the reader could understand that Neoptolemus, a descendant of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, is mentioned here. It is worth noting that Pyrrhus, in the form of "Pviro" can also be seen in the "Fables of the Hellenes", in particular in the work "Judgments of Julian the First". It is said about Priam's daughter Polyxene that Achilles, fascinated by her, was fatally wounded by Paris with an arrow in the temple of Apollo. It is important that Pyrrhus is also mentioned by 12th century poet Chakhrukhadze. In “Tamariani”, Chakhrukhadze says in praise of Tamar's son, Lasha Giorgi, that he is “a new Pyrrhus”. Thus, it turns out that the tradition of comparing with Neoptolemus existed in Georgian fiction as early as the 12th century, which was repeated by the Anonymous Chronicler two centuries later in connection with another character. 2. “But it is written, as in Aphrosinians writings, someone tells, that fights with Antipatros and young Cassandros killed him”. Despite numerous attempts, the word "Aphrosinians" could not be understood correctly, which is why the essence of the sentence remained unclear. We believe that this section of the work, which provides information about the death of Alexander the Great, is related to the following phrase a few paragraphs later: „But it is said that he may have been poisoned by his wife Esukan as it is said by one writer („viTar sityჳsmoqmedi ityჳs“) of the Macedonian, to whom, having a headache and being in thought was given a poison by Midos and Antipatros“. First of all, we are convinced by the fact that, as T. Kaukhchishvili notes that the text is incomprehensible, because it is not clear who fought with Antipatros and who was killed by Kassandros. Thus the text should be restored as follows: „But it is said that he may have been poisoned by his wife Esukan as it is said by one writer of the Macedonian, to whom, having a headache and being in thought was given a poison by Midos and Antipatros, But it is written, as in Aphrosinians writings, someone tells, that fights with Antipatros and young Cassandros killed him”. In case of such correction or "filling" of the text, it becomes clear that there are two versions and two sources about Alexander's murder. Conditional "opposition" is more clearly defined – “one writer (sityჳsmoqmedi)” and other– “Aphrosinians writings” It is difficult to say who is meant in this particular case as the "the writer", however, based on the fact that P. Ingorokva believes that this story is taken from Alexander's novel, it is highly probable that the Chronicler here refers to Pseudo-Callisthenes. As for the meaning of "Aphrosinians", it is noteworthy that this source is not created by any "word maker" – historian or writer. I think this refers to the "Ephemerides" – Ἀλεξάνδρου ἐφημερίδων βιβλία (in ancient Georgian “efemeridni“), the diaries of Alexander's exploits, which were written by the king's private secretaries, Eumenes of Kardia and Diodotos of Erythrai. Thus, most likely, "Lies among the Aphrosinians" refers to "Alexander's book of Ephemerides", the existence of which could have been known to the Chronicler through various sources, it is also possible to assume that the name of this book was distorted by the Chronicler himself (because he knew it from oral transmission) or by the copyist. 3. “And it was said that he was poisoned by his wife Esukan, as the writer says about the Great Macedonian, who had a headache and was in thought, who feasted at the evening and drank the cup of Irakli. they say that Esukan took vengeance on him for putting to death Basil of Ujarma for his dishonorable behavior: Basil committed adultery with Esukan and dishonored the King's bed, and threw off his cassock, and stole the power. And for this dishonor, Basil was put to death”. This passage can be seen in a relatively recently discovered two-page manuscript (H-1067) of the writings of Chronicles, which was published in 2009 and describes the fact of the poisoning of David Ulu by his wife, Esukni, which is compared to the death of Alexander the Great. In my opinion, this passage has been misunderstood and interpreted by the publisher, who thinks that it refers to Deianira poisoning Heracles out of jealousy. Thus, as V. Silogava explains, "jealousy, on the basis of which this happened, is compared to the poisoning and murder of the greatest mythological hero of the ancient world, Herakles ("Iraklis"), as well as jealousy-based poisoning." It is not clear which jealousy is being discussed when in the text it is clearly indicated that Esukni was not jealous of David, but committed the murder of revenge of her lover Basil of Ujarma, who was killed by the king. Here, the problem is caused by the wrong interpretation of "iWvisa" (which is not "jealousy" at all, but, according to the "The Dictionary of Ancient Georgian Language” (Il. Abuladze): "conscience", "thought"; "expectation") and again the wrong understanding of the context. In addition, "being in thought" is addressed not to Irakli, but to Alexander the Great. As fascinating as it is to see the myth of Deianira and Heracles here, it is impossible given the structure and content of the sentence. In my opinion, in this case we are dealing with the information preserved in the sources about the death of Alexander (which originates from the "Ephemerides"), according to which Alexander was poisoned when he emptied a large cup full of undiluted wine in honor of Heracles (Iust. 12.13.7; Plut. Alex., 75.3; Ar. 7.24.4-25.1; Diod. XVII, 117).

Marco Barducci

This dossier collects the contributions of the conference "Republican virtues: interdisciplinary reflections between antiquity and contemporaneity" held at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia on 10 October 2024. The organisation of this conference is part of the research and third mission activities promoted by the Pavia research unit belonging to the national project Lexicon for the republic: from municipal self-government to a united Europe coordinated by Professor Maurizio Ridolfi at the University of Tuscia, and financed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (National anniversaries and national and international sporting events mission structure). The title of the dossier may suggest the idea of the univocity and coherence of the object of investigation of the various contributions (the ‘republican virtues’), which are examined here with a multidisciplinary viewpoint and along a chronological span ranging from antiquity to the present day. In fact, this dossier, and of course the conference from which it has taken its cue, aims to problematise precisely the relationship between virtue and republic, which is why I consider it useful to briefly clarify in this introduction what its aims are. To this end, I intend to begin with an analysis of the title itself. First of all, examined through the lens of an interdisciplinary gaze that combines history, philology, pedagogy and constitutionalism, the ‘republican virtues’ appear as a corpus of concepts ranging from amor patriae to fraternity, whose common roots can indeed be traced back to Greco-Roman culture, but whose composition and meaning vary in time and space in response to different circumstances and political, social and economic contexts, as well as to different ideas of ‘republic’.  Here, for example, the promotion of community welfare over egoistic-individual welfare, even in the pursuit of the ‘good life. ', is central to both classical and humanistic-Renaissance culture and paideia, but then leaves room, between the 17th and 19th centuries, for various attempts to harmonise individual initiative and collective well-being in response to the emergence first of the trading society and later of the industrial society. Secondly, the very relationship between virtue and republic(ness) is not so straightforward, but rather it is rather complex, if not at times even contradictory. In part, this situation stems from the ambiguity of the very notion of res-publica, understood both as the primacy of the collective interest, as an alternative form of government to monarchy, and as a synonym for ‘state’. . The tendency, promoted by a certain Anglo-Saxon literature, to separate ‘constitutional’ republicanism from the tradition of civic humanism has certainly contributed to making this relationship particularly complex. One of the consequences of such a distinction is that ‘republican virtues’ have been identified in countries, such as England for example, which, with the exception of the very brief (and unsuccessful) Commonwealth interlude, have never established a republican order.The importance of civic virtues and the need to promote them in the community are also central aspects of contemporary republican thinking. Within the so-called ‘neo-republican’ theory, for example, the importance of the virtues in the defence of political freedom is sometimes invoked in support of institutions and norms, sometimes instead as the basis for the active citizenship's contestation of the various forms of domination. The reference to the virtues not only as a moral and political tradition to be explored in a long-term framework, but also as a goal to be realised through political and educational initiatives, is therefore a theme that lends itself to reflections straddling the realist analysis and the normative-prescriptive dimension.In line with these trends, this dossier also intends to demonstrate how the relationship between virtue and republic from antiquity to the present is still in the making, as it is historically conditioned as much by contextual factors as by political and ideological agendas, which revolve first and foremost around the definition of the controversial idea of the ‘republic’, the very crux of our common discussion.

Massimiliano Munzi

This is a review of Ancient Rome and the Modern Italian State. Ideological Placemaking, Archaeology, and Architecture, 1870–1945 by Alessandro Sebastiani, published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

Ahmet Türkan, Thomas Corsten

Aizanoi, located within the borders of modern village of Çavdarhisar, had been founded as a Pergamene colony in the Hellenistic Period and became an important polis of Western Asia Minor under the Roman rule. Territory of the city covers Örencik Plain which is irrigated by Kocasu (Penkalas) Stream and once called as Aizanitis. This article presents seven tombstones reused on the quay walls which were identified during excavations conducted around the Penkalas River in years 2018, 2019, 2020 under the directorship of Prof. Dr. Elif Özer. The first five inscriptions are bomoi, while inscriptions no. 7 and no. 8 stelai. No. 6, unlike the others, was found in the northern necropolis of the city. No.1 is an epigram for a young man, Iulianus who identified poetically as kind to Muses and Herakles. No. 2 is erected by Ephesis and Amias for their father Agathas. No. 3. is erected by a guild for its member, scutulae-maker Zosimos from Sardis. No. 4. is fragment of a bomos. No. 5. erected by Apellas, Trophimos and Aleksandros for their father Agathas. No. 7. is erected for Demetrios by his brothers, a cult servant and an oikonomos. No. 8 is erected by Menekles and Theodoros but deceased’s name is missing.

Arno Simons

This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.

Leonardo Impett, Fabian Offert

In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker's question, "Is there a digital art history?" -- posed exactly a decade ago -- in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional types of neural networks have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically analyzed. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a "digital" art history in Drucker's sense. On the one hand, the visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of different forms of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have "seen" large parts of the Western visual canon mediated by Net visual culture, and they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. On the other hand, based on two technical case studies of utilizing a contemporary large-scale visual model to investigate basic questions from the fields of art history and urbanism, we suggest that such systems require a new critical methodology that takes into account the epistemic entanglement of a model and its applications. This new methodology reads its corpora through a neural model's training data, and vice versa: the visual ideologies of research datasets and training datasets become entangled.

Ulyana Piterbarg, Lerrel Pinto, Rob Fergus

Neural Language Models (LMs) offer an exciting solution for general-purpose embodied control. However, a key technical issue arises when using an LM-based controller: environment observations must be converted to text, which coupled with history, results in long and verbose textual prompts. As a result, prior work in LM agents is limited to restricted domains with small observation size as well as minimal needs for interaction history or instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce diff history, a simple and highly effective solution to these issues. By applying the Unix diff command on consecutive text observations in the interaction histories used to prompt LM policies, we can both abstract away redundant information and focus the content of textual inputs on the salient changes in the environment. On NetHack, an unsolved video game that requires long-horizon reasoning for decision-making, LMs tuned with diff history match state-of-the-art performance for neural agents while needing 1800x fewer training examples compared to prior work. Even on the simpler BabyAI-Text environment with concise text observations, we find that although diff history increases the length of prompts, the representation it provides offers a 25% improvement in the efficiency of low-sample instruction tuning. Further, we show that diff history scales favorably across different tuning dataset sizes. We open-source our code and data to https://diffhistory.github.io.

The Rt Hon Lady Rose of Colmworth

Agreements on prices by undertakings selling competing products are regarded as one of the most serious competition law infringements. This article considers what happens when government sets the prices at which those competing firms can sell their products. This article firstly examines the extensive use of government price controls in World War II. It then reviews early cases in the Restrictive Practices Court that considered the public interest (if any) in price stability. This article then touches on EU case law on when government involvement in price setting is acceptable or may provide some defence for undertakings and more recent EU legislation imposing price controls. Finally, the article draws the arguments for and against price fixing together to show what we can learn from the history of price controls. Current economic conditions and the range of solutions available to government make such a historical review both valuable and timely.

H. Iwamoto, S. Shimose, Y. Noda et al.

Simple Summary Although the clinical trial of atezolizumab plus bevacizumab have revealed its efficacy for HCC, the outcomes in the real-world clinical practice are unclear. In the study, we retorspectively evaluated the efficacy and safety of atezoizumab plus bevacizumab for HCC. Atezorizumab plus bevacizumab was effective and safe even in the real-world clinical practice including patients with HCC in a previous MTA history or other than ALBI grade 1. Abstract Background: Atezolizumab plus bevacizumab was approved for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Although clinical trials have revealed its efficacy, the outcomes in the real-world clinical practice are unclear. We retrospectively evaluated the efficacy and safety of atezolizumab plus bevacizumab for HCC. Materials and Methods: This is a multicenter study conducted between November 2020 and March 2021. Among the 61 patients, 51 were assessed for progression-free survival (PFS), therapeutic response, and adverse events (AEs). Results: The median PFS was 5.4 months. The objective response rate (ORR) was 35.3%. The disease control rate (DCR) was 86.3%. The incidence rates of AEs at any grade and grade >3 were 98.0% and 29.4%, respectively. The most frequent AE at any grade and grade >3 was hepatic disorder. In patients with a previous history of molecular targeted agent (MTA) or the degree of albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) grade, there were no significant differences in the PFS, ORR, DCR, and incidence rates of AEs. Conclusion: The study demonstrated that atezolizumab plus bevacizumab was effective and safe for patients with HCC even in the real-world setting including patients with a previous MTA history or other than ALBI grade 1.

S. Linda

The practice of borrowing and mixing architectural forms and meanings from different cultural environments dates back to the architecture of the ancient world and is still relevant today. Therefore, discovering its origins, mechanisms and causes of development is an important subject in the theory and history of architecture. The purpose of the study is to introduce the concept of cultural diffusion, as a methodological technique for mixing architectural forms from different artistic environments, which contributes to the development of qualitatively new solutions that form new architectural styles and synthesise new meanings. It is also vital to substantiate the phenomena of cultural diffusion as the first and necessary stage of subsequent processes of development of architectural meaning and shape – the stage of conscious and reasonable choice of an architectural prototype for a new design. The main material for the study is objects related to the cult of Isis – one of the most common religious cults in the architecture of the ancient world, which belonged to the Greco-Roman civilisation. In terms of methodology, the study is based on the analysis and systematisation of papers on architectural objects associated with the cult of Isis, and the results of visual observations (description and comparative analysis). Using the example of architectural objects associated with the cult of Isis, the study demonstrates that in the architecture of the ancient world, various methodological approaches were developed in architectural form-making: both autonomous processes in different cultures and mixed, which involved the capabilities and means of various cultural environments, opening unlimited prospects for the development of architectural form and meaning. Scientific originality is the interpretation of the process of cultural diffusion as an important methodological prerequisite for a new architectural form and meaning development. This determines the practical importance of the study, since the phenomenon of cultural diffusion, as a methodological technique for the architect's work, is still relevant today

Luciana Molina

Nossa hipótese é de que a originalidade da interpretação de Judith Butler para Antígona só pode ser compreendida à luz das interpretações filosóficas já existentes da tragédia e das críticas à compreensão da tradição psicanalítica a respeito de gênero e parentesco, em particular como aparecem no Complexo de Édipo. Nesse sentido, analisamos algumas interpretações de Antígona pertencentes à tradição filosófica e psicanalítica (Hegel, Frédéric Gros, Jacques Lacan etc.) e também algumas feitas à interpretação freudiana de Édipo (Jessica Benjamin, Juliet Mitchell e da própria Butler) para delimitar a contribuição da perspectiva de Judith Butler sobre a tragédia e para a discussão filosófica das noções de gênero e parentesco.

Hanxun Zhong, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu et al.

Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.

Juergen Schmidhuber

Machine learning (ML) is the science of credit assignment. It seeks to find patterns in observations that explain and predict the consequences of events and actions. This then helps to improve future performance. Minsky's so-called "fundamental credit assignment problem" (1963) surfaces in all sciences including physics (why is the world the way it is?) and history (which persons/ideas/actions have shaped society and civilisation?). Here I focus on the history of ML itself. Modern artificial intelligence (AI) is dominated by artificial neural networks (NNs) and deep learning, both of which are conceptually closer to the old field of cybernetics than what was traditionally called AI (e.g., expert systems and logic programming). A modern history of AI & ML must emphasize breakthroughs outside the scope of shallow AI text books. In particular, it must cover the mathematical foundations of today's NNs such as the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914), the theory of AI and its limitations (1931-34), and the first working deep learning algorithms (1965-). From the perspective of 2025, I provide a timeline of the most significant events in the history of NNs, ML, deep learning, AI, computer science, and mathematics in general, crediting the individuals who laid the field's foundations. The text contains numerous hyperlinks to relevant overview sites. With a ten-year delay, it supplements my 2015 award-winning deep learning survey which provides hundreds of additional references. Finally, I will put things in a broader historical context, spanning from the Big Bang to when the universe will be many times older than it is now.

Louis Ndekha

This article offers a reading of the parable of the Dishonest Steward from the perspective of Greco-Roman status concern. It observes that the parable has a long and complicated history of interpretation. The different approaches in the reading of the parable reveal the unresolved quest in scholarship to establish a reading of the parable that takes into account both the steward’s act of generosity towards his master’s debtors and the praise that follows this action. This article proposes the Greco-Roman status concern as a framework for understanding the meaning of the parable in its original context. Status concern was the spirit of tenacity in maintaining one’s status and honour against all odds characteristic of Greco-Roman honour and shame culture. The article argues that when the parable is read within its literary context, it reveals that at the heart of Jesus’ message in the parable is the theme of persistence as an attribute of authentic discipleship. This understanding of the parable resonates with the entrenched Greco-Roman spirit of status concern. The interpretation would also have been relevant to Luke’s Greco-Roman auditors living on the periphery of the Greco-Roman culture with the constant pressures to conform to the ethos of the larger social context. The steward’s resolve to maintain his status even in the most difficult circumstances provided a paradigm for those Christ-followers to remain steadfast in the faith against all odds.Contribution: The article presents an alternative interpretation of the parable of the Dishonest Steward. By proposing status concern as an interpretative framework, it offers both new insights into the socio-economic and socio-cultural realities of Luke’s world and the continuing evidence of the contribution of Greco-Roman world to the development of the New Testament texts.

Ella Parodi

In an article, ‘The Slaves were Happy’: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies, Erik Robinson, a Latin teacher from a public high school in Texas, criticises how, in his experience, Classics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (Robinson, 2017). However, texts such as the article ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics in the Secondary Classics Classroom’ (Hunt, 2016), and the book ‘From abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the Classics classroom’ (Sorkin Rabinowitz & McHardy, 2014) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensitive topics. They argue that the historical distance between us and Greco-Roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. Thus, Robinson's assertion that Classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. Regardless, Robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be significantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in Latin classes, such as the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), one of the most widely used high school Latin textbooks in use in both America and the United Kingdom (Robinson, 2017). In particular, Robinson views the presentation of slavery within the CLC as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader's perspective on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the Roman slave trade (Robinson, 2017). As far as he was concerned, the problem lay with the characterisation of the CLC's slave characters Grumio and Clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. There was never any hint in the book that Grumio or Clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the CLC itself states in its English background section on Roman slavery, Roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (CLC I, 1998, p. 78). One might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the English language information we learn about the brutality of the Roman slave trade provided in the background section of Stage 6, and what we can infer about Roman slavery from the Latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves.