Jonathan Rystrøm, Chris Schmitz, Karolina Korgul
et al.
Deploying Large Language Model-based agents (LLM agents) in the public sector requires assuring that they meet the stringent legal, procedural, and structural requirements of public-sector institutions. Practitioners and researchers often turn to benchmarks for such assessments. However, it remains unclear what criteria benchmarks must meet to ensure they adequately reflect public-sector requirements, or how many existing benchmarks do so. In this paper, we first define such criteria based on a first-principles survey of public administration literature: benchmarks must be \emph{process-based}, \emph{realistic}, \emph{public-sector-specific} and report \emph{metrics} that reflect the unique requirements of the public sector. We analyse more than 1,300 benchmark papers for these criteria using an expert-validated LLM-assisted pipeline. Our results show that no single benchmark meets all of the criteria. Our findings provide a call to action for both researchers to develop public sector-relevant benchmarks and for public-sector officials to apply these criteria when evaluating their own agentic use cases.
Wosene Berhanu, Simon Yigremachew, Claudia Hanson
et al.
Background Cervical cancer causes morbidity and mortality among women worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is crucial for cervical cancer prevention, yet the vaccination rates remain suboptimal in Ethiopia. Studies identified cultural and religious factors as key barriers. While evidence suggests that faith leaders can effectively promote public health interventions, their potential role in HPV vaccination efforts has largely been overlooked and remains inadequately understood. Objective This study aimed to explore the perspectives of faith leaders in Addis Ababa to identify factors influencing HPV vaccination among girls. Methods This study employed qualitative methods, using in-depth interviews with purposively selected faith leaders. The faith leaders employed by the Inter-Religious Counsel of Ethiopia (IRCE) were excluded. A total of 13 faith leaders participated in the interviews. The 5C framework informed the data collection tool, and data analysis was conducted using inductive reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). Result Faith leaders are navigating between modern medicine and their religious beliefs, face distrust of Western vaccine aid intentions and local HPV vaccine providers, and receive fragmented or inconsistent information. These challenges make it difficult for them to act as champions for the vaccination, but with clear, well-organized information, there is an opportunity to involve them more effectively. Conclusion Faith leaders face several challenges that limit their role in promoting HPV vaccination. This study recommends providing clear, culturally relevant materials and communication strategies to support faith leaders and their communities. With these tools, faith leaders have the opportunity to engage and become effective advocates for the elimination of cervical cancer.
Lukas Birkenmaier, Laureen Sieber, Felix Bergstein
This paper presents a novel dataset of public broadcast interviews featuring high-ranking German politicians. The interviews were sourced from YouTube, transcribed, processed for speaker identification, and stored in a tidy and open format. The dataset comprises 99 interviews with 33 different German politicians across five major interview formats, containing a total of 28,146 sentences. As the first of its kind, this dataset offers valuable opportunities for research on various aspects of political communication in the (German) political contexts, such as agenda-setting, interviewer dynamics, or politicians' self-presentation.
Peer review is central to academic publishing, but the growing volume of submissions is straining the process. This motivates the development of computational approaches to support peer review. While each review is tailored to a specific paper, reviewers often make assessments according to certain aspects such as Novelty, which reflect the values of the research community. This alignment creates opportunities for standardizing the reviewing process, improving quality control, and enabling computational support. While prior work has demonstrated the potential of aspect analysis for peer review assistance, the notion of aspect remains poorly formalized. Existing approaches often derive aspects from review forms and guidelines, yet data-driven methods for aspect identification are underexplored. To address this gap, our work takes a bottom-up approach: we propose an operational definition of aspect and develop a data-driven schema for deriving aspects from a corpus of peer reviews. We introduce a dataset of peer reviews augmented with aspects and show how it can be used for community-level review analysis. We further show how the choice of aspects can impact downstream applications, such as LLM-generated review detection. Our results lay a foundation for a principled and data-driven investigation of review aspects, and pave the path for new applications of NLP to support peer review.
Menghua Xia, Reimund Bayerlein, Yanis Chemli
et al.
Artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has shown remarkable performance in nuclear medicine imaging (NMI), offering cost-effective software solutions for tasks such as image enhancement, motion correction, and attenuation correction. However, these advancements come with the risk of hallucinations, generating realistic yet factually incorrect content. Hallucinations can misrepresent anatomical and functional information, compromising diagnostic accuracy and clinical trust. This paper presents a comprehensive perspective of hallucination-related challenges in AIGC for NMI, introducing the DREAM report, which covers recommendations for definition, representative examples, detection and evaluation metrics, underlying causes, and mitigation strategies. This position statement paper aims to initiate a common understanding for discussions and future research toward enhancing AIGC applications in NMI, thereby supporting their safe and effective deployment in clinical practice.
We revisit a recent puzzle about common knowledge, the ``sailboat" case (Lederman, 2018), and argue that Lewisian common knowledge allows us to reconcile the pre-theoretical intuition that certain facts are ``public" in such situations, while these facts cannot be common knowledge in the classical, iterative sense. The crux of the argument is to understand Lewisian common knowledge as an account of what it means for an event to be public. We first formulate this argument informally to clarify its philosophical commitment and then propose one way to capture it formally in epistemic-plausibility models. Taken together, we take the philosophical and the formal arguments as providing evidence that Lewisian common knowledge is a plausible account of what it means for an event to be public.
Mabel Nilson Alves, Denise Petrucci Gigante, Gicele Costa Mintem
et al.
Abstract Objective Describe dietary practices recommended in the Dietary Guidelines and the association with sociodemographic factors and lifestyle habits in users of the nutrition service at a Basic Health Unit in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul in 2022. Methods Cross-sectional study with individuals aged ≥20 years who received nutritional care. The questionnaire used included a scale validated for the Brazilian population, which considers three domains of food consumption: domestic planning and organization, food choice and eating habits. Practices with a frequency of 60% or more were considered appropriate to the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines. Results Among the 162 interviewees, only the eating practices related to the domain of eating habits were adequate. The mean adequacy score was 39.0 points with a standard deviation of 5.4 points and a median of 39.0 points. The mean adequacy score was statistically higher among respondents who declared themselves to be race/skin color brown/black, who had 40.4 points with a 95% confidence interval (95%CI 39.1; 41.7) and among those active in their free time, who had 40.4 points (95%CI 39.0; 41.8), after adjustments for demographic and socioeconomic variables. Conclusion The adequacy score values were higher in brown/black individuals and those who practiced some kind of physical activity during leisure time. Practices related to the domains of planning and food choices should be prioritized in nutritional counseling.
Denne introduktion skitserer det konceptuelle og analytiske omfang af det biosociale som et nyt felt, der udfordrer den traditionelle dikotomi mellem det biologiske og det sociale. Den placerer det biosociale i relation til tilstødende begreber som biopolitik, biosozialitet og den biopsykosociale tilgang og diskuterer, hvordan de fem bidrag til dette særnummer hver på sin måde beskæftiger sig med sammenvævningen af liv, materie og social praksis. Teksten fremhæver, hvordan disse artikler samlet set bevæger sig i retning af at forstå livet som relationelt og sammensat på tværs af arter, kroppe og institutioner.
Public aspects of medicine, Social sciences (General)
The article considers particular characteristics of becoming and development of medical charity and volunteering in the countries of the Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan). The analysis of databases of the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the program “The United Nations Volunteers” revealed key trends and problems of development of medical social initiatives in the Region. It is demonstrated that medical volunteering performs compensatory, integral, innovative and educational functions promoting to increase accessibility of medical care, consolidation of social solidarity and modernization of public health. It is established that volunteering and charity practices become important element of social infrastructure in the countries of the Central Asia. However, their institutionalization and professionalization continue to be incomplete. The directions of further development are grounded: formation of legal fundamentals, certification of volunteers, digitization, integration into national strategies of sustainable development.
We present a quantum network that distributes entangled photons between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a public library in Urbana. The network allows members of the public to perform measurements on the photons. We describe its design and implementation and outreach based on the network. Over 400 instances of public interaction have been logged with the system since it was launched in November 2023.
Joel Alves de Lima Júnior, Kiev Gama, Jorge da Silva Correia Neto
The use of the open innovation paradigm has been, over the past years, getting special attention in the public sector. Motivated by an urban environment that is increasingly more complex and challenging, several government agencies have been allocating financial resources and efforts to promote open and participative government initiatives. As a way to try and understand this scenario, a systematic review of the literature was conducted, to provide a comprehensive analysis of the scientific papers that were published, seeking to capture, classify, evaluate and synthesize how the use of this paradigm has been put into practice in the public sector. In total, 4,741 preliminary studies were analyzed. From this number, only 37 articles were classified as potentially relevant and moved forward, going through the process of data extraction and analysis. From the data obtained, it was possible to verify that the use of this paradigm started to be reported with a higher frequency in the literature since 2013 and, among the main findings, we highlight the reports of experiences, approach propositions, of understanding how the phenomenon occurs and theoretical reflections. It was also possible to verify that the use of open innovation through social media was one of the pioneer techniques of engagement between the public sector and citizens. In conclusion, the reports confirm that the main challenges of this paradigm applied to the public sector are associated with their respective bureaucratic aspects, therefore lacking a bigger reflection on the procedures and methods to be used in the public sphere.
In our original article (Sarvet & Stensrud, 2024), we examine twin definitions of "harm" in personalized medicine: one based on predictions of individuals' unmeasurable response types (counterfactual harm), and another based solely on the observations of experiments (interventionist harm). In their commentary, Mueller & Pearl (2024) (MP) read our review as an argument that "counterfactual logic should [...] be purged from consideration of harm and benefit" and "strongly object [...] that a rational decision maker may well apply the interventional perspective to the exclusion of counterfactual considerations." Here we show that this objection is misguided. We analyze MP's examples and derive a general result, showing that determinations of harm through interventionist and counterfactual analyses will always concur. Therefore, individuals who embrace counterfactual formulations and those who object to their use will make equivalent decisions in uncontroversial settings.
Public models offer predictions to a variety of downstream tasks and have played a crucial role in various AI applications, showcasing their proficiency in accurate predictions. However, the exclusive emphasis on prediction accuracy may not align with the diverse end objectives of downstream agents. Recognizing the public model's predictions as a service, we advocate for integrating the objectives of downstream agents into the optimization process. Concretely, to address performance disparities and foster fairness among heterogeneous agents in training, we propose a novel Equitable Objective. This objective, coupled with a policy gradient algorithm, is crafted to train the public model to produce a more equitable/uniform performance distribution across downstream agents, each with their unique concerns. Both theoretical analysis and empirical case studies have proven the effectiveness of our method in advancing performance equity across diverse downstream agents utilizing the public model for their decision-making. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Ren-Research/Socially-Equitable-Public-Models.
Yasaman Hakiminejad, Elizabeth Pantesco, Arash Tavakoli
Studies show that psychological effects are among one of the top concerns for public transportation users. While many Americans spend a significant portion of their time in public transportation spaces, the impact of the design and maintenance of these spaces on user well-being has not been fully studied. In this study, we conducted a survey to better understand the effect of implementing different designs on people's well-being and perceptual metrics (N=304). Participants were presented with six images depicting different cabin configurations, including (1) the current version of the cabin space, (2) a low-maintenance version, (3) an aesthetically enhanced version, (4) a bike rack-enabled version, (5) a version with an added workspace, and (6) an improved version with biophilic design. After viewing each image, participants' well-being metrics (e.g., stress, and emotion) and their public transportation perception metrics (e.g., perceptions of safety, and reasonable cost) were evaluated. Our results from linear mixed-effect modeling indicated that adding functional amenities and biophilic design elements led to an overall enhancement in well-being and perceptual metrics. Conversely, low maintenance worsened all measured well-being. This research lays the ground for developing human-centered public transportation spaces that can lead to an increase in public transportation adoption.
BackgroundAs the population ages, there has been a growing focus on the decline in fertility. Research has identified age and fertility history as the primary influencing factors. Nevertheless, there is a deficiency in fundamental data regarding the fertility status among different industries. ObjectiveTo investigate the fertility status and influencing factors among female workers aged 22-35 years in different industries. MethodsFrom July 2020 to February 2021, a cross-sectional survey was conducted using a staged sampling approach. This survey specifically targeted 22-35-year-old married female workers with a history of pregnancy in industries such as education, healthcare, finance, and telecommunications, totaling 22903 participants. The survey encompassed industry, demographic characteristics, pregnancy history, time to pregnancy (TTP), and other influencing factors. The influencing factors of decline in fertility were identified by chi-square test and Cox proportional hazards regression. Subsequent industry-specific Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to compared fertility decline patterns across a spectrum of industries after selected influencing factors were adjusted. ResultsAmong the 22903 respondents, 19194 valid questionnaires were collected, with a valid recovery rate of 83.8%. The cumulative pregnancy rates (CRP) of 1-6 months and 1-12 months for the 22-35-year-old female workers were 67.23% and 91.33% respectively. The multivariate analysis showed that region, age, education level, personal annual income, housework time, coping style, gravidity, parity, and spontaneous abortion were influencing factors of fertility decline (P<0.05). Female workers with ≥3 gravidities and ≥2 spontaneous abortions had a higher risk of fertility decline, with hazard ratios (HR) and associated 95% confidence interval (95%CI) of 0.633 (0.582, 0.688) and 0.785 (0.670, 0.921) respectively (P<0.01). Compared to the education industry, the healthcare and finance industries showed a higher risk of fertility decline, with HR (95%CI) values of 0.876 (0.834, 0.920) and 0.909 (0.866, 0.954), respectively (P<0.05). These two HR (95%CI) values remained statistically significant [0.899 (0.852, 0.948) and 0.882 (0.833, 0.934) respectively, P<0.05)] after further adjustment with nine influencing factors such as region and age. ConclusionRegions, age, education level, personal annual income, housework time, coping style, pregnancy and childbirth times, and natural abortion times are influencing factors of fertility decline in female workers. Compared to the education industry, the healthcare and finance industries have a higher risk of declining fertility.
Purpose: The prevalence of HIV among Black women is higher than the prevalence among other ethnic groups. Although antiretroviral therapy reduces HIV transmission and mortality, Black women still face health disparities when it comes to receiving health care. The purpose of this scoping review is to synthesize research regarding health disparities and health inequities faced by Black women living with HIV (BWLH). Methods: We searched three scholarly databases, PsychNet, MEDLINE, and CINAHL, and 18 peer-reviewed complete studies that met the inclusion criteria. Results: Several themes emerged from the literature, including discrimination, poverty, mental and physical health, health care, and social support. Each theme had a role in the progression of BWLH along the HIV care continuum. Conclusion: Black women continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV, which involves active engagement in HIV care to sustain viral suppression to prevent the spread of the virus. Factors continue to exist that contribute to health disparities and inequities, such as discrimination, internal and enacted HIV-related stigma, and poverty. Thematic findings in this review indicate that patient-centered care and support systems can positively impact BWLH experiences along the HIV continuum.
The increase in emerging and reemerging infectious diseases has underscored the need for the prompt monitoring of intact infectious viruses and the quick assessment of their infectivity. However, molecular techniques cannot distinguish between intact infectious and noninfectious viruses. Here, two distinct methodologies have been developed for the expeditious and dependable quantification of intact infectious H1N1 virus, and several experiments have been conducted to substantiate their efficacy. One is an integrated cell absorption quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method (ICA-qPCR), and the other is a combined propidium monoazide qPCR method (PMA-qPCR). The quantification limit is 100 cell culture infective dose 50 % (CCID50)/mL in ICA-qPCR following a 1.5-hour cell absorption or 126 CCID50/mL after a 15-minute incubation. For PMA-qPCR, the limit was 2,512 CCID50/mL. The number of genome copies quantified by the ICA-qPCR and PMA-qPCR methods was strongly correlated with the infectious titer determined by the CCID50 assay, thereby enabling the estimation of virus infectivity. The ICA-qPCR and PMA-qPCR methods are both suitable for the identification and quantification of intact infectious H1N1 virus in inactivated samples, wastewater, and biological materials. In conclusion, the ICA-qPCR and PMA-qPCR methods have distinct advantages and disadvantages, and can be used to quantify intact infectious viruses rapidly. These methodologies can facilitate the identification of the presence of intact infectious viruses in wastewater or on pathogen-related physical surfaces in high-level biosafety laboratories and medical facilities. Furthermore, these methodologies can also be utilized to detect other highly pathogenic pathogens.
Infectious and parasitic diseases, Public aspects of medicine
Walid Krichene, Nicolas Mayoraz, Steffen Rendle
et al.
We study a class of private learning problems in which the data is a join of private and public features. This is often the case in private personalization tasks such as recommendation or ad prediction, in which features related to individuals are sensitive, while features related to items (the movies or songs to be recommended, or the ads to be shown to users) are publicly available and do not require protection. A natural question is whether private algorithms can achieve higher utility in the presence of public features. We give a positive answer for multi-encoder models where one of the encoders operates on public features. We develop new algorithms that take advantage of this separation by only protecting certain sufficient statistics (instead of adding noise to the gradient). This method has a guaranteed utility improvement for linear regression, and importantly, achieves the state of the art on two standard private recommendation benchmarks, demonstrating the importance of methods that adapt to the private-public feature separation.
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Tomoyuki Morimae, Ryo Nishimaki
et al.
We construct quantum public-key encryption from one-way functions. In our construction, public keys are quantum, but ciphertexts are classical. Quantum public-key encryption from one-way functions (or weaker primitives such as pseudorandom function-like states) are also proposed in some recent works [Morimae-Yamakawa, eprint:2022/1336; Coladangelo, eprint:2023/282; Barooti-Grilo-Malavolta-Sattath-Vu-Walter, eprint:2023/877]. However, they have a huge drawback: they are secure only when quantum public keys can be transmitted to the sender (who runs the encryption algorithm) without being tampered with by the adversary, which seems to require unsatisfactory physical setup assumptions such as secure quantum channels. Our construction is free from such a drawback: it guarantees the secrecy of the encrypted messages even if we assume only unauthenticated quantum channels. Thus, the encryption is done with adversarially tampered quantum public keys. Our construction is the first quantum public-key encryption that achieves the goal of classical public-key encryption, namely, to establish secure communication over insecure channels, based only on one-way functions. Moreover, we show a generic compiler to upgrade security against chosen plaintext attacks (CPA security) into security against chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA security) only using one-way functions. As a result, we obtain CCA secure quantum public-key encryption based only on one-way functions.
Social and cultural norms and beliefs shape how men, as social actors, perceive and engage in sexual activities. Little is known about risky sexual practices and prevention strategies among older Yoruba men. As a growing concern in Nigeria, this paper explores risky sexual behaviours of older Yoruba men living in Ibadan, a metropolitan city, and their strategies for preventing sexually transmitted infections in old age. We held six focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews, with a total of 65 participants. The findings show that social norms allow older men to engage in multiple sexual relationships, which exposes them to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and to use potent traditional medical protective and preventive measures to mitigate their vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections and the consequences of having sex with women under “magun.” Such measures include “magun” on men, incisions, amulets, and aseje (a traditionally prepared concoction). Additionally, the findings revealed that protective measures are against serious consequences of risky sexual behaviors, like sexual pleasures and death. The findings point to the need for more inclusive sexual health and HIV campaigns and strategies addressing the sexual health challenges of all men and women and must be culturally sensitive.