Hasil untuk "Epistemology. Theory of knowledge"

Raphael Morisco

The knowledge gap hypothesis suggests that the diffusion of information tends to increase rather than reduce social inequalities. Subsequent research on the digital divide has extended this perspective by focusing on unequal access to and use of digital technologies. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence raises the question of whether these frameworks remain sufficient to describe current forms of informational inequality. While access to AI systems is increasingly widespread, differences may arise in how users engage with AI-generated content. This paper proposes a theoretical extension of the knowledge gap perspective by arguing that generative AI shifts the focus from access and usage to the critical evaluation of information. It is assumed that individuals with higher levels of education are more likely to question and contextualize AI-generated outputs, whereas individuals with lower levels of education may rely more directly on them. The contribution is conceptual and does not present empirical findings. It aims to provide a framework for future research on the relationship between education, AI use, and knowledge inequality.

Yanhui Li, Dongxia Wang, Zhu Sun et al.

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the dominant approach for Knowledge Graph-aware Recommender Systems (KGRSs) due to their proven effectiveness. Building upon GNN-based KGRSs, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been incorporated to address the sparity issue, leading to longer training time. However, through extensive experiments, we reveal that: (1)compared to other KGRSs, the existing GNN-based KGRSs fail to keep their superior performance under sparse interactions even with SSL. (2) More complex models tend to perform worse in sparse interaction scenarios and complex mechanisms, like attention mechanism, can be detrimental as they often increase learning difficulty. Inspired by these findings, we propose LightKG, a simple yet powerful GNN-based KGRS to address sparsity issues. LightKG includes a simplified GNN layer that encodes directed relations as scalar pairs rather than dense embeddings and employs a linear aggregation framework, greatly reducing the complexity of GNNs. Additionally, LightKG incorporates an efficient contrastive layer to implement SSL. It directly minimizes the node similarity in original graph, avoiding the time-consuming subgraph generation and comparison required in previous SSL methods. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that LightKG outperforms 12 competitive KGRSs in both sparse and dense scenarios while significantly reducing training time. Specifically, it surpasses the best baselines by an average of 5.8\% in recommendation accuracy and saves 84.3\% of training time compared to KGRSs with SSL. Our code is available at https://github.com/1371149/LightKG.

Orestis Tsirakis, Konstantinos Fysarakis, Vasileios Mavroeidis et al.

Modern cybersecurity threats are growing in complexity, targeting increasingly intricate & interconnected systems. To effectively defend against these evolving threats, security teams utilize automation & orchestration to enhance response efficiency and consistency. In that sense, cybersecurity playbooks are key enablers, providing a structured, reusable, and continuously improving approach to incident response, enabling organizations to codify requirements, domain expertise, and best practices and automate decision-making processes to the extent possible. The emerging Collaborative Automated Course of Action Operations (CACAO) standard defines a common machine-processable schema for cybersecurity playbooks, facilitating interoperability for their exchange and ensuring the ability to orchestrate and automate cybersecurity operations. However, despite its potential and the fact that it is a relatively new standardization work, there is a lack of tools to support its adoption and, in particular, the management & lifecycle development of CACAO playbooks, limiting their practical deployment. Motivated by the above, this work presents the design, development, and evaluation of a Knowledge Management System (KMS) for managing CACAO cybersecurity playbooks throughout their lifecycle, providing essential tools to streamline playbook management. Using open technologies & standards, the proposed approach fosters standards-based interoperability & enhances the usability of state-of-the-art cybersecurity orchestration & automation primitives. To encourage adoption, the resulting implementation is released as open-source, which, to the extent of our knowledge, comprises the first publicly available & documented work in this domain, supporting the broader uptake of CACAO playbooks & promoting the widespread use of interoperable automation and orchestration mechanisms in cybersecurity operations.

article Editorial

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Hannah Sansford, Nicholas Richardson, Hermina Petric Maretic et al.

Methods to evaluate Large Language Model (LLM) responses and detect inconsistencies, also known as hallucinations, with respect to the provided knowledge, are becoming increasingly important for LLM applications. Current metrics fall short in their ability to provide explainable decisions, systematically check all pieces of information in the response, and are often too computationally expensive to be used in practice. We present GraphEval: a hallucination evaluation framework based on representing information in Knowledge Graph (KG) structures. Our method identifies the specific triples in the KG that are prone to hallucinations and hence provides more insight into where in the response a hallucination has occurred, if at all, than previous methods. Furthermore, using our approach in conjunction with state-of-the-art natural language inference (NLI) models leads to an improvement in balanced accuracy on various hallucination benchmarks, compared to using the raw NLI models. Lastly, we explore the use of GraphEval for hallucination correction by leveraging the structure of the KG, a method we name GraphCorrect, and demonstrate that the majority of hallucinations can indeed be rectified.

Elona Shatri, George Fazekas

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) automates the transcription of musical notation from images into machine-readable formats like MusicXML, MEI, or MIDI, significantly reducing the costs and time of manual transcription. This study explores knowledge discovery in OMR by applying instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN to enhance the detection and delineation of musical symbols in sheet music. Unlike Optical Character Recognition (OCR), OMR must handle the intricate semantics of Common Western Music Notation (CWMN), where symbol meanings depend on shape, position, and context. Our approach leverages instance segmentation to manage the density and overlap of musical symbols, facilitating more precise information retrieval from music scores. Evaluations on the DoReMi and MUSCIMA++ datasets demonstrate substantial improvements, with our method achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of up to 59.70\% in dense symbol environments, achieving comparable results to object detection. Furthermore, using traditional computer vision techniques, we add a parallel step for staff detection to infer the pitch for the recognised symbols. This study emphasises the role of pixel-wise segmentation in advancing accurate music symbol recognition, contributing to knowledge discovery in OMR. Our findings indicate that instance segmentation provides more precise representations of musical symbols, particularly in densely populated scores, advancing OMR technology. We make our implementation, pre-processing scripts, trained models, and evaluation results publicly available to support further research and development.

Wanxu Wei, Yitong Song, Bin Yao

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a vital role in enhancing search results and recommendation systems. With the rapid increase in the size of the KGs, they are becoming inaccuracy and incomplete. This problem can be solved by the knowledge graph completion methods, of which graph attention network (GAT)-based methods stand out since their superior performance. However, existing GAT-based knowledge graph completion methods often suffer from overfitting issues when dealing with heterogeneous knowledge graphs, primarily due to the unbalanced number of samples. Additionally, these methods demonstrate poor performance in predicting the tail (head) entity that shares the same relation and head (tail) entity with others. To solve these problems, we propose GATH, a novel GAT-based method designed for Heterogeneous KGs. GATH incorporates two separate attention network modules that work synergistically to predict the missing entities. We also introduce novel encoding and feature transformation approaches, enabling the robust performance of GATH in scenarios with imbalanced samples. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the GATH's performance. Compared with the existing SOTA GAT-based model on Hits@10 and MRR metrics, our model improves performance by 5.2% and 5.2% on the FB15K-237 dataset, and by 4.5% and 14.6% on the WN18RR dataset, respectively.

S. P. Zapariy, A. G. Samusenko, Yu. E. Vyazovichenko et al.

Relevance. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic progressive neurodegenerative autoimmune disease of the central nervous system, affecting mainly people of working age and leading to disability. Since this disease is a frequent cause of persistent disability, the importance and at the same time insufficiency of research in the field of regional specific programs related to disability due to MS is noted. Aims. To study the dynamics and features of the formation of primary and repeated disability due to MS among various age groups of the population, taking into account gender characteristics and severity of disability in Moscow in 2014–2021. Materials and methods. The study used examination materials of persons over 18 years of age with MS, collected in an electronic database of medical and social expertise (ITU) of the Federal State Institution "ITU Main Bureau for Moscow", acts, protocols of ITU, static f-088/06 on the re-examination of RS. Results. The last 8 years have been characterized by a decrease in general disability due to MS, with a decrease in the number of persons recognized as disabled for the first time (VPI) and an increase in the number of persons re-recognized as disabled (PPI). There is a drop in the proportion of disabled people of the first and second disability groups with an increase in the third group. In the structure of VPI and PPI due to MS, persons of working age prevailed with a slight decrease in the group of PPI. The gender structure was dominated by female persons. Conclusion. The study of indicators of disability due to MS among various population groups in modern conditions is of great importance for monitoring the level of disability of patients and maintaining a socially active life of the patient.

Оксана Олександрівна Осетрова

Сучасні реалії буття України, зануреної рф у війну, а також тих країн, які перебувають у стані онтологічної загрози, з новою силою актуалізують проблему, що розгортається у соціальній площині (йдеться про антиномію «хаос – стабільність»). Інакше кажучи, сучасні соціальні катаклізми – COVID-19 і війна – порушили стабільність повсякденного життя. Наявність загрози ядерної ескалації міжнародного конфлікту розширює метафізичні обрії танатологічної та суїцидологічної проблематики, загострення якої здатне зруйнувати усталений порядок цивілізованого світу, що опинився у межовій ситуації. З огляду на зазначене мета даного дослідження полягає у з’ясуванні сутності феномену хаосу та соціальних процесів, похідних від нього – кінець, катастрофа, згідно з філософськими поглядами французького мислителя Ж.Бодріяра. Дане дослідження сфокусовано на актуальній екзистенціальній проблемі перебування людини у межовій ситуації хаосу, детермінованого реальністю танатологічної ситуації, що уможливлює перспективу онтологічної загрози планетарного масштабу, витоки якої містяться, на думку мислителя-інтелектуала Ж.Бодріяра, у нав’язливій ідеї тотального контролю, зреалізація якого призводить до зникнення соціального та заміщенні реальності ілюзією, у т.ч. навіть ілюзією безпеки як фундаментальною засадою спас-економії, що чітко спостерігається в ідеології рф, яка ґрунтується на споживанні катастрофи у повсякденному житті. У подальшому усвідомлення фахівцем із соціальної роботи того, що хаос – не Кінець усього (радше означити цей феномен як кінець старого порядку, трансформованого у безладдя, прикладом якого може слугувати аномія), а – Початок нового упорядкування, безпосередньо сприятиме досягненню ефективних результатів у його професійній діяльності в громаді, зокрема, у напрямі мінімізації/подолання наслідків аномії як різновиду хаосу.

Subhashis Das, Debashis Naskar, Sayon Roy

The purpose of this work is to find out how different library classification systems and linguistic ontologies arrange a particular domain of interest and what are the limitations for information retrieval. We use knowledge representation techniques and languages for construction of a domain specific ontology. This ontology would help not only in problem solving, but it would demonstrate the ease with which complex queries can be handled using principles of domain ontology, thereby facilitating better information retrieval.

François Lauzier-Jobin, L. Brunson, Brad Olson

This special issue explores how philosophy of science matters for both research and social action in community psychology. It explores the complex issue of what might be appropriate philosophical bases for community psychology theory, research, and practice. In particular, it focuses on critical realism, a relatively new approach to the philosophy of science. In this introductory article, we start by discussing the importance of philosophy of science for community psychologists. We then situate our subject by exploring the history of paradigms in community psychology. We next offer a brief description of critical realism by describing its assumptions on ontology (nature of the world), epistemology (theory of knowledge), axiology (theory of values), and methodology (theory of action).

A. Senok, A. John-Baptiste, S. Heialy et al.

Background: The aftermath of the 1910 Flexner report resulted in significant gaps in the structure of medical education. Experiential co-curricular opportunities can contribute to addressing these gaps. Purpose: To explore, from a holistic social constructionism perspective, the added value of a co-curricular program, designed and implemented based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. Methodology/Approach: In this case study, randomly selected medical students, who had participated in an experiential co-curricular program, undertook focus group sessions. Data were inductively analyzed using thematic analysis based on constructivist epistemology. Findings/Conclusions: Benefits at the individual/student level included three interlinked themes: personal, academic, and professional development. The personal development theme related to building character and resilience, and the academic development theme related to application of theory and previously acquired knowledge. Four categories surfaced within the professional development theme. Emergent categories at the community level were institutional advancement, contribution to host centers, and giving back to the community. Implications: Co-curricular programs, that are based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) and that foster learning as participation in the social world, humanize medical education, and nurture holistic millennial physicians.

Ambrose T. Kessy

Transparency is an essential tool of local governance which enables the local citizens to hold local institutions accountable for their performance, to foster trust in government, minimize corruption and improve local service delivery. Accountability and transparency have been on the top of agendas in all the local government reforms in Tanzania. For transparency to work properly, it needs effective structures of implementation. Within the local government system in Tanzania, the structures of transparency are present but appear to be not working as they should do. This paper seeks to assess the extent to which the problems of transparency have persisted under the new phase of local government reforms and how they are likely to impact on local service delivery in Tanzania. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to examine the extent to which fiscal transparency in local governments in Tanzania is practised and how this has played a greater role in service delivery. The study used a case study of purposively selected local councils in Tanzania to examine the dynamics of fiscal transparency and service delivery. The findings show that there is little flow of information from higher levels of local governments to the lower levels in relation to resources available and results achieved. The information received from the councils is sometimes opaque or fuzzy in the sense that it does not reveal all about what their leaders do or what important decisions have been made about their councils. The study concludes that the importance of accountability and transparency attached to service delivery in any country is essential for good practice in local governance. Hence, instruments for accountability and transparency at the local levels must be enhanced to enable public institutions and public officials to be responsive to the citizens.

Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Cory Henson, Amit Sheth

The autonomous driving (AD) industry is exploring the use of knowledge graphs (KGs) to manage the vast amount of heterogeneous data generated from vehicular sensors. The various types of equipped sensors include video, LIDAR and RADAR. Scene understanding is an important topic in AD which requires consideration of various aspects of a scene, such as detected objects, events, time and location. Recent work on knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) - an approach that facilitates neuro-symbolic fusion - has shown to improve the predictive performance of machine learning models. With the expectation that neuro-symbolic fusion through KGEs will improve scene understanding, this research explores the generation and evaluation of KGEs for autonomous driving data. We also present an investigation of the relationship between the level of informational detail in a KG and the quality of its derivative embeddings. By systematically evaluating KGEs along four dimensions -- i.e. quality metrics, KG informational detail, algorithms, and datasets -- we show that (1) higher levels of informational detail in KGs lead to higher quality embeddings, (2) type and relation semantics are better captured by the semantic transitional distance-based TransE algorithm, and (3) some metrics, such as coherence measure, may not be suitable for intrinsically evaluating KGEs in this domain. Additionally, we also present an (early) investigation of the usefulness of KGEs for two use-cases in the AD domain.

Nirmal Puwar

The act of decentring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge as longstanding geopolitical anchors of epistemological authority presents déjà vu scenarios, involved in centre-staging processes. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’ of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can reproduce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This article considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus is on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitutes points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes places them high in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre-staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which fields are mapped in order to produce a point of intervention.

P. Roth, future—hayden White

This essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility-space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. a tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options (and so shape the epistemology as well). This essay argues that both of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by leon Goldstein and Ian hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. a plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience.

Linlin Xu, L. Zhang

Abstract Drawing upon Bakhtin's (1981) theory of dialogism, this study explores how two Chinese international doctoral students reflect upon their experiences of voice evolvement in thesis writing under the influences of their epistemological development in New Zealand. Through Reinharz's (1997) framework of self, we scrutinise each participant's data from their first PhD thesis draft, a retrospective written report, and two rounds of semi-structured interviews. Results reveal that, by interacting with others (e.g., supervisors, theorists) in the context where the thesis is produced, the participants' epistemology has developed. This epistemological development itself is the process in which students forge their own philosophical views in relation to knowledge and knowing as individual researchers and members of an academic community with shared disciplinary attributes. The philosophical views further inform their writers' voice as the representation of their individual and social selves that are embodied in thesis writing. Results also indicate that Chinese international doctoral students bring valuable cultural assets for potential intercultural communication between Chinese and Anglophone disciplinary scholarships. For these students who write their theses in English as a second or additional language (L2), such interchanges create a space for them to (re)examine the different ideologies that promote their learning.

A. A. Malashenko, B. I. Aslanov, V. V. Nechaev

Approaches  to the prevention of surgical site infections (SSI) in pediatric surgery is an extrapolation of data obtained mainly from studies in the adult surgical patients. In Russia, data on the actual incidence of SSI in pediatric surgery are almost nonexistent. It is known that one of the reasons for the low effectiveness of SSI prevention is a weak system of epidemiological surveillance, which leads to an underestimation of risk factors and the urgency of the problem. A number of preventive measures aimed at preventing of SSI have shown efficacy in adult surgical patients. One of the leading position belongs to antimicrobial prophylaxis. The study was conducted in St. Petersburg State Children's city hospital № 19 named after K. A. Rauhfus. The data were obtained during a retrospective and prospective epidemiological surveillance among patients of surgical units.It has been shown that SSIs in children have high morbidity. The effectiveness of detecting the real incidence of SSI depends on the methods of epidemiological surveillance: 3.8 per 100 surgeries using standard approaches of surveillance and 11.6 using specially developed forms of active epidemiological surveillance. The incidence of SSI varied depending on the type of surgical unit: 3.8 per 100 surgeries in the traumatology unit, 7.1 in the neurosurgical unit and 15.3 in the general surgery unit. In the etiologic structure, S. aureus predominates (46.5%), E. coli (22.2%) and S. epidermidis (16.7%) were respectively in the second and third positions. It has been shown that antimicrobial prophylaxis is an effective measure for prevention of SSI in pediatric surgery (the odds ratio OR in the case-control study was 0.52 (95% CI = 0.3–0.8)).

Dohyeong Kim, Jeehoon Park, Junyeong Park

The goal of this article is to develop BV (Batalin-Vilkovisky) formalism in the $p$-adic Dwork theory. Based on this formalism, we explicitly construct a $p$-adic dGBV algebra (differential Gerstenhaber-Batalin-Vilkovisky algebra) for a smooth projective complete intersection variety $X$ over a finite field, whose cohomology gives the $p$-adic Dwork cohomology of $X$, and its cochain endomorphism (the $p$-adic Dwork Frobenius operator) which encodes the information of the zeta function $X$. As a consequence, we give a modern deformation theoretic interpretation of Dwork's theory of the zeta function of $X$ and derive a formula for the $p$-adic Dwork Frobenius operator in terms of homotopy Lie morphisms and the Bell polynomials.

Katya Margareth Aurani

Através da análise dos resultados de Carnot publicados em 1824, Clausius estabelece as duas leis da termodinâmica e a definição formal da entropia, em 1867. Mostramos que o ponto de partida de Clausius foi uma suposição que é desconhecida atualmente; segundo ele existiria nos ciclos reversíveis uma equivalência das transformações. Ele elaborou sua suposição inicial em forma de um teorema, que ele chamou de “teorema da equivalência das transformações”. Quantificando essa equivalência,no ciclo reversível,ele estabeleceu inicialmente valores equivalentes para as transformações que hoje reconhecemos como sendo os valores da entropia associados às transformações. A equivalência das transformações constitui uma compreensão original do conceito de entropia por Clausius,que é totalmente coerente com o quadro conceitual moderno da termodinâmica. Discutimos algumas contribuições dessas concepções para a formação de professores, e alguma ideias de Amélia I. Hamburger, e de Michael R. Matthews, sobre a utilização da história e filosofia da ciência na formação de professores.