Automating planning with LLMs presents transformative opportunities for traditional industries, yet remains underexplored. In commercial construction, the complexity of automated scheduling often requires manual intervention to ensure precision. We propose CONSTRUCTA, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to optimize construction schedules in complex projects like semiconductor fabrication. CONSTRUCTA addresses key challenges by: (1) integrating construction-specific knowledge through static RAG; (2) employing context-sampling techniques inspired by architectural expertise to provide relevant input; and (3) deploying Construction DPO to align schedules with expert preferences using RLHF. Experiments on proprietary data demonstrate performance improvements of +42.3% in missing value prediction, +79.1% in dependency analysis, and +28.9% in automated planning compared to baseline methods, showcasing its potential to revolutionize construction workflows and inspire domain-specific LLM advancements.
This article examines the influence of soft law on formal international economic law structures and develops a theoretical framework for understanding its systemic significance within the discipline. The study addresses two intersecting objectives: first, demonstrating that soft laws substantially impact commercial treaties, global financial regulation policies, investment agreements, and dispute settlement institutions; second, establishing that despite this broad influence, international economic law lacks a cohesive theoretical understanding of soft law’s systemic weight. The research employs comparative, normative, and analytical methodologies to examine how soft law functions as a contemporary mechanism through which seemingly benign taxonomies exert substantial influence in international economic law. The analysis reveals that soft law operates as a functional alternative when states and international law-makers cannot achieve consensus on treaties or hard law instruments. This study contributes to international economic law scholarship by providing a systematic theoretical framework for understanding soft law’s role and demonstrating its significant impact on formal legal structures and regulatory processes.
Residual resistance ratio (RRR) of Cu stabilizer in REBCO coated conductor is an important design parameter for REBCO magnets. In this work, we measured RRR of electroplated Cu stabilizer in commercial REBCO tapes. Over 130 samples were measured for the quality assurance programs of REBCO magnet projects at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, USA (NHMFL). The average RRR value was above 50. In order to investigate the factors that influence RRR, several samples were analyzed by using scanning electron microscopy, secondary ion mass spectroscopy, and inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy. We found that, in our samples, RRR was strongly correlated with the grain size. We demonstrated that RRR was primarily determined by grain boundary resistivity. Lower RRR was also strongly correlated with higher concentration of chlorine impurity. This is explained by that higher chlorine impurity hindered the grain growth in the room temperature self annealing process resulting smaller grain. Smaller grain resulted in lower RRR. In addition, thermal annealing significantly enhanced RRR. An activation energy of 0.4 eV was obtained from the annealing experiment which corresponds to the activation of Cu grain growth.
Javier Conde, Andres Munoz-Arcentales, Mario Romero
et al.
The aerospace sector is one of the many sectors in which large amounts of data are generated. Thanks to the evolution of technology, these data can be exploited in several ways to improve the operation and management of industrial processes. However, to achieve this goal, it is necessary to define architectures and data models that allow to manage and homogenise the heterogeneous data collected. In this paper, we present an Airport Digital Twin Reference Conceptualisation's and data model based on FIWARE Generic Enablers and the Next Generation Service Interfaces-Linked Data standard. Concretely, we particularise the Airport Digital Twin to improve the efficiency of flight turnaround events. The architecture proposed is validated in the Aberdeen International Airport with the aim of reducing delays in commercial flights. The implementation includes an application that shows the real state of the airport, combining two-dimensional and three-dimensional virtual reality representations of the stands, and a mobile application that helps ground operators to schedule departure and arrival flights.
Pablo Rivas, Tomas Cerny, Alejandro Rodriguez Perez
et al.
Our study addresses the challenges of building datasets to understand the risks associated with organized activities and human trafficking through commercial sex advertisements. These challenges include data scarcity, rapid obsolescence, and privacy concerns. Traditional approaches, which are not automated and are difficult to reproduce, fall short in addressing these issues. We have developed a reproducible and automated methodology to analyze five million advertisements. In the process, we identified further challenges in dataset creation within this sensitive domain. This paper presents a streamlined methodology to assist researchers in constructing effective datasets for combating organized crime, allowing them to focus on advancing detection technologies.
Destriananda Safa Aina, Putri Pertiwi, Muh Faqihuddin Minasta
et al.
Abstract: The high frequency of agrarian conflicts involving customary land reflects the weak legal protection of communal land rights. In response, the government issued Presidential Regulation Number 62 of 2023 concerning the acceleration of agrarian reform implementation, aimed at providing legal protection for customary land through land legalization and redistribution programs. However, the program's implementation has been ineffective due to the limited recognition of communal land rights, which does not fully prevent the repurposing of legalized customary land for investment or commercial use. As a comparison, Tenganan Pegringsingan Village in Bali demonstrates a robust system of customary land tenure, where land remains protected from conversion despite significant tourism pressures. This article aims to explore the values within the customary land tenure system in Tenganan Pegringsingan and its potential integration into agrarian reform agendas. This study employs a socio-legal approach, with data collected through non-participatory observation and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal that some aspects of the customary land tenure in Tenganan align with the principles of agrarian reform, while others do not, primarily due to the influence of modernization, tourism, and the role of tenant farmers. However, this village's customary land tenure system presents a novel model for agrarian reform initiatives in similar communities.
Keywords: Agrarian Reform, Customary Law, Tenganan Pegringsingan
Digital property emerges as a new segment of property law, while simultaneously being a consequence of the digitalization of financial intermediation and representing a form of technological innovation that substitutes payment services and investments in the banking and stock markets. Key issues that arise include the choice of governing law, internationally competent courts, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign court and arbitration decisions related to transactions in cryptocurrencies, which are the most widespread form of digital assets. This paper is designed to highlight the specific features of digital property that are important for the application of existing private international law (PIL) rules. It does not focus on a specific legal system, but rather situates the analysis within PIL as a branch of legal science with its own regulatory postulates, which are largely harmonized across legal systems. The aim of the paper is to see the scope of the possibility of applying traditional institutes of international private law to digital property as a legal and regulatory novelty that stands between property or things and rights or financial instrument. By synthesizing core issues that emerge in application of private international law rules to digital assets, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of regulatory challenges which encompass digital assets’ role in modern law and economies.
Vadim Makarov, Alexey Abrikosov, Poompong Chaiwongkhot
et al.
A commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) system needs to be formally certified to enable its wide deployment. The certification should include the system's robustness against known implementation loopholes and attacks that exploit them. Here we ready a fiber-optic QKD system for this procedure. The system has a prepare-and-measure scheme with decoy-state BB84 protocol, polarisation encoding, qubit source rate of 312.5 MHz, and is manufactured by QRate. We detail its hardware and post-processing. We analyse the hardware for known implementation loopholes, search for possible new loopholes, and discuss countermeasures. We then amend the system design to address the highest-risk loopholes identified. We also work out technical requirements on the certification lab and outline its possible structure.
We establish a weighted positive mass theorem which unifies and generalizes results of Baldauf--Ozuch and Chu--Zhu. Our result is in fact equivalent to the usual positive mass theorem, and can be regarded as a positive mass theorem for smooth metric measure spaces. We also study Dirac operators on certain warped product manifolds associated to smooth metric measure spaces. Applications of this include, among others, an alternative proof for a special case of our positive mass theorem, eigenvalue bounds for the Dirac operator on closed spin manifolds, and a new way to understand the weighted Dirac operator using warped products.
The goals of reducing energy costs, shifting electricity peaks, increasing the use of renewable energy, and enhancing the stability of the electric grid can be met in part by fully exploiting the energy flexibility potential of buildings and building equipment. The development of strategies that exploit these flexibilities could be facilitated by publicly available high-resolution datasets illustrating how control of HVAC systems in commercial buildings can be used in different climate zones to shape the energy use profile of a building for grid needs. This article presents the development and integration of a Hardware-In-the-Loop Flexible load Testbed (HILFT) that integrates physical HVAC systems with a simulated building model and simulated occupants with the goal of generating datasets to verify load flexibility of typical commercial buildings. Compared to simulation-only experiments, the hardware-in-the-loop approach captures the dynamics of the physical systems while also allowing efficient testing of various boundary conditions. The HILFT integration in this article is achieved through the co-simulation among various software environments including LabVIEW, MATLAB, and EnergyPlus. Although theoretically viable, such integration has encountered many real-world challenges, such as: 1) how to design the overall data infrastructure to ensure effective, robust, and efficient integration; 2) how to avoid closed-loop hunting between simulated and emulated variables; 3) how to quantify system response times and minimize system delays; and 4) how to assess the overall integration quality. Lessons-learned using the examples of an AHU-VAV system, an air-source heat pump system, and a water-source heat pump system are presented.
Contextualização: Apesar de a Lei nº 14.470/2022 endereçar algumas das dificuldades enfrentadas no âmbito do private enforcement no direito concorrencial brasileiro, trouxe consigo novas dúvidas sobre aplicabilidade da nova lei no tempo, pois não consagrou em seu texto uma norma de direito intertemporal que regulasse essa questão. Em quais hipóteses, em que momento e como aplicar a Lei nº 14.470/2022 ou a lei antiga nas ações indenizatórias por danos concorrenciais (ARDCs) já extintas, ainda pendentes, e que ainda não foram iniciadas? A resposta a tais perguntas sobre a aplicabilidade imediata da Lei nº 14.470/2022 poderá determinar a viabilidade das ARDCs ou tornará o processo menos oneroso/mais compensatório para as vítimas.
Objetivo: O artigo tem como objetivo analisar como se dará a aplicabilidade das disposições novas da Lei nº 14.470/2022.
Método: As autoras analisaram a natureza das novas normas trazidas pela Lei nº 14.470/2022, classificando-as como de direito material e processual. A partir disso, examinaram as hipóteses de aplicação dessas disposições nas ARDCs já extintas, ainda pendentes, e que ainda não foram iniciadas.
Resultado: Verificou-se que as ARDCs pendentes são o foco das maiores controvérsias de aplicabilidade da Lei nº 14.470/2022, em suma, devido à incerteza sobre a existência de situação jurídica pendente, o que permitiria a aplicação da nova lei, ou de formação de ato jurídico perfeito/direito adquirido nos processos ainda em curso, obrigando a observância à lei antiga.
Many of today's deep neural network accelerators, e.g., Google's TPU and NVIDIA's tensor core, are built around accelerating the general matrix multiplication (i.e., GEMM). However, supporting convolution on GEMM-based accelerators is not trivial. The naive method explicitly lowers the convolution to GEMM, commonly known as im2col, which introduces significant performance and memory overhead. Existing implicit im2col algorithms require unscalable hardware and are inefficient in supporting important convolution variants such as strided convolution. In this paper, we propose a memory-efficient and hardware-friendly implicit im2col algorithm used by Google's TPU, which dynamically converts a convolution into a GEMM with practically zero performance and memory overhead, fully unleashing the power of GEMM engines. Through comprehensive experimental results, we quantitatively argue that this algorithm has been adopted in commercial closed-source platforms, and we are the first to describe its high-level idea and implementation details. Finally, we show that our algorithm can also be generally applied to Nvidia's Tensor Cores (TC), matching and out-performing the measured performance on TCs.
El Consejo de Estado ha desarrollado la regla conforme a la cual todas las reclamaciones que emanen del desequilibrio económico del contrato estatal deben hacerse al momento de suscribir documentos tales como prórrogas, suspensiones, contratos adicionales u otrosíes. De no ser así, se finiquitan los asuntos pendientes para las partes, no siendo posible discutir posteriormente hechos anteriores, por resultar contrario al principio de la buena fe y a los actos propios. Se pretende analizar la restricción en la forma de aplicar el principio de la buena fe, pues al privilegiarse escenarios concretos de reclamación por desequilibrios económicos se disminuye la posibilidad de lograr el reajuste del contrato y la consecuente reparación de un daño.
Intent detection is a key component of modern goal-oriented dialog systems that accomplish a user task by predicting the intent of users' text input. There are three primary challenges in designing robust and accurate intent detection models. First, typical intent detection models require a large amount of labeled data to achieve high accuracy. Unfortunately, in practical scenarios it is more common to find small, unbalanced, and noisy datasets. Secondly, even with large training data, the intent detection models can see a different distribution of test data when being deployed in the real world, leading to poor accuracy. Finally, a practical intent detection model must be computationally efficient in both training and single query inference so that it can be used continuously and re-trained frequently. We benchmark intent detection methods on a variety of datasets. Our results show that Watson Assistant's intent detection model outperforms other commercial solutions and is comparable to large pretrained language models while requiring only a fraction of computational resources and training data. Watson Assistant demonstrates a higher degree of robustness when the training and test distributions differ.
On Our Selection is a series of stories by Steele Rudd, the pen name of Arthur Hoey Davis. The stories portray elements of small ‘selector’ farming in federation-era Australia and represent a significant body of literature originating in or ‘about’ the ‘bush’, the ‘outback’, the ‘never-never’ – unspecific appellations attached to regions of non-urban Australia. The stories detail the Rudd family’s experiences after taking up a ‘selection’ in the Australian bush – the arduous processes of early clearing through to their relative prosperity. ‘Dad Rudd’ has been described as ‘Australia’s Everyman’, and his pugnacious attitude of opposition to the ‘squattocracy’ and the cities resonated with audiences. The sketches, periodicals, radio plays, theatre productions and, eventually, films that continued the Rudd legacy made these stories a significant voice in the creation of Australian national identity – or at least the ‘bush’ identity. However, an attempt to update the representation to the 1970s in a television series was unsuccessful. This article considers the interaction between the legislative creation of ‘selection’ of land and the depictions of life on a selection in the creation of the Australian national identity. It then considers the media and social changes that contextualise the failure of the television series.
The creation of the Anglo-Saxon system of law, the agency contract received its own rules at a European Community level by the adoption of the Council of Europe Directive no. 86/653 of 1986, regarding the harmonization of the member states legislations concerning the independent commercial agents. This directive was intended to eliminate the existing regulatory differences in the laws of the member states relating to commercial representation, which affected competition and the smooth running of trade relations within the Community. “The exchange of goods must take place under conditions that are similar to those of the single market, and this requires the resemblance of the legal systems of the member states to such an extent as to satisfy the proper functioning of the common market.” (the Council Directive of the 18th of December 1986). In the Romanian law system, the commercial agents, as independent auxiliaries of traders, were submitted to the regulations of the Commercial Code, namely art. 402. Afterwards, the principles set by the named European Directive were imported to our legal system as well; this type of contract was enshrined as a sui generis agreement by the Law no. 509/2002 regarding the permanent commercial agents. This law was repealed by the entry into force of Law no. 71/2011 regarding the implementation of Law no. 287/2009 on the Civil Code, which, achieving a unitary regulation of private law relations, codifies this type of contract in art. 2072-2095.This category of independent auxiliaries, the agents, has emerged from the needs imposed by the activity of the trader, who wants to expand his activity to a more or less distant market, without increasing the costs and risks of setting up branches abroad. Through this legal mechanism, he will be able to use an individual or a legal person in order to achieve the stated purpose, granting them a remuneration for all contracts concluded by the principal as a result of their intervention. This person works as a self-employed professional, placing, in a certain area, the products of one or several principals. In market economy countries, real agent companies have been set up, in the legal form of joint stock companies, whose object of activity is the intermediation of business between companies in the country of origin and companies in other countries. In the Common Law system, commercial agents are independent intermediaries of different categories (factor, mercantile agent, broker), which are specialized in dealing with commercial operations in a certain branch of activity, but they are subjects to the same legal regime. Therefore, the agency contract is a legal mechanism characterized by increased flexibility, which better meets the current requirements of speculative activities and which, as has been rightly said in the doctrine (Prescure, 2003: 52), will gradually replace the old commission agreement. Thus, producers of goods for export frequently resort to the contract of agency, that they consider to be a simple yet efficient means of organizing the distribution of their goods outside their state of origin.
An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no unified framework that encompasses all them. This paper presents a new perspective to establish a connection between different statistical linguistic laws. Characterizing each word type by two random variables, length (in number of characters) and absolute frequency, we show that the corresponding bivariate joint probability distribution shows a rich and precise phenomenology, with the type-length and the type-frequency distributions as its two marginals, and the conditional distribution of frequency at fixed length providing a clear formulation for the brevity-frequency phenomenon. The type-length distribution turns out to be well fitted by a gamma distribution (much better than with the previously proposed lognormal), and the conditional frequency distributions at fixed length display power-law-decay behavior with a fixed exponent $α\simeq 1.4$ and a characteristic-frequency crossover that scales as an inverse power $δ\simeq 2.8$ of length, which implies the fulfilment of a scaling law analogous to those found in the thermodynamics of critical phenomena. As a by-product, we find a possible model-free explanation for the origin of Zipf's law, which should arise as a mixture of conditional frequency distributions governed by the crossover length-dependent frequency.
Phillipe R. Sampaio, Raphael Salvazet, Pierre Mandel
et al.
In this paper, an energy conservation measure that optimizes the planning of heating and cooling systems for tertiary sector buildings is proposed. It consists of a model-based predictive control approach that employs a grey-box model built from the building data history and from weather condition data that predicts the building heat load and indoor temperature. This model is then used by heating and cooling optimization strategies that aim at reducing the total energy consumption of the building in the next day while satisfying the desired indoor thermal comfort constraint. The proposed optimization strategies do not modify the regulation mode in place; rather, they send optimized set-points to the building management system in order to reduce the energy consumption. We applied our approach in a case study of a commercial building during heating and cooling seasons and we show that it was able to yield up to 12% of energy savings while having a mean power forecast error of 8%.