AI agents are rapidly expanding in both capability and population: they now write code, operate computers across platforms, manage cloud infrastructure, and make purchasing decisions, while open-source frameworks such as OpenClaw are putting personal agents in the hands of millions and embodied agents are spreading across smartphones, vehicles, and robots. As the internet prepares to host billions of such entities, it is shifting toward what we call Open Agentic Web, a decentralized digital ecosystem in which agents from different users, organizations, and runtimes can discover one another, negotiate task boundaries, and delegate work across open technical and social surfaces at scale. Yet most of today's agents remain isolated tools or closed-ecosystem orchestrators rather than socially integrated participants in open networks. We argue that the next generation of agents must become Agentic Citizens, defined by three requirements: Agentic-Web-Native Collaboration, participation in open collaboration networks rather than only closed internal orchestration; Agent Identity and Personhood, continuity as a social entity rather than a resettable function call; and Lifelong Evolution, improvement across task performance, communication, and collaboration over time. We present Synergy, a general-purpose agent architecture and runtime harness for persistent, collaborative, and evolving agents on Open Agentic Web, grounding collaboration in session-native orchestration, repository-backed workspaces, and social communication; identity in typed memory, notes, agenda, skills, and persistent social relationships; and evolution in an experience-centered learning mechanism that proactively recalls rewarded trajectories at inference time.
When I set out to edit a Special Issue in Arts on urban development and the role of the arts, I wanted to harvest a different perspective on the advantages of culture for urban development [...]
This paper explores the philosophical, scientific, and artistic dimensions of home, alienation, and the slow return home as a framework for understanding the crises of modern knowledge and existence. It critiques the dominance of reductionist objectivism in science and the fragmentation of meaning in contemporary culture, arguing that both subjective and relational perspectives have been undervalued. Drawing on thinkers such as Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Wilhelm Dilthey, the study examines how unresolved epistemological and ontological dualities—such as subjectivism versus objectivism and materialism versus idealism—have shaped intellectual and cultural developments since the Enlightenment. The concept of the border situation, introduced by Jaspers, is central to this analysis, describing moments of existential rupture that force individuals and societies to confront fundamental contradictions. The slow return home is presented not as a simple restoration of tradition but as a dynamic process of integration, where insights gained through alienation enable a deeper, reconstructed sense of belonging. By maintaining a dialectical balance between objectivity and subjectivity, science and art, rationality and intuition, this paper advocates for an approach to knowledge that transcends ideological rigidity and fosters existential illumination.
Alayt Issak, Uttkarsh Narayan, Ramya Srinivasan
et al.
Ethical theories and Generative AI (GenAI) models are dynamic concepts subject to continuous evolution. This paper investigates the visualization of ethics through a subset of GenAI models. We expand on the emerging field of Visual Ethics, using art as a form of critical inquiry and the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to invoke moral imagination. Through formative interviews with 10 ethics experts, we first establish a foundation of ethical theories. Our analysis reveals five families of ethical theories, which we then transform into images using the text-to-image (T2I) GenAI model. The resulting imagery, curated as Kaleidoscope Gallery and evaluated by the same experts, revealed eight themes that highlight how morality, society, and learned associations are central to ethical theories. We discuss implications for critically examining T2I models and present cautions and considerations. This work contributes to examining ethical theories as foundational knowledge that interrogates GenAI models as socio-technical systems.
Rajmund Nagy, Hendric Voss, Thanh Hoang-Minh
et al.
We review human evaluation practices in automated, speech-driven 3D gesture generation and find a lack of standardisation and frequent use of flawed experimental setups. This leads to a situation where it is impossible to know how different methods compare, or what the state of the art is. In order to address common shortcomings of evaluation design, and to standardise future user studies in gesture-generation works, we introduce a detailed human evaluation protocol for the widely-used BEAT2 motion-capture dataset. Using this protocol, we conduct large-scale crowdsourced evaluation to rank six recent gesture-generation models -- each trained by its original authors -- across two key evaluation dimensions: motion realism and speech-gesture alignment. Our results provide strong evidence that 1) newer models do not consistently outperform earlier approaches; 2) published claims of high motion realism or speech-gesture alignment may not hold up under rigorous evaluation; and 3) the field must adopt disentangled assessments of motion quality and multimodal alignment for accurate benchmarking in order to make progress. Finally, in order to drive standardisation and enable new evaluation research, we will release five hours of synthetic motion from the benchmarked models; over 750 rendered video stimuli from the user studies -- enabling new evaluations without model reimplementation required -- alongside our open-source rendering script, and the 16,000 pairwise human preference votes collected for our benchmark.
In the day-ahead energy market, the offering strategy of distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators must be submitted before the uncertainty realization in the form of price-quantity pairs. This work addresses the day-ahead offering problem through a two-stage adaptive robust stochastic optimization model, wherein the first-stage price-quantity pairs and second-stage operational commitment decisions are made before and after DER uncertainty is realized, respectively. Uncertainty in day-ahead price is addressed using a stochastic programming-based approach, while uncertainty of DER generation is handled through robust optimization. To address the max-min structure of the second-stage problem, a neural network-accelerated column-and-constraint generation method is developed. A dedicated neural network is trained to approximate the value function, while optimality is maintained by the design of the network architecture. Numerical studies indicate that the proposed method yields high-quality solutions and is up to 100 times faster than Gurobi and 33 times faster than classical column-and-constraint generation on the same 1028-node synthetic distribution network.
Understanding the stroke-based evolution of visual artworks is useful for advancing artwork learning, appreciation, and interactive display. While the stroke sequence of renowned artworks remains largely unknown, formulating this sequence for near-natural image drawing processes can significantly enhance our understanding of artistic techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for approximating artwork stroke evolution through a proximity-based clustering mechanism. We first convert pixel images into vector images via parametric curves and then explore the clustering approach to determine the sequence order of extracted strokes. Our proposed algorithm demonstrates the potential to infer stroke sequences in unknown artworks. We evaluate the performance of our method using WikiArt data and qualitatively demonstrate the plausible stroke sequences. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach to handle a wide variety of input image types such as line art, face sketches, paintings, and photographic images. By exploring stroke extraction and sequence construction, we aim to improve our understanding of the intricacies of the art development techniques and the step-by-step reconstruction process behind visual artworks, thereby enriching our understanding of the creative journey from the initial sketch to the final artwork.
The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating effect of academic challenge in the relationship between liberal arts education satisfaction and core competency improvement, and to verify the moderated mediating effect of professor-student interaction on the influence of liberal arts education satisfaction on academic challenge. For this purpose, data from the 2022 National Assessment of Student Engagement in Learning (NASEL), conducted by the Korean Educational Development Institute, were utilized. The study sample consisted of 95 four-year universities (45,424 students). After excluding missing cases, and a total of 36,320 students were analyzed. SPSS Macro PROCESS (Model 7) was used for analysis. The results showed the following: First, liberal arts education satisfaction had a significant positive relationship with academic challenge, core competency improvement, and professor-student interaction; academic challenge had a significant positive relationship with core competency improvement and professor-student interaction; and core competency improvement was significantly positively related to professor-student interaction. Second, academic challenge mediated the relationship between liberal arts education satisfaction and core competency improvement. Third, the moderated mediating effect of professor-student interaction was confirmed in the relationship between liberal arts education satisfaction and academic challenge, indicating that the effect size varied depending on the level of professor-student interaction. Based on these results, the educational implications of liberal arts education satisfaction and strategies for enhancing core competencies were discussed.
پوسترهای گرافیکی در نوع خود میتوانند در نقش یک ابزار تبلیغی عمل کنند. امروزه نقشآفرینی آنها در کنار ابزارهای اینترنتی نقش مهمی در انتقال اطلاعات و پیامها دارد. این تحقیق از لحاظ نوع، کیفی بوده و از لحاظ رویکرد، کاربردی-اکتشافی میباشد. در فاز پیمایشی تحقیق و بهمنظور پدیدارشناسی ارزش ادراکشدۀ مشتریان از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتی بانک رفاه کارگران، 11 نفر از مشتریان این بانک که تجربۀ زیستۀ در حوزه استفاده از خدمات اینترنتی بانک مذکور داشتند با روش نمونهگیری هدفمند انتخاب شدند و مورد مصاحبه عمیق قرار گرفتند. دادههای حاصل از مصاحبهها در سه مرحله تجزیهوتحلیل شدند (شناسایی مفاهیم، شناسایی مقولهها، و دستهبندی مقولهها). نتایج تحقیق نشان داد که ارزش ادراکشدۀ مشتریان از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتی بانک رفاه کارگران از سه جنبه قابلتوصیف میباشد: ارزش ادراکشدۀ ناشی از کاهش ریسک؛ ارزش ادراکشدۀ ناشی از منافع کاربردی؛ و ارزش ادراکشده ناشی از جایگاه برند بانک در ذهن مشتری.اهداف پژوهش:توصیف تجربۀ زیستۀ ارزش ادراکشده مشتریان از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتیبانک رفاه کارگران.بررسی مقولههای پدیدارشناسی ارزش ادراک مشتریان بانک رفاه کارگران از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتبانک.سؤالات پژوهش:تجربۀ زیستۀ ارزش ادراکشده مشتریان از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتیبانک رفاه کارگران دارای چه ماهیتی است؟مقولههای پدیدارشناسی ارزش ادراک مشتریان بانک رفاه کارگران از استراتژی خدمات اینترنتبانک در کدامند؟
Abstract: This study aimed to verify the validity of the emotional intelligence scale of (Bar-On) using the modern theory of measurement according to the One Parameter Rash model, which consists of 60 items. It was applied to a sample of (624) students from the University of Laghouat. The results showed that the scale has characteristics Acceptable psychometric, the coefficient of vocabulary stability was (0.99), while the stability of individuals' abilities was estimated at (0.78), as well as its enjoyment of an acceptable degree of validity according to the ability and difficulty parameters of the logit unit, and the grading of items differed using the model.
Keywords: Psychometry, Modern theory, Rasch model, Emotional intelligence
Arts in general, Computational linguistics. Natural language processing
Resumen: Nuestra investigación lleva sobre la situación de la religión en La cena secreta publicada en 2004. La obra de Javier Sierra Albert nos presenta la situación en la que se encuentra la fe católica. Según su obra, la religión católica se encuentra en una situación de decaimiento o más bien de descrecencia debido a muchos factores. Dentro de estos elementos que favorecieron el decaimiento de la Iglesia Católica, el autor destaca la pérdida de la facultad de interpretar imágenes, el advenimiento del racionalismo, la Grecia de Platón, el Egipto de Cleopatra, las extravagancias que vienen del Oriente, la presencia de turcos en la Mediterránea, la aparición de una horda de paganos y el Papa Alejandro que sostenía el paganismo. Según el autor de la obra, estos aspectos hicieron que la Iglesia católica y la cristiandad en general se encontraran en un contexto peor.
Palabras claves: La situación de la religión, la fe católica, el decaimiento de valores bíblicos.
Arts in general, Computational linguistics. Natural language processing
Some critical words on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 UNESCO Convention
2022 marked the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the 1972 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. On the occasion of this anniversary, the article uncharacteristically contains criticism of both UNESCO itself and doubts about the 1972 Convention. However, all these remarks flow from concern for the fate and future of this international organisation, whose activities and achievements in the protection of the world cultural heritage ultimately deserve recognition. The problems do not merely arise within UNESCO, but rather with other members of the international community, particularly some states and their actions toward the organisation. Problems also arise from the implementation of and compliance with international law. The allegations against UNESCO are organised and discussed here according to three criteria: formalism, time and costs. On the other hand, the 1972 UNESCO Convention itself is presented from two perspectives – first, in the normative layer as an international legal act, which serves as a sui generis constitution of the world’s protection of cultural and natural heritage; and second, in the empirical layer. In the latter context, attention was paid to the role of the UNESCO World Heritage List. Regardless of the criticisms, as well as the weaknesses and problems highlighted, it is clear from the article that it emphasises the value of both the 1972 UNESCO Convention, one of whose main advantages is that it has resisted the passage of time, and the great role of UNESCO itself, as an important international organisation with considerable achievements and merits.
Keywords: cultural heritage, cultural heritage law, UNESCO, 1972 UNESCO Convention, UNESCO List
Streszczenie: W 2022 r. przypadało 50-lecie przyjęcia Konwencji UNESCO w sprawie ochrony światowego dziedzictwa kulturalnego i naturalnego z 1972 r. Artykuł – nietypowo jak na jubileuszowy – zawiera słowa krytyki zarówno wobec samego UNESCO, jak i wątpliwości co do Konwencji z 1972 r. Jednak wszelkie te uwagi wypływają z troski o losy i przyszłość tej międzynarodowej organizacji, której działalność i osiągnięcia w zakresie ochrony światowego dziedzictwa kultury finalnie zasługują na uznanie. W ocenie autora problemy nie leżą tylko po stronie UNESCO, lecz często bardziej po stronie innych członków społeczności międzynarodowej, w szczególności niektórych państw i ich działań w stosunku do organizacji. Problemy rodzi także implementowanie oraz przestrzeganie prawa międzynarodowego. Zarzuty wobec UNESCO zostały tu uporządkowane według trzech kryteriów: formalizmu, czasu i kosztów. Natomiast sama Konwencja UNESCO z 1972 r. została przedstawiona z dwóch perspektyw – po pierwsze, w warstwie normatywnej jako międzynarodowy akt prawny, który pełni funkcję sui generis konstytucji światowej ochrony dziedzictwa kultury i natury, po drugie, w warstwie empirycznej. W tym ostatnim kontekście zwrócono uwagę na rolę Listy Światowego Dziedzictwa UNESCO. Niezależnie od uwag krytycznych, a także zaakcentowanych słabych stron i problemów, z artykułu jednoznacznie wynikają znaczenie i wartość zarówno samej Konwencji UNESCO z 1972 r., której jedną z podstawowych zalet jest to, że oparła się upływowi czasu, jak i ogromna rola samego UNESCO jako ważnej i mającej niemałe osiągnięcia i zasługi organizacji międzynarodowej.
Mixed martial arts (MMA) has been one of the fastest-growing sports in recent years and has become a mainstream sport on the global stage. The growth of MMA has been driven by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which is currently the largest MMA promotion organization in the world. However, data collection and statistical modeling in MMA are still in their infancy. We developed FightTracker, a data-driven solution that delivers real-time predictions for UFC fights. We first conducted regression analyses on the data provided by the UFC and MMA Decisions and built two predictive models of UFC fight outcomes. One model predicts the judges' majority score by round while the other predicts whether the red fighter will win the fight or not in 3-round fights that go beyond the second round (53% of all UFC fights). Both models use in-round fight statistics as explanatory variables and achieve 80% accuracy. We then designed an R shiny app that delivers these two predictions in real-time based on the ESPN live data. This information is valuable for fans, coaches, athletes, and especially bettors. Indeed, a live betting strategy based on FightTracker proved to generate large profits over an 8-week period against the bookmaker Unibet (90.17% ROI).
Digital art synthesis is receiving increasing attention in the multimedia community because of engaging the public with art effectively. Current digital art synthesis methods usually use single-modality inputs as guidance, thereby limiting the expressiveness of the model and the diversity of generated results. To solve this problem, we propose the multimodal guided artwork diffusion (MGAD) model, which is a diffusion-based digital artwork generation approach that utilizes multimodal prompts as guidance to control the classifier-free diffusion model. Additionally, the contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model is used to unify text and image modalities. Extensive experimental results on the quality and quantity of the generated digital art paintings confirm the effectiveness of the combination of the diffusion model and multimodal guidance. Code is available at https://github.com/haha-lisa/MGAD-multimodal-guided-artwork-diffusion.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the types of perceptions held by students regarding the ‘Reading Arete Classics’ course, which was offered as a liberal arts program at K University. For this purpose, Q methodological analysis was used to study subjectivity among the students, such as individual perception and belief. The Q population was composed based on literature analysis, in-depth interviews, survey materials on Reading Classics, and after expert reviewing the Q sample was composed of 33 statements. 31 students of ‘Reading Arete Classics’ were selected as P samples, and the data were analyzed using the PQ method 2.35 program. The data analysis based on the most positive statements, negative statements and identification items, along with the types of perceptions concerning ‘Reading Arete Classics’, were classified into the three types. Type 1, which was called “discovering the value of classics”, revealed the value of classics and the pleasure of reading books through ‘Reading Arete Classics’. Type 2, called “discovering the pleasure of discussion”, taught the joy of discussion during the discussion process of ‘Reading Arete Classics’. Type 3 called “discovering the value of collaboration” showed the students the fun and the value of engaging in joint activities while making and solving the problems posed by the questions for discussion through team activities. The results of this study will be used as basic data to improve reading classics classes as liberal arts courses.
يساعدنا تحليل العناصر المكونة للسرد وتمثيل القواعد التي تحكمه في فهم أفضل للآليات والعلاقات داخل العناصر السردية. نظرًا لأن علم السرد هو أحد الفروع الرئيسية للبنيوية ، فإن تحليل البنية السردية للنصوص السابقة وتطورها يمكن أن يؤدي إلى نتائج قيمة وفتح وجهات نظر جديدة ومختلفة للجمهور. يعد تاريخ البيهقي أحد النصوص الأساسية في النثر الفارسي. يحلل هذا البحث البنية السردية "حكاية أفشين وبودلوف" من "التاريخ" لبايهقي بناءً على أفكار البنيوي الفرنسي جيرار جينيت. تمت دراسة المستويات السردية لهذا العمل بالتفاعل مع مكونات المدة والمزاج والصوت) للكشف عن هيكله السردي المحدد وقوة كتابه البيهقي في الاستفادة من إمكانيات اللغة والأدب. على عكس المؤمنين بفكرة أن المحترفين السابقين للأدب الفارسي مجرد قصص وروايات ويفتقرون إلى بنية منظمة ومؤامرة قوية ، يُظهر هذا البحث الهيكل المنظم والحبكة القوية للحالة المدروسة وفقًا لأفكار جيرار جينيت.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Arts in general