Search Results (5)

Social media have been fundamental in the daily lives of millions of people, but they have raised concerns about content moderation policies, the management of personal data, and their commercial exploitation. The acquisition of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk in 2022 generated concerns among Twitter users regarding changes in the platform’s direction, prompting a migration campaign by some user groups to the federated network Mastodon. This study reviews the onboarding of users to this decentralised platform between 2016 and 2022 and analyses the migration of 19,000 users who identified themselves as supporters of the platform switch. The results show that the migration campaign was a reactive response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and was led by a group of highly active academics, scientists, and journalists. However, a complete transition was not realised, as users preferred to straddle their presence on both platforms. Mastodon’s decentralisation made it difficult to exactly replicate Twitter’s communities, resulting in a partial loss of these users’ social capital and greater fragmentation of these user communities, which highlights the intrinsic differences between both platforms. Full article

The article’s primary purpose is to highlight the importance of cybersecurity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Due to the widespread use of such devices in everyone’s daily and professional lives, taking care of their security is essential. This security can be strengthened by raising awareness about the vulnerabilities and risks of these devices among their manufacturers and users. Therefore, this paper shows the results of several years of work regarding building vulnerabilities and exploiting databases, with a particular focus on IoT devices. We highlight multiple unique features of our solution, such as aggregation, correlation, and enrichment of known vulnerabilities and exploits collected from 12 different sources, presentation of a timeline of threats, and combining vulnerability information with exploits. Our databases have more than 300,000 entries, which are the result of aggregating and correlating more than 1,300,000 entries from 12 different databases simultaneously, enriched with information from unstructured sources. We cover the innovative utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support data enrichment, examining the usage of the Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LGBM) model to automatically predict vulnerability severity and Mistral7B to categorize vulnerable products, which, especially in the case of IoT devices, is critical due to the diversity of nomenclature. Social media and various unstructured sources are prominent places for gathering information. Retrieving data from them is much more complex than from structured databases, but the information there is normally supplied at a faster rate. Thus, we added Mastodon monitoring to enhance our threat timelines. Full article

The task of joint dialogue act recognition (DAR) and sentiment classification (DSC) aims to predict both the act and sentiment labels of each utterance in a dialogue. Existing methods mainly focus on local or global semantic features of the dialogue from a single perspective, disregarding the impact of the other part. Therefore, we propose a multiple information-aware recurrent reasoning network (MIRER). Firstly, the sequence information is smoothly sent to multiple local information layers for fine-grained feature extraction through a BiLSTM-connected hybrid CNN group method. Secondly, to obtain global semantic features that are speaker-, context-, and temporal-sensitive, we design a speaker-aware temporal reasoning heterogeneous graph to characterize interactions between utterances spoken by different speakers, incorporating different types of nodes and meta-relations with node-edge-type-dependent parameters. We also design a dual-task temporal reasoning heterogeneous graph to realize the semantic-level and prediction-level self-interaction and interaction, and we constantly revise and improve the label in the process of dual-task recurrent reasoning. MIRER fully integrates context-level features, fine-grained features, and global semantic features, including speaker, context, and temporal sensitivity, to better simulate conversation scenarios. We validated the method on two public dialogue datasets, Mastodon and DailyDialog, and the experimental results show that MIRER outperforms various existing baseline models. Full article

(1) Background: Over the last decades, important fossil records of Late Pliocene mammals and reptiles have been unearthed in Milia, Grevena (N Greece). This assemblage shows a remarkable composition and diversity, including the partial skeletons of mastodons that reached record-breaking sizes, abundant rhinos—the first occurrence of this species in Greece—and some new species; (2) Methods: We perform a thorough quantitative analysis of the recovered assemblage, presenting the information of the various collection spots in Milia, and calculate various biodiversity indices for each spot; (3) Results: Our research has revealed the vast majority of expected taxa in the assemblage. We argue that the various sub-localities in Milia could be grouped into a larger, composite assemblage representing a short period. We analyze the diversity changes through the various localities in Milia and highlight potential barriers that could affect the distribution of taxa; (4) Conclusions: We re-affirm the Early Villafranchian affinities of the fauna. In particular, Milia should date at MN16a, with a surprising presence of some more archaic, Ruscinian taxa. The fossils of Milia depict a Late Pliocene paradise in the Southern Balkans; a paradise, unfortunately, lost with the onset of the dramatic climate changes of the Quaternary. Full article

Focusing on those animals that have been overlooked in reading Joyce’s work opens up new perspectives for understanding his writing. One of his earliest essays, “Force” (1898), written at the age of sixteen, shows his so far unexplored concern about the domestication of animals and extinction of species, and develops a theory of subjugation. The essay provides a useful mainstay for considering the “tuskers,” (the mammoth and mastodon, the elephants, their tusks, and ivory) in the context of the cultural discourses of modern society. The game-changer discovery of the notion of extinction; representation of mammoths and mastodons as fearful creatures; the novelty of elephants exposed to curious gaze on exhibition; the sculpture of Elvery’s Elephant House in Sackville street; a circus elephant and “terrible queer creature” episode in Stephen Hero; the forced labor perpetrated in the Congo Free State to exploit rubber and the ivory of wild elephants. These seemingly disparate topics deeply wedded to modernity will be interrelated with each other in “Force,” shaping a constellation of “Joyce’s tuskers.” Full article