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Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
The Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, commonly known as the GGE on LAWS, refers to a group of governmental experts established under the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a United Nations arms control framework. The group examines legal, ethical, societal and moral questions that arise from the increased use of autonomous robots to carry weapons and to be programmed to engage in combat in various situations that might arise, including battles between countries, or in patrolling border areas or sensitive areas, or other similar roles. As of 18 March 2025, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons had 128 High Contracting Parties. In the Geneva Conventions, the term "High Contracting Parties" refers to the states that have joined the conventions and are therefore bound to uphold them. Among the countries that have joined are states with tense relations or ongoing armed conflict with one another, including Russia and Ukraine, Israel and the State of Palestine, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. == Background == In 2013, the Meeting of State Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons agreed on a mandate on lethal autonomous weapon systems and tasked its chairperson with convening an informal Meeting of Experts to discuss issues related to emerging technologies in the area of LAWS. Those informal Meetings of Experts were then held in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and their reports fed into subsequent meetings of the High Contracting Parties. At the Fifth CCW Review Conference in 2016, the High Contracting Parties decided to establish an open-ended Group of Governmental Experts on emerging technologies in the area of LAWS, building on the earlier expert meetings. Since then, the group has been reconvened annually. In 2023, the Meeting of the High Contracting Parties to the CCW decided that the GGE on LAWS would continue its work in 2024 and 2025. The group was tasked with developing, by consensus, elements of a possible instrument, without predetermining its form, as well as other measures addressing lethal autonomous weapon systems, drawing on existing CCW protocols, earlier recommendations, state proposals, and legal, military, and technological expertise. == 2024 == In 2024, the GGE met twice, and the group was chaired by Robert in den Bosch, the Netherlands' disarmament ambassador. The 2024 Meeting of the High Contracting Parties decided that the group would meet for 10 days in 2025, in two five-day sessions, and reaffirmed its mandate to continue work by consensus on possible elements of an instrument and other measures addressing lethal autonomous weapon systems. == 2025 == At its first 2025 session, held in Geneva from 3 to 7 March 2025, the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems discussed revisions to the chair's rolling text. The text was structured into five sections, or "boxes", though delegates held differing views on whether headings were useful or appropriate. Broadly, the discussions covered the characterization of lethal autonomous weapon systems, the application of international humanitarian law, possible prohibitions and regulations, legal review, and questions of accountability and responsibility. At its second session, held from 1 to 5 September 2025, delegations continued work on the chair's rolling text, which set out elements of a possible instrument and was organized into five thematic "boxes". == 2026 == === Developments before the 2026 session === A few weeks before the meeting, autonomous weapons drew renewed attention when the United States pressured Anthropic to revise the terms of use for its AI model Claude. Anthropic prohibited the model's use for mass domestic surveillance and for fully autonomous weapons operating without human oversight, while reports also emerged that OpenAI had reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of War for the use of its AI models, reportedly stipulating that they would not independently direct autonomous weapons where human control was required. The U.S. military nevertheless continued to use Claude during its war on Iran, and there was increasing alarm about the use of AI-assisted semi-autonomous weapons in conflicts including those in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, and Iran. Before the start of the sessions, Robert in den Bosch, as chair, warned that progress was urgent because technological developments were moving quickly. At the same time, although states agreed that international humanitarian law applied to LAWS, specific internationally binding standards governing such systems remained largely absent. A key divide before the session was that Russia and the United States opposed new legally binding instruments, while other states argued that new rules were necessary. According to Robert in den Bosch, the talks could lead to new rules, amendments to an existing convention, or a new treaty. === First session === From 2 to 6 March 2026, the group held its penultimate session under the group's three-year mandate. Delegations discussed the chair's rolling draft text, circulated in December 2025, on elements of a possible instrument or other measures concerning lethal autonomous weapon systems. In revised text circulated by the chair on 5 March 2026, a lethal autonomous weapon system was characterized as "a functionally integrated combination of one or more weapons and technological components, that can identify, select, and engage a target, without intervention by a human operator in the execution of these tasks". The text was divided into five boxes to structure discussion. During the session, delegates conducted a first reading of the draft text, and the chair later circulated revised language for several sections. Informal consultations were also held. According to campaign groups and participating observers, support grew during the week for moving to negotiations on the basis of the rolling text, with more than 70 states said to support that step by the end of the session, though some participants warned that attempts to bridge differences risked blurring the group's core purpose. The International Committee of the Red Cross argued that the text should not only restate existing international humanitarian law, but also clarify how those rules apply to autonomous weapons and set out additional measures tailored to the specific challenges such systems raise. Stop Killer Robots likewise emphasized the need to preserve meaningful human judgment and control over increasingly autonomous systems. During the discussions, the U.S. delegation opposed the term "human control" and reportedly proposed the alternative phrase "good faith human judgment and care". Other delegations rejected that wording as too weak, while many states continued to insist that meaningful human control over weapon systems remained essential.
Alexey Chervonenkis
Alexey Yakovlevich Chervonenkis (Russian: Алексей Яковлевич Червоненкис; 7 September 1938 – 22 September 2014) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Along with Vladimir Vapnik, he was one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory, also known as the "fundamental theory of learning", an important part of computational learning theory. Chervonenkis held joint appointments with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Royal Holloway, University of London. Alexey Chervonenkis got lost in Losiny Ostrov National Park on 22 September 2014, and later during a search operation was found dead near Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow. He had died of hypothermia.
AlphaEvolve
AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent for designing advanced algorithms based on large language models such as Gemini. It was developed by Google DeepMind and unveiled in May 2025. == Design == AlphaEvolve aims to autonomously discover and refine algorithms through a combination of large language models (LLMs) and evolutionary computation. AlphaEvolve needs an evaluation function with metrics to optimize, and an initial algorithm. At each step, AlphaEvolve uses the LLM to produce variants of the existing algorithms, and then selects the most effective ones. Unlike domain-specific predecessors like AlphaFold or AlphaTensor, AlphaEvolve is designed as a general-purpose system. It can operate across a wide array of scientific and engineering tasks by automatically modifying code and optimizing for multiple objectives. Its architecture allows it to evaluate code programmatically, reducing reliance on human input and mitigating risks such as hallucinations common in standard LLM outputs. == Achievements == According to Google, across a selection of 50 open mathematical problems, the model was able to rediscover state-of-the-art solutions 75% of the time and discovered improved solutions 20% of the time, for example advancing the kissing number problem. AlphaEvolve was also used to optimize Google's computing ecosystem. Improved data center scheduling heuristics, enabled the recovery of 0.7% of stranded resources. It was also used to optimize TPU circuit design and Gemini's training matrix multiplication kernel. == Open source implementations == Following the publication of AlphaEvolve, several open source implementations have been developed by the research community. One such implementation is OpenEvolve, which implements distributed evolutionary algorithms, multi-language support, integration with various large language model providers, and automated discovery of high-performance GPU kernels that outperform expert-engineered baselines.
Mental mapping
In behavioral geography, a mental map is a person's point-of-view perception of their area of interaction. Although this kind of subject matter would seem most likely to be studied by fields in the social sciences, this particular subject is most often studied by modern-day geographers. Researchers have also applied mental mapping to understand and define cognitive regions. They study it to determine subjective qualities from the public such as personal preference and practical uses of geography like driving directions. Mass media also have a virtually direct effect on a person's mental map of the geographical world. The perceived geographical dimensions of a foreign nation (relative to one's own nation) may often be heavily influenced by the amount of time and relative news coverage that the news media may spend covering news events from that foreign region. For instance, a person might perceive a small island to be nearly the size of a continent, merely based on the amount of news coverage that they are exposed to on a regular basis. In psychology, the term names the information maintained in the mind of an organism by means of which it may plan activities, select routes over previously traveled territories, etc. The rapid traversal of a familiar maze depends on this kind of mental map if scents or other markers laid down by the subject are eliminated before the maze is re-run. == Background == Mental maps are an outcome of the field of behavioral geography. The imagined maps are considered one of the first studies that intersected geographical settings with human action. The most prominent contribution and study of mental maps was in the writings of Kevin Lynch. In The Image of the City, Lynch used simple sketches of maps created from memory of an urban area to reveal five elements of the city; nodes, edges, districts, paths and landmarks. Lynch claimed that “Most often our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.” (Lynch, 1960, p 2.) The creation of a mental map relies on memory as opposed to being copied from a preexisting map or image. In The Image of the City, Lynch asks a participant to create a map as follows: “Make it just as if you were making a rapid description of the city to a stranger, covering all the main features. We don’t expect an accurate drawing- just a rough sketch.” (Lynch 1960, p 141) In the field of human geography mental maps have led to an emphasizing of social factors and the use of social methods versus quantitative or positivist methods. Mental maps have often led to revelations regarding social conditions of a particular space or area. Haken and Portugali (2003) developed an information view, which argued that the face of the city is its information . Bin Jiang (2012) argued that the image of the city (or mental map) arises out of the scaling of city artifacts and locations. He addressed that why the image of city can be formed , and he even suggested ways of computing the image of the city, or more precisely the kind of collective image of the city, using increasingly available geographic information such as Flickr and Twitter . Using mental maps, we will be able to predict individual decision making and spatial selection, as well as evaluate their routing and navigation. A cognitive maps utility as a mnemonic and metaphorical device is precisely one of its other benefits as a shaper of the world and local attitudes. The first major field of study within the domain of memory maps is geography, spatial cognition and neurophysiology. This aims to understand how routes are drawn by subject from their set of subjects out into space which lead to memorization and internal representations. Overall these representations take the form of drawings, positioning in a graph, or oral/textual narratives, but are reflected as behavior is space that can be recorded as tracking items. == Research applications == Mental maps have been used in a collection of spatial research. Many studies have been performed that focus on the quality of an environment in terms of feelings such as fear, desire and stress. A study by Matei et al. in 2001 used mental maps to reveal the role of media in shaping urban space in Los Angeles. The study used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to process 215 mental maps taken from seven neighborhoods across the city. The results showed that people's fear perceptions in Los Angeles are not associated with high crime rates but are instead associated with a concentration of certain ethnicities in a given area. The mental maps recorded in the study draw attention to these areas of concentrated ethnicities as parts of the urban space to avoid or stay away from. Mental maps have also been used to describe the urban experience of children. In a 2008 study by Olga den Besten mental maps were used to map out the fears and dislikes of children in Berlin and Paris. The study looked into the absence of children in today's cities and the urban environment from a child's perspective of safety, stress and fear. Peter Gould and Rodney White have performed prominent analyses in the book “Mental Maps.” This book is an investigation into people's spatial desires. The book asks of its participants: “Suppose you were suddenly given the chance to choose where you would like to live- an entirely free choice that you could make quite independently of the usual constraints of income or job availability. Where would you choose to go?” (Gould, 1974, p 15) Gould and White use their findings to create a surface of desire for various areas of the world. The surface of desire is meant to show people's environmental preferences and regional biases. In an experiment done by Edward C. Tolman, the development of a mental map was seen in rats. A rat was placed in a cross shaped maze and allowed to explore it. After this initial exploration, the rat was placed at one arm of the cross and food was placed at the next arm to the immediate right. The rat was conditioned to this layout and learned to turn right at the intersection in order to get to the food. When placed at different arms of the cross maze however, the rat still went in the correct direction to obtain the food because of the initial mental map it had created of the maze. Rather than just deciding to turn right at the intersection no matter what, the rat was able to determine the correct way to the food no matter where in the maze it was placed. The idea of mental maps is also used in strategic analysis. David Brewster, an Australian strategic analyst, has applied the concept to strategic conceptions of South Asia and Southeast Asia. He argues that popular mental maps of where regions begin and end can have a significant impact on the strategic behaviour of states. A collection of essays, documenting current geographical and historical research in mental maps is published by the Journal of Cultural Geography in 2018.
Multi-model database
In the field of database design, a multi-model database is a database management system designed to support multiple data models against a single, integrated backend. In contrast, most database management systems are organized around a single data model that determines how data can be organized, stored, and manipulated. Document, graph, relational, and key–value models are examples of data models that may be supported by a multi-model database. == Background == The relational data model became popular after its publication by Edgar F. Codd in 1970. Due to increasing requirements for horizontal scalability and fault tolerance, NoSQL databases became prominent after 2009. NoSQL databases use a variety of data models, with document, graph, and key–value models being popular. A multi-model database is a database that can store, index and query data in more than one model. For some time, databases have primarily supported only one model, such as: relational database, document-oriented database, graph database or triplestore. A database that combines many of these is multi-model. This should not be confused with multimodal database systems such as Pixeltable or ApertureDB, which focus on unified management of different media types (images, video, audio, text) rather than different data models. For some time, it was all but forgotten (or considered irrelevant) that there were any other database models besides relational. The relational model and notion of third normal form were the default standard for all data storage. However, prior to the dominance of relational data modeling, from about 1980 to 2005, the hierarchical database model was commonly used. Since 2000 or 2010, many NoSQL models that are non-relational, including documents, triples, key–value stores and graphs are popular. Arguably, geospatial data, temporal data, and text data are also separate models, though indexed, queryable text data is generally termed a "search engine" rather than a database. The first time the word "multi-model" has been associated to the databases was on May 30, 2012 in Cologne, Germany, during the Luca Garulli's key note "NoSQL Adoption – What’s the Next Step?". Luca Garulli envisioned the evolution of the 1st generation NoSQL products into new products with more features able to be used by multiple use cases. The idea of multi-model databases can be traced back to Object–Relational Data Management Systems (ORDBMS) in the early 1990s and in a more broader scope even to federated and integrated DBMSs in the early 1980s. An ORDBMS system manages different types of data such as relational, object, text and spatial by plugging domain specific data types, functions and index implementations into the DBMS kernels. A multi-model database is most directly a response to the "polyglot persistence" approach of knitting together multiple database products, each handing a different model, to achieve a multi-model capability as described by Martin Fowler. This strategy has two major disadvantages: it leads to a significant increase in operational complexity, and there is no support for maintaining data consistency across the separate data stores, so multi-model databases have begun to fill in this gap. Multi-model databases are intended to offer the data modeling advantages of polyglot persistence, without its disadvantages. Operational complexity, in particular, is reduced through the use of a single data store. == Benchmarking multi-model databases == As more and more platforms are proposed to deal with multi-model data, there are a few works on benchmarking multi-model databases. For instance, Pluciennik, Oliveira, and UniBench reviewed existing multi-model databases and made an evaluation effort towards comparing multi-model databases and other SQL and NoSQL databases respectively. They pointed out that the advantages of multi-model databases over single-model databases are as follows : == Architecture == The main difference between the available multi-model databases is related to their architectures. Multi-model databases can support different models either within the engine or via different layers on top of the engine. Some products may provide an engine which supports documents and graphs while others provide layers on top of a key-key store. With a layered architecture, each data model is provided via its own component. == User-defined data models == In addition to offering multiple data models in a single data store, some databases allow developers to easily define custom data models. This capability is enabled by ACID transactions with high performance and scalability. In order for a custom data model to support concurrent updates, the database must be able to synchronize updates across multiple keys. ACID transactions, if they are sufficiently performant, allow such synchronization. JSON documents, graphs, and relational tables can all be implemented in a manner that inherits the horizontal scalability and fault-tolerance of the underlying data store. == Theoretical Foundation for Multi-Model Databases == The traditional theory of relations is not enough to accurately describe multi-model database systems. Recent research is focused on developing a new theoretical foundation for these systems. Category theory can provide a unified, rigorous language for modeling, integrating, and transforming different data models. By representing multi-model data as sets and their relationships as functions or relations within the Set category, we can create a formal framework to describe, manipulate, and understand various data models and how they interact.
Vilém Flusser
Vilém Flusser (May 12, 1920 – November 27, 1991) was a Czech-born Brazilian philosopher, writer and journalist, best known for his contributions to media studies, communication theory, and the philosophy of language. He lived for a long period in São Paulo (where he became a Brazilian citizen) and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages. His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy logic theory through history: the period of image worship, and period of text worship, with deviations consequently into idolatry and "textolatry". == Life == Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague, Czechoslovakia into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics (under Albert Einstein among others). Vilém attended German and Czech primary schools and later a German grammar school. In 1938, Flusser started to study philosophy at the Juridical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser emigrated to London (with Edith Barth, his later wife, and her parents) to continue his studies for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Vilém Flusser lost all of his family in the German concentration camps: his father died in Buchenwald in 1940; his grandparents, his mother and his sister were brought to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz where they were killed. The next year, he emigrated to Brazil, living both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He started working at a Czech import/export company and then at Stabivolt, a manufacturer of radios and transistors. In 1960 he started to collaborate with the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo and published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia; by these means he seriously approached the Brazilian intellectual community. Flusser had as his friend and closest interlocutor the Brazilian philosopher Vicente Ferreira da Silva. Flusser and Vicente Ferreira da Silva met in São Paulo in the 1960s and began a close intellectual dialogue that continued until Ferreira da Silva's death in 1963. Flusser wrote several essays on Ferreira da Silva's work and that Ferreira da Silva's concept of "Fundamental ontology” had a significant impact on Flusser's understanding of the nature of reality. During the 60s Flusser published and taught at several schools in São Paulo, being Lecturer for Philosophy of Science at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola Superior de Cinema in São Paulo. He also participated actively in the arts, collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo, among other cultural events. Beginning in the 1950s he taught philosophy and worked as a journalist, before publishing his first book Língua e realidade (Language and Reality) in 1963. In 1972 he decided to leave Brazil. Some say it was because it was becoming difficult to publish because of the military regime. Others dispute this reason, since his work on communication and language did not threaten the military. In 1970, when a reform took place at the University of São Paulo by the Brazilian military government, all Lecturers of Philosophy (members of the Department of Philosophy) were dismissed. Flusser, who taught at the Engineering School (Escola Politécnica), had to leave the university as well. In 1972 he and his wife Edith settled temporarily in Merano (Tyrol). Further short stays in various European countries followed until they moved to Robion in southern France in 1981, where they remained until Flusser's death in 1991. To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory and working with new topics (Philosophy of Photography, Technical Images, etc.). He died in 1991 in a car accident near the Czech–German border, while trying to visit his native city, Prague, to give a lecture. Vilém Flusser is the cousin of David Flusser. == Philosophy == Flusser's essays are short, provocative and lucid, with a resemblance to the style of journalistic articles. Critics have noted he is less a 'systematic' thinker than a 'dialogic' one, purposefully eclectic and provocative (Cubitt 2004). However, his early books, written in the 1960s, primarily in Portuguese, and published in Brazil, have a slightly different style. Flusser's writings relate to each other, however, which means that he intensively works over certain topics and dissects them into a number of brief essays. His main topics of interest were: epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, ontology, language philosophy, semiotics, philosophy of science, the history of Western culture, the philosophy of religion, the history of symbolic language, technology, writing, the technical image, photography, migration, media and literature, and, especially in his later years, the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. His writings reflect his wandering life: although the majority of his work was written in German and Portuguese, he also wrote in English and French, with scarce translation to other languages. Because Flusser's writings in different languages are dispersed in the form of books, articles or sections of books, his work as a media philosopher and cultural theorist is only now becoming more widely known. The first book by Flusser to be published in English was Towards a Philosophy of Photography in 1984 by the then new journal European Photography, which was his own translation of the work. The Shape of Things, was published in London in 1999 and was followed by a new translation of Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Flusser's archives have been held by the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and are currently housed at the Berlin University of the Arts. === Philosophy of photography === Writing about photography in the 1970s and 80s, in the face of the early worldwide impact of computer technologies, Flusser argued that the photograph was the first in a number of technical image forms to have fundamentally changed the way in which the world is seen. Historically, the importance of photography had been that it introduced nothing less than a new epoch: 'The invention of photography constitutes a break in history that can only be understood in comparison to that other historical break constituted by the invention of linear writing.' Whereas ideas might previously have been interpreted in terms of their written form, photography heralded new forms of perceptual experience and knowledge. As Flusser Archive Supervisor Claudia Becker describes, "For Flusser, photography is not only a reproductive imaging technology, it is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood". In this context, Flusser argued that photographs have to be understood in strict separation from 'pre-technical image forms'. For example, he contrasted them to paintings which he described as images that can be sensibly 'decoded', because the viewer is able to interpret what he or she sees as more or less direct signs of what the painter intended. By contrast, even though photography produces images that seem to be 'faithful reproductions' of objects and events they cannot be so directly 'decoded'. The crux of this difference stems, for Flusser, from the fact that photographs are produced through the operations of an apparatus. And the photographic apparatus operates in ways that are not immediately known or shaped by its operator. For example, he described the act of photographing as follows: The photographer's gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm's-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must 'decide' within them: he must press the trigger. Roughly put, the person using a camera might think that they are operating its controls to produce a picture that shows the world the way they want it to be seen, but it is the pre-programmed character of the camera that sets the parameters of this act and it is the apparatus that shapes the meaning of the resulting image. Given the central role of photography to almost all aspects of contemporary life, the programmed character of the photographic apparatus shapes the experience of looking at and interpreting photographs as well as most of the cultural contexts in which we do so. 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