On topology and time: efficient evaluation for temporal-clique subgraph queries

Efficient monitoring and forensic analysis via accurate network-attached provenance collection with minimal storage overhead

We study the problem of temporal-clique subgraph pattern matching. In such patterns, edges are required to jointly overlap in time within a given temporal window in addition to forming a topological sub-structure. This problem arises in many application domains, e.g., in social networks, life sciences, smart cities, telecommunications, and others. State-of-the-art subgraph matching techniques, however, are shown to be limited and inefficient in processing queries with both temporal and topological constraints. We propose an approach that takes full advantage of both topological and temporal selectivities during the processing of temporal-clique subgraph queries. Additionally, we investigate a number of optimizations that can be introduced into our approach to improve its efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing methods by a wide margin at a small additional storage cost.

The need for translational research in digital investigation

The idea of 'smart cities' increasingly dominates much of the discourse about future urban development although there is little agreement on definitions or derivations for the term. In the UK there is an abundance of encouragement for cities to strive to become 'smart', with Government (e.g. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)), state agencies (e.g. Future Cities Catapult (FCC) and Innovate UK) and foundations such as Nesta all urging cities to embrace the growing market opportunities for collaboration with corporate technology providers. At the same time the term remains highly contested with a number of critiques warning of the dangers of civic leaders accepting the promises of global tech corporations, e.g. offering 'smart city in a box' solutions (IFTF, 2011; Townsend, 2013).Others, such as the American science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, no stranger to depicting future dystopias, even suggest that much of what is being offered by these corporations is a conscious conspiracy to undermine democracy and human rights:Mutated forms of electronic sociality are arising. Some resemble the trade guilds once common in the days of feudal aristocracy. Others are 'smart city' machines that resemble the urban political party machinery that distributed protection and favouritism. At the flip of a switch, any 'smart city' can become a smart gated-community, fortress-like, secured and 'resilient'. (Sterling, 2014, 19)In spite of these critical voices the public profile of 'smart cities' and the tech corporations supporting them has never been higher, backed up by massive marketing campaigns and public events which offer cities an ever-growing array of tech driven solutions to economic, environmental and social challenges. Little of this is particularly new, however, as there has been a critical appreciation of the impact of technological change on economic and social life, particularly in cities, around the concept of the 'information society' for more than 30 years (Qvortrup, 1986). Urban policy makers have been considering ideas such as information cities, digital cities and intelligent cities since the early development of more open and commercial versions of the internet in the 1990s, including many urban initiatives, such as the Manchester Host network (1991), Digital City Amsterdam (1994) and Virtual Helsinki (1996). Alongside these developments a number of cities came together to form their own trans-European networks, including Telecities, set up as part of Eurocities in 1993, and the Inter-Regional Information Society Initiative (IRISI) in 1994 (ENoLL, 2015).Even the more proactive policy initiatives around ideas of local digital agendas, digital strategies and digital challenges have been embedded in many aspects of public policy for more than 10 years, from the 2005 strategy Connecting the UK: The Digital Strategy (Cabinet Office and DTI, 2005) to the 2010 Digital Agenda for Europe (European Commission, 2010a). What does seem to be different in what has emerged in the last five years is the scope and scale of the hype around the idea of 'smart cities'. In an increasingly globalised digital world it is perhaps not surprising that most, if not all, of the legacy of these earlier, often very disparate, initiatives have coalesced into one convenient, more generic label, of cities being, or wanting to be, 'smart'. Certainly the marketing and deployment budgets of the many corporates focusing on the smart cities market appear to have grown as exponentially as the number of smart products and services they aim to offer, now supported by global industrial networks, representing most of the largest corporate players, such as the Smart Cities Council (http://smartcitiescouncil.com/).In 1992 the adoption of the Agenda 21 programme by the UN included the idea of 'smart growth' and five years later in 1997 the American Planning Association included this concept within a regulatory framework (Ryser, 2014). …

Basic and strategic research for infectious disease control at the interface of the life, health and social sciences

P ublic support for U.S. federal expenditures for basic research gained momentum with the science and technology breakthroughs that contributed to the Allies' victory in World War II. After World War II, the Korean and Cold Wars concentrated research appropriations in the Department of Defense (DOD). DOD research expenditures were massive from 1950 to 1990. They included not only direct investments in weapons and intelligence systems but support of the underlying science, centered in physical sciences and engineering. What is less well remembered today is that DOD's basic research investments were broadly based, ranging far beyond the physical sciences and engineering into the life and social sciences. Through its service research offices and the Advanced Research Projects agencies, DOD also fostered interdisciplinary research in promising new areas, such as computation, and developed new modes for the performance of research, as in university materials research laboratories. The large investment in the physical sciences also contributed indirectly to medical science and health care, giving rise to many technologies used today. The life sciences now account for more than 50 percent of U.S. federal investment in basic research. Biomedical research funding has followed a pattern of steady significant growth over four decades, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have slowly come to dominate that funding. Today's strong federal support for the life sciences is warranted, because biomedical research is on the cusp of a revolution in preventative medicine and treatment. Nevertheless, today's overall research budget is increasingly out of balance. Federal funding of many fields in the physical sciences and engineering is down substantially since 1993 (9 to 36% in real terms in fields such as chemistry, physics, and electrical and chemical engineering). This loss, if continued, will imperil advances in these disciplines and endanger the continued flow of valuable discoveries and technologies that have been important to biomedical research and health care. National science and technology (S&T) policy over the past four decades has largely been led by physical scientists who first gained national experience in World War II. They crafted policies for broad investment in basic research and infrastructure, including the life sciences. As we enter the 21st century, biological scientists must assume broader leadership responsibilities in S&T policy, and they must speak out about the importance of support for all disciplines, including the physical sciences and engineering. NIH's Harold Varmus and the National Science Foundation's Rita Colwell recognize the imbalance in the current federal research portfolio and have begun advocating increased investment in all areas of research. Their leadership is to be commended, but it is not enough. Government, organizations, institutions, and industry can and should do more to bolster all basic research. NIH must set the example by much more broadly supporting innovative interdisciplinary research embracing all science, just as DOD did when it was the prime funder of R&D. Some of this has already begun in NIH's cross-institute bioengineering initiative and in prospective increased NIH support of information technology for biocomputation. Similar initiatives should be launched in other areas of the physical sciences and in the social and behavioral sciences. Funding for these initiatives should become a much larger percentage of NIH's overall expenditures. The life science professional societies must speak broadly for basic research and not just argue their own disciplinary cases. Disease advocacy groups must also articulate the case for the physical sciences in their work with the public and before Congress. University leaders and corporate executives must make the case for investment in all research disciplines. Most of all, biologists in the laboratory—working scientists and their students—need to appreciate that their research rests on the legacy not only of the life sciences but also the physical and other sciences. Today's life scientists and the next generation they are training must be the national leaders of the future who will increasingly guide all of U.S. basic research policy in the 21st century.

Recently, initiatives to share data on peer review (Squazzoni et al, 2020) have brought about better understanding of the peer review process across different disciplines (Buljan et al, 2020, Squazzoni et al 2021a, Squazzoni et al 2021b). Some studies (Strang & Siler, 2015; Siler & Strang, 2016) examined the changes from initial submissions to journals to publication. Another study (Teplitskiy & Bakanic, 2016) explored how well peer reviews predict the article’s citation impact. A study of almost half a million peer review reports from 61 journals (Buljan et al., 2020) showed that peer review reports were longer in social science than in medical journals. It also showed that their language characteristics differed across disciplines (Buljan et al., 2020).The aim of our study was to further examine structural and linguistic differences between articles and the characteristics of the peer review process, including the language used and outcomes of peer review reports, in medicine and health sciences vs. social sciences.To select the articles we used the search engine of the Open Research Central (ORC) platform, which covers different fields, and applied the following filters: “Subject area: Medical and health sciences”, and “Subject area: Social science”. “Article type(s): Research article” filter was also applied. We ended up with 1912 medical and 477 social science articles. To create the samples of articles with clear medical/health vs. social sciences content, we excluded those with a tag for medicine and health sciences and any other disciplinary field except biology and life sciences and those with a tag both for social sciences, and biology and life sciences. This left 408 medical and 54 social science articles. Using the DOIs of filtered articles, we downloaded them manually in an XML format. Articles that had not been reviewed were excluded, yielding a total of 51 articles with a social sciences tag and 361 articles with a medicine and health sciences tag, as well as their peer review texts.We analysed them using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software and word embeddings, a method in which words are given mathematical vector representation. To assess the differences between the articles and their reviews across medical and social sciences, we used the one-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey’s test. For multivariate frequency distribution of the variables we used the contingency test. All analyses were carried out in JASP, version 0.14.1. Articles from medicine and health sciences and those from social sciences differed in structure. The median word count in the introduction section was 674 (IQR=308.0–637.0) for social sciences and 431 (IQR=420.5–1029.0) for medical sciences. The conclusion section was also longer in social sciences, with 263 words (IQR=135.5–516.0) vs. 94 words (IQR=64.0–168.0) in medical sciences (p<0.01, Mann Whitney). The percentage of articles with merged discussion and conclusion was higher in social sciences, whereas medical articles followed the IMRaD structure more often and contained fewer declarations and non-IMRaD sections. They also contained more figures. Linguistic analysis showed that social science articles had higher word count, higher clout, and a less positive tone.Longer wording was also dominant in peer review reports on social science articles. However, the social and medical sciences did not significantly differ in the characteristics of the peer review process and comments from all stages of review or in the outcome of the peer review process (approved, approved with reservation, or rejected) between the two disciplines. There were also no statistically significant differences in manuscript changes between the disciplines, with the exception of text changes in the introduction section that changed more in the social sciences. The review process for articles in social and medical/health sciences may not differ as much as is usually believed. This, however, may be partly owed to the use of the same ORC platform, which may have uniform policies and processes.

Az okos városok témája divatossá vált az utóbbi évek városfejlesztéssel foglalkozó nemzetközi konferenciáin, a nemzetközi tudományos szakirodalomban és a médiában is – főleg, amikor a városok jövőbeli fejlesztésről van szó – jelen van az okos város diskurzusa. A téma kutatásában három nagyobb szakterületről érkeznek kutatók: akik az okos városok technológiai infrastruktúrájával (telekommunikációs mérnökök, programozók), illetve a városok élhetőségével, ökológiai fenntarthatóságával foglalkoznak (ökológusok, környezetvédelmi szakemberek). A harmadik szakterület a különböző társadalomtudósok csoportja (szociológusok, regionális kutatók, geográfusok, közgazdászok), akik elsősorban az okos városok fejlesztésének társadalmi hatásait vizsgálják.A tanulmány első része a nemzetközi szakirodalom segítségével áttekintést nyújt az okosváros-koncepció értelmezéséről, történetéről és főbb jellemzőiről. Majd bemutatjuk azokat az alrendszereket, melyek az okos városok fejlesztésének kiemelt részterületei, illetve azokat a kapcsolódási lehetőségeket, melyekkel a területi kutatók és társadalomtudósok részt vesznek a téma jobb megismerésében. Végül a tanulmány utolsó részében arra keressük a választ, hogy a tér és társadalom összefüggéseit kutató szakemberek hogyan képzelik el a jövő okos városait. E kutatások fókuszában az „okos” világ áll, a „big data” típusú adatbázisok kezelésének területe, valamint az IT-cégekkel és programozókkal való együttműködési kapcsolatok építése.

Political science and other closely related social science disciplines could certainly benefit from the creation of a Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences within the National Science Foundation. I present the case for such organizational restructuring on behalf of the American Political Science Association and the Western Political Science Association, and as a charter member and former President of the Social Science History Association. That a benefit would accrue from a reorganization would seem likely in the face of two organizational imperatives. First, political science and its sister disciplines need direct representation by senior officers of their own directorate in the policy making and resource allocation of at least three additional existing directorates: the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and the Directorate for Scientific, Technological and International Affairs. The needs of political science in these three domains are similar to those of the other social sciences and are distinctly different from the needs of either the life sciences, the geosciences or the mathematical and physical sciences. Social science needs will not, and most likely cannot, be articulated by Foundation officers whose organizational responsibilities are overwhelmingly defined by the needs -and current resources-of the biosciences and whose professional backgrounds lie in one of the biosciences. We believe that the manifold resources of the Foundationprofessional and technical as well as budgetary-have not successfully addressed the needs of the social sciences in large part because the social sciences are not directly represented at the appropriate organizational level within the Foundation. The second organizational imperative stems from the need for greater organizational differentiation within the social sciences. Even though few of the social and behavioral science disciplines are as diverse as the array of subfields in chemistry or its sister disciplines, the full panoply of research specialties across the several social sciences is on a par with the diversity represented in the other substantive directorates. Many of the existing activities of the present Division of Social and Economic Science could be relocated as divisions of the new directorate. For example, without attempting to provide an organizational blueprint for the future, it may be suggested that, as with the other substantive directorates, each of the present disciplinary programs in S.E.S. might well be a division within a Social and Behavioral Science Directorate. They might be joined by a Division of Methods, Measurement and Instrumentation needed to address those problems of data generation and analysis that the disciplinary divisions have in common. Similarly, there should also be a separate division for large-scale multi-purpose data collection and resource development. A quite new division might also be established for activities centered on increasing the scientific usefulness of data generated by governmental agencies. Finally, and still illustratively, a separate division might be created for multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional projects or programs. To give greater clarity to the foregoing prescriptions, consider the following. First, with regard to representing social science needs in other directorates, the computer has become as central-and totally indispensable-to the work ways of social science as to the other sciences. And yet the central tasks for the computer are somewhat different. Certainly in contrast to mathematics, social science does much more data management of numeric data, more archiving and retrieval of non-quantitative materials, and much less sheer computation. On a quite different dimension, social science has its own version of the adaptation of the computer to data generation. In the harnessing of the computer in Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, in improving methods of textual analysis, and in the use of the lap top computer for data collection in the field (and quite apart from use in simulation exercises), we are only beginning to exploit fully this technological wonder. As a third illustration, it can be noted that in the absence of large laboratories or research centers which bring together scientists working on common problems, the computer network is becoming an essential feature of the social scientist's life. Both the transmission of data by computer nets and inter-personal exchanges among scientists are probably more crucial for the maturing social sciences than for the more developed disciplines. Many of these and other needs of the social scientist are served indirectly and inadvertently by computer developments in other realms. However, without a new directorate in the Foundation, it seems unrealistic if not unreasonable to expect strong and direct representation of social science computing needs that should affect future Foundation policy and resource allocation. A separate Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to have an impact on Foundation decisions concerning the development of computer and information science.

This study aimed to determine the lexical word-class distribution in research articles of four subject areas: social sciences, health sciences, physical sciences and life sciences. Total 5,754,560 tokens or running words were extracted from research articles published by Elsevier for examination. Results show both similarities and differences in distribution across the four subject areas. For health, physical and life sciences, the noun is the most dominant lexical word class, followed by the adjective, verb and adverb. For social sciences, the verb is more dominant than the adjective. This finding reflects that research articles in social sciences use the highest number of words and are more conversational in nature. For types of nouns, singular nouns are used more often than plural nouns in all subject areas; this usage might indicate that research articles tend to focus on a single research object. For types of verbs, research articles in health, life and physical sciences tend to prefer using past tense and past participle forms over others; this usage indicates emphasis on reporting what has been done. In contrast, social sciences research articles show more frequent use of the verbs’ base form, and this usage possibly signifies arguments regarding general truths. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.33.0.19945

Smart cities are not a new phenomenon and it is an interdisciplinary definition that became a popular labeling for modern cities. However, there a is surprisingly little academic research in urban design and planning field that discusses this phenomenon. Smart cities definition is similar to intelligent, creative, sustainable or liveable cities which appears to be considered as a part of a play with words. In most of the technological and social science articles smart cities refer to a smart urban management and development via technologies and infrastructure. Based on the scientific literature overview, there are several factors affecting the city smartness, such as technology, people and communities, economy governance, planning and infrastructure. Overall there is a little information and research on urban design principles and tools in the smart city’s creation and contribution to its smartness. The most important thing is to clarify the urban design, planning and landscape design role importance to a smart city context and vice versa. The aim of this paper is to overview the smart cities concept from urban design perspective to find and highlight the important touch points, relation and role of urban design, planning and landscape design in smart cities creation. This would lead to the robust principles for smart European cities that would enable to achieve sustainable development, efficient urban growth and a better urban landscape.

This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and social sciences. This includes approaches, which work across disciplines and intellectual traditions, in order to open up the complexity of what might count as an object of knowledge within these different contexts. Each paper in this special collection is engaged in productive approaches that cut across disciplines and that enable dialogues and exchanges to take place between the social sciences, life sciences and philosophy. The articles respond to some of the new developments across the life and biological sciences, which include the field of epigenetics, the genome and microbiome and new theorisations of immunity. They engage in different ways with emergent issues, problematics, ontologies, controversies and debates within these fields. These are explored at the intersection of science and technology studies (Landecker), new materialism (Jamieson; Warins et al; Yoshizawa); and critical theorizations of immunity, which draw primarily from cultural studies of immunity, including the writings of Ed Cohen (2009), Robert Esposito (2013) and Margrit Shildrick (2010, 2015) (see Davies et al; Newman et al).

Research that addresses complex challenges often requires contributions from the social, life and natural sciences. The disciplines that contribute subject response data, and more specifically qualitative analyses of subject response data, to interdisciplinary studies are characterised by low consensus with respect to methods they use a diversity of terms to describe those methods and they often work from assumptions that are foreign to readers in the natural and life sciences. The first contribution this paper makes is to demonstrate that the forms of reporting that may be adequate for communicating quantitative analysis do not provide teams that include members from natural, life and social sciences with useful accounts of qualitative analysis. Our second contribution is to discuss and model how to report four methods appropriate for qualitative contributions to interdisciplinary projects.

With the rapid development of society, regional urban construction has become the main guarantee of economic development, and smart city construction has become the main trend of regional development. Smart cities consist of information images and urban development, which can meet the needs of the modern generation for material life, knowledge and scientific life. Therefore, wireless remote sensing (RS) and video image processing have become key tools for the development of smart cities, which can solve the problems encountered by many professionals before, and become an integral part of urban construction. On this basis, this paper summarized the video processing image and wireless network RS image, and analyzed their development and application in urban design and layout. Based on this, this paper expounded the application of wireless network RS image in smart city design and layout, and analyzed the application prospects of RS technology in building smart city space-time information framework, RS+urban management, RS+smart environmental protection, RS+smart city agriculture and video processing technology in smart city design and planning. It analyzed the application in intelligent security, intelligent transportation and management visualization, and then used the two-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (2D-DFT) definition to strengthen the design and layout of smart cities. According to experiments and surveys, introducing 2D-DFT into the design and layout of smart cities can build a more intelligent city and improve residents’ satisfaction by 30%.

"Smart city technologies are being developed in many cities around the world to improve people's well-being, social life and economic prosperity with the help of digital transformation and technology. The need for cities to provide supportive services and inclusive technologies for all people is also increasing with the increasing urban population and smart city applications. Current technologies play an important role in the development of smart cities. Thanks to these technologies, data can be collected and analyzed in real time. As a result of the analysis, more effective and efficient decisions can be made about the city. In our country, the number of local and national companies should be increased in terms of smart cities and support should be received from local and national companies when establishing smart cities. Because it is expected that the applications that will collect important data throughout the country will belong to that country in terms of both hardware and software. This situation both contributes to the full independence of the country and the information that can create intelligence is kept within the country. Smart cities have three basic benefits: cost, time and sustainability. Consumption in a smart city can be optimized and savings can be achieved. Since problems can be detected early, costly repairs and maintenance are eliminated. In addition, since processes are automated, decision-making becomes easier with real-time data and time is saved. Sustainability is an important aspect of smart cities. When energy and water usage are optimized and waste is reduced, a more environmentally friendly city emerges. Priority should be given to accelerating urban transformation and innovation when establishing smart cities. Among the technologies required for smart cities, big data, artificial intelligence, internet of things, cyber security, blockchain, digital twin, cloud computing, etc. should be used effectively. Smart cities cannot be established only with technology companies, all stakeholders must come together for this. Citizen participation is extremely important in these processes. There are many challenges encountered when creating smart cities. These challenges are divided into administrative, managerial and technological groups. In this study, many points to be considered when creating smart cities are explained with examples and suggestions are given. It is evaluated that the study will be beneficial to smart city stakeholders."