Cross-disciplinary Field Of Research Research Articles

Bibliometric research analysis of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs): evidence and research activity dynamics

The escalating issue of water pollution has become a worldwide issue that has captured the attention of numerous scientists. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have emerged as adaptable materials with exceptional attributes, including easy synthesis, low cost, remarkable durability, long life, and accessibility. These attributes have motivated researchers to develop novel materials based on MIPs to tackle hazardous contaminants in environmental matrices. The purpose of this paper was to conduct a bibliometric analysis on MIPs’ publications, in order to shed light on the developments and focus points of the field. The selected publications were obtained from Scopus database and subjected to a filtering process, resulting in 11,131 relevant publications. The analysis revealed that the leading publication source (journal) is Biosensors and Bioelectronics; the mostly employed keywords are solid-phase extraction, electrochemical sensor, and molecular recognition; and the top contributing countries are China, Iran, and the USA. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was used for extracting thematic axes from the textual content of the publications. The results of the LDA model showcase that the topic of synthesis and performance of MIPs for environmental applications can be considered as the most dominant topic with a share value of 72.71%. From the analysis, it can be concluded that MIPs are a cross-disciplinary research field.

“Digital Death and Immortality” in Contemporary Scientific Discourse

The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of the formation of digital thanatology as one of the new areas of scientific research, to outline its subject field, to operationalize the basic concepts, to make some adjustments to the conceptual apparatus of traditional thanatology (“Death Studies”). The research methods are based on socio-communicative, systemic, historical and genetic approaches and the principles of digital humanities. The article also uses the methods of historiographical and source research, analysis of specialized publications on the research topic, descriptive approach, content analysis, etc. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that one of the first attempts to explicate the problem of “digital death and immortality” and to analyze the peculiarities of the formation of digital thanatology was made in the Ukrainian scientific discourse. Against the backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the author distinguishes the conceptualization of Ukraine’s cultural memory, the subject of which is the current state of the memorial landscape of Ukrainian culture as a complex, multilayered, heterogeneous entity, of which the digital memorial landscape is a significant structural element. Conclusions. In digital reality, technologies create social relations, ranging from gadgets to nanotechnology, affecting both the process of dying and the ideas of death and immortality in their two modes – real and digital. It is about constructing common semantic boundaries within which not only death and immortality, the study of which is fundamentally impossible but also mediated relations, that is, the process of building relationships in collaboration with various fields of scientific knowledge. That is why “digital death and immortality” as a subject of study is a fundamentally interdisciplinary problem, and digital death studies are emerging as a specific cross-disciplinary field of research into the phenomenon of death in the digital environment. The overview of previous research on digital death and immortality provides an appropriate context for scientific work. It allows us to identify and develop promising areas for further studies, which are especially relevant against the backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements in a wide range of challenging tasks, including board games, arcade games, and robot control. Despite these successes, several critical challenges remain, such as brittle convergence properties caused by sensitive hyperparameters, difficulties in temporal credit assignment with long time horizons and sparse rewards, a lack of diverse exploration, particularly in continuous search space scenarios, challenges in credit assignment in multi-agent RL, and conflicting objectives for rewards. Evolutionary computation (EC), which maintains a population of learning agents, has demonstrated promising performance in addressing these limitations. This article presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art methods for integrating EC into RL, referred to as evolutionary reinforcement learning (EvoRL). We categorize EvoRL methods according to key research areas in RL, including hyperparameter optimization, policy search, exploration, reward shaping, meta-RL, and multi-objective RL. We then discuss future research directions in terms of efficient methods, benchmarks, and scalable platforms. This survey serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners interested in the field of EvoRL, highlighting the important challenges and opportunities for future research. With the help of this survey, researchers and practitioners can develop more efficient methods and tailored benchmarks for EvoRL, further advancing this promising cross-disciplinary research field.

Deep Learning for Mobile Mental Health: Challenges and recent advances

Mental health plays a key role in everyone’s day-to-day lives, impacting our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Also, over the past years, given their ubiquitous and affordable characteristics, the use of smartphones and wearable devices has grown rapidly and provided support within all aspects of mental health research and care—from screening and diagnosis to treatment and monitoring—and attained significant progress in improving remote mental health interventions. While there are still many challenges to be tackled in this emerging cross-disciplinary research field, such as data scarcity, lack of personalization, and privacy concerns, it is of primary importance that innovative signal processing and deep learning (DL) techniques are exploited. In particular, recent advances in DL can help provide a key enabling technology for the development of next-generation user-centric mobile mental health applications. In this article, we briefly introduce the basic principles associated with mobile device-based mental health analysis, review the main system components, and highlight the conventional technologies involved. We also describe several major challenges and various DL technologies that have potential for strongly contributing to dealing with these issues, and we discuss other problems to be addressed via research collaboration across multiple disciplines.

Moscow and Saint Petersburg Censuses at the Turn of the 20th Century as Sources for Labor History Studies

The article studies urban censuses taken in Moscow and Saint Petersburg at the turn of the 20th century as important sources for labor history studies (a cross-disciplinary field of research). The article addresses aggregated data of urban censuses taken in Saint Petersburg in 1881, 1890, 1900 and 1910 and in Moscow in 1882, 1902 and 1912 which provide occupational data. The research subject is the structural content of census occupational tables. When analyzing Moscow and Saint Petersburg censuses, the comparative-historical method is used to identify similar and unique data of historical sources. Despite numerous studies carried out by Russian and foreign scholars addressing pre-revolutionary censuses, one of the aspects of the sources (that is temporal occupational distribution of males and females in Moscow and Saint Petersburg) is still poorly studied. The article briefly describes the creation of each census, analyzes the way occupational data were registered and shows changes in the census program of Saint Petersburg and Moscow from 1881 to 1912. One can see different formation of Moscow occupational groups. Whereas an industry branch prevailed in 1882, social status of the worker dominated 1902 and 1912 censuses. In Saint Petersburg the distribution was related to an industry branch accompanied by a production status. The author considers census structure studies important for comparing temporal data and further analysis of labor activity in Moscow and Saint Petersburg presented in the sources understudy.   

A Neurocinematic Study of the Suspense Effects in Hitchcock's Psycho

As a new and rapidly emerging cross-disciplinary research field, neurocinematics focuses on movie research from an empirical perspective, adopting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other cognitive neuroscience technologies as well as theoretical methods. By verifying and exploring relevant film concepts, neurocinematics tries to establish a scientific basis for the movie theory and better understand frontier subjects in movie studies. We designed this experiment to detect audiences' brain activity when watching movies and verify the manipulation power of narrative film. We selected the shower murder scene in Hitchcock's Psycho as the experimental material. The results of the experiment showed that the trends of the audiences' brain activity were almost consistent with the specific movie plots. By observing audiences' brain activity while watching the movie, the experiment verified the specific effect of Hitchcock's set-up of suspense and explored the neurocognitive brain mechanisms behind the suspense effect.

Digital Emotion Regulation

People routinely regulate their emotions in order to function more effectively at work, to behave more appropriately in social situations, or simply to feel better. Recently, researchers have begun to examine how people shape their affective states using digital technologies, such as smartphones. In this article, we discuss the emergence of digital emotion regulation, both as a widespread behavioral phenomenon and a new cross-disciplinary field of research. This field bridges two largely distinct areas of enquiry: (a) psychological research into how and why people regulate their emotions, which has yet to systematically explore the role of digital technology, and (b) computing research into how digital technologies impact users’ emotions, which has yet to integrate psychological theories of emotion regulation. We argue that bringing these two areas into better contact will benefit both and will facilitate a deeper understanding of the nature and significance of digital emotion regulation.

НОВАЯ ФИЛОСОФИЯ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ: ОПЫТ ОСМЫСЛЕНИЯ ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКОЙ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ

The article is devoted to the issues of considering the new philosophy of education as a cross-disciplinary research field. It is shown that its emergence is connected with the change of education role and place in a man’s life, with information technologies spread. The key positions of the ideologists of the new philosophy of education in Russia and abroad are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the place of the philosophy of education, as a scientific area, in the theory and practice of the Russian education that is capable to comprehend new pedagogical reality and help to develop the national education strategy.

New Insights into Perfluorinated Sulfonic-Acid Ionomers.

In this comprehensive review, recent progress and developments on perfluorinated sulfonic-acid (PFSA) membranes have been summarized on many key topics. Although quite well investigated for decades, PFSA ionomers' complex behavior, along with their key role in many emerging technologies, have presented significant scientific challenges but also helped create a unique cross-disciplinary research field to overcome such challenges. Research and progress on PFSAs, especially when considered with their applications, are at the forefront of bridging electrochemistry and polymer (physics), which have also opened up development of state-of-the-art in situ characterization techniques as well as multiphysics computation models. Topics reviewed stem from correlating the various physical (e.g., mechanical) and transport properties with morphology and structure across time and length scales. In addition, topics of recent interest such as structure/transport correlations and modeling, composite PFSA membranes, degradation phenomena, and PFSA thin films are presented. Throughout, the impact of PFSA chemistry and side-chain is also discussed to present a broader perspective.

Genomics-based plant germplasm research (GPGR)

Plant germplasm underpins much of crop genetic improvement. Millions of germplasm accessions have been collected and conserved ex situ and/or in situ, and the major challenge is now how to exploit and utilize this abundant resource. Genomics-based plant germplasm research (GPGR) or “Genoplasmics” is a novel cross-disciplinary research field that seeks to apply the principles and techniques of genomics to germplasm research. We describe in this paper the concept, strategy, and approach behind GPGR, and summarize current progress in the areas of the definition and construction of core collections, enhancement of germplasm with core collections, and gene discovery from core collections. GPGR is opening a new era in germplasm research. The contribution, progress and achievements of GPGR in the future are predicted.

SOCIAL ROBOT: DEFINING THE CONCEPT

Социальная робототехника является одним из актуальных междисциплинарных направлений. Разработка социальных робототехнических платформ требует совместных усилий специалистов различных областей, в том числе гуманитарной для решения социокультурных задач. Для эффективного междисциплинарного сотрудничества необходимо разработать единый терминологический аппарат, поскольку содержание термина «социальный робот» нуждается в теоретическом осмыслении и более четкой дефиниции. Цель. Представить обзор основных подходов к содержанию понятия «социальный робот», выявить определяющие характеристики социального робота в современном контексте социальной робототехники. Метод проведения работы. В работе применялись лексикографический метод и классификация. Результаты. В статье проанализированы различные подходы к определению понятия «социальный робот» и история становления термина. Предпринята попытка выявить специфические особенности социальных роботов. Основной характеристикой социального робота названа способность к построению взаимодействия с человеком с использованием сложившихся семиотических систем и учетом социального и ситуативного контекста. Социальный робот встраивается в сложившуюся классификацию типов взаимодействия с человеком в качестве автономного социального партнера. Область применения результатов. Полученные результаты составляют теоретическую базу междисциплинарного направления «социальная робототехника» и могут быть использованы для проведения фундаментальных и прикладных исследований в данной области и в учебных курсах по направлениям «Социология», «Робототехника», «Этика технологий», «Искусственный интеллект» и др.

The Future of Structural Chemistry Nucleates in the Present

AbstractA personal view of nearly four decades of structural chemistry is presented. The rise of molecular crystal engineering as an independent cross‐disciplinary field of research at the intersection of crystallography with supramolecular chemistry and solid‐state reactivity is discussed in light of the development of theoretical and instrumental tools and the need for novel molecular materials. The exchange of ideas and experience within the structural chemistry community has played a fundamental role in reaching the present high level of understanding of the factors that control crystal formation and stability. Crystal‐oriented synthetic strategies, including solvent‐free mechanochemical methods, have been developed, as well as screening methods and computational approaches. Some drawbacks and limitations are also discussed. The wealth of multiple crystal forms, from single‐molecule crystals to solvates, co‐crystals, salts and ionic co‐crystals, and their polymorphs, is both an open challenge to the crystal engineering paradigm and a source of discovery and innovation.

Ecological geotechnics: Role of waterfront geoenvironment as habitats in the activities of crabs, bivalves, and birds for biodiversity restoration

The present study aims to pioneer a new cross-disciplinary research field which we call “Ecological Geotechnics”. Recent findings about the salient geophysics involved in intertidal sediments made it possible to closely investigate the linkage between the waterfront geoenvironment and the ecology of intertidal flats. The results of a comprehensive set of field observations, surveys and controlled laboratory experiments demonstrated that the waterfront suction, which remained thus far unexplored in soil mechanics, and the associated geoenvironments govern the performances of the basic living activities of various representative creatures involving crabs, bivalves and birds. Furthermore, these results are discussed and substantiated in light of a successful habitat restoration project showing that such waterfront geoenvironment plays a pivotal role in the habitat selection for the benthos diversity. Hence, the present findings are expected to facilitate a new horizon for performance-based geoenvironmental assessments, design and management for the conservation and restoration of habitats with rich natural ecosystems in intertidal zones.

Rethinking education as experience design

Internationally recognised creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson (2011) has argued that there is an urgent need to transform education systems around the world in view of today’s social, economic and environmental challenges. The current system of mass education that arose from the demands of the Industrial Revolution places unnecessary limitations on the creative capacities of today’s students, he claims. New conceptions of intelligence, creativity and human ability are needed. One way of contributing to that transformation might be to rethink education in terms of experience design – an emerging cross-disciplinary field of research and practice that is concerned with designing products, services, processes, events and environments with a focus on the quality of human experience. This article discusses selected theories and principles from the field of experience design, and considers how they can be applied to learning experiences, both face-to-face and online.

‘Lost’ Surveillance Studies: A critical review of French work on CCTV

In recent years, the rapidly developing field of ‘surveillance studies’ has sparked a remarkable and revealing body of research, which has led to repeated claims to recognise ‘surveillance studies’ as a cross-disciplinary field of research in its own right. However, the almost exclusive reliance of these independency claims upon Anglophone references raises a series of important questions: Must we conclude that other linguistic traditions in surveillance studies do not exist at all, or are we to assume that such studies are heading in a broadly similar direction as their English counterpart?In order to address these questions, the paper suggests engaging with ‘lost’ CCTV studies published in French academia. It succinctly discusses three specificities of the French CCTV context – the legal regulation of CCTV through the 1995 ‘Loi Pasqua’, the specialised economic journal ‘En toute sécurité’ and the quasi absence of publicly mandated statistical evaluations of open street CCTV systems – thus providing a reading of how they are reflected in the existing CCTV literature. From an analytical standpoint, this approach provides an exploratory framework not only for investigating the key elements that French studies about CCTV can add to the relevant Anglophone literature, but also for examining the broader processes of knowledge generation about surveillance issues and on how these may depend on particular national characteristics.

Epileptic Time Series Prediction: A Patent Perspective

The field of epileptic seizure prediction is today highly relevant not only for elucidating underlying brain dynamical mechanisms but also from a technological (and medical industry) perspective. In this paper, a birds eye view of the state-of-the-art in this truly cross-disciplinary research field is presented. It describes the chronological path of the major results achieved in recent years. Once the relevant background is depicted, some important patents concerning epilepsy and, in general, brain disorders treatment are analysed, paying special attention to a promising patent on seizure prediction and control. The advantages of the proposed scheme and some potential improvements on it are discussed giving then a final look to the possible future developments.

Nanotechnology and Cancer

Cancer nanotechnology is a cross-disciplinary field of research in science, engineering, and medicine for cancer imaging, molecular diagnosis, and targeted therapy; which refers to use of a vast & diverse array of devices smaller than 100 nanometers. These devices include nanovectors for targeted delivery of anti cancer drugs & contrast media for imaging. Nanowires & Nanocantilivers are devices under development which are used for early detection of Precancerous lesion. These and many others nanodevices are going to provide essential breakthrough in the fight against Cancer. Future prediction is that it will play a key role in achieving goal of eliminating morbidity & mortality from cancer by 2015.

Biogeochemical controls on palaeoceanographic environmental proxies: an introduction

The current volume samples a selection of papers presented at the Geological Society of London meeting on ‘Biogeochemical Controls on Palaeoceanographic Proxies’, held at Burlington House, London, UK on 3–4 October 2005. The aim of the meeting was to bring together palaeontologists, geochemists and palaeoceanographers who could contribute evidence that, when considered together, would better constrain the proxies that are used for palaeoclimate reconstruction. An improved understanding and quantification of past climate change, and the processes that force climate to change, has a fundamental role to play in constraining model projections of future climate (e.g. Hegerl et al. 2006) but it remains a huge challenge. This is because key climate variables, such as temperature and ocean salinity, cannot be observed in a world which no longer exists, but must instead be teased from proxies in the geological and ice records. There are numerous proxy archives, but one of the most important, currently lying at the forefront of palaeoceanographic research, is the biogeochemical composition of sediment records. This publication consists of 11 papers which deal with various aspects of biogeochemical proxies and their interpretation in terms of past climate. Seven of these specifically focus on the Foraminifera. What are proxies? Primarily, these are biogenic components which have a close relationship to environmental parameters and may be identified as so-called ‘proxy variables’ (Wefer et al. 1999), providing measurable descriptors of key climatic and environmental variables. The methods commonly employed in palaeoceanography have their origins in the biological, chemical and physical sciences; palaeoceanography therefore represents a relatively young and truly crossdisciplinary field of research. At the time of writing, an excellent new book entitled Proxies in Late Cenozoic Paleoceanography has been published (Hillaire-Marcel & De Vernal 2007), providing a comprehensive review of the subject. This volume begins with an overview by James & Austin, highlighting some of the most important biological and geochemical proxies, and outlining their contribution to our understanding of the ocean–climate system. We anticipate that this review article will provide an accessible introduction to the topic as well as an insight into a wide range of analytical methods. The second paper by Williams highlights some of the fundamental features of the biomineralization process, initially contrasting these with inorganic mineral formation, before selecting examples from corals, foraminifera and coccoliths. The paper by Zeebe et al. develops a modellingbased approach to improve our understanding of stable carbon, oxygen, and boron isotopes as well as magnesium incorporation into foraminiferal calcite shells. The approach adopted by these authors is based on an integrated understanding of the inorganic chemistry, inorganic isotope fractionation, and biological controls that determine palaeo-tracer signals in organisms used in climate reconstructions. They argue very convincingly that the integration of laboratory experiments, field and culture studies, theoretical considerations, and numerical modelling holds the key to the method’s success. These authors demonstrate that a mechanism-based understanding is often required before primary climate signals can be extracted from the geological record, because these signals can be heavily overprinted by secondary, nonclimate related phenomena. One such phenomenon is foraminifer test diagenesis, which Pearson & Burgess highlight in their study of high-latitude Eocene sites. These authors illustrate the textures using a combination of reflected light microscopy and high-resolution scanning electron microscopy, highlighting the fact that foraminifer tests are prone to diagenetic recrystallization on a micron scale, which can affect their geochemical composition. For example, diagenetic calcite added on the sea floor or in shallow burial at low temperature, may result in the severe underestimation of the apparent tropical sea surface temperatures obtained from calcite foraminifera (e.g. Pearson et al. 2001). Next, two papers consider the growth rates and growth patterns in biogenic calcite. The first of these, by Schmidt et al. provides an overview of the effect of growth rate on the trace element

Part 5: Statistical mechanics of communication and computation

Statistical mechanics (SM) is a branch of theoretical physics that explores cooperative phenomena observed in many body systems. For a long time, applications of SM were limited to material objects such as gases, liquids, metals, magnets, and semi-conductors. However, about a decade ago, concepts and methods developed for SM began to be actively applied to problems in information science. These applications have provided various ground-breaking results, particularly in the fields of communication and computation. Such activities are still ongoing, resulting in the development of a novel cross-disciplinary research field between the natural and the information sciences. In this review article, we show why and how SM can be utilized in information science, illustrating its use by means of three applications: error correcting codes, a public key cryptosystem, and analysis of a decision problem.

Political Dramaturgy: A Dramaturg's (Re)View

Whatever the historical truth of this anecdote, it dramatizes a truism about the relationship between theatre and throughout Western history. Ever since theatre emerged as an aesthetic mode, both theatre practitioners and politicians, from Thespis and Solon to Harold Pinter and Ronald Reagan, have had to deal with the affinities between and theatre. As Erving Goffmnan wrote, All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify (Goffman 1959:72). Substituting politics for the world, the same might be said about political life. In what sense is dramatic and theatrical? Or, to follow Goffman more closely, in what crucial ways is not theatrical? Since the 1960s a cross-disciplinary field of research and discourse in the social sciences, known as dramaturgy or dramaturgism, has burgeoned under the application of such questions to social interaction.' The field has historical