International Scientific Relations offers a holistic analysis of the role and impact of science, technology, and innovation in the international system of the twenty-first century.

Quantum physics and the dialogue with religion The present paper has two main purposes. On the one hand, to introduce Pascual Jordan, an author little known in philosophy academic circles and better known in scientific ones. Jordan took part in the birth of quantum physics during the first half of the 20th century and worked side by side with Werner Heisenberg under Max Born’s direction to elaborate Matrix Mechanics, an essential contribution to the formal description of atom quantum structure. On (...) the other hand, I expose his personal contribution to the science and religion debate. In this regard, he found himself both in an unfavorable and a favorable position. Unfavorable, because Jordan stands far from such epistemological matters as scientific realism; favorable, because he took very seriously the discoveries of new rising physics, and was, thus, a committed realist when discussing scientific theories. Furthermore, he was a devoted Christian, which means that he has a realist stance on religion – the only valid choice for those who consider the relation between life and faith as indissoluble. His constitutive realism leads him to regard the relation between religion and science as an existential problem rather than as an academic one, and therefore, he dedicated a large part of his philosophical works to this subject. (shrink)

In Chile, the contemporary form of academic life is irreducible to neoliberalism. There are past experiences and discourses that continue to disrupt the daily routine, dynamics, intensity, and rhythm of academics. They manifest as various epistemological, ethical, institutional, technical, and political mechanisms that produce innumerable images, meanings, and practices. These experiences conflict with the affects and material realities of the neoliberalism. The entanglement of these experiences from the past and present is conflicting, as they attempt to ignore or repress each (...) other. In this respect, this paper addresses the following question: what is the model of academic behaviour that was established during the post-independence period in the Chilean university system? To answer this question, I explore Andres Bello's texts concerning university and academic life. The conclusion is that Bello established a specific model of academic behaviour that, with some later modifications, reconfigurations, and contradictions, returns to the present. Bello's influence today can be seen through spectres that enable and limit new possibilities for expanding academic critique within and across scholarly settings. (shrink)

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys did not (...) come with a thorough consideration of their ethical implications and, despite being a well-established technical domain, the potential impacts of RecSys on their users are still under-assessed. This paper aims at filling this gap in regards to one of the main impacts of RecSys: personal autonomy. We first describe how technology can affect human values and a suitable methodology to identify these effects and mitigate potential harms: Value Sensitive Design (VSD). We use VSD to carry out a conceptual investigation of personal autonomy in the context of a generic RecSys and draw on a nuanced account of procedural autonomy to focus on two components: competence and authenticity. We provide the results of our inquiry as a value hierarchy and apply it to the design of a speculative RecSys as an example. (shrink)

Unfortunately, there are still cases of domestic violence or situations where it is necessary to call for help without arousing the suspicion of the aggressor. In these situations, the help signal devised by the Canadian Women’s Foundation has proven to be effective in reporting a risky situation. By displaying a sequence of hand signals, it is possible to report that help is needed. This work presents a vision-based system that detects this sequence and implements it in a social robot, so (...) that it can automatically identify unwanted situations and alert the authorities. The gesture recognition pipeline presented in this work is integrated into a cognitive architecture used to generate behaviours in robots. In this way, the robot interacts with humans and is able to detect if a person is calling for help. In that case, the robot will act accordingly without alerting the aggressor. The proposed vision system uses the MediaPipe library to detect people in an image and locate the hands, from which it extracts a set of hand landmarks that identify which gesture is being made. By analysing the sequence of detected gestures, it can identify whether a person is performing the distress hand signal with an accuracy of 96.43%. (shrink)

Resumen El presente texto realiza un análisis de la estructura narrativa, y de la estética y contenido de la obra cinematográfica de Fernando Arrabal Iré como un caballo loco. Más allá de su reconocida trayectoria como dramaturgo, esta obra singular construye de forma profunda y estructurada una narración compleja, llena de referentes biográficos, literarios y mediáticos, más allá de la simple apariencia de caos, confusión y absurdo. La intertextualidad de su estructura narrativa obliga a realizar un análisis cualitativo e interdisciplinar, (...) para llegar a los aspectos más escondidos e insospechados de la película, donde nada es casual. Entre las principales aportaciones se encuentran la dualidad narrativa y estructural que la conecta tanto con Esquilo como con las películas de viaje y carretera.: This article makes an analysis of the narrative structure, of the aesthetics and content of Fernando Arrabal’s film work Iré como un caballo loco. Beyond his acknowledged trajectory as a playwright, this unique work constructs -in a deep and structured way- a complex narrative, full of biographical, literary and media referents, beyond the mere appearance of chaos, confusion and absurdity. The intertextuality of its narrative structure forces a qualitative and interdisciplinary analysis to reach the most hidden and unsuspected aspects of the film, where nothing is accidental. Among the main contributions are a narrative and structural duality that connects both with Aeschylus and also with journey and road movies. (shrink)

En el presente, se ofrece una breve reconstrucción histórica de la evolución de la Filosofía y la Historia de la Ciencia hasta hoy y, además, una visión panorámica del estado actual de ambas disciplinas.

One of the protagonists of the darwinist controversy in the Canary Islands (Spain), during the Nineteenth Century, was the advocate and teacher Rafael Lorenzo y García. In this paper, I show his original thought, until now unknown, against the classical darwinism and next to the fixism.Moreover I analyse the philosophical and natural constants in his Estudios filosóficos (1876 y 1877).

Traditionally, the field of science and technology studies (STS) considered the scientific laboratory as the central site of knowledge production and technological development. While providing rich analyses of the social construction of scientific knowledge and the role of non-human actors, STS scholars have often neglected the university – the very context in which laboratories themselves are embedded – as a relevant object of research. In this paper, we argue for re-introducing the university as a relevant category and object of analysis (...) by using the notion of epistemic virtues to link epistemic culture – traditionally the focus of STS – and epistemic structure – traditionally the focus of higher education studies. Advancing this line of argumentation, we make three analytical moves. First, we explore academic freedom as a specific version of negative liberty that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. We suggest that academics continuously negotiate academic freedom considering culturally and socially situated epistemic virtues such as objectivity and neutrality. Second, we introduce the notion of humility to revisit scientific knowledge production more generally and academic freedom in particular. Finally, we argue that practicing humility leads to enacting the university as an infrastructure of becoming otherwise, thereby enriching our understanding of universities as distinct and highly complex social spaces with a logic of their own. (shrink)

This paper analyses the details that characterized the negotiation and collection of the servicio de los naturales from the year 1603 onwards, the last time of those three in which moriscos of Granada paid to the Hispanic Monarchy after the Alpujarras War, when they were settled in Castile. The author has analysed documents coming from the Archivo General de Simancas, but also those included in notary’s protocols and in local archives. Its main contributions are three: to publish the content of (...) the actual contract signed by the moriscos and the Crown; to contribute to set up a precise spatial distribution of the communities that paid the tax and, finally, to show the amounts delivered by them. Irregularities, problems, and conflicts lived while the precedent servicios were being paid, are analysed too. There are aspects that we know thanks to other previous works. Nevertheless, if they are considered in relation with the situation of the year 1603, they allow observing that all those difficulties were used in order to improve the servicio itself and the agreement between the minority and the King. (shrink)

Court rulings are among the most important documents in all legal systems. This article describes a study in which natural language processing is used for the automatic characterization of Spanish judgments that deal with the physical custody (joint or individual) of minors. The model was trained to identify a set of elements: the type of custody requested by the plaintiff, the type of custody decided on by the court, and eight of the most commonly used arguments in this type of (...) judgment. Two jurists independently annotated more than 3000 judgments, which were used to train a model based on transformers. The main difficulties encountered in this task were the complexity of the judicial language and the need to work with appellate court rulings that have a more complicated structure than decisions at first instance. For the complete court rulings, the F1 score of the inter-annotator agreement ranged from 0.60 to 0.86 and the Kappa index from 0.33 to 0.73. The F1 score of the agreement between the model and the annotators ranged from 0.66 to 0.93 and the Kappa index from 0.57 to 0.80. These results in which the model performance exceeds even the inter-annotator agreement show the high ability of transformers to identify abstract entities in legal texts. (shrink)

Batteries are a fundamental storage component due to its various applications in mobility, renewable energies and consumer electronics among others. Regardless of the battery typology, one key variable from a user’s perspective is the remaining energy in the battery. It is usually presented as the percentage of remaining energy compared to the total energy that can be stored and is labeled State Of Charge (SOC). This work addresses the development of a hybrid model based on a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) (...) power cell, due to its broad implementation. The proposed model calculates the SOC, by means of voltage and electric current as inputs and the latter as the output. Therefore, four models based on k-Means, Agglomerative Clustering, Gaussian Mixture and Spectral Clustering techniques have been tested in order to obtain an optimal solution. (shrink)

This paper aims to enhance security in IoT device networks through a visual tool that utilizes three projection techniques, including Beta Hebbian Learning (BHL), t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and ISOMAP, in order to facilitate the identification of network attacks by human experts. This work research begins with the creation of a testing environment with IoT devices and web clients, simulating attacks over Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for recording all relevant traffic information. The unsupervised algorithms chosen provide a set (...) of projections that enable human experts to visually identify most attacks in real-time, making it a powerful tool that can be implemented in IoT environments easily. (shrink)

Nowadays, the quality standards of higher education institutions pay special attention to the performance and evaluation of the students. Then, having a complete academic record of each student, such as number of attempts, average grade and so on, plays a key role. In this context, the existence of missing data, which can happen for different reasons, leads to affect adversely interesting future analysis. Therefore, the use of imputation techniques is presented as a helpful tool to estimate the value of missing (...) data. This work deals with the academic records of engineering students, in which imputation techniques are applied. More specifically, it is assessed and compared to the performance of the multivariate imputation by chained equations methodology, the adaptive assignation algorithm based on multivariate adaptive regression splines and a hybridization based on self-organisation maps with Mahalanobis distances and AAA algorithm. The results show that proposed methods obtain successfully results regardless the number of missing values, in general terms. (shrink)

As systems based on opaque Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to flourish in diverse real-world applications, understanding these black box models has become paramount. In response, Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a field of research with practical and ethical benefits across various domains. This paper not only highlights the advancements in XAI and its application in real-world scenarios but also addresses the ongoing challenges within XAI, emphasizing the need for broader perspectives and collaborative efforts. We bring together experts from diverse (...) fields to identify open problems, striving to synchronize research agendas and accelerate XAI in practical applications. By fostering collaborative discussion and interdisciplinary cooperation, we aim to propel XAI forward, contributing to its continued success. Our goal is to put forward a comprehensive proposal for advancing XAI. To achieve this goal, we present a manifesto of 27 open problems categorized into nine categories. These challenges encapsulate the complexities and nuances of XAI and offer a road map for future research. For each problem, we provide promising research directions in the hope of harnessing the collective intelligence of interested stakeholders. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the approach to the health-disease system, raising the question about the principles of bioethics present in physician–patient relations. The principles while widely accepted may not be sufficient for a comprehensive ethical analysis. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the perception of these principles and the physician–patient relationship during a hospital stay through a qualitative approach. Method Sixteen semi-structured interviews took place to know the patients’ perception during their 2020 hospitalization for COVID-19. (...) The data was analyzed through the constant comparison method, creating categories and comparing them. In the end, seven categories were established and were grouped in three: bioethical principles (dignity, charity, vulnerability, autonomy), doctor-patient relationship (participant commitment, informed consent, health staff-patient relationship) and the experience of the disease (illness, the role of the family). Results The research found that most patients described a positive experience, with the feeling of having been well cared for with no sense of discrimination or injustice done. The majority also reported that their autonomy was respected in the treatment decisions. The evaluation of these attitudes is an area of opportunity, especially when the patients' vulnerability is at risk. Conclusions The ethics of virtue offers a better reflection of how human beings manifest themselves by emphasizing the development of virtuous character and behaviors that allow them to realize their values in life. Authorized by the Research Ethics Committee with registration: DI/18/105-B/3/308. (shrink)