Open research Europe最新文献

Background: As Southeast Asia embraces digital technology, governments use it to make public services more efficient and accessible. This study explores Thailand's digitalization efforts, focusing on how government agencies implement e-government services to improve services and reduce costs.

Methods: Using survey data from 288 representatives across central and regional government institutions, the research identifies key focus areas of Thailand's digital strategy and evaluates its effectiveness through factor and descriptive analysis.

Results: The results show that digital tools are widely used in such sectors as defence, environmental protection, healthcare, and education. The results show that in Thailand, the digital tools contribute to enhancing service delivery, reduce administrative burden, and improve transparency. However, the results show that the financial benefits are frequently underassessed during project planning and evaluation. Only a small number of agencies report to systematically measure the financial returns of ICT projects, despite their long-term potential to strengthen public finances. Challenges to effective digital transformation include uneven digital literacy, low service maturity and limited data integration across agencies. Moreover, concerns about data security and access disparities between urban and rural populations pose further challenges.

Discussion/conclusions: Thailand's case demonstrates that digitalization can drive both efficiency and inclusivity, but its success depends on coordinated implementation, robust evaluation and targeted efforts to improve digital skills among citizens and public sector employees.

This article delves into the collaborative work of the interspecies dance collective, Mapped to the Closest Address (MaCA), focusing on MaCA's living archival practice and exploration of choreography with other-than-human persons. Through encounters with various species and environments, MaCA seeks to shift anthropocentric perspectives, interrogate its orientation towards modernity and coloniality, and question its understanding/administration/entanglement/devotion of, with, and to nature. The collective's journey, from a digital residency during the COVID-19 pandemic to site research, installations, and performance at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2022, is documented and analyzed. The collective's collaborative process involves relinquishing control to allow for the emergence of disobedient movements and the exploration of choreography from the perspective of other-than-human perspectives. This practice includes encounters with kudzu vines and mountains, weaving their movements and patterns into performances and installations. The authors discusses the immersive performance Turn Off the House Lights, in which MaCA integrates stories from local communities with gestures inspired by the landscape. Through the collective's living archival practice, MaCA aims to transmit a collective memory of intra-actions among organisms and environments. and highlight the intra-connectedness of humans and the other creatures of the Earth. The article reflects on the significance of choreography beyond human-centric notions, emphasizing the emergent forms of ecological performance and the dissolution of boundaries between human and non-human realms. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives including dance, visual art, and theatre, MaCA's work exemplifies an intra-disciplinary approach to expressing the choreography of other-than-human persons. This approach not only presents audiences with immersive experiences but also responds to the future ecosystem through artistic exploration. Ultimately, MaCA's living archival practices contribute to awareness of the collective lives of other-than-human persons and offer insights into navigating the collective's enmeshment with the natural world.

Background: Immersive technologies-virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR)-are being piloted in the water sector for public engagement, training, and decision support. Within the European Commission's ICT4Water Cluster, multiple projects report XR tools, but comparable evidence on functionality, interoperability, and scalability is limited.

Methods: We conducted a two-stage survey across ICT4Water projects (preliminary project-level screening: September-December 2023; tool-level assessment: April-May 2024). Responses were triangulated with public project materials. Seven distinct immersive solutions were analysed using a four-dimension rubric covering functionality, interoperability, scalability, and perceived impact.

Results: The portfolio spans VR, AR, MR, decision-support dashboards, and public-facing installations. Reported deployment options include PCs (4/7; 57%) and smartphones (4/7; 57%), with online-only operation in 3/7 (43%) tools and offline capability in 2/7 (29%). Interoperability is uneven: 3/7 (43%) expose data integration or APIs, while 4/7 (57%) lack external interfaces. Evidence of scalability beyond single-site pilots is reported for 4/7 (57%) tools; 3/7 (43%) remain at pilot/proof-of-concept stage.

Conclusions: XR can enhance awareness, learning, and operational insight, yet broader uptake depends on open interfaces, shared semantics, and post-project maintainability. We recommend designing against open standards and Smart Data Models, adopting modular packaging and open repositories to support post-project sustainment, and embedding XR within utility workflows and digital-twin initiatives to enable responsible scale-up.

Background: Manual process control of the continuous casting (CC) process is difficult due to the big number of influencing factors. During continuous casting, manual top-freezing controls must be carried out. Every manual performed mould control can affect the strand quality and even increase the risk of failure. Therefore, regular top-freezing controls are performed after a certain casting duration. However, top-freezing events between the regular controls cannot be detected and are a major risk for plant safety.

Methods: In the RFCS (Research Fund for Coal and Steel) project RealTimeCastSupport, the aim of the research was the digitalisation and optimised control of continuous casting machines. A real-time support system was developed to predict quality-relevant top-freezing events and thus achieve improved control. This was reached by offline material tracking, synchronisation of data streams and statistical analysis by application of Big Data technologies, the development of a digital twin and the exploitation of various CC data and surface inspection to predict reliability of steel production. Results The following results were achieved: Identification of defect promoting scenarios by correlation of statistical results and surface defect detection.Realisation of an offline 3D digital twin of the mould with two different casting sizes, different geometries, and a varying immersion depth of the submerged entry nozzle (SEN), considering heat transfer, inert gas feeding, and solidification for parameter studies to identify the most influential factors in top-freezing as a defect promoting scenario. Input variables from the continuous casters were evaluated by CFD simulations and afterwards used to develop and train an online support system which was connected to the existing database in the plant. The system will be finetuned offline to internal specifications. This will further allow an optimized system with increased recall and precision parameter.

Conclusions: The application of a real-time support system enables the prediction of top-freezing events during the whole casting process. Subsequently, this significantly increases the plant safety and offers to carry out top-freezing inspections in a more targeted manner in the future. This publication is part of a series of papers in the frame of the dissemination project METACAST.

Bridge scour is a leading cause of bridge failures worldwide, exacerbated by climate change and increasing flood risks. Real-time data collection plays a critical role in effective flood risk management and decision-making, ultimately enhancing infrastructure resilience. The EU-funded RAMOBRIS (Risk Assessment and Monitoring for Bridges under Scour Hazard) project investigated cost-effective monitoring approaches to develop a novel, multidisciplinary strategy for assessing the risk of critical bridges exposed to scour. This manuscript outlines the monitoring strategy developed during the project, with a focus on the application of cost-effective sensors for hydraulic monitoring. The adopted methodology employs an indirect approach using low-cost remote sensing sensors to assess hydraulic properties and estimate scour depth through advanced formulas. Two pilot case studies were conducted on high-risk masonry bridges over the River Nith in Scotland. Various sensors were installed to evaluate their effectiveness in capturing hydraulic data and monitoring scour dynamics. Data from low-cost sensors were evaluated against data collected from higher-cost sensors or other available datasets. The results showed that low-cost sensors for measuring water levels provided accuracy comparable to high-cost radar systems, while being more cost-effective and easier to install. Video data from solar cameras enabled extensive measurements of surface velocity and discharge, improving the understanding of flow dynamics. The study confirmed the feasibility of using image velocimetry techniques for long-term estimation of river velocity and discharge, although further validation is required. These findings highlight the potential of low-cost and innovative sensor technologies. The open-access dataset generated in this study, which will be periodically updated with new data, provides a valuable resource of real-world information for ongoing research in hydraulic monitoring and bridge safety assessment.

Background: There remains debate about the pyrotechnical capabilities of Neanderthals. Evidence of fire has been found at many Middle Palaeolithic sites, widely accepted to be associated with Neanderthals. However, multiple Neanderthal sites show a marked decrease in evidence for fire use during colder periods. This counterintuitive pattern was explained by the possibility that some Neanderthal groups were unable to create fire at will and relied on wildfire. Here, we evaluate the plausibility of this "wildfire hypothesis" through formal modeling.

Methods: We computed the probability of a group of Neanderthals losing campfire-making skills due to cultural loss. The EMBERS model codes four empirically motivated mechanisms of skill loss: variability in use, period in between uses, memory decay and number of experts.

Results: Our results indicate that losing the ability to use wildfire was more likely than retaining it for most of our parameter values within reasonable ranges. Significantly, demography, in the form of expert numbers, was the least significant mechanism of loss. The rate of memory loss at group level, and intervals between uses were markedly more important than demography. Variability in time between uses was by far the strongest driver of loss. These results, linked with the estimated climatic, mnemonic, and demographic conditions for the Neanderthals' occupation of Europe in cold periods, support the plausibility of the wildfire hypothesis. Our results also highlight the need to pay more attention to cultural loss as a factor in cultural evolution.

Teaser: Our modeling demonstrates the feasibility of the controversial hypothesis that some European Neanderthal groups were unable to create fire at will and instead relied on wildfire to start their campfires.

Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) constitutes a viable solution toward sustainable future mobility in order to achieve the target of decarbonization. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data (BD) have altered several industrial sectors providing novel and affordable solutions that facilitate and improve existing operations in these sectors. Hence, the combination of the CCAM paradigm with AI methodologies based on BD could ever increase the potential benefits of CCAM in the contemporary society. For this reason, three CCAM services, which are based on AI and BD, are introduced in the current research work in order to tackle three well-known issues of mobility such as i) the estimated time of arrival, ii) the passenger demand prediction and iii) the mobility patterns identification. The proposed CCAM services were tested on various pilot sites of the EU-funded SHOW project, thus demonstrating the potential of BD and AI in future mobility services.

The reference genome of Lineus lacteus is a crucial resource for studying the genetic basis of novelty and the evolution of remarkable traits, such as regeneration and venom, as well as the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptability in marine intertidal ecosystems. Lineus lacteus belongs to the Nemertea, a phylum of worm-shaped animals comprising approximately 1,300 species within the Lophotrochozoa - a superphylum of animals including leeches, snails, and other invertebrates that is crucial to our understanding of bilaterian evolution. Despite their evolutionary and ecological relevance, genomic resources for the phylum Nemertea remain scarce. We assembled the entirety of the L. lacteus genome into 19 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules. This chromosome-level assembly encompasses 0.37 Gb, composed of 71 contigs and 27 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 8.9 Mb and 20.4 Mb, respectively.

Soil is multifunctional and fundamental for both humans and ecosystem health. However, it faces growing threats from contamination, particularly from pesticides. In this review, pesticide contamination trends across Europe were assessed by analysing published data from 5193 sampled soils collected between 2015 and 2022. By raking pesticides based on detection frequency, persistence and toxicity, key concerns were brought to attention, including the presence of banned substances, such as p,p'-DDT (detected in 31% of sampled soils) and Atrazine (17%), as well as high detection rates of currently approved pesticides like Boscalid (36%) and Epoxiconazole (32%). Results also revealed regional contamination patterns and differences. Greece and Poland presented a strong association with non-approved pesticides. The presence of these substances, although long banned, raises concerns about their origin, persistence and potential cross-border pollution. In contrast, Portugal appears to be more associated with currently approved pesticides. Furthermore, metabolites like AMPA, a degradation product of Glyphosate, was detected in 44% of soils, which highlights the contribution of metabolites in long-term contamination risks. The metabolite 1,2,4-triazole has been proposed as a potential indicator of soil pesticide contamination, which could enhance monitoring and reduce associated costs. These results point out the limitations of currently regulatory frameworks, which often fail to account for environmental transport, persistent residues, and policies related to pesticide distribution across countries. To protect soil health, monitoring programs and remediation strategies are necessary. Establishing more comprehensive legislation for both active substances and their breakdown products is essential to mitigate long-term contamination risks.

The reference genome of Lewinskya acuminata (H. Philib.) F. Lara, Garilleti & Goffinet will enable phylogenomic, biogeographic, and evolutionary studies within the Orthotrichaceae and related bryophyte lineages at a depth previously inaccessible. This species of moss is among the most representative of the Mediterranean epiphytic communities and can be readily identified by its long-acuminate leaves, fusiform capsules with a vestigial exostome, a well-developed endostome of six broad segments, and a dark, puckered peristome mouth when dry. The entirety of the genome sequence was assembled into 6 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules, 1 mitochondrial genome, and 2 plastid genomes. This chromosome-level assembly encompasses 0.25 Gb, composed of 51 contigs and 13 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 11.5 Mb and 40.8 Mb, respectively.