Roberto Casadei, Lukas Esterle, Rose Gamble, Paul Harvey, and Elizabeth F. Wanner

Front. Robot. AI, 06 May 2024

Cyber-physical collectives (CPCs) are systems consisting of groups of interactive computational devices situated in physical space. Their emergence is fostered by recent techno-scientific trends like the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems (CPSs), pervasive computing, and swarm robotics. Such systems feature networks of devices that are capable of computation and communication with other devices, as well as sensing, actuation, and physical interaction with their environment. This distributed sensing, processing, and action enables them to address spatially situated problems and provide environment-wide services through their collective intelligence (CI) in a wide range of domains including smart homes, buildings, factories, cities, forests, oceans, and so on. However, the inherent complexity of such systems in terms of heterogeneity, scale, non-linear interaction, and emergent behaviour calls for scientific and engineering ideas, methods, and tools (cf. Wirsing et al. (2023); Dorigo et al. (2021); Brambilla et al. (2013); Casadei (2023a; b)). This Research Topic gathers contributions related to understanding and engineering cyber-physical collectives.

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Siddharth Patwardhan, Marc Barthelemy, Şirag Erkol, Santo Fortunato & Filippo Radicchi
Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 3758 (2024)

Engineering multilayer networks that efficiently connect sets of points in space is a crucial task in all practical applications that concern the transport of people or the delivery of goods. Unfortunately, our current theoretical understanding of the shape of such optimal transport networks is quite limited. Not much is known about how the topology of the optimal network changes as a function of its size, the relative efficiency of its layers, and the cost of switching between layers. Here, we show that optimal networks undergo sharp transitions from symmetric to asymmetric shapes, indicating that it is sometimes better to avoid serving a whole area to save on switching costs. Also, we analyze the real transportation networks of the cities of Atlanta, Boston, and Toronto using our theoretical framework and find that they are farther away from their optimal shapes as traffic congestion increases.

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Abramson, J., Adler, J., Dunger, J. et al.

Nature (2024).

The introduction of AlphaFold 2 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design. In this paper, we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture, which is capable of joint structure prediction of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions, and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates significantly improved accuracy over many previous specialised tools: far greater accuracy on protein-ligand interactions than state of the art docking tools, much higher accuracy on protein-nucleic acid interactions than nucleic-acid-specific predictors, and significantly higher antibody-antigen prediction accuracy than AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3. Together these results show that high accuracy modelling across biomolecular space is possible within a single unified deep learning framework.

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Tiago P. Peixoto

A fundamental problem associated with the task of network reconstruction from dynamical or behavioral data consists in determining the most appropriate model complexity in a manner that prevents overfitting, and produces an inferred network with a statistically justifiable number of edges. The status quo in this context is based on L1 regularization combined with cross-validation. However, besides its high computational cost, this commonplace approach unnecessarily ties the promotion of sparsity with weight “shrinkage”. This combination forces a trade-off between the bias introduced by shrinkage and the network sparsity, which often results in substantial overfitting even after cross-validation. In this work, we propose an alternative nonparametric regularization scheme based on hierarchical Bayesian inference and weight quantization, which does not rely on weight shrinkage to promote sparsity. Our approach follows the minimum description length (MDL) principle, and uncovers the weight distribution that allows for the most compression of the data, thus avoiding overfitting without requiring cross-validation. The latter property renders our approach substantially faster to employ, as it requires a single fit to the complete data. As a result, we have a principled and efficient inference scheme that can be used with a large variety of generative models, without requiring the number of edges to be known in advance. We also demonstrate that our scheme yields systematically increased accuracy in the reconstruction of both artificial and empirical networks. We highlight the use of our method with the reconstruction of interaction networks between microbial communities from large-scale abundance samples involving in the order of 104 to 105 species, and demonstrate how the inferred model can be used to predict the outcome of interventions in the system.

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Rafael Prieto-Curiel, Gian Maria Campedelli

El Salvador, once one of the most violent countries in the world, has, in recent years, experienced a huge drop in homicides. The massive reduction is the result of Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang policies, which brought widespread domestic and international popularity to the President and its government. Other countries suffering high levels of violence are praising Bukele’s actions, electing El Salvador as a model to be followed despite the blatant violations of human, civil and political rights suffered by its citizens. While concurring that this aspect represents the most concerning facet of El Salvador’s strategy, we reflect on whether other countries should follow Bukele’s policies, elaborating on issues that have been largely overlooked. First, the policy scalability, adaptability and external validity. Second, the long-term vision of the prison population and the demographic and economic costs. As a result of our reflections, we conclude that other countries should not follow El Salvador’s strategy: beyond the likely erosion of citizens’ rights, the exportation of the policy may entail an array of additional unbearable costs, making Latin American democracies weaker.

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