British Broadcasting Corporation (United Kingdom)

Over 40,000 delegates from all over the world gathered in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan, the transcontinental country bordering Eastern Europe and West Asia for the 29th edition of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP29). Adopted in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Dawson & Spannagle 2008), the Conference of Parties set the limits on the emission of greenhouse gas (GHG) to prevent the dangers of climate change. 195 countries adopted the Parish Agreement in 2015 at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21), committing to undertake more efforts to keep a global temperature rise in this century below 2°C. Over the years, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have recorded tremendous impact and influence over policy decisions in key areas of the economy within nations and transnational structures. The paper examines the realities of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) within the global climate change corridor, and their contributions towards influencing climate change policies at COP29 held in Baku, Azerbaijan, particularly advocacy efforts, high-level intergovernmental and civic engagement activities to drive policy changes.

With the development of digital media technology, data sharing has become the main theme of the new media era of big data, so the news industry is facing new opportunities and challenges. As a new form of data news, the transmission path of data news is very important to its transmission effect. By the news propagation path as the research object, from the theoretical level discusses the communication content, the influence of the platform and digital news propagation path the main body, on the basis of social network analysis and the theory of the virus, analyses the related data of representative, studied three kinds of the difference of the path, find the data of news communication path mainly includes three types: the communication effect is affected by communication platform, communication node, news nature, external interference factors and so on. In the production and dissemination of data news using various operating platforms, attention should be paid to strengthening technology construction, maintaining user relations and paying fees.

Hashing methods help retrieve swiftly in large-scale dataset, which is important for real-world image retrieval. New data is produced continually in the real world which may cause concept drift and inaccurate retrieval results. To address this issue, hashing methods in non-stationary environments are proposed. However, most hashing methods in non-stationary data environments are supervised. In practice, it is hard to get exact labels of data especially in non-stationary data environments. Therefore, we propose the unsupervised multi-hashing (UMH) method for unsupervised image retrieval in non-stationary environments. Thus, in the UMH, a set of hash functions is trained and added to the kept list of hash functions sets when a new data chunk occurs. Then, multiple sets of hash functions are kept with different weights to guarantee that similarity information in old and new data are both adapted. Experiments on two real-world image datasets show that the UMH yields better retrieval performance in non-stationary environments than other comparative methods.

When an audience member becomes immersed, their attention shifts towards the media and story, and they allocate cognitive resources to represent events and characters. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to measure immersion using continuous behavioural and physiological measures. Using television and film clips, we validated dual-task reaction times, heart rate, and skin conductance against self-reported narrative engagement. We find that reaction times to a secondary task were strongly positively correlated with self-reported immersion: slower reaction times were indicative of greater immersion, particularly emotional engagement. Synchrony in heart rate across participants was associated with self-reported attentional and emotional engagement with the story, although we found no such relationship with skin conductance. These results establish both dual-task reaction times and heart rate as candidate measures for the real-time, continuous, assessment of audience immersion.

Assessing habitat loss effects on biodiversity is a major focus of ecological research. The relationship between habitat amount and biodiversity, postulated in the habitat amount hypothesis, is usually assessed at one point in time, which does not account for habitat loss as a temporal process. We examined habitat amount effects at two time periods, 1930s and 2010s, using plant data from three semi‐natural habitats: calcareous grassland, heathland and broadleaved woodland, across Dorset, southern England. Woodlands, which changed little in area over the time period, showed minimal effects of habitat amount on species occurrence in both time periods. For grassland and heathland, which had undergone severe losses over the study period, we found the expected positive relationship in the 2010s, but the relationship was negative for these habitats in the 1930s. We explored possible reasons for this result. Total perimeter‐to‐area ratio (TPAR) showed positive effects in the 1930s for grassland and heathland, suggesting effects of habitat configuration, specifically edge. However, TPAR was highly correlated with habitat amount so this finding is speculative. One possible explanation for the relationships with habitat amount, and the change between the two periods could be the quality of the surrounding matrix. In the 1930s, the landscape was less intensified and was dominated by semi‐natural habitats, whereas by the 2010s much had been converted to arable and intensive grasslands. We speculate that species could likely utilise the matrix to a greater degree in the 1930s compared with the 2010s when the matrix was more hostile, thereby decreasing the importance of habitat amount in the 1930s compared with the 2010s. These findings have important implications for conservation, as they show the importance of context (i.e. matrix quality) in determining the relationship between habitat amount and biodiversity.

Open-domain conversational interaction with news, podcasts, and other types of heterogeneous content remains an open challenge. Interactive agents must support information access in a way that is fair, impartial, and true to the content and knowledge discussed. To facilitate this, systems building on interactive retrieval from knowledge-grounded media are a controllable and known base for experimentation. A conversational media agent should retrieve relevant content, understand key concepts in the content through grounding to a knowledge base, and enable exploration by offering to discuss a topic further or progress to describe related topics. In this work, we release a new multi-task benchmark on COnversational Media EXploration (COMEX) to measure knowledge-grounded conversational content exploration. It consists of a heterogeneous semantically annotated media corpus and topic-specific data for 1) entity Wikification and salience, 2) conversational content ranking on heterogeneous media content, 3) background link ranking, and 4) background linking explanation. We develop COMEX with judgments and conversational interactions developed in partnership with professional editorial staff from the BBC. We study the behavior of state-of-the-art systems, with the results demonstrating significant headroom on all tasks.

QUARE - measuring the QUality of explAnations in REcommender systems - is the first workshop that aims to promote discussion upon future research and practice directions around evaluation methodologies for explanations in recommender systems. To that end, we bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to facilitate discussions about the main issues and best practices in the respective areas, identify possible synergies, and outline priorities regarding future research directions. Additionally, we want to stimulate reflections around methods to systematically and holistically assess explanation approaches, impact, and goals, at the interplay between organisational and human values. The homepage of the workshop is available at: https: //sites.google.com/view/quare-2022/.

From the landing page of a shopping website, to a tailored layout on a video streaming app, digital media experiences are becoming increasingly personalised, and none of us have the same experience as each other. We report on a series of in-depth interviews, with UK media users from 19 to 68 years old, exploring their awareness, feelings, expectations and concerns about the digital media being personalised ’for them’, and the language that they use when talking about it. Our repeatable, extensible methodology develops insights aligned to a framework of fundamental human values.