New papers on fairness, safety, alignment and governance.

As AI agents become integral to business workflows, establishing guiding user experience (UX) principles is crucial for ensuring user trust and successful adoption. To address this, our study uses a multi-method approach - combining participatory design workshop, paper-and-pencil, expert review, meta-analysis, and in-depth interviews - to identify and validate a design framework of eight core UX principles for human-AI agent interaction in the workplace. Together with their underlying criteria,

Large metal-organic framework (MOF) databases support simulation, screening, and machine learning through crystallographic information files (CIFs). Subtle chemical and structural errors in these inputs can compromise downstream results and hinder manual inspection. LLM advances in computational chemistry offer paths beyond predictive screening toward fine-grained diagnosis with evidence-grounded explanations. However, two challenges remain: (i) limited fine-grained attribution: MOF-specific val

Text-guided video editing with diffusion models is impractically slow, hindered by costly multi-step sampling and inversion. We present OSVE, the first framework to successfully adapt one-step Text-to-Image (T2I) models for high-quality video editing, addressing the core challenges of inversion, editability, and temporal consistency. To bypass slow iterative inversion, we train a learnable encoder that predicts the initial noise for each frame in a single forward pass. This encoder is trained wi

‘He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars’. 1 The poet William Blake expressed himself colourfully but also with good sense. What he writes of ‘Art and Science’ is true also of medical ethics. The papers included in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics illustrate this. They concern a range of issues whic

This paper examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into cancer screening programmes, focusing on the associated equity challenges and resource allocation implications. While AI technologies promise significant benefits—such as improved diagnostic accuracy, shorter waiting times, reduced reliance on radiographers, and overall productivity gains and cost-effectiveness—current interventions disproportionately favour those already engaged in screening. This neglect of no

Prominent consequentialists who write about conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare, Julian Savulescu and Udo Schüklenk, both argue for the ‘incompatibility thesis’—the view that healthcare professionals ought never to be entitled to exercise a CO to absolve themselves of the responsibility to perform professional duties. I argue, contra Savulescu and Schüklenk, that consequentialists should advocate for a compromise position under which healthcare professionals are entitl

A number of authors have attempted to provide a consequentialist ethical justification for the accommodation of conscientious objectors. 1 Steve Clarke’s article is the most recent such effort. 2 Clarke essentially suggests that objectors should be accommodated because they would benefit from that accommodation, and that seems to make accommodation ethically desirable. He also acknowledges the empirical evidence demonstrating that accommodating objectors has detrimental health consequences

Clarke’s arguments in favour of permitting conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare and setting up registries are not new, but the consequentialist basis for them and the careful attention to seemingly deontological claims from prominent consequentialists about CO are novel. Though many of the arguments are persuasive, at least among those who already accept consequentialism of the form Clarke articulates, the analysis misses an important feature of CO (and a central point in debates abo

Clarke’s feature article 1 on conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare turns the spotlight on a medically relevant and theoretically ambitious topic. He well outlines background and prominent consequentialist positions towards CO and discusses registers as a promising approach to manage CO in practice that helps for dealing with the ‘incompatibility thesis’ beyond ‘conventional compromise’. 2 From our point of view, a register might be a beneficial way to enable h

Introduction The debate over conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare remains deeply polarised, often framed as a clash between professional obligations and individual moral integrity. In their consequentialist defence of permitting CO, Steve Clarke proposes a region-based register of non-objecting professionals as a mechanism to minimise reliance on referrals—what they aptly term a ‘fight without fighting’ approach. This commentary supports Clarke’s core argument but s

Introduction The permissibility of conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare presents a complex balance of benefits and harms, and philosophers disagree on whether it should be permitted at all. For example, consequentialists such as Udo Schuklenk argue that healthcare professionals should never be allowed to object, a position known as the ‘incompatibility thesis’. 1 Steve Clarke, however, believes that there is a positive consequentialist case for permitting CO in healthcare. 2 Th

In ‘A consequentialist case for permitting conscientious objection in healthcare,’ Steve Clarke proposes a publicly available registry for people seeking certain medical procedures (eg, abortion) to which some clinicians object for moral reasons. 1 The registry would list healthcare professionals (HCPs) available to perform those procedures, and patients could locate clinicians willing to help them and bypass the others. HCPs could also use the registry as an informational source for

Within a consequentialist framework, Steve Clarke opposes the complete exclusion of conscientious objection (CO) rights from medical professional duties. More specifically, he proposes a compromise to reduce the practical and moral costs of direct doctor–patient conflict: a system of region-based, regularly updated registers listing clinicians who do not object to specified CO-permissible procedures, together with a recommendation that patients (or referring clinicians) consult this inform

I feel privileged to receive so many thoughtful commentaries. Four commentaries focus on my proposal for a register system to manage conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare. Reasons of space meant I was unable to develop this proposal to any great extent in my article. 1 Hirschberg et al 2 explore practical and ethical issues involved in implementing a register system. I am pleased to have provoked further discussion of the proposal, and I thank them for their efforts. Boretti 3 offers three

Normothermic regional perfusion during controlled donation after circulatory death has emerged as a means to increase the number and viability of organs available for transplant. Because normothermic regional perfusion uses extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, an intervention used for resuscitation under other circumstances, critics have concluded that organ donation using normothermic regional perfusion violates the dead donor rule. As such, the debate about normothermic regional perfusion has

The article examines China’s vaccination policy, focusing particularly on childhood immunisation and pandemic vaccines. Although China’s laws require individuals to engage in the vaccination decision-making process, the policy does not enforce mandatory vaccination through penalties. Instead, it emphasises informed decision-making, allowing and supporting individuals to choose whether to vaccinate or adopt other preventive measures based on their best health interests. The legal fram

The expressivist objection argues against the legalisation of euthanasia and/or assisted suicide (EAS), on the grounds that EAS laws express a disrespectful judgement of certain classes of people: roughly, that they are better off dead. Recently, some ethicists have argued that laws which require only an informed, competent and voluntary request for EAS would avoid the expressivist objection, since that objection depends on the further requirement of irremediable suffering. In this paper, I argu

‘Live tissue training’, using an anaesthetised live animal substituted for a human patient for the practice of surgical skills, is a controversial topic. Although simulator technologies have developed significantly for inclusion in many areas of surgical education, it is contested that training to manage traumatic injuries requires a model that can bleed and has a dynamic circulation. This article uses the published literature to explore the values at stake regarding live tissue trai

Recruitment challenges in clinical research are widespread, particularly for traditionally under-represented groups. Referral relationships—in which research partners and clinical partners agree to collaborate on selected research studies or programmes, with the expectation that the clinical partners refer appropriate patients as potential participants—may help alleviate these challenges. Referral relationships allow research partners access to expanded and more diverse pools of part

This paper describes a global pattern of declining academic freedom, often driven by powerful political interference with core functions of academic communities. It argues that countering threats to academic freedom requires doubling down on ethics, specifically standards of justice and fairness in pursuing knowledge and assigning warrant to beliefs. Using the example of the selection of a Qatari university to host the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics, the authors urge fairness towards diverse g

Jonathon VandenHombergh argues in this journal that the expressivist objection against assisted death cannot be avoided by appealing to autonomy-centred assisted death laws. He claims that these laws need to appeal to a person’s motivations for requesting assisted death and that judgments that these motivations are reasonable will express a message of disrespect for similarly-situated individuals. I argue that VandenHombergh’s article errs in at least two respects. First, certain kin

This paper introduces Sentence Splitter, a self-supervised framework built upon a T5-based encoder--decoder architecture for uncovering the latent factual structure of natural language sentences. The proposed method identifies the semantic boundary between a descriptive prefix (head) and its factual completion (tail) by formulating sentence splitting as a discrete segmentation problem, where a sentence of length $N$ admits $N$ possible split points but only one recovers the intended head--tail s

Most existing LLM safety evaluation and defense methods follow a static formulation: jailbreak vulnerabilities are evaluated with fixed attack methods, and guardrails are trained on fixed malicious prompt datasets. However, real-world adversaries continuously evolve their capabilities and expand the attack space. To address this challenge, we propose DARWIN, an evolutionary attack-defense framework that formulates jailbreaking as an open-ended evolution process and continuously updates guardrail

LLM preference alignment aims to optimize models toward human preferences across diverse user instructions. Reinforcement learning has become a major post-training approach for this goal, but existing proxy rewards are often outcome-level, mainly evaluating the final response while providing limited guidance for the reasoning trajectory. This can make credit assignment coarse when multiple responses receive similar final scores, leaving trajectory-level preferences under-specified. To address th

Computational Modeling and Simulation of Medical Devices: Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification    Springer Nature Link

Breastfeeding provides critical insight into infant feeding competence and physiological health, yet objective monitoring remains difficult due to the intimate and internal nature of feeding. We present Mammal, a caregiver-worn computational garment that unobtrusively monitors breastfeeding without attaching sensors to the infant. Mammal leverages inter-body signal transmission through natural mouth-to-breast contact to capture infant cardiac and feeding-related acoustic signals on the caregiver

Existing symbolic music generation models typically use bars as the basic structural unit. However, human perception of musical phrases often does not align with notated bar lines, leading to long-term structural fragmentation. This paper proposes RPPNet-a two-stage deep learning architecture with variable structural boundaries. It first generates variable-length Rhythm-Pitch Primitive (RPP) sequences, where each RPP encodes note count, rhythm, and contour; then decodes the RPP sequences into co

Publication date: Available online 20 July 2026 Source: Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence Author(s): Vasyl G. Kremen, Oleh M. Spirin, Oleksandr I. Liashenko, Svitlana H. Lytvynova, Yurii I. Malovanyi, Olha P. Pinchuk, Oleksandra M. Sokolyuk, Serhiy O. Semerikov

Publication date: November 2026 Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 232 Author(s): Harold Paredes-Frigolett, Andreas Pyka

The integration of AI in Talent Management is a change in the way that organizations are designing their strategies for Talent Retention (TR), engagement, and future strategy. New and innovative tools such as predictive models, sentiment analysis, and personalized career planning have come up, and they offer better ways of addressing retention issues, workforce engagement, and, in general, sustainability. Through the application of predictive analytics, organizations can determine employees' lik

arXiv:2607.18424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated analyses of privacy policies enable large-scale assessments of transparency in digital ecosystems, yet existing auditing pipelines remain predominantly English-centric. This limits their ability to systematically evaluate multilingual environments, as in the European Union, where many services disclose privacy practices only in local languages. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can extend privacy policy analysis bey

arXiv:2607.18459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid improvement of AI systems has intensified debate about humanity's economic, political, social, and existential future. As AI reshapes expectations about what lies ahead, policy choices and institutional responses will play a crucial role in determining who benefits, who bears the costs, and whether the most serious risks can be mitigated. Africa remains relatively overlooked in these discussions, partly because it is largely a consumer ra

arXiv:2607.18483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The digital substrate of states -- data, algorithms, infrastructure, platforms, applications -- is being governed without adequate conceptual foundations. The ability and legitimacy required to govern this substrate, and to govern with it, are simultaneously misaligned, contested, and structurally absent. We introduce digital statecraft as the organising concept for this emerging field, arguing that 'digital' reconstitutes the statecraft question r

arXiv:2607.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI alignment is essential for the safe deployment of advanced AI systems. Given that values and preferences change over time, culture, social roles, and context, we need to develop a better understanding of the possible long-term consequences of AI alignment, in particular considering the likely ubiquitous future use of personalized AI assistants. We introduce a flexible and extensible mathematical modelling framework, rooted in social physics, aim

arXiv:2607.18931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web browsers now provide AI-generated news summaries for millions of users. Despite their popularity and influence, we lack a systematic understanding of how these systems transform news before people read it. Through a large-scale audit, we investigate the factual accuracy of browser-based AI summarizers and how they alter the political bias, negative affect, and journalistic writing quality of news. Drawing on 13,777 articles from 15 U.S. news ou

arXiv:2607.19209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This full paper in the research-to-practice track presents methods for assessing student teams in tabletop exercises (TTXs). TTXs enable learner teams to prepare for workplace tasks and practice crisis responses, such as resolving cybersecurity incidents. While assessment is essential for determining how well teams achieve learning objectives, the complex, open-ended nature of TTXs often leads to delayed or incomplete feedback. TTX learning platfor

arXiv:2607.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI safety discourse still focuses disproportionately on visible failures, including obvious harms, dramatic misuse, and hypothetical catastrophic scenarios. That focus is incomplete. In deployed systems, many of the most consequential failures are quieter: plausible rather than spectacular, distributed across components rather than localized in a single output, and normalized by workflows before they are recognized as hazards. We argue that

arXiv:2607.18366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution. While single-turn safety mechanisms are relatively mature, extended interactions reveal structural vulnerabilities where initial alignment degrades over time. This paper empirically characterizes two observed failure modes across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs: Safety Drift, the gradual erosion of declared

arXiv:2607.18446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: Understanding how much of routine policing involves vulnerable people could inform resourcing, training, and multi-agency response, yet administrative data provide limited insight. We explore whether an LLM-based classification pipeline, developed on open-source US police data, can be adapted to estimate the prevalence of four vulnerability indicators - mental ill health, substance misuse, alcohol dependence, and homelessness - in UK pol