Journals
2026 EN
Abbinante Fabrizio · Baggesen Dorte Lau · Flamini Vittoria
+15 more
Abstract This report of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Advisory Group on Data (AGoD) presents updates on the group's activities in 2025. The mission of the group is to identify and launch tangible projects solving the most pressing pain points of Member States and bringing benefits to the European food safety systems data and risk assessment community. In 2025, the group continued to action tasks under the five strategic areas of its 2024–2027 roadmap, these areas are data governance, data management, tools and ecosystems, people and capacity, and innovation. During 2025, the AGoD maintained its strong connections with other data and innovation initiatives, by receiving regular updates from EFSA's AI & Innovation Board and inviting Member States and the European Commission to provide updates on relevant projects. These connections allow for information exchange and the identification of possible collaborations. Following the success of the 2024 conference and with the formal establishment of the People and Capacity subgroup in 2025, cross‐collaboration of the various AGoD subgroups continued in the form of a joint online meeting held in June 2025.
Journals
2026 EN
Yakubu Bello Musa · Jamail Nor Shahida Mohd · Latif Rabia
+1 more
Federated Learning (FL) enables joint training over distributed devices without data exchange but is highly vulnerable to attacks by adversaries in the form of model poisoning and malicious update injection. This work proposes Secured-FL, a blockchain-based defensive framework that combines smart contract–based authentication, clustering-driven outlier elimination, and dynamic threshold adjustment to defend against adversarial attacks. The framework was implemented on a private Ethereum network with a Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithm to ensure tamper-resistant and auditable model updates. Large-scale simulation on the Cyber Data dataset, under up to 50% malicious client settings, demonstrates Secured-FL achieves 6%–12% higher accuracy, 9%–15% lower latency, and approximately 14% less computational expense compared to the PPSS benchmark framework. Additional tests, including confusion matrices, ROC and Precision-Recall curves, and ablation tests, confirm the interpretability and robustness of the defense. Tests for scalability also show consistent performance up to 500 clients, affirming appropriateness to reasonably large deployments. These results make Secured-FL a feasible, adversarially resilient FL paradigm with promising potential for application in smart cities, medicine, and other mission-critical IoT deployments.
Journals
2026 EN
Hou Gang · Liu Aifeng · Zhao Tao
+4 more
Cooperative multi-UAV search requires jointly optimizing wide-area coverage, rapid target discovery, and endurance under sensing and motion constraints. Resolving this coupling enables scalable coordination with high data efficiency and mission reliability. We formulate this problem as a discounted Markov decision process on an occupancy grid with a cellwise Bayesian belief update, yielding a Markov state that couples agent poses with a probabilistic target field. On this belief–MDP we introduce a segment-conditioned latent-intent framework, in which a discrete intent head selects a latent skill every K steps and an intra-segment GRU policy generates per-step control conditioned on the fixed intent; both components are trained end-to-end with proximal updates under a centralized critic. On the 50 × 50 grid, coverage and discovery convergence times are reduced by up to 48% and 40% relative to a flat actor-critic benchmark, and the aggregated convergence metric improves by about 12% compared with a state-of-the-art hierarchical method. Qualitative analyses further reveal stable spatial sectorization, low path overlap, and fuel-aware patrolling, indicating that segment-conditioned latent intents provide an effective and scalable mechanism for coordinated multi-UAV search.
Journals
2026 EN
Penev Lyubomir · Georgiev Teodor · Metodiev Teodor
+2 more
ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT) is an XML-first authoring tool that allows researchers to collaborate with co-authors, editors, reviewers, proofreaders, and others to prepare a ready-to-submit manuscript in a shared online environment before publishing it in any scientific journal or platform.Being the very first authoring tool to provide ontology-linked and domain-specific semantic tagging, AWT 2.0 also supports import of structured data from external resources (e.g., Darwin Core data from GBIF , iDigBio , BOLD ) and semantic enhancements made during the writing process (e.g., citation intent based on the Citation Typing Ontology ( CiTO ) or automated links for taxon names to trusted online resources) ( Agosti et al. 2024 , Benichou et al. 2023 , Shotton 2010 ).Amongst the most notable benefits designed for the domain of biodiversity science are various biodiversity-specific data import and export features and bi-directional links with leading biodiversity data aggregators (e.g., GBIF, BOLD, Catalogue of Life , ChecklistBank , TreatmentBank , Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo , European Nucleotide Archive ( ENA) , OpenBiodiv ) ( Page 2023 ).Originally designed for the Biodiversity Data Journal and later integrated into other journals published on the ARPHA platform , the 2.0 version of the authoring environment is now also available as a fully collaborative editing tool. As such, it allows users to export manuscripts in either PDF or JATS -XML format, before submitting them to any scientific journal or platform. Thus, the AWT 2.0 prompts wider use of XML-born and FAIR scientific publications.AWT 2.0 can also be used for collaborative authoring, community review, editing and publication of documents for institutions or international organisations. The publications are automatically available in semantically enriched HTML, well-designed PDFs and machine-readable JATS-XML. This is how, for example, the collaborative SOLO platform allows the Soils for Europe project stakeholders to contribute to the development of strategic documents—called roadmaps—in a shared environment. There, the documents are subject to at least two rounds of transparent and open community peer review before they are published on the platform (Fig. 1 ). External reviewers can also leave comments as long as they are logged in with their Open Researcher and Contributor ID ( ORCID) . Those publications serve to address knowledge gaps relevant to the EU Soil Mission and guide funding priorities ( CORDIS 2025 ).A key feature of publishing with SOLO is the annual roadmaps update, which ensures they remain current and in tune with the latest research and emerging trends. Once their authors update them, documents retain links to their earlier versions, so that their ‘evolution’ can be easily tracked. This iterative process ensures that the platform remains a ‘living’ resource for stakeholders, providing up-to-date guidance on soil health priorities and challenges.
Journals
2026 EN
Gopi Karthika Kandamkulathil · Ksiksi Taoufik · Henderson Aaron C.
In mangrove ecosystems, the significance of litterfall as a key contributor to ecosystem productivity and soil nutrient dynamics is well established. This study conducted a comprehensive analysis of litterfall patterns within a hyper-arid saline mangrove ecosystem in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), revealing substantial monthly fluctuations. The annual litterfall ranged from 0.107 to 0.768 Mg/ha (± 0.093 Mg/ha), with the lowest values observed in February and the highest in August. The investigation further examined the relationship between litterfall and ten distinct remotely sensed vegetation indices, utilising multispectral imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite mission. The findings indicated a weak correlation between litterfall and several vegetation indices. Nevertheless, exemplary predictive performance was achieved through a random forest regression model (RF), yielding an R² value of 0.81 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.71. The analysis identified the Normalised Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), Plant Senescence Reflectance Index (PSRI) and Transformed Vegetation Index (TVI) as the most significant variables influencing litterfall dynamics. The study underscores the critical importance of comprehending monthly litterfall patterns and leveraging remote sensing methodologies for effectively monitoring and managing mangrove ecosystems amid shifting climatic conditions.
Journals
2026 EN
Elhadj Benkhelifa · Tamara Zhukabayeva · Pradeeban Kathiravelu
+1 more
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic, infrastructure-less systems where nodes self-organize to communicate. They are vital for mission-critical domains—military operations, disaster relief, and rescue—and increasingly support Internet of Things in smart homes, smart environments, and Industry 4.0. Despite flexibility, MANETs face frequent topology changes, packet loss, and quality of service degradation. Software-defined networking offers centralized visibility and control, but current software-defined MANETs (SD-MANETs) suffer scalability limits and single points of failure. The authors implemented a decentralized SD-MANET that distributes control across clustered Ryu controllers, coordinated by Apache ZooKeeper for leader election and Redis for synchronized state. In Mininet-Wi-Fi, the framework delivers higher throughput, better scalability, and improved fault tolerance with lower control overhead than centralized SD-MANETs. Replacing a single controller with a cluster strengthens deployments and provides a resilient backbone for Internet of Things-driven smart environments where high reliability and mobility are essential.
Journals
2026 EN
Sukhpal Singh Gill · Steve Uhlig · David Haunschild
+1 more
The authors propose a proof of concept (PoC) combining Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) for robust local ransomware detection with blockchain to share adversarial threat intelligence (TI) across connectivity networks (air gaps). Using a ransomware dataset in a simulated air gap environment, they show how independent cloud tenants strengthen local models. Achieved through adversarial threat intelligence training and publishing immutable intelligence on new evasion tactics to a shared ledger, Baseline Machine Learning (ML) models are vulnerable to carefully crafted perturbations. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) security adversarial TI training greatly enhances robustness. When a tenant adopts blockchain-anchored intelligence produced by another tenant, it gains significant advantages against previously unseen adversarial ransomware. This PoC demonstrates a collaborative defense approach suitable for critical infrastructure, such as permissioned mission critical service operators, and durable knowledge sharing under strict compliance requirements.
Journals
2025 EN
Berns Anton · Ringborg Ulrik · Celis Julio
+2 more
The development of new anticancer treatments, their clinical evaluation and introduction into the healthcare system need improvement. New drugs and cell therapies often come with significant costs for society while only marginally improving patients' survival and health‐related quality‐of‐life. Therefore, bold, innovative clinical trials with critical assessment of the efficacy and cost‐effectiveness of new preventive measures and medical treatments are needed to ensure that patients and society benefit. Drug development programmes controlled by pharma should be complemented with initiatives such as stop studies, dose reduction, combination and repurposing trials. These should be validated in academia‐initiated trials supported by societal funds. Special attention should be devoted to paediatric and rare adult cancers. Comprehensive Cancer Centres (CCCs) covering the entire cancer research continuum, present throughout the EU, are critical for this. More of such centres must be established concomitantly with a robust accreditation methodology to ensure that they meet appropriate quality standards. It is crucial that funding for these initiatives, now temporarily and partially provided by the EU Cancer Mission and Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, is secured for a much longer period.
Journals
2025 EN
RodriguesJunior Dorival Mendes · Kocholata Michaela · Lekka Marilena E.
+3 more
The 2nd MObility for Vesicle research in Europe (MOVE) Symposium, held in Belgrade—Serbia, from October 8 to 11, 2024, showcased the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of extracellular vesicles (EVs) research in Europe. Organized by eight National EV Societies under the MOVE initiative, the event gathered over 280 attendees from 28 countries, promoting collaboration and scientific exchange. The symposium featured eight keynote lectures, 48 oral and 126 poster presentations, and sessions dedicated to EV‐related tools and industry innovations. The scientific program was structured around seven core themes: EV biogenesis and signal transmission, roles of EVs in health and disease, EV‐based biomarkers, interspecies communication, novel EV preparation and analysis techniques, therapeutic and regenerative applications, and the manufacturing of native and engineered EV products. Supported by 18 sponsors and the Ministry of science, technological development and innovation of the Republic of Serbia, the symposium also highlighted the MOVE Fellowship Program and offered rich networking opportunities. This landmark event reinforced MOVE's promising mission to promote excellence, mobility, and resource sharing in EV research across Europe.
Journals
2025 EN
Ebara Sumiko
Abstract Most of the dual‐purpose buildings built by the Incorporated Church Building Society in the 19th century were mission buildings. In the 20th century, many consecrated churches were constructed as dual‐purpose buildings. Installing a stage for secular use became common. However, reserving at least one‐third of the total floor to be used exclusively for worship was recommended. In addition, several floor plans emerged that allowed the worship floor to be extended but not vice versa. A wider range of floor plan variations was found that explicitly identified worship as the primary use.