The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education Research: A Cross-Sectional Study of Adoption Trends and Productivity Impact

Inside the black box: A comprehensive survey of explainable AI benchmarks, protocols, technical analysis, and open gaps

End-to-End Federated Intelligence for Secure and Standardized Digital Twin Orchestration in 6G Smart Cities

Digital twins (DTs) are rapidly emerging as foundational enablers of 6G smart cities, offering real time monitoring, predictive analytics, and autonomous control across transportation, energy, healthcare, and industrial domains. Large scale DT adoption faces critical barriers including cybersecurity vulnerabilities, privacy risks, and the absence of standardized orchestration frameworks. This article presents Fed-DTOrch, a comprehensive end to end architecture that integrates federated intelligence, blockchain based audit trails, and AI governance to achieve secure and privacy preserving DT management. The proposed three tier architecture spans IoT and edge devices, domain specific twins, and a city level orchestrator, employing secure federated learning for model updates, lightweight cryptographic authentication, and tamper proof logging. We quantify the DT threat landscape, perform a standards gap analysis across ISO/IEC 27001, 3GPP TS 33.501, ITU-T IoT risk frameworks, and NIST AI RMF, and introduce a 6G ready security framework incorporating federated AI trust metrics, secure synchronization, and explainable AI audits. Cross domain evaluation across five smart city sectors demonstrates 35-60% privacy gain, 40-55% attack mitigation, 28-40% reliability uplift, 26-30% latency reduction, and >85% compliance readiness with <10% overhead. These results provide the first integrated blueprint that combines federated intelligence, blockchain-based auditability, and standards gap analysis to enable secure, standardized, and interoperable DT orchestration for trustworthy 6G ecosystems.

AI and Bullshit

It is argued that both AI and bullshitters are untrustworthy informants, and for similar reasons, it is natural to describe AI’s informational outputs as bullshit, as it signals their distinctive kind of epistemic deficiencies, which they share with bullshit.

On the Interplay of Explainability and Fairness in AI: A Survey

Algorithmic fairness and explainability are foundational pillars of responsible AI. Although often studied independently, their interplay is increasingly recognized as crucial for diagnosing and mitigating bias in machine learning systems. We first introduce two systematic taxonomies: one for algorithmic fairness and one for explainable AI, to organize the landscape of existing work across diverse tasks (classification, ranking, and recommendation) and data modalities (tabular, graph). Next, we categorize the use of explanations in fairness efforts into three main functions: (a) detecting and understanding the causes of unfairness, (b) defining enhanced fairness metrics, and (c) designing mitigation strategies. In addition, we examine how explanation methods themselves can be biased, underscoring the need to evaluate fairness for explanations. Finally, we identify open research challenges and outline promising directions for future research at the intersection of fairness and explainability.

Adaptive Repayment Optimisation for SME Lending: A Stochastic Programming Framework with Generative AI Explanation

The Adaptive Repayment Optimisation Engine is introduced, a novel framework that applies constrained stochastic optimisation to the design of loan repayment schedules for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and contributes to the operations research literature by bridging stochastic programming, explainable AI, and financial regulation in a novel application domain.

The Awakener: A Unified Materialist Theory of Consciousness as a Dynamic Process

What is consciousness? Despite millennia of inquiry, humanity still lacks a consensus definition. This paper proposes a unified, strictly materialist theory: consciousness is not an entity but a process-specifically, the dynamic process that occurs when a specific structure, formed within complex, chaotic circuits, formats and processes input data and produces output. The structure is the carrier; the processing itself is consciousness. Building on this definition, the paper introduces a two-layer architecture that distinguishes basal consciousness (the autonomous survival functions shared by nearly all living organisms) from advanced consciousness (spanning the awareness of basic sensations, self-awareness, metacognition, and abstract reasoning). We argue that the two layers are related not as a hierarchy of subordination, but as a partnership of trust shaped by natural selection. The paper further proposes the mechanism of the self-reinforcing circuit: advanced consciousness is not complete at birth; it must be "awakened" through sustained external stimulation. Once awakened, it consolidates its own existence by continuously reinforcing the neural pathways dedicated to it, sculpting the unique "I" of each individual. This mechanism offers a parsimonious explanation of dissociative identity disorder, personality change after brain injury, and the diversity of human personality. The Awakener model traces the complete evolutionary path: from primitive sensory-interpretation tools, through the emergence of intelligence, the first awakening event, and chained cultural transmission, to the birth of language and writing. We apply this framework to explain why intelligent animals never developed civilization, to predict which species might awaken next, and to redefine the current state of artificial intelligence as a frozen brain-structurally capable of consciousness, but temporally static: a single frame. Within a single, self-consistent framework, the theory unifies the core problems of consciousness research: the definition and essence of consciousness, the hard problem, the two-layer distinction, the physical basis of the "I", personality diversity, the evolutionary origin of consciousness, the boundaries of animal consciousness, the origin of language, the conscious status of AI, free will and the Libet experiments, split-brain interpretation, dreams and sleepwalking, and the relation between the subconscious and System 1/System 2. No immaterial components are required: every step rests on existing experimental evidence or established neuroscientific findings.