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Roughly four decades ago, Taher ElGamal put forward what is today one of the most widely known and best understood public key encryption schemes. ElGamal encryption has been used in many different contexts, chiefly among them by the OpenPGP email encryption standard. Despite its simplicity, or perhaps because of it, in reality there is a large degree of ambiguity on several key aspects of the cipher. Each library in the OpenPGP ecosystem seems to have implemented a slightly different "flavor" of ElGamal encryption. While-taken in isolation-each implementation may be secure, we reveal that in the interoperable world of OpenPGP, unforeseen cross-configuration attacks become possible. Concretely, we propose different such attacks and show their practical efficacy by recovering plaintexts and even secret keys.

In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a public sequence of potentially ambiguous signals and interpret it according to a rule that includes confirmation bias. First, this study shows that regardless of level of ambiguity both for people or networked society, only two types of opinions can be formed, and both are biased. However, one opinion type is less biased than the other depending on the state of the world. The size of both biases depends on the ambiguity level and relative magnitude of the state and confirmation biases. Hence, long-run learning is not attained even when people impartially interpret ambiguity. Finally, analytically confirming the probability of emergence of the less-biased consensus when people are connected and have different priors is difficult. Hence, I used simulations to analyze its determinants and found three main results: i) some network topologies are more conducive to consensus efficiency, ii) some degree of partisanship enhances consensus efficiency even under confirmation bias and iii) open-mindedness (i.e. when partisans agree to exchange opinions with opposing partisans) might inhibit efficiency in some cases., Status: Accepted (Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier)

We propose a novel two-stage training strategy with ambiguity boosting for the self-supervised learning of single view depths from stereo images. Our proposed two-stage learning strategy firstly aims to obtain a coarse depth prior by training an auto-encoder network for a stereoscopic view synthesis task. This prior knowledge is then boosted and used to self-supervise the model in the second stage of training in our novel ambiguity boosting loss. Our ambiguity boosting loss is a confidence-guided type of data augmentation loss that improves the accuracy and consistency of generated depth maps under several transformations of the single-image input. To show the benefits of the proposed two-stage training strategy with boosting, our two previous depth estimation (DE) networks, one with t-shaped adaptive kernels and the other with exponential disparity volumes, are extended with our new learning strategy, referred to as DBoosterNet-t and DBoosterNet-e, respectively. Our self-supervised DBoosterNets are competitive, and in some cases even better, compared to the most recent supervised SOTA methods, and are remarkably superior to the previous self-supervised methods for monocular DE on the challenging KITTI dataset. We present intensive experimental results, showing the efficacy of our method for the self-supervised monocular DE task.

Security analysts rely on scenarios to assess vulnerabilities, project attacks, and decide on security requirements that mitigate the threat. However, eliciting natural language scenarios from stakeholders can be an ad-hoc process and subject to ambiguity and incompleteness. In this paper, we examine systematic scenario elicitation by introducing a method based on user stories that uses a simplified process model of iterative scenario refinement. The process consists of three steps: 1) eliciting an interaction statement that describes a critical action performed by a user or system process; 2) eliciting one or more descriptive statements about a technology that enables the interaction; and 3) refinement of the technology into technical variants that correspond to design alternatives. We empirically evaluated our method by implementing our prototype in a user study that collects 30 security scenarios from participants. Based on our analysis, our proposed method is shown effective. Participants had a 100% task completion rate with 57% of participants achieving complete task-success, and the remaining 43% of participants achieving partial task-success. We also show the effect of security domain knowledge, and the benefit of using structure when collecting security requirements in natural language text. Finally, we present lessons learned and future research directions.

Text is a new way to guide human image manipulation. Albeit natural and flexible, text usually suffers from inaccuracy in spatial description, ambiguity in the description of appearance, and incompleteness. We in this paper address these issues. To overcome inaccuracy, we use structured information (e.g., poses) to help identify correct location to manipulate, by disentangling the control of appearance and spatial structure. Moreover, we learn the image-text shared space with derived disentanglement to improve accuracy and quality of manipulation, by separating relevant and irrelevant editing directions for the textual instructions in this space. Our model generates a series of manipulation results by moving source images in this space with different degrees of editing strength. Thus, to reduce the ambiguity in text, our model generates sequential output for manual selection. In addition, we propose an efficient pseudo-label loss to enhance editing performance when the text is incomplete. We evaluate our method on various datasets and show its precision and interactiveness to manipulate human images.

With substantial amount of time, resources and human (team) efforts invested to explore and develop successful deep neural networks (DNN), there emerges an urgent need to protect these inventions from being illegally copied, redistributed, or abused without respecting the intellectual properties of legitimate owners. Following recent progresses along this line, we investigate a number of watermark-based DNN ownership verification methods in the face of ambiguity attacks, which aim to cast doubts on the ownership verification by forging counterfeit watermarks. It is shown that ambiguity attacks pose serious threats to existing DNN watermarking methods. As remedies to the above-mentioned loophole, this paper proposes novel passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes which are both robust to network modifications and resilient to ambiguity attacks. The gist of embedding digital passports is to design and train DNN models in a way such that, the DNN inference performance of an original task will be significantly deteriorated due to forged passports. In other words, genuine passports are not only verified by looking for the predefined signatures, but also reasserted by the unyielding DNN model inference performances. Extensive experimental results justify the effectiveness of the proposed passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes. Code is available at https://github.com/kamwoh/DeepIPR.

This document outlines minimal design principles underlying annotation of coreference relations in PoCoS, a scheme for cross-linguistic anaphoric annotation. We identify language-independent principles for markable identification which are essential for comparability of annotations produced for different languages. We further suggest a clear and motivated structure of annotation stages, the separation of a coarse-grained core and a family of more elaborate extended schemes, and strategies for the systematic treatment of ambiguity. Explicit mark-up of ambiguities is a novel feature. We implemented three instantiations of PoCoS for German, English and Russian applied to corpora of newspaper texts.

Groundwater exists in underground aquifers and is largely hidden and intangible to water users. As such, groundwater models are one of the main vehicles through which groundwater is made legible. They are critical for water supply planning purposes. However, models are imperfect representations of limited data and contain much uncertainty, posing challenges for the water supply planning process. In this paper, we draw on a case from the Greater Chicago area to examine efforts by the authors and the Illinois State Water Survey to engage with local water managers to develop future water supply scenarios. Much of this area has been dependent upon the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer System for over 150 years. Over this period, water levels have declined by over 300 m and aquifers are expected to be unviable by 2030. Here we advance the growing field of participatory groundwater modelling (PGM) to identify forms of uncertainty and their influence on understandings of water supply and risk perceptions of depletion. Conceptually, we draw on the idea of models as world builders, where uncertainties are elucidated through knowledge production in the act of model building, while model development is simultaneously influenced by expectations, beliefs, and ambiguity surrounding those using the models. Through planning meetings and focus group discussions between groundwater modelers and water supply stakeholders, we identify four forms of interconnected uncertainty that hinder planning efforts: 1) hydrogeologic uncertainty, 2) modelling uncertainty; 3) water demand uncertainty; and 4) urban planning uncertainty. We describe our PGM efforts to reduce uncertainty and find stakeholder perceptions are as important as model uncertainties in water management decisions. Participatory modelling is effective in reducing and clarifying these four forms of uncertainty, particularly applied to short-term management decisions in a rapidly changing system. We conclude that future participatory modelling efforts need to focus on reducing communication barriers between scientists and local users.

With the increasing demand of users for personalized social services, social recommendation (SR) has been an important concern in academia. However, current research on SR universally faces two main challenges. On the one hand, SR lacks the considerable ability of robust online data management. On the other hand, SR fails to take the ambiguity of preference feedback into consideration. To bridge these gaps, a deep learning-embedded social Internet of Things (IoT) is proposed for ambiguity-aware SR (SIoT-SR). Specifically, a social IoT architecture is developed for social computing scenarios to guarantee reliable data management. A deep learning-based graph neural network model that can be embedded into the model is proposed as the core algorithm to perform ambiguity-aware SR. This design not only provides proper online data sensing and management but also overcomes the preference ambiguity problem in SR. To evaluate the performance of the proposed SIoT-SR, two real-world datasets are selected to establish experimental scenarios. The method is assessed using three different metrics, selecting five typical methods as benchmarks. The experimental results show that the proposed SIoT-SR performs better than the benchmark methods by at least 10% and has good robustness.

Annotated corpus can greatly assist in the natural language processing field. For example, computers can understand more of the document context, and indexing and clustering in information retrieval can be done precisely with less or no ambiguity of words. However, there are only a few annotated corpora in Malay language, which are not publicly shared. In this paper, we delve into analysing and annotating Malay translated hadith documents in terms of tagging and entities. There are three phases, which are manual filtering and cleaning, analysing the corpus and creating the benchmark. As the result, an analysis and benchmark of Malay translated hadith corpus were produced in term of part-of-speech and named entities tags that follows the Zipf’s law distribution.

In an intelligent surveillance system, detecting and predicting diverse collective crowd behaviors has emerged as a challenging problem for efficient crowd management. In real-world scenarios, potential disasters and hazards can be averted by considering crowd psychology for predicting crowd behaviors. This paper proposes an approach that exploits the psychological and cognitive aspects of human behavior in determining nine diverse crowd behaviors. The proposed approach is a combination of two cognitive deep learning frameworks and a psychological fuzzy computational model that utilizes OCC theory of emotions, OCEAN five-factor model of personality and visual attention for detecting crowd behaviors. Experiments are performed on different datasets and the results prove that our approach is successful in detecting and predicting crowd behavior in confronting situations and also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, considering psychological aspects and cognition in determining crowd behavior is beneficial for rectifying the semantic ambiguity in identifying crowd behaviors.

Problem definition: Among the most vexing issues in the U.S. healthcare ecosystem is inappropriate use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures, also known as overstenting. A key driver of overstenting is physician subjectivity in eyeballing a coronary angiogram. Advanced tests such as fractional flow reserve (FFR) provide more precise and objective measures of PCI appropriateness, yet the decision to perform these tests is endogenous and not immune to clinical ambiguity associated with eyeballing. Additionally, conflicts of interest, arising from revenue-generating incentives, play a role in overstenting. Academic/practical relevance: Conventional wisdom suggests more precise diagnostic testing will help reduce overtreatment. However, the literature rarely recognizes that the testing decision is itself endogenous. Our research highlights the role of endogeneity surrounding interventional cardiology decision making. Methodology: This study uses stochastic modeling and simulation. Results: Under a low conflict-of-interest level, the physician performs the advanced test for intermediate lesions. Under a high conflict-of-interest level, however, the physician would perform the advanced test only for high-grade lesions, because of a financial disincentive: Performing the advanced test may lower PCI revenue if the test results argue against the procedure. Surprisingly, despite this disincentive, a more revenue-driven physician can be more inclined to perform the advanced test. Managerial implications: Our model leads to implications for various efforts aimed at tackling overstenting: (1) Attention should be paid not only to the sheer quantity of FFR procedures but to which patients receive FFR procedures; (2) reducing the risk of the advanced test has a behavior-inducing effect, yet a modest risk reduction may lower patient welfare; and (3) offering a bonus to the physician for performing FFR procedures equal to a third of its reimbursement rate will cause only a 5% increase in average physician payment while inducing a 26% decline in overstenting. In addition, we show implementing a bundled payment scheme may discourage the use of FFR procedures and lead to more salient overstenting.

This paper investigates the implication of correlation ambiguity to investor behavior, asset pricing and issuers' listing choices from a market microstructure perspective. We introduce two markets to a multi-asset model: Market A is transparent and Market B is opaque, or Market A with low and Market B with high ambiguity perceived by investors. Each firm can choose only a unique market to list its stock. Due to ambiguity aversion, a naive investor's demand function demonstrates piecewise linear. Such trading behavior may lead to different equilibria and hence different market-clearing prices for each listing outcome. Rational entrepreneurs make their optimal listing decisions depending on asset prices on alternative markets. We further demonstrate that a crafted design of specific features of the microstructure, such as listing standards and disclosure requirements, can effectively reduce the perceived ambiguity and induce more naive investors' participation to improve market liquidity, maintain greater volume, and lower the cost of capital, so as to attract more new listings.

Quantitative analysis is a solid, well established mathematical technique that can be used to analyze the result of survey(s) in a specific field. Survey analysis is usually based on the study of the effect of independent variables on a dependent variable. Although quantitative analysis can use an R-Squared value as a method to measure the strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables, it does not capture the effect of participants' ambiguity when answering questionnaires. The source of such ambiguity stems from the process of completing the survey, whereby the respondent may have answered most of the independent questions with ease, but has difficulty in responding to the overall dependent question (or vice versa). The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the use of fuzzy logic as a mechanism to measure the uncertainty faced by participants when filling a questionnaire. Based on the participants' responses to the independent variables, the proposed technique uses fuzzy logic inference to measure the subjectivity (qualitative aspect) of the participants' response to the dependent variable. Beyond quantitative analysis, augmentation with such a fuzzy module can provide clearer picture to analysts when analyzing the survey results.

This paper addresses the cyber resilience issues of multi-vector energy distribution systems (MEDS) caused by false data injection FDI, considering the uncertainty from renewable resources. A novel two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is proposed to realize the day-ahead and real-time resilience improvement. The first stage determines an initial plan for day-ahead reserve preparation and the second stage makes adjustment and takes resilience-based actions after potential load redistribution (LR) attacks and renewable output deviation. The ambiguity set is based on both the Wasserstein distance and moment information. Compared to robust optimization which considers the worst case, DRO yields less-conservative solutions and thus provides more economic operation schemes. The Wasserstein-metric based ambiguity set enables to provide additional flexibility hedging against renewable uncertainty. Case studies are demonstrated on two representative MEDS networked with energy hubs, i.e., a 33-bus-20-node MEDS and a 69-bus-20-node-MEDS, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed cyber-secured model.

This article proposes a risk-based contingency-constrained optimal power flow model by leveraging the methods of both adjustable uncertainty set and distributionally robust optimization. In the proposed model, an adjustable uncertainty set of wind power is developed with network contingencies explicitly incorporated. Based on this uncertainty set, the proposed model is capable of securing the network against both wind power fluctuations and contingencies in a probabilistic manner with the optimal balance between operation cost and risk. Meanwhile, a data-driven L 1-norm-based ambiguity set is employed so that the proposed model is distributionally robust to the ambiguous probability distribution of wind power and the size of the model remains unchanged as the available wind power data increases. A decomposition-based algorithm is also derived so that the proposed model is solvable by off-the-shelf solvers. Numerical studies on IEEE 14- and 118-bus systems are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Abnormal crowd behavior detection has recently attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications in computer vision research areas. However, it is still an extremely challenging task due to the great variability of abnormal behavior coupled with huge ambiguity and uncertainty of video contents. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new probabilistic framework named variational abnormal behavior detection (VABD), which can detect abnormal crowd behavior in video sequences. We make three major contributions: (1) We develop a new probabilistic latent variable model that combines the strengths of the U-Net and conditional variational auto-encoder, which also are the backbone of our model; (2) We propose a motion loss based on an optical flow network to impose the motion consistency of generated video frames and input video frames; (3) We embed a Wasserstein generative adversarial network at the end of the backbone network to enhance the framework performance. VABD can accurately discriminate abnormal video frames from video sequences. Experimental results on UCSD, CUHK Avenue, IITB-Corridor, and ShanghaiTech datasets show that VABD outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on abnormal crowd behavior detection. Without data augmentation, our VABD achieves 72.24% in terms of AUC on IITB-Corridor, which surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by nearly 5%.

Counter-intuitive to the lessons of principal-agent models, Chinese leaders have often provided local officials with ambiguous policy guidelines that do not clarify the boundaries of discretion. While ambiguity can give local officials flexibility in policy implementation, it can also instill fear of punishment among possible transgressors and encourage preemptive self-censoring. Incorporating both perspectives, I develop a formal model that analyzes a situation in which ambiguity allows flexibility for certain types of local officials while intimidating others. I argue that central leaders use ambiguity as a screening tool to encourage only the competent type of local officials—or those who have policy expertise for producing good outcomes—to choose a gray-area policy at their own risk, while deterring the incompetent type from doing so. I illustrate the model with the case of state-owned enterprise restructuring in China. The argument is broadly applicable to interactions between any upper- and lower-level actors in bureaucratic hierarchy.

Zero-shot learning uses semantic attributes to connect the search space of unseen objects. In recent years, although the deep convolutional network brings powerful visual modeling capabilities to the ZSL task, its visual features have severe pattern inertia and lack of representation of semantic relationships, which leads to severe bias and ambiguity. In response to this, we propose the Graph-based Visual-Semantic Entanglement Network to conduct graph modeling of visual features, which is mapped to semantic attributes by using a knowledge graph, it contains several novel designs: 1. it establishes a multi-path entangled network with the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the graph convolutional network (GCN), which input the visual features from CNN to GCN to model the implicit semantic relations, then GCN feedback the graph modeled information to CNN features; 2. it uses attribute word vectors as the target for the graph semantic modeling of GCN, which forms a self-consistent regression for graph modeling and supervise GCN to learn more personalized attribute relations; 3. it fuses and supplements the hierarchical visual-semantic features refined by graph modeling into visual embedding. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on multiple representative ZSL datasets: AwA2, CUB, and SUN by promoting the semantic linkage modelling of visual features., 15 pages, 11 figures, on IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

The problem of continuous emotion recognition has been the subject of several studies. The proposed affective computing approaches employ sequential machine learning algorithms for improving the classification stage, accounting for the time ambiguity of emotional responses. Modeling and predicting the affective state over time is not a trivial problem because continuous data labeling is costly and not always feasible. This is a crucial issue in real-life applications, where data labeling is sparse and possibly captures only the most important events rather than the typical continuous subtle affective changes that occur. In this work, we introduce a framework from the machine learning literature called Multiple Instance Learning, which is able to model time intervals by capturing the presence or absence of relevant states, without the need to label the affective responses continuously (as required by standard sequential learning approaches). This choice offers a viable and natural solution for learning in a weakly supervised setting, taking into account the ambiguity of affective responses. We demonstrate the reliability of the proposed approach in a gold-standard scenario and towards real-world usage by employing an existing dataset (DEAP) and a purposely built one (Consumer). We also outline the advantages of this method with respect to standard supervised machine learning algorithms.

Labels, short textual annotations are an important component of data visualizations, illustrations, infographics, and geographical maps. In interactive applications, the labeling method responsible for positioning the labels should not take the resources from the application itself. In other words, the labeling method should provide the result as fast as possible. In this work, we propose a greedy point-feature labeling method running on GPU. In contrast to existing methods that position the labels sequentially, the proposed method positions several labels in parallel. Yet, we guarantee that the positioned labels will not overlap, nor will they overlap important visual features. When the proposed method is searching for the label position of a point-feature, the available label candidates are evaluated with respect to overlaps with important visual features, conflicts with label candidates of other point-features, and their ambiguity. The evaluation of each label candidate is done in constant time independently from the number of point-features, the number of important visual features, and the resolution of the created image. Our measurements indicate that the proposed method is able to position more labels than existing greedy methods that do not evaluate conflicts between the label candidates. At the same time, the proposed method achieves a significant increase in performance. The increase in performance is mainly due to the parallelization and the efficient evaluation of label candidates.

Semantic segmentation in aerial imagery is still an important yet challenging task due to the complex characteristics of remote sensing data. The critical issues consist of 1) extreme foreground-background imbalance, 2) large intra-class variance and 3) arbitrary-oriented, dense and small objects. The above challenges make it unlikely to model the effective global interdependencies of semantic heterogeneous regions. Besides, general semantic segmentation methods suffer from feature ambiguity due to the joint feature learning paradigm, leading to inferior detail information. In this paper, we propose an improved semantic segmentation framework to tackle these problems via graph reasoning and disentangled learning. On the one hand, a simple yet effective graph reasoning (GR) unit is introduced to implement coordinate-interaction space mapping and perform relation reasoning over the graph. It can be deployed on the feature pyramid network (FPN) to exploit cross-stage multi-scale information. On the other hand, we propose a so-called disentangled learning paradigm to explicitly model the foreground and boundary objects, instantiated as foreground prior estimation and boundary alignment. The indication of the intermediate feature can be effectively emphasized to enhance the discriminative abilities of the network. Extensive experiments over iSAID, ISPRS Vaihingen and the general Cityscapes data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework over other state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods.

Introduction Health professions educators risk misunderstandings where terms and concepts are not clearly defined, hampering the field’s progress. This risk is especially pronounced with ambiguity in describing roles. This study explores the variety of terms used by researchers and educators to describe “faculty”, with the aim to facilitate definitional clarity, and create a shared terminology and approach to describing this term. Methods The authors analyzed journal article abstracts to identify the specific words and phrases used to describe individuals or groups of people referred to as faculty. To identify abstracts, PubMed articles indexed with the Medical Subject Heading “faculty” published between 2007 and 2017 were retrieved. Authors iteratively extracted data and used content analysis to identify patterns and themes. Results A total of 5,436 citations were retrieved, of which 3,354 were deemed eligible. Based on a sample of 594 abstracts (17.7%), we found 279 unique terms. The most commonly used terms accounted for approximately one-third of the sample and included faculty or faculty member/s (n = 252; 26.4%); teacher/s (n = 59; 6.2%) and medical educator/s (n = 26; 2.7%) were also well represented. Content analysis highlighted that the different descriptors authors used referred to four role types: healthcare (e.g., doctor, physician), education (e.g., educator, teacher), academia (e.g., professor), and/or relationship to the learner (e.g., mentor). Discussion Faculty are described using a wide variety of terms, which can be linked to four role descriptions. The authors propose a template for researchers and educators who want to refer to faculty in their papers. This is important to advance the field and increase readers’ assessment of transferability. Supplementary Information The online version of this article (10.1007/s40037-021-00683-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Facade image parsing is essential to the semantic understanding and 3-D reconstruction of urban scenes. Considering the occlusion and appearance ambiguity in single-view images and the easy acquisition of multiple views, in this letter, we propose a multiview enhanced deep architecture for facade parsing. The highlight of this architecture is a cross-view feature aggregation module that can learn to choose and fuse useful convolutional neural network (CNN) features from nearby views to enhance the representation of a target view. Benefitting from the multiview enhanced representation, the proposed architecture can better deal with the ambiguity and occlusion issues. Moreover, our cross-view feature aggregation module can be straightforwardly integrated into existing single-image parsing frameworks. Extensive comparison experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method and the validity and transportability of the cross-view feature aggregation module.

A lost navigator must identify its current location and recover its facing direction to restore its bearings. We tested the idea that these two tasks--place recognition and heading retrieval--might be mediated by distinct cognitive systems in mice. Previous work has shown that numerous species, including young children and rodents, use the geometric shape of local space to regain their sense of direction after disorientation, often ignoring nongeometric cues even when they are informative. Notably, these experiments have almost always been performed in single-chamber environments in which there is no ambiguity about place identity. We examined the navigational behavior of mice in a two-chamber paradigm in which animals had to both recognize the chamber in which they were located (place recognition) and recover their facing direction within that chamber (heading retrieval). In two experiments, we found that mice used nongeometric features for place recognition, but simultaneously failed to use these same features for heading retrieval, instead relying exclusively on spatial geometry. These results suggest the existence of separate systems for place recognition and heading retrieval in mice that are differentially sensitive to geometric and nongeometric cues. We speculate that a similar cognitive architecture may underlie human navigational behavior.

The lack of synergy between the HRM functions and the ambiguity of human resources business partnering (HRBP) role are significantly blocking the way of HR professionals to become business partners. The paper proposed a theoretical framework, based on Ibrahim (2015) model focusing on the antecedents of HRBP performance, and further link HRBP performance to Organizational Performance and effectiveness. We proposed that factors such as having HR Business Knowledge by Management, Top Management & Line Manager support to HRBP, Management understanding of HRBP’s Role, and Synergy between HRM practices, positively affect the performance of HRBP, and better performance would lead to increased Organizational Performance and effectiveness. To establish the empirical validity, we conducted a self-administered study, from 250 employees belongs to HR top management, line managers, and professionals working in the banking sector. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results showed that among other factors, Synergy between HRM practices has a positive and significant influence on HRBP performance. However, HRBP performance positively and significantly affects both Organizational Performance and effectiveness. The findings revealed that HRBP would play an important and positive role to achieve goals, implement HR strategy, and also increased Synergy between HRM functions makes HRBP performance more effective.

This study aims to determine the effect of Job Insecurity and Intention to Leave on the Performance of Contract Employees at the Surabaya City Manpower Office. The approach used is quantitative with the type of inferential research. The sample in this study was 30 employees in the Surabaya City Manpower Office. The analysis technique used is Partial Least Square (PLS). This study proves that Job Insecurity has a positive effect on employee performance at the Surabaya City Manpower Office. In this study, job insecurity is influenced by factors such as role conflict, role ambiguity, and organizational change. Intention To Leave has a positive effect on employee performance at the Surabaya City Manpower Service

Digitalization is one of the key distinctive features of modern environment and social life. Nowadays more and more functions are transferred to the artificial mind. How effective is the replacement of human activity with computer activity? In the given article, this problem is solved by an example of integration of digital technologies into translation activities. It this paper, emphasis is placed on the quality of machine translation (MT) output of legal texts in the language pair English - Slovak. It studies a Criminal Code formulated in the Slovak language which was translated by a human translator into English and consequently via machine translation system Google Translate (GT) back into Slovak. The back-translation - translation of a translated text back into its original language - as a quality assessment tool to detect discrepancies, mistranslations and inevitable differences between the source text and the target text was used. The quality of MT output was evaluated according to Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) standards with the focus on the dimension of Fluency. The multiple comparisons were applied to determine which issues (errors) in Fluency dimension differ from the others. A statistically significant difference is noticed between Agreement and other issues, as well as between Ambiguity and other issues. The errors in Agreement are related to the differences between the languages: English is considered mostly an analytic language, Slovak represents a synthetic language. The issues in the Ambiguity dimension correlate with the type of the text being examined, since legal texts are characterized by relatively complicated wording and numerous terms; moreover, accuracy and unambiguity need to be preserved. Generally, the MT output is able to provide users with basic information about the text. On the other hand, most of the segments need revision and/or correction; in such cases, human intervention and post-editing is necessary.