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Machine learning (ML) components are increasingly integrated into software products, yet their complexity and inherent uncertainty often lead to unintended and hazardous consequences, both for individuals and society at large. Despite these risks, practitioners seldom adopt proactive approaches to anticipate and mitigate hazards before they occur. Traditional safety engineering approaches, such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), offer systematic frameworks for early risk identification but are rarely adopted. This position paper advocates for integrating hazard analysis into the development of any ML-powered software product and calls for greater support to make this process accessible to developers. By using large language models (LLMs) to partially automate a modified STPA process with human oversight at critical steps, we expect to address two key challenges: the heavy dependency on highly experienced safety engineering experts, and the time-consuming, labor-intensive nature of traditional hazard analysis, which often impedes its integration into real-world development workflows. We illustrate our approach with a running example, demonstrating that many seemingly unanticipated issues can, in fact, be anticipated., Comment: Accepted for publication at the International Conference on AI Engineering (CAIN) 2025

Recent high-profile incidents in open-source software have greatly raised practitioner attention on software supply chain attacks. To guard against potential malicious package updates, security practitioners advocate pinning dependency to specific versions rather than floating in version ranges. However, it remains controversial whether pinning carries a meaningful security benefit that outweighs the cost of maintaining outdated and possibly vulnerable dependencies. In this paper, we quantify, through counterfactual analysis and simulations, the security and maintenance impact of version constraints in the npm ecosystem. By simulating dependency resolutions over historical time points, we find that pinning direct dependencies not only (as expected) increases the cost of maintaining vulnerable and outdated dependencies, but also (surprisingly) even increases the risk of exposure to malicious package updates in larger dependency graphs due to the specifics of npm's dependency resolution mechanism. Finally, we explore collective pinning strategies to secure the ecosystem against supply chain attacks, suggesting specific changes to npm to enable such interventions. Our study provides guidance for practitioners and tool designers to manage their supply chains more securely.

Algorithmic fairness of machine learning (ML) models has raised significant concern in the recent years. Many testing, verification, and bias mitigation techniques have been proposed to identify and reduce fairness issues in ML models. The existing methods are model-centric and designed to detect fairness issues under static settings. However, many ML-enabled systems operate in a dynamic environment where the predictive decisions made by the system impact the environment, which in turn affects future decision-making. Such a self-reinforcing feedback loop can cause fairness violations in the long term, even if the immediate outcomes are fair. In this paper, we propose a simulation-based framework called FairSense to detect and analyze long-term unfairness in ML-enabled systems. Given a fairness requirement, FairSense performs Monte-Carlo simulation to enumerate evolution traces for each system configuration. Then, FairSense performs sensitivity analysis on the space of possible configurations to understand the impact of design options and environmental factors on the long-term fairness of the system. We demonstrate FairSense's potential utility through three real-world case studies: Loan lending, opioids risk scoring, and predictive policing., Comment: In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2025)

GitHub, the de-facto platform for open-source software development, provides a set of social-media-like features to signal high-quality repositories. Among them, the star count is the most widely used popularity signal, but it is also at risk of being artificially inflated (i.e., faked), decreasing its value as a decision-making signal and posing a security risk to all GitHub users. In this paper, we present a systematic, global, and longitudinal measurement study of fake stars in GitHub. To this end, we build StarScout, a scalable tool able to detect anomalous starring behaviors (i.e., low activity and lockstep) across the entire GitHub metadata. Analyzing the data collected using StarScout, we find that: (1) fake-star-related activities have rapidly surged since 2024; (2) the user profile characteristics of fake stargazers are not distinct from average GitHub users, but many of them have highly abnormal activity patterns; (3) the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots; (4) some repositories may have acquired fake stars for growth hacking, but fake stars only have a promotion effect in the short term (i.e., less than two months) and become a burden in the long term. Our study has implications for platform moderators, open-source practitioners, and supply chain security researchers.

Machine learning in production needs to balance multiple objectives: This is particularly evident in ranking or recommendation models, where conflicting objectives such as user engagement, satisfaction, diversity, and novelty must be considered at the same time. However, designing multi-objective rankers is inherently a dynamic wicked problem -- there is no single optimal solution, and the needs evolve over time. Effective design requires collaboration between cross-functional teams and careful analysis of a wide range of information. In this work, we introduce Orbit, a conceptual framework for Objective-centric Ranker Building and Iteration. The framework places objectives at the center of the design process, to serve as boundary objects for communication and guide practitioners for design and evaluation. We implement Orbit as an interactive system, which enables stakeholders to interact with objective spaces directly and supports real-time exploration and evaluation of design trade-offs. We evaluate Orbit through a user study involving twelve industry practitioners, showing that it supports efficient design space exploration, leads to more informed decision-making, and enhances awareness of the inherent trade-offs of multiple objectives. Orbit (1) opens up new opportunities of an objective-centric design process for any multi-objective ML models, as well as (2) sheds light on future designs that push practitioners to go beyond a narrow metric-centric or example-centric mindset.

Fatigue fracture is one of the main causes of failure in structures. However, the simulation of fatigue crack growth is computationally demanding due to the large number of load cycles involved. Metals in the low cycle fatigue range often show significant plastic zones at the crack tip, calling for elastic-plastic material models, which increase the computation time even further. In pursuit of a more efficient model, we propose a simplified phase-field model for ductile fatigue fracture, which indirectly accounts for plasticity within the fatigue damage accumulation. Additionally, a cycle-skipping approach is inherent to the concept, reducing computation time by up to several orders of magnitude. Essentially, the proposed model is a simplification of a phase-field model with elastic-plastic material behavior. As a reference, we therefore implement a conventional elastic-plastic phase-field fatigue model with nonlinear hardening and a fatigue variable based on the strain energy density, and compare the simplified model to it. Its approximation of the stress-strain behavior, the neglect of the plastic crack driving force and consequential range of applicability are discussed. Since in fact the novel efficient model is similar in its structure to a phase-field fatigue model we published in the past, we include this older version in the comparison, too. Compared to this model variant, the novel model improves the approximation of the plastic strains and corresponding stresses and refines the damage computation based on the Local Strain Approach. For all model variants, experimentally determined values for elastic, plastic, fracture and fatigue properties of AA2024 T351 aluminum sheet material are employed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded into software products across diverse industries, enhancing user experiences, but at the same time introducing numerous challenges for developers. Unique characteristics of LLMs force developers, who are accustomed to traditional software development and evaluation, out of their comfort zones as the LLM components shatter standard assumptions about software systems. This study explores the emerging solutions that software developers are adopting to navigate the encountered challenges. Leveraging a mixed-method research, including 26 interviews and a survey with 332 responses, the study identifies 19 emerging solutions regarding quality assurance that practitioners across several product teams at Microsoft are exploring. The findings provide valuable insights that can guide the development and evaluation of LLM-based products more broadly in the face of these challenges., Comment: 10 pages, 2 tables

We present a data-driven framework for the multiscale modeling of anisotropic finite strain elasticity based on physics-augmented neural networks (PANNs). Our approach allows the efficient simulation of materials with complex underlying microstructures which reveal an overall anisotropic and nonlinear behavior on the macroscale. By using a set of invariants as input, an energy-type output and by adding several correction terms to the overall energy density functional, the model fulfills multiple physical principles by construction. The invariants are formed from the right Cauchy-Green deformation tensor and fully symmetric 2nd, 4th or 6th order structure tensors which enables to describe a wide range of symmetry groups. Besides the network parameters, the structure tensors are simultaneously calibrated during training so that the underlying anisotropy of the material is reproduced most accurately. In addition, sparsity of the model with respect to the number of invariants is enforced by adding a trainable gate layer and using lp regularization. Our approach works for data containing tuples of deformation, stress and material tangent, but also for data consisting only of tuples of deformation and stress, as is the case in real experiments. The developed approach is exemplarily applied to several representative examples, where necessary data for the training of the PANN surrogate model are collected via computational homogenization. We show that the proposed model achieves excellent interpolation and extrapolation behaviors. In addition, the approach is benchmarked against an NN model based on the components of the right Cauchy-Green deformation tensor.

Building on the foundations of our previous work, this paper introduces Arena 4.0, a significant advancement over Arena 3.0, Arena-Bench, Arena 1.0, and Arena 2.0. Arena 4.0 offers three key novel contributions: (1) a generative-model-based world and scenario generation approach that utilizes large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models to dynamically generate complex, human-centric environments from text prompts or 2D floorplans, useful for the development and benchmarking of social navigation strategies; (2) a comprehensive 3D model database, extendable with additional 3D assets that are semantically linked and annotated for dynamic spawning and arrangement within 3D worlds; and (3) a complete migration to ROS 2, enabling compatibility with modern hardware and enhanced functionalities for improved navigation, usability, and easier deployment on real robots. We evaluated the platform's performance through a comprehensive user study, demonstrating significant improvements in usability and efficiency compared to previous versions. Arena 4.0 is openly available at https://github.com/Arena-Rosnav., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Machine learning models make mistakes, yet sometimes it is difficult to identify the systematic problems behind the mistakes. Practitioners engage in various activities, including error analysis, testing, auditing, and red-teaming, to form hypotheses of what can go (or has gone) wrong with their models. To validate these hypotheses, practitioners employ data slicing to identify relevant examples. However, traditional data slicing is limited by available features and programmatic slicing functions. In this work, we propose SemSlicer, a framework that supports semantic data slicing, which identifies a semantically coherent slice, without the need for existing features. SemSlicer uses Large Language Models to annotate datasets and generate slices from any user-defined slicing criteria. We show that SemSlicer generates accurate slices with low cost, allows flexible trade-offs between different design dimensions, reliably identifies under-performing data slices, and helps practitioners identify useful data slices that reflect systematic problems.

Cyber attacks leveraging or targeting the software supply chain, such as the SolarWinds and the Log4j incidents, affected thousands of businesses and their customers, drawing attention from both industry and government stakeholders. To foster open dialogue, facilitate mutual sharing, and discuss shared challenges encountered by stakeholders in securing their software supply chain, researchers from the NSF-supported Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2) organize Secure Supply Chain Summits with stakeholders. This paper summarizes the Industry Secure Supply Chain Summit held on November 16, 2023, which consisted of \panels{} panel discussions with a diverse set of \participants{} practitioners from the industry. The individual panels were framed with open-ended questions and included the topics of Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), vulnerable dependencies, malicious commits, build and deploy infrastructure, reducing entire classes of vulnerabilities at scale, and supporting a company culture conductive to securing the software supply chain. The goal of this summit was to enable open discussions, mutual sharing, and shedding light on common challenges that industry practitioners with practical experience face when securing their software supply chain., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure

We present a detailed investigation of the near-field optical response of core-shell nanoparticles using Fourier-demodulated full-wave simulations, revealing significant modifications to established contrast mechanisms in scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM). Our work examines the complex interplay of geometrical and optical resonances within core-shell structures. Using a finite element method (FEM) simulation closely aligned with the actual s-SNOM measurement processes, we capture the specific near-field responses in these nanostructures. Our findings show that core-shell nanoparticles exhibit unexpected distinct resonance shifts and massively enhanced scattering driven by both core and shell properties. This investigation not only advances the understanding of near-field interactions in complex nanosystems but also provides a refined theoretical framework to accurately predict the optical signatures of nanostructures with internal heterogeneity., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

In recent years, the continued detection of complex organic molecules of prebiotic interest has refueled the interest on a panspermic origin of life. The prebiotic molecule glyceraldehyde is proposed to be formed from (Z)-1,2-ethenediol, a molecule recently detected towards the G+0.693-0.027 molecular cloud at the galactic center. In this work, we computationally simulate the formation of (Z)-1,2-ethenediol from vinyl alcohol on the surface of amorphous solid water in a two-step synthesis involving a OH addition and a H abstraction reaction. In total, we considered all reaction possibilities of the 1,1 and 1,2-OH addition to vinyl alcohol followed by H-abstraction or H-addition reactions on the resulting radicals. The combination of these reactions is capable of explaining the formation of (Z)-1,2-ethenediol provided a suprathermal diffusion of OH. We also conclude that our proposed formation pathway is not selective and also yields other abstraction and addition products. Key in our findings is the connection between the adsorption modes of the reactants and intermediates and the stereoselectivity of the reactions., Comment: This version is the unedited accepted version in the Astrophysical Journal

Centrifugation of erythrocytes (aka Red Blood Cells, RBCs) in a self-forming Percoll gradient is a protocol often used as a way to sort RBCs by age. However, a pattern formation of discrete bands is systematically observed along the continuous density gradient. Although early studies mentioned that aggregation between cells might modify their spatial distribution, it is debated whether a population with continuous density distribution can form discrete bands. Here, we develop a continuity equation, considering the aggregation of cells with a continuous density distribution, which describes the macroscopic evolution of the RBC volume concentration in a density gradient. The numerical solutions demonstrate that the competition between iso-density distribution and aggregation is sufficient to create band patterns. Our model reproduces the temporal evolution observed in the conventional experimental protocol, but also predicts several types of bifurcation-like behaviors for the steady-state patterns in constant gradients, when the volume fraction and aggregation energy of the cells are varied. We threrefore discovered that the competition between RBC aggregation and iso-density distribution is a novel physical mechanism leading to pattern formation.

Chemical processes taking place on ice-grain mantles are pivotal to the complex chemistry of interstellar environments. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the catalytic effects of an amorphous solid water (ASW) surface on the reaction between ammonia (NH$_3$) and formaldehyde (H$_2$CO) to form aminomethanol (NH$_2$CH$_2$OH) using density functional theory. We identified potential catalytic sites based on the binding energy distribution of NH$_3$ and H$_2$CO reactants, on a set-of-clusters surface model composed of 22 water molecules and found a total of 14 reaction paths. Our results indicate that the catalytic sites can be categorized into four groups, depending on the interactions of the carbonyl oxygen and the amino group with the ice surface in the reactant complex. A detailed analysis of the reaction mechanism using Intrinsic Reaction Coordinate and reaction force analysis revealed three distinct chemical events for this reaction: formation of the C--N bond, breaking of the N--H bond, and formation of the O--H hydroxyl bond. Depending on the type of catalytic site, these events can occur within a single, concerted, albeit asynchronous, step, or can be isolated in a step-wise mechanism, with the lowest overall transition state energy observed at 1.3 kcal mol$^{-1}$. A key requirement for the low-energy mechanism is the presence of a pair of dangling OH bonds on the surface, found at 5\% of the potential catalytic sites on an ASW porous surface.

Evaporation of blood droplets and diluted blood samples is a topic of intensive research, as it is seen as a possible low-cost tool for diagnosis. So far, samples with volume fraction down to a few percents of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) have been studied, and those were reportedly dominated by a ``coffee-ring'' deposit. In this study, samples with lower volume fractions have been used in order to study the growth of the evaporative deposit from sessile droplets more in details. We observed that blood samples and salt solutions with less than 1\% volume fraction of RBCs are dominated by a central deposit. We characterized the growth process of this central deposit by evaporating elongated drops, and determined that it is consistent with the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang process in the presence of quenched disorder. Our results showed a sensitivity of this deposit size to the fibrinogen concentration and shape of the RBCs, meaning that this parameter could be used to develop a new and cost-effective clinical marker for inflammation and RBC deformation., Comment: 27 pages, 11 Figures

Building upon our previous contributions, this paper introduces Arena 3.0, an extension of Arena-Bench, Arena 1.0, and Arena 2.0. Arena 3.0 is a comprehensive software stack containing multiple modules and simulation environments focusing on the development, simulation, and benchmarking of social navigation approaches in collaborative environments. We significantly enhance the realism of human behavior simulation by incorporating a diverse array of new social force models and interaction patterns, encompassing both human-human and human-robot dynamics. The platform provides a comprehensive set of new task modes, designed for extensive benchmarking and testing and is capable of generating realistic and human-centric environments dynamically, catering to a broad spectrum of social navigation scenarios. In addition, the platform's functionalities have been abstracted across three widely used simulators, each tailored for specific training and testing purposes. The platform's efficacy has been validated through an extensive benchmark and user evaluations of the platform by a global community of researchers and students, which noted the substantial improvement compared to previous versions and expressed interests to utilize the platform for future research and development. Arena 3.0 is openly available at https://github.com/Arena-Rosnav., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems across various domains is increasingly surfacing issues related to algorithmic fairness, especially in high-stakes scenarios. Thus, critical considerations of how fairness in AI systems might be improved -- and what measures are available to aid this process -- are overdue. Many researchers and policymakers see explainable AI (XAI) as a promising way to increase fairness in AI systems. However, there is a wide variety of XAI methods and fairness conceptions expressing different desiderata, and the precise connections between XAI and fairness remain largely nebulous. Besides, different measures to increase algorithmic fairness might be applicable at different points throughout an AI system's lifecycle. Yet, there currently is no coherent mapping of fairness desiderata along the AI lifecycle. In this paper, we we distill eight fairness desiderata, map them along the AI lifecycle, and discuss how XAI could help address each of them. We hope to provide orientation for practical applications and to inspire XAI research specifically focused on these fairness desiderata.

Tailoring materials to achieve a desired behavior in specific applications is of significant scientific and industrial interest as design of materials is a key driver to innovation. Overcoming the rather slow and expertise-bound traditional forward approaches of trial and error, inverse design is attracting substantial attention. Targeting a property, the design model proposes a candidate structure with the desired property. This concept can be particularly well applied to the field of architected materials as their structures can be directly tuned. The bone-like spinodoid materials are a specific class of architected materials. They are of considerable interest thanks to their non-periodicity, smoothness, and low-dimensional statistical description. Previous work successfully employed machine learning (ML) models for inverse design. The amount of data necessary for most ML approaches poses a severe obstacle for broader application, especially in the context of inelasticity. That is why we propose an inverse-design approach based on Bayesian optimization to operate in the small-data regime. Necessitating substantially less data, a small initial data set is iteratively augmented by in silico generated data until a structure with the targeted properties is found. The application to the inverse design of spinodoid structures of desired elastic properties demonstrates the framework's potential for paving the way for advance in inverse design.

The past decade has seen tremendous breakthroughs in computation and there is no indication that this will slow any time soon. Machine learning, large-scale computing resources, and increased industry focus have resulted in rising investments in computer-driven solutions for data management, simulations, and model generation. However, with this growth in computation has come an even larger expansion of data and with it, complexity in data storage, sharing, and tracking. In this work, we introduce ZnTrack, a Python-driven data versioning tool. ZnTrack builds upon established version control systems to provide a user-friendly and easy-to-use interface for tracking parameters in experiments, designing workflows, and storing and sharing data. From this ability to reduce large datasets to a simple Python script emerges the concept of Data as Code, a core component of the work presented here and an undoubtedly important concept as the age of computation continues to evolve. ZnTrack offers an open-source, FAIR data compatible Python package to enable users to harness these concepts of the future., Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, 2MB PDF

We propose a machine learning method to model molecular tensorial quantities, namely the magnetic anisotropy tensor, based on the Gaussian-moment neural-network approach. We demonstrate that the proposed methodology can achieve an accuracy of 0.3--0.4 cm$^{-1}$ and has excellent generalization capability for out-of-sample configurations. Moreover, in combination with machine-learned interatomic potential energies based on Gaussian moments, our approach can be applied to study the dynamic behavior of magnetic anisotropy tensors and provide a unique insight into spin-phonon relaxation.

Efficiently creating a concise but comprehensive data set for training machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) is an under-explored problem. Active learning, which uses biased or unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) to generate candidate pools, aims to address this objective. Existing biased and unbiased MD-simulation methods, however, are prone to miss either rare events or extrapolative regions -- areas of the configurational space where unreliable predictions are made. This work demonstrates that MD, when biased by the MLIP's energy uncertainty, simultaneously captures extrapolative regions and rare events, which is crucial for developing uniformly accurate MLIPs. Furthermore, exploiting automatic differentiation, we enhance bias-forces-driven MD with the concept of bias stress. We employ calibrated gradient-based uncertainties to yield MLIPs with similar or, sometimes, better accuracy than ensemble-based methods at a lower computational cost. Finally, we apply uncertainty-biased MD to alanine dipeptide and MIL-53(Al), generating MLIPs that represent both configurational spaces more accurately than models trained with conventional MD.

The accuracy of the training data limits the accuracy of bulk properties from machine-learned potentials. For example, hybrid functionals or wave-function-based quantum chemical methods are readily available for cluster data but effectively out-of-scope for periodic structures. We show that local, atom-centred descriptors for machine-learned potentials enable the prediction of bulk properties from cluster model training data, agreeing reasonably well with predictions from bulk training data. We demonstrate such transferability by studying structural and dynamical properties of bulk liquid water with density functional theory and have found an excellent agreement with experimental as well as theoretical counterparts.

The mechanical behaviour of many materials, including polymers or natural materials, significantly depends on the rate of deformation. As a consequence, a rate-dependent ductile-to-brittle fracture transition may be observed. For toffee-like caramel, this effect is particularly pronounced. At room temperature, this confectionery may be extensively deformed at low strain rates, while it can behave highly brittle when the rate of deformation is raised. Likewise, the material behaviour does significantly depend on temperature, and even a slight cooling may cause a significant embrittlement. In this work, a thorough experimental investigation of the rate-dependent deformation and fracture behaviour is presented. In addition, the influence of temperature on the material response is studied. The experimental results form the basis for a phase-field modelling of fracture. In order to derive the governing equations of the model, an incremental variational principle is introduced. By means of the validated model, an analysis of the experimentally observed ductile-to-brittle fracture transition is performed. In particular, the coupling between the highly dissipative deformation behaviour of the bulk material and the rate-dependent fracture resistance is discussed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software applications. Downstream application developers often access LLMs through APIs provided as a service. However, LLM APIs are often updated silently and scheduled to be deprecated, forcing users to continuously adapt to evolving models. This can cause performance regression and affect prompt design choices, as evidenced by our case study on toxicity detection. Based on our case study, we emphasize the need for and re-examine the concept of regression testing for evolving LLM APIs. We argue that regression testing LLMs requires fundamental changes to traditional testing approaches, due to different correctness notions, prompting brittleness, and non-determinism in LLM APIs., Comment: conference version

Current model testing work has mostly focused on creating test cases. Identifying what to test is a step that is largely ignored and poorly supported. We propose Weaver, an interactive tool that supports requirements elicitation for guiding model testing. Weaver uses large language models to generate knowledge bases and recommends concepts from them interactively, allowing testers to elicit requirements for further testing. Weaver provides rich external knowledge to testers and encourages testers to systematically explore diverse concepts beyond their own biases. In a user study, we show that both NLP experts and non-experts identified more, as well as more diverse concepts worth testing when using Weaver. Collectively, they found more than 200 failing test cases for stance detection with zero-shot ChatGPT. Our case studies further show that Weaver can help practitioners test models in real-world settings, where developers define more nuanced application scenarios (e.g., code understanding and transcript summarization) using LLMs.

The problem of generating microstructures of complex materials in silico has been approached from various directions including simulation, Markov, deep learning and descriptor-based approaches. This work presents a hybrid method that is inspired by all four categories and has interesting scalability properties. A neural cellular automaton is trained to evolve microstructures based on local information. Unlike most machine learning-based approaches, it does not directly require a data set of reference micrographs, but is trained from statistical microstructure descriptors that can stem from a single reference. This means that the training cost scales only with the complexity of the structure and associated descriptors. Since the size of the reconstructed structures can be set during inference, even extremely large structures can be efficiently generated. Similarly, the method is very efficient if many structures are to be reconstructed from the same descriptor for statistical evaluations. The method is formulated and discussed in detail by means of various numerical experiments, demonstrating its utility and scalability.

We present a framework for the multiscale modeling of finite strain magneto-elasticity based on physics-augmented neural networks (NNs). By using a set of problem specific invariants as input, an energy functional as the output and by adding several non-trainable expressions to the overall total energy density functional, the model fulfills multiple physical principles by construction, e.g., thermodynamic consistency and material symmetry. Three NN-based models with varying requirements in terms of an extended polyconvexity condition of the magneto-elastic potential are presented. First, polyconvexity, which is a global concept, is enforced via input convex neural networks (ICNNs). Afterwards, we formulate a relaxed local version of the polyconvexity and fulfill it in a weak sense by adding a tailored loss term. As an alternative, a loss term to enforce the weaker requirement of strong ellipticity locally is proposed, which can be favorable to obtain a better trade-off between compatibility with data and physical constraints. Databases for training of the models are generated via computational homogenization for both compressible and quasi-incompressible magneto-active polymers (MAPs). Thereby, to reduce the computational cost, 2D statistical volume elements and an invariant-based sampling technique for the pre-selection of relevant states are used. All models are calibrated by using the database, whereby interpolation and extrapolation are considered separately. Furthermore, the performance of the NN models is compared to a conventional model from the literature. The numerical study suggests that the proposed physics-augmented NN approach is advantageous over the conventional model for MAPs. Thereby, the two more flexible NN models in combination with the weakly enforced local polyconvexity lead to good results, whereas the model based only on ICNNs has proven to be too restrictive.

Recent years have shown increased cyber attacks targeting less secure elements in the software supply chain and causing fatal damage to businesses and organizations. Past well-known examples of software supply chain attacks are the SolarWinds or log4j incidents that have affected thousands of customers and businesses. The US government and industry are equally interested in enhancing software supply chain security. On June 7, 2023, researchers from the NSF-supported Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2) conducted a Secure Software Supply Chain Summit with a diverse set of 17 practitioners from 13 government agencies. The goal of the Summit was two-fold: (1) to share our observations from our previous two summits with industry, and (2) to enable sharing between individuals at the government agencies regarding practical experiences and challenges with software supply chain security. For each discussion topic, we presented our observations and take-aways from the industry summits to spur conversation. We specifically focused on the Executive Order 14028, software bill of materials (SBOMs), choosing new dependencies, provenance and self-attestation, and large language models. The open discussions enabled mutual sharing and shed light on common challenges that government agencies see as impacting government and industry practitioners when securing their software supply chain. In this paper, we provide a summary of the Summit., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2307.16557, arXiv:2307.15642

Machine learning (ML) components are increasingly incorporated into software products for end-users, but developers face challenges in transitioning from ML prototypes to products. Academics have limited access to the source of commercial ML products, hindering research progress to address these challenges. In this study, first and foremost, we contribute a dataset of 262 open-source ML products for end users (not just models), identified among more than half a million ML-related projects on GitHub. Then, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze 30 open-source ML products to answer six broad research questions about development practices and system architecture. We find that the majority of the ML products in our sample represent more startup-style development than reported in past interview studies. We report 21 findings, including limited involvement of data scientists in many open-source ML products, unusually low modularity between ML and non-ML code, diverse architectural choices on incorporating models into products, and limited prevalence of industry best practices such as model testing, pipeline automation, and monitoring. Additionally, we discuss seven implications of this study on research, development, and education, including the need for tools to assist teams without data scientists, education opportunities, and open-source-specific research for privacy-preserving telemetry.

Fatigue crack growth is decisive for the design of thin-walled structures such as fuselage shells of air planes. The cold rolling process, used to produce the aluminium sheets this structure is made of, leads to anisotropic mechanical properties. In this contribution, we simulate the fatigue crack growth with a phase-field model due to its superior ability to model arbitrary crack paths. A fatigue variable based on the Local Strain Approach describes the progressive weakening of the crack resistance. Anisotropy regarding the fracture toughness is included through a structural tensor in the crack surface density. The model is parameterised for an aluminium AA2024-T351 sheet material. Validation with a set of experiments shows that the fitted model can reproduce key characteristics of a growing fatigue crack, including crack path direction and growth rate, considering the rolling direction.

Modern computer systems are ubiquitous in contemporary life yet many of them remain opaque. This poses significant challenges in domains where desiderata such as fairness or accountability are crucial. We suggest that the best strategy for achieving system transparency varies depending on the specific source of opacity prevalent in a given context. Synthesizing and extending existing discussions, we propose a taxonomy consisting of eight sources of opacity that fall into three main categories: architectural, analytical, and socio-technical. For each source, we provide initial suggestions as to how to address the resulting opacity in practice. The taxonomy provides a starting point for requirements engineers and other practitioners to understand contextually prevalent sources of opacity, and to select or develop appropriate strategies for overcoming them., Comment: Accepted at the Third International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Explainable Systems (RE4ES) co-located with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'23)

Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR) is a clinical parameter used as a non-specific marker for inflammation, and recent studies have shown that it is linked to the collapse of the gel formed by red blood cells (RBCs) at physiological hematocrits (i.e. RBC volume fraction). Previous research has suggested that the delay time before the sedimentation process is related to the formation of fractures in the gel. Moreover, RBC gels present specific properties due to the anisotropic shape and flexibility of the RBCs. Namely, the onset of the collapse is reached earlier and the settling velocity of the gel increases with increasing attraction between the RBCs, while gel of spherical particles show the opposite trend. Here, we report experimental observations of the gel structure during this onset and suggest an equation modeling this initial process as fracturing of the gel. We demonstrate that this equation provides a model for the motion of the interface between blood plasma and the RBC gel, along the whole time span. We also observe that the increase in the attraction between the RBCs modifies the density of fractures in the gel, which explains why the gel displays a decrease in delay time when the aggregation energy between the RBCs increases. Our work uncovers the detailed physical mechanism underlying the ESR and provides insights into the fracture dynamics of a RBC gel. These results can improve the accuracy of clinical measurements., Comment: 10 pages, 3 Figures