TBC

As part of the collaborative research project 'Re-evaluating on Punch Marks on Early Italian Paintings', Kyoko's research project aims to explore application of imaging techniques including 3D imaging for punch marks on gilded background of early Italian paintings. The use of different methods of imaging and technical analysis combined with art historical research promises to explore historical interactions between Italian schools in the 13-14th centuries, with a special focus on Florentine and Sienese schools. A comprehensive study of punch marks published by Erling S. Skaug in 1994 clearly showed a potential of the study of punch marks as a new approach to art historical research on early Italian panel paintings. This proposal would develop this approach, and enrich the 2D photographic and diagrammatic information collected by Skaug. As there is sparce mention of punching tools or shapes of punch marks used by artists in historical texts, the study of punch marks is crucial to advance our understanding of how the artists of the two schools could have exchanged materials, tools and techniques. In addition, 3D imaging techniques have great potential to provide more detailed information about punch marks which could make it possible to pinpoint punching tools or marks used by specific artists or studios. My research scope will also include evaluating advantages and limitations of the imaging techniques applied for the paintings.

TBC

Digital disease surveillance (DDS), by facilitating media scanning, is vital for the early detection of health threats. Typically, DDS systems operate on a per-text basis, however, a text's relevance is context-dependent: Are such outbreaks common in the area? What is the risk of further transmission? A context-aware relevance estimation requires an array of information, including intricate data such as environmental or mobility data. Large language models (LLMs), which excel in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks,show considerable potential to support explainable, context-aware decision making with DDS. While relevant work has been done to adapt LLMs to specific domains and augment them with external knowledge bases, research on LLMs for reasoning from multimodal, spatio-temporal data is limited. In my PhD research, I aim to fill this gap and contribute towards DDS 2.0. My three main objectives are: (1) creating a benchmark dataset that contextualises health threats using both textual and non-textual data, and (2) utilising LLMs' capabilities in natural language understanding and generation to create reports assessing health threats using contextual data made available through retrieval augmented generation (RAG), for which I will (3) tackle LLMs' current limitations in spatio-temporal reasoning to effectively use mobility and environmental data with fine-tuning and mixture-of-modality adapters.

Speech constitutes action (Austin 1962) and, sometimes, it constitutes the action of subordination (Langton 1993). One's utterance can constitutively (rather than causally) unfairly rank someone as inferior and make them count as inferior in a particular domain, unfairly deprive them of rights or powers, and/or legitimate discriminatory behaviour against them (Langton 1993). Such an utterance is the illocution of subordination (henceforth subordinating illocution). The philosophical literature on subordinating illocutions focuses primarily on in-person illocutions. Little systematic attention has been paid to how speakers perform subordinating illocutions in online communicative environments (social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook). This is a gap that needs to be filled given that online environments are a primary outlet for hate speech, they occupy an important role in our communicative practices, and they are importantly different to in-person conversational exchanges, therefore requiring special philosophical treatment. I aim to offer a detailed analysis of online subordinating illocutions, adding both to the literature on subordinating illocutions and to the nascent literature on online illocutions.