• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• Research data close
• NARCIS close

Integrated photonics will play a key role in quantum systems as they grow from few-qubit prototypes to tens of thousands of qubits. The underlying optical quantum technologies can only be realized through the integration of these components onto quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) with accompanying electronics. In the last decade, remarkable advances in quantum photonic integration have enabled table-top experiments to be scaled down to prototype chips with improvements in efficiency, robustness, and key performance metrics. These advances have enabled integrated quantum photonic technologies combining up to 650 optical and electrical components onto a single chip that are capable of programmable quantum information processing, chip-to-chip networking, hybrid quantum system integration, and high-speed communications. In this roadmap article, we highlight the status, current and future challenges, and emerging technologies in several key research areas in integrated quantum photonics, including photonic platforms, quantum and classical light sources, quantum frequency conversion, integrated detectors, and applications in computing, communications, and sensing. With advances in materials, photonic design architectures, fabrication and integration processes, packaging, and testing and benchmarking, in the next decade we can expect a transition from single- and few-function prototypes to large-scale integration of multi-functional and reconfigurable devices that will have a transformative impact on quantum information science and engineering. JPhys Photonics, 4 (1) ISSN:2515-7647

This paper introduces the 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit (4CAT), an open-source Web-based research tool that can capture data from a variety of online sources including Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, 4chan, 8kun, BitChute, Douban and Parler, and analyze the data through analytical processors. 4CAT seeks to make robust data capture and analysis available to researchers not familiar with computer programming, without “black-boxing” the implemented research methods. Before outlining the practical use of 4CAT, we discuss three “affordances” that informed its design: modularity, transparency, and traceability. 4CAT is modular because new data sources and analytical processors can be easily added and changed; transparent because it aims to render legible its inner workings; and traceable because of automatic and shareable documentation of intermediate analysis steps. We then show how 4CAT operationalizes these features through a description of its general setup and a short walkthrough. Finally, we discuss how 4CAT strives for an “ethics by design” development philosophy that enables ethically sound data-driven research with it. 4CAT is then positioned as both an answer to and a further call for “tool criticism” in computational social research.

The first issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience was published 20 years ago, in 2000. To mark this anniversary, in this Viewpoint article we asked a selection of researchers from across the field who have authored pieces published in the journal in recent years for their thoughts on notable and interesting developments in neuroscience, and particularly in their areas of the field, over the past two decades. They also provide some thoughts on current lines of research and questions that excite them.

Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communities within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a deep congruence between robust features of Pan community life cycles and protocell models of the origins of life. We argue that if a cultural tradition, meeting certain requirements, arises in the context of such a “social protocell,” the outcome will be an evolutionary transition in individuality whereby traditions and hominins coalesce into a macroscopic bio-socio-technical system, with an organismal organization that is culturally inherited through irreversible fission events on the community level. We refer to the resulting hypothetical evolutionary individual as a “sociont.” The social protocell provides a preadapted source of alignment of fitness interests that addresses a number of open questions about the origins of shared adaptive cultural organization, and the derived genetic (and highly unusual) adaptations that support them. Also, social cooperation between hominins is no longer in exclusive focus since cooperation among traditions becomes salient in this model. This provides novel avenues for explanation. We go on to hypothesize that the fate of the hominin in such a setting would be mutualistic coadaptation into a part-whole relation with the sociont, and we propose that the unusual suite of derived features in Homo is consistent with this hypothesis.

As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualisation, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.