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If public trust is lost in a new technology early in its life cycle it can take much more time for the benefits of that technology to be realised. Eventually tens-of-millions of people will collectively have the power to determine…
Astronomy is the study of the Universe and all the objects that it comprises. Our attention is therefore usually focused beyond Earth, home to the only form of life known today. However, how can we continue to explore the secrets of the…
This paper presents an argument for why we are not measuring trust sufficiently in explainability, interpretability, and transparency research. Most studies ask participants to complete a trust scale to rate their trust of a model that has…
The detection of exoplanets orbiting other stars has revolutionized our view of the cosmos. First results suggest that it is teeming with a fascinating diversity of rocky planets, including those in the habitable zone. Even our closest…
Trustworthiness and trust are basic factors in common societies that allow us to interact and enjoy being in crowds without fear. As robotic devices start percolating into our daily lives they must behave as fully trustworthy objects, such…
As of 2025, over 6000 planets are known to orbit stars other than our Sun. We can measure their sizes and orbital periods, infer their masses and temperatures, and constrain their compositions. Based on these data, about 1% of extrasolar…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
Health experts assert that hope plays a crucial role in enhancing individuals' physical and mental well-being, facilitating their recovery, and promoting restoration. Hope speech refers to comments, posts and other social media messages…
Humanity has wondered whether we are alone for millennia. The discovery of life elsewhere in the Universe, particularly intelligent life, would have profound effects, comparable to those of recognizing that the Earth is not the center of…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor…
Since time immemorial life has been viewed as being fragile, yet over the past few decades it has been found that many extreme environments are inhabited by organisms known as extremophiles.Knowledge of their emergence, adaptability, and…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
The search for life on planets outside our solar system has largely been the province of the astrophysics community until recently. A major development since the NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015 document (AS15) has been the integration of…
This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…
We re-examine the likelihood for alien civilizations to develop communication technology on the basis of the general assumption that life elsewhere could have a non-carbon chemical foundation. We particularized the discussion to a complex…
Can information theory provide insights into whether exoplanets are habitable? Here we apply information theory to a range of simulated exoplanet transmission spectra as a diagnostic tool to search for potential signatures of life on…
The behaviors of various confidence/credible interval constructions are explored, particularly in the region of low statistics where methods diverge most. We highlight a number of challenges, such as the treatment of nuisance parameters,…