علیرضا منصوری

Recently, supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) have caused significant progress in many fields, including industrial and research fields of artificial intelligence, data science, big data, Internet of Things, as well as large scale web applications. Regarding this characteristic, the supercomputer field becomes one of the strategic issues in developed and developing countries. Successful HPC development requires a robust infrastructure that effectively depends on a multidimensional policy and roadmap, covering all aspects of HPC services. In this regard, a comprehensive roadmap is necessary to design and achieve high-performance computing services. This paper proposes a comprehensive roadmap focusing on several strategic areas, including research activities, infrastructure and platforms, data processing, standard regulations, applied services, and business development. The roadmap follows an evolutionary strategy where strategic regions evolve in parallel. Also, in this paper, the Supercomputing Development Readiness Indicators (SDRI) inspired by the "Network Readiness Indicators" (NRI) are presented and the proposed roadmap uses them. The proposed roadmap is then compared with two other hypothetical roadmaps with the timing and priority of different strategic areas in terms of progress and completion time. Evaluation of the proposed roadmap based on the SDRI specification shows the effectiveness of the proposed method in creating and developing the services of a petaflops scale supercomputer.

Opinion formation is a collective behavior, describing the dynamics of people’s opinions due to their interactions. Nowadays, social media are broadly used and cause a lot of interactions among users who mainly know each other merely as a username, but significantly influence each others’ opinions and emotions. Both emotions and opinions spread across users in social media via their exchanged posts. Furthermore, based on psychology research, emotion affects people’s opinion. In this research, we implemented two binary classifiers to predict the users’ next opinions considering previous posts sent in online community: an original classifier, a classifier based on the social impact model of opinion formation; and an emotion-integrated classifier, a classifier based on the social impact model of opinion formation integrated with an emotion model to achieve an improved model. To evaluate the improved classifier, we used a dataset containing some debates from the CreateDebate.com website and compared the performance of the original classifier with the performance of the emotion integrated classifier. The experiment results show that considering emotions improves the accuracy and precision of the social impact model of opinion formation in social media.

Artifacts are ubiquitous and influential in our world, but their nature and existence are controversial. Several theories have been proposed to explain the ontology of artifacts. Drawing on Popper's theory of three worlds, this paper suggests a metaphysics for artifacts along the line of a critical rationalist (CR) approach. This theory distinguishes between three realms of reality: the physical world (World 1), the mental world (World 2), and the world of objective knowledge (World 3). The paper argues that artifacts have different ontological components that correspond to these three realms, and that each component is real and causal. The paper shows how this perspective can account for the intentional and functional aspects of artifacts, as well as their dependence on plans that influence different realms of reality. The paper explains how this pluralistic ontology, compared to the rival theories, enables one to explain the relevant ontological problems of artifacts. The paper also explores how this proposal can lead to a research program encompassing a broader range of technologies, such as social artifacts. In sum, the paper suggests that Popper's three worlds theory provides a rich and comprehensive framework for understanding the metaphysics of artifacts.

This paper delves into the intersection between Kant’s moral theory and evolutionary perspectives on personhood. It explores how Kant’s emphasis on rationality in moral agency aligns with evolutionary studies on the development of moral behaviors. By examining the transcendental implications of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI) and the evolutionary origins of moral agency, this study aims to illuminate the link between Kant’s conception of moral agency and personhood. Additionally, it investigates how Kant’s call for CI resonates with evolutionary insights on the adaptive nature of social cooperation in human societies. Through this analysis, we seek to deepen our understanding of the cognitive, social dimensions of moral agency and moral status within the framework of Kant’s moral theory and evolutionary perspectives on personhood.