Dirk Helbing , Sachit Mahajan , Dino Carpentras , Monica Menendez , Evangelos Pournaras , Stefan Thurner , Trivik Verma , Elsa Arcaute , Michael Batty and Luis M. A. Bettencourt

Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A Volume 382 Issue 2285

The digital revolution, fuelled by advancements in social media, Big Data, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, is reshaping our urban landscapes into ‘participatory cities’. These cities leverage digital technologies to foster citizen engagement, collaborative decision-making and community-driven urban development, thus unlocking new potentials while confronting emerging threats. Such technologies are empowering individuals and organizations in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. They do, however, introduce new risks and vulnerabilities that must be carefully managed. Hence, socio-technical innovation is urgently needed. In this connection, open-source technologies, participatory approaches and new forms of governance are becoming more popular and relevant. This theme issue looks into the tangible impacts of these technological advancements, with a focus on participatory cities. It aims to explain how digital tools are used in cities to tackle urban challenges, improve governance and promote sustainability. Through a collection of in-depth analyses, case studies and real-world examples, this issue seeks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the digital governance frameworks underpinning participatory cities. By offering a platform for multidisciplinary discourse, this theme issue endeavours to contribute to the broader narrative of shaping a more resilient, sustainable and democratic urban future in the digital age.

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See Also: Theme issue ‘Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance’

James Henderson, Yuta Nagano, Martina Milighetti, and Andreas Tiffeau-Mayer

PNAS 121 (42) e2408696121

The specificity of cellular immune responses is determined by the binding of T cell receptors (TCRs) to diverse ligands, yet due to their vast diversity, most TCRs lack experimentally validated binding partners. To overcome this gap requires understanding the recognition code linking receptors and ligands. Here, we introduce an information theoretic approach to rank TCR features by their relevance to predicting specificity and bound how accurately T cell specificity can be predicted from partial information. By identifying informative features, our work provides a rational basis for prioritizing matches in TCR databases and for developing machine learning models to predict TCR–ligand interactions.

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Ryosuke Takata, Atsushi Masumori, Takashi Ikegami

We study the emergence of agency from scratch by using Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. In previous studies of LLM-based agents, each agent’s characteristics, including personality and memory, have traditionally been predefined. We focused on how individuality, such as behavior, personality, and memory, can be differentiated from an undifferentiated state. The present LLM agents engage in cooperative communication within a group simulation, exchanging context-based messages in natural language. By analyzing this multi-agent simulation, we report valuable new insights into how social norms, cooperation, and personality traits can emerge spontaneously. This paper demonstrates that autonomously interacting LLM-powered agents generate hallucinations and hashtags to sustain communication, which, in turn, increases the diversity of words within their interactions. Each agent’s emotions shift through communication, and as they form communities, the personalities of the agents emerge and evolve accordingly. This computational modeling approach and its findings will provide a new method for analyzing collective artificial intelligence.

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Sneha Ramshanker, Hungtang Ko, Radhika Nagpal

Robot swarms offer significant potential for inspecting di- verse infrastructure, ranging from bridges to space stations. However, effective inspection requires accurate robot localization, which demands substantial computational resources and limits productivity. Inspired by biological systems, we introduce a novel cooperative localization mech- anism that minimizes collective computation expenditure through self- organized sacrifice. Here, a few agents bear the computational burden of localization; through local interactions, they improve the inspection pro- ductivity of the swarm. Our approach adaptively maximizes inspection productivity for unconstrained trajectories in dynamic interaction and environmental settings. We demonstrate the optimality and robustness using mean-field analytical models, multi-agent simulations, and hard- ware experiments with metal climbing robots inspecting a 3D cylinder.

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