Artificial intelligence-grounded machine translation has fundamentally changed public awareness and attitudes towards multilingual communication. In some language pairs, the accuracy, quality and efficiency of machine-translated texts of certain types can be quite high. Hence, the end-user acceptability and reliance on machine-translated content could be justified. However, machine translation in small and/or low-resource languages might yield significantly lower quality, which in turn may lead to potentially negative consequences and risks if machine translation is used in high-risk contexts without awareness of the drawbacks, critical assessment and modifications to the raw output. The current study, which is part of a more extensive project focusing on the societal impact of machine translation, is aimed at revealing the attitudes towards usability and quality as perceived from the end-user perspective. The research questions addressed revolve around the machine translation types used, purposes of using machine translation, perceived quality of the generated output, and actions taken to improve the quality by users with various backgrounds. The research findings rely on a survey of the population (N = 402) conducted in 2021 in Lithuania. The study reveals the frequent use of machine translation for a diversity of purposes. The most common uses include work, research and studies, and household environments. A higher level of education correlates with user dissatisfaction with the generated quality and actions taken to improve it. The findings also reveal that age correlates with the use of machine translation. Sustainable measures to reduce machine translation related risks have to be established based on the perceptions of different social groups in different societies and cultures.

Tortuosity is one of parameters which describe a state of the eye fundus blood vessels. Tortuosity can be estimated from the detected vessels in optical fundus images. The increase in vessel tortuosity was observed in eyes of patients with advanced background diabetic retinopathy, papilloedema, even in some completely healthy eyes (in this case tortuosity does not change in time). Though many methods to estimate eye vessel tortuosity exist, dependencies between tortuosity and parameters of cardiovascular system are not fully explored. In this paper we studied whether different tortuosity estimation algorithms can detect the change of blood pressure in the cylindrical segment of the vessel modeled using finite elements method. In addition we studied how does one inhomogeneity added inside the blood vessel influence the tortuosity and what are the relationships between the different tortuosity estimates and blood pressure? We found that even single inhomogeneity of the vessel wall triggers the increase of tortuosity when inner blood pressure increases. The resulting dependencies among different tortuosity estimates and blood pressure are mostly nonlinear.

Conventional finite element method (FEM) is capable of obtaining wave solutions, but large discretized structures at high frequency require high computational resources, the computational domain can be reduced by combining FEM with analytical assumption for guided wave. Semi Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) formulation for immersed waveguide in perfect fluid is used for acquiring propagating wave modes as dynamic equilibrium states. Modes are solutions to eigenvalue problem and provide with important characteristic features of the guided waves – phase velocity, attenuation, wave structure, etc. The effect of surrounding leaky medium is modeled via traction boundary condition, which is based on assumption of the continuity of stresses at solid-fluid interface. The boundary condition causes wave attenuation due to energy leakage into outer medium. The derivation of the eigen-problem takes into account complex wavenumbers of leaky wave in fluid and guided wave in a three-dimensional waveguide. Linearization procedure for solving nonlinear eigenvalue problem is used. Dispersion relations for immersed waveguide with Rayleigh damping are obtained. The limits of applications of Rayleigh damping and convergence analysis of immersed waveguide model are discussed.

Analysis of publications related to category of smart cities as smart social system shows differences between all characteristics describing the smart city and especially the contribution of digital dimension to the general concept of smart city. Differences and similarities of opinions of different authors about the digital dimension have been noted. The practical analysis has been prepared using EUROSTAT, the open databases published by international projects and Lithuanian committee for development of information society. A methodic that uses statistical comparison of places of states and cities in lists ranked by various indicators of smartness has been tried out. The paper compares three cities (of a similar size) of Baltic countries (Kaunas, Liepaja and Tartu) from the point of view of digital dimension. The investigation has shown that their positions in the abovementioned lists correspond to the positions of the states. Further research is required to find out to what extent that is true for other cities. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.13.3.8295

There are two main approaches to achieving proportional representation in elections: the single transferable vote and methods based on party lists. This paper discusses ways to use the single transferable vote while using some of the main features used with the largest remainder method, such as the electoral threshold. The investigation has shown that the Weighted Inclusive Gregory method is a suitable replacement for the largest remainder method when it is desirable to avoid wasted votes and to handle independent candidates in a straightforward way, but it is also desirable to keep the results as close to the ones achieved under the largest remainder method as possible. The investigation also led to the development of an algorithm for using the single transferable vote when preference lists are based on party lists, exploiting commonalities and symmetries between the patterns of preferences given in the votes. It has been shown that such an algorithm makes the calculations faster than the use of ordinary implementations of the single transferable vote when the numbers of seats and candidates are high, as commonly happens when methods based on party lists are used.