As autonomous vehicles (AVs) revolutionize the global transportation landscape, their implications for emerging economies like Malaysia remain a subject of significant interest. This study delves into the multifaceted world of AV technology, focusing on Malaysia’s unique transportation challenges and opportunities. Through interviews with key stakeholders and experts, the research uncovers valuable insights into AV technology’s awareness, regulatory landscape, integration hurdles, potential benefits, and inclusivity impact in the Malaysian context. The study finds that while AVs hold the promise of improved road safety, reduced traffic congestion, and enhanced environmental sustainability, addressing challenges related to regulation, infrastructure, and public acceptance is imperative for successful integration. Additionally, AV technology has the potential to significantly enhance inclusivity in transportation, benefiting individuals with disabilities. The study underscores the need for holistic policy and infrastructure development to leverage the benefits of AV technology and pave the way for a sustainable and inclusive transportation future in Malaysia.

Increasing number of smart cities, the rise of technology and urban population engagement in urban management, and the scarcity of open data for evaluating sustainable urban development determines the necessity of developing new sustainability assessment approaches. This study uses passive crowdsourcing together with the adapted SULPiTER (Sustainable Urban Logistics Planning to Enhance Regional freight transport) methodology to assess the sustainable development of smart cities. The proposed methodology considers economic, environmental, social, transport, communication factors and residents’ satisfaction with the urban environment. The SULPiTER relies on experts in selection of relevant factors and determining their contribution to the value of a sustainability indicator. We propose an alternative approach based on automated data gathering and processing. To implement it, we build an information service around a formal knowledge base that accumulates alternative workflows for estimation of indicators and allows for automatic comparison of alternatives and aggregation of their results. A system architecture was proposed and implemented with the Astana Opinion Mining service as its part that can be adjusted to collect opinions in various impact areas. The findings hold value for early identification of problems, and increasing planning and policies efficiency in sustainable urban development.

The use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) has led to several opposing legal opinions regarding their violations of international law. The responsibility of the state, individuals, and corporations as producers, designers, and programmers is all being taken into consideration. If the decision to kill humans without “meaningful human control” is transferred to computers, it would be hard to attribute accountability for the actions of AWS to their corporations. Consequently, this means that corporate actors will enjoy impunity in all cases. The present paper indicates that the most significant problem arising from the use of AWS is the attribution of responsibility for its violation. Corporations are not subject to liability for the legitimate use of weapons under international law. The main problem with corporate responsibility, according to article 25 (4) of the Rome Statute, is that the provision only relates to individual criminal responsibility and that the ICC shall only have jurisdiction over natural persons. Nevertheless, corporations may be held accountable under aspects of international law. The paper proposes a more positive view on artificial intelligence, raising corporations’ accountability in international law by historically linking the judging of business leaders. The article identifies aiding and abetting as well as co-perpetration as the two modes of accountability under international law potentially linked to AWS. The study also explores the main ambiguity in international law relating to corporate aiding and abetting of human rights violations by presenting the confusion on determining the standards of these 2 modes of liability before the ICC and International ad doc Tribunal. Moreover, with the new age of war heavily dependent on AI and AWS, one cannot easily and precisely ascertain who must be held accountable for war crimes because of the unanticipated facts in decision-making combined with the aiding or abetting of violations of international law. International law prioritizes the goal of ending impunity for the individual and largely neglects the need to achieve the same goal for corporate complicity. In sum, progress to regulate the use of AWS by corporate actors could be enormously helpful to the cause of ending impunity.

The Circular Economy is one of the most prominent cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral concepts to emerge in recent decades. It has permeated academia, policymaking, business, NGOs, and the general public, leading to numerous applications of the concept, some of which only partially overlap. In this article, we review recent debates and research trends in the Circular Economy, outlining the ten most common groups of its conceptualizations using the PRISMA (Preferred Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) method. We then propose a post disciplinary and transnational research program on the Circular Economy that would not only combine hard and soft sciences in unprecedented ways but also have important practical applications, such as developing tools to embed the Circular Economy in natural, technical, economic, and socio-cultural settings.

For centuries, stem cuttings harvested from sexually mature trees have been recognized to be more difficult to root than those from juvenile shoots. This has been poorly understood and attributed to a combination of ontogenetic and physiological ageing. The recent suggestion that micro-RNA may play a key role in phase change has stimulated a re-examination of some old data that identified pre-severance light x nutrient interactions affecting the rooting ability of stem cuttings. This was linked to vigorous growth and active photosynthesis without constraint from accumulated starch. Support for the prime importance of physiological factors was also obtained when seeking to induce physiological youth in the crowns of ontogenetically mature trees by the induction of roots within the tree crown. Meanwhile, at the other end of the phase change spectrum, floral initiation occurred when the opposite set of environmental conditions prevailed so that growth was stunted, and carbohydrates accumulated in leaves and stems. A re-examination of this literature suggests that rooting ability is driven at the level of an individual leaf and internode emerging from the terminal bud affecting both morphological and physiological activity. In contrast, flowering occurs when internode elongation and assimilate mobilization were hindered. It is therefore suggested that the concepts of juvenility and ageing are not relevant to vegetative propagation and should instead be replaced by physiological and morphological ‘fitness’ to root.