The University of Bialystok is the largest university in the north-eastern region of Poland, educating in various fields of study, including humanities, social and natural sciences and mathematics. It has nine faculties, including a foreign one in Vilnius. Four faculties have been awarded the highest scientific category “A”. The University of Bialystok has the right to confer doctoral degrees in ten fields, as well as postdoctoral degrees in law, economics, chemistry, biology, history and physics.Over 13,000 students are being educated in 31 fields of study, including doctoral studies and postgraduate studies. The University employs nearly 800 academics, almost 200 professors among them.Every year the University carries out approximately 60 research projects, financed from domestic and foreign funds; it also benefits from the structural funds. Among the University’s many accomplishments are its participation in 6th and 7th Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration, Horizon 2020, Comenius and Aspera as well as the DAPHNE III programme.
One of the main challenges of social parasitism is deceiving the host’s recognition system and thereby exploiting redirected altruistic behavior. Various chemical strategies have evolved to achieve this goal. The most widespread, used also by the obligate slave-making ants, is camouflage or mimicry of the colony odour encoded in cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) composition. However, recent studies have shown that facultative slave-makers employ a different strategy: they manipulate the slaves’ recognition labels to make them resemble the parasite’s CHC profile. We examined the limitations of this strategy by focusing on incipient F. sanguinea colonies, where slaves are the majority. Our study revealed that callow F. sanguinea ants initially suppress their species-specific odour profile, which develops gradually over time, accompanied by an increase of the CHC amount per surface area in slave-maker workers. This allows the slaves to familiarise themselves with the parasite’s CHCs. We found that callow ants produce lower amounts of CHCs, and the relative abundance of certain compounds differs from that in older ants. Additionally, preimaginal stages of F. sanguinea ants acquire CHCs from the slaves, which are later incorporated into the recognition labels of the imagines. These findings support the proposition that the parasite’s manipulation strategy is limited by the slaves’ learning capacity, which is necessary to maintain colony cohesion. They also shed light on the selective pressures that might have led to the evolution of chemical mimicry in mature obligate slave-maker colonies. Social insects are characterized by colony-specific odours used for colony member recognition and ensuring proper targeting of altruistic behaviour. This barrier is challenged by social parasites that attempt to establish themselves in host colonies. Slave-making ants are unique in that they bring the host ants (so-called slaves) to their own nests. Like other social parasites, they use chemical mimicry by having a recognition odour similar to that of the host. However, the function of this adaptation is not clear, given that slave-makers live separately from host colonies. Our study demonstrates that in a facultative slave-making species, chemical mimicry is employed only in the initial phase of colony development when slaves constitute the majority of the slave-maker colony. This finding emphasizes the role of the slave proportion in the evolution of chemical strategies in slave-making ants.
It is clear that the automorphism group of the (15, 8, 4)-design of points and hyperplane complements of PG (3,2) is GL (4,2) . Using methods of point-line geometries, we determine the automorphism groups of the remaining four symmetric (15, 8, 4)-designs and describe their actions on the sets of points and blocks.
As schema languages for RDF data become more mature, we are seeing efforts to extend them with recursive semantics, applying diverse ideas from logic programming and description logics. While ShEx has an official recursive semantics based on greatest fixpoints (GFP), the discussion for SHACL is ongoing and seems to be converging towards least fixpoints (LFP). A practical study we perform shows that, indeed, ShEx validators implement GFP, whereas SHACL validators are more heterogeneous. This situation creates tension between ShEx and SHACL, as their semantic commitments appear to diverge, potentially undermining interoperability and predictability. We aim to clarify this design space by comparing the main semantic options in a principled yet accessible way, hoping to engage both theoreticians and practitioners, especially those involved in developing tools and standards. We present a unifying formal semantics that treats LFP, GFP, and supported model semantics (SMS), clarifying their relationships and highlighting a duality between LFP and GFP on stratified fragments. Next, we investigate to which extent the directions taken by SHACL and ShEx are compatible. We show that, although ShEx and SHACL seem to be going in different directions, they include large fragments with identical expressive power. Moreover, there is a strong correspondence between these fragments through the aforementioned principle of duality. Finally, we present a complete picture of the data and combined complexity of ShEx and SHACL validation under LFP, GFP, and SMS, showing that SMS comes at a higher computational cost under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions.
In Poland, doctoral education remained outside the mainstream of public policy interest for many years. The 2018 reform is the first major change in the systemic approach to education at this level. Significant deregulation at the national level has introduced new requirements for conducting doctoral education and the need for its new organisation. The reform aimed to decrease the number of doctoral candidates while enhancing the quality and effectiveness of PhD education. For the first time in history, doctoral education has begun to be subject to a real external evaluation of its quality, too. The legal status of PhD candidates was also redefined, aligning them more closely with young researchers. The 2018 Act granted universities considerable autonomy in organising doctoral schools, resulting in diverse structural solutions and management models. Doctoral education is also influenced by the new rules of scientific evaluation and the instability of rules in this area; financing of the science and higher education sector; and first experience in conducting doctoral schools. The paper analyses the adopted system solutions against the background of policy changes in Europe. It also presents the initial conclusions from the implementation of new systemic solutions.
The monograph offers a coherent and self-contained treatment of massless (ladder) representations of the conformal group U(2,2) and their restriction to the de Sitter group Sp(2,2), combining rigorous representation-theoretic analysis with fully explicit constructions. It systematically develops these representations, including the derivation of invariant bilinear forms and Casimir operators, and constructs vertex operators and two-point functions for low-helicity fields. A central and distinctive contribution is the introduction of a canonical Clifford-split-octonion framework, in which 8-component Majorana spinors are realized within an alternative composition algebra, providing a unified and intrinsically defined setting for the algebraic, spinorial, and geometric structures underlying the theory. By bridging abstract symmetry principles with concrete computational methods and physically motivated applications in quantum field theory and cosmology, the monograph advances both conceptual clarity and technical control. While primarily addressed to researchers in mathematical physics and related fields, the exposition is carefully structured to guide advanced graduate students through subtle constructions, maintaining accessibility without compromising mathematical precision.
