The MIMIC (Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause) model has been the dominant framework for shadow economy estimation since the 1970s. However, its linear, latent-variable architecture imposes constraints that modern machine l[REDACTED]g methods can overcome. This article evaluates neural network approaches to shadow economy estimation, comparing their predictive accuracy, non-linear pattern recogn...
Tax compliance is a central determinant of shadow economy size, yet the behavioral mechanisms linking government enforcement to citizen reporting decisions remain poorly understood. Agent-based modeling (ABM) offers a bottom-up computational approach to simulating how individual taxpayers respond to audit probability, penalty severity, and peer behavior. This article applies ABM to tax complian...
Every technology is a mirror. The telescope revealed our cosmic insignificance; the microscope revealed the teeming life we cannot see. Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, is the latest mirror—and perhaps the strangest. It reflects not the physical cosmos but the cognitive one: language, thought, reasoning, and the architecture of mind itself.
The dominant paradigm for AI memory—fixed-size context windows processed through self-attention—faces fundamental scalability barriers as large language models are deployed in long-horizon agentic tasks requiring hundreds of interaction sessions. This article investigates the transition from fixed context windows to persistent memory architectures through three research questions addressing sca...
We stand at an inflection point where artificial intelligence is transitioning from a specialized tool invoked for discrete tasks to an ambient partner woven into the fabric of every human decision. This article examines the trajectory toward ubiquitous AI integration---a state in which AI participates in virtually every action a person takes, much as automatic balance calculations underpin eve...
Beyond the Tool Paradigm: How Artificial Intelligence is Becoming the Core Identity of the Products We Create
Imagine a vast library, its shelves groaning under the weight of a million tomes—each page a fragment of human knowledge, scraped from the digital detritus of the internet. This is the teacher: a colossal language model, 1.8 trillion parameters strong, trained on exabytes of data. It speaks with the fluency of gods, predicts the next word with eerie precision, but its inner workings? A black bo...
From the earliest myths about the soul's twin to modern discussions of digital avatars, humanity has long imagined a counterpart that can "be there" when the flesh cannot. In the coming decade, this imagination is moving from metaphor to reality: an AI copy—a persistent, personalized artificial mind that mirrors a person's knowledge, preferences, habits, and emotional contours.
This systematic review examines the relationship between EU accession conditionality and shadow economy reform in candidate and potential candidate countries. We address three research questions: (1) How does EU accession conditionality affect the size and dynamics of shadow economies? (2) Which policy instruments within the conditionality framework are most effective at reducing shadow economi...
The 2026 Trusted Open Source Index provides a comprehensive ranking of open‑source projects across security, maintenance, community, and licensing dimensions. This annual review presents the final rankings for 2026, evaluates methodological improvements that increased predictive validity, and identifies categories with the strongest trust‑score growth. Our analysis of 1,200+ projects shows that...