arXiv subjects

Mauricio Figueroa

Publications and source records attributed to Mauricio Figueroa.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Mutations of Machine Speech

Algorithmic outputs now populate the digital environments through which contemporary life is organized. The role of law in facilitating and constituting (rather than merely responding to) these processes is gaining increasing traction across scholarly accounts. This inquiry traces the evolution of algorithmic outputs attending to their legal underpinnings and social implications, surfacing the mutations of machine speech. The first mutation redefined speech as data to be queried: search engines transformed the web from a space of information retrieval into an economic regime of algorithmic visibility. The second mutation reframed speech as engagement: social media platforms fused moderation with amplification, turning expression into a metric of attention, governed by corporate architectures. The third mutation emerges in conversational systems and interfaces, where generative text displaces information retrieval, bringing with it dense technolegal entanglements and profound epistemic consequences. Scholars of freedom of expression, informational privacy, and communication studies have long grappled with these dynamics, yet their implications for broader legal thought have also become urgent. This piece seeks to organize and clarify the evolving debate around algorithmic speech, making this critical but often fragmented discourse more accessible to wider legal and interdisciplinary audiences. In doing so, it bridges the gap between observing technological transformation and critically assessing the constitutive role of law within it, offering a conceptual resource for researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners navigating and contesting this evolving landscape.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

The politics of postmortem privacy

While the existence of postmortem privacy is increasingly acknowledged (such as the protection of the presence of deceased within digital spaces), far less attention has been paid to its internal instability: its scope (the extent of its application), justificatory foundations (why do we protect the deceased in the first place), and uneven articulation across jurisdictions (for example, some jurisdictions may tolerate or endorse practices that may be contestable in a different jurisdiction). This piece unearths the internal diversity of the concept by illuminating specific points of tension and conflict that the notion of postmortem privacy evokes. These points of tension are collectively refer to as the politics of postmortem privacy. To do so, this paper organises existing contributions of legal scholarship, placing them in dialogue with broader cultural, social, historical and political observations to illustrate the politics of postmortem privacy through three different loci of analysis: the transatlantic divide between European and American approaches, intra-European tensions within data protection governance, and postcolonial and post-authoritarian contexts in the Global South. While existing literature has glimpsed toward the former two, this piece contends that the latter deserves greater attention and inclusion in the debates around privacy and the dead. The piece explains, in continuity with existing scholarship, how postmortem privacy is assembled differently as a productive register through which societies negotiate memory and dignity, which play a great role in the governance of data of the dead and information flows.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

A Digital Twin Framework for Traffic-Aware UAV Pavement Monitoring in Open-Traffic Conditions

UAV-based pavement inspection can reduce the cost and risk of road-surface monitoring, but real-world deployment remains difficult when traffic, pedestrians, and temporary occlusions affect defect visibility. This paper presents a Unity-based digital twin framework for traffic-aware UAV pavement monitoring in open-traffic conditions. The proposed environment integrates procedurally generated road defects, dynamic traffic agents, autonomous UAV navigation, and a multitask YOLOv8n perception module for detecting road defects, pedestrians, and vehicles while classifying road-defect subtypes. After synthetic-domain fine-tuning, the perception model achieved 0.959 mAP@0.5 and 0.940 macro F1-score on a held-out synthetic test set generated from the simulator. The digital twin was then used to evaluate hover-and-recheck, micro-repositioning, and skip-and-revisit recovery strategies across different traffic densities and flight altitudes. Results show that flight altitude strongly affects inspection coverage, while recovery strategies introduce different trade-offs between coverage, mission duration, energy consumption, and revisit behaviour. These findings demonstrate that digital twins can support the development and evaluation of traffic-aware UAV inspection strategies before real-world deployment. The full implementation and trained models are available at https://github.com/EdwinTSalcedo/RDMO-DigitalTwin.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

The Limits of Artificial Companionship

This Article argues that conversations with companion chatbot should be subject to a clear structural distinction between commercial and non-commercial contexts. The insertion of undisclosed promotional content into affective or relational exchanges should be prohibited, as it collapses the boundary between market transaction and communicative intimacy in ways that erode user autonomy and conversational context. The Article begins by theorizing digital companionship as a sociotechnical form that reconfigures intimacy, dependence and relational vulnerability. It then introduces the potential economic harms derived from conversational advertising. The Article ultimately argues for a firm legal and social distinction between commercial and non-commercial conversational contexts as a precondition for the responsible stabilization of these technologies within social life.

cs.CY↗