The EU’s ‘strategic partnership’ with China in a post-Brexit world:Recalibrating internal dynamics and facing up to external challenges

The UK has played a critical role in shaping EU–China relations. Policymakers need to carefully consider the extent to which Brexit will weaken the EU’s collective power – shifting the balance in China’s favour – and impact prospects for increasing EU involvement in East Asia. Brexit arrives at a moment when negotiations for an ambitious bilateral investment agreement continue – with an eye on an eventual free trade agreement – while EU policymakers increasingly perceive challenges arising from the expansion of China’s global presence, exemplified by the Belt and Road Initiative, the creation of alternative international institutions, and its behaviour in the South China Sea disputes. As both the EU and China emerge as global powers, the significance of their relationship’s trajectory extends beyond bilateral confines. I analyse how the relationship’s contemporary dynamics are playing out and likely to evolve. Assessing the impact of Brexit on the relative power balance, specifically the EU27’s collective economic, military and political power, sets the scene for mapping out the ‘state of play’ in four crucial issue areas, highlighting the UK’s preferences and input. This leads to consideration of how the loss of resources and shifting constellation of preferences among the EU27 could affect the attainment of strategic objectives. I argue that while Brexit does not fundamentally disrupt the EU–China relationship, it will weaken the EU’s capacity to respond to China’s rise and necessitates a recalibration to the new constellation of Member State preferences and reduced resources

Their memory:exploring veterans’ voices, virtual reality and collective memory

This paper focuses on the virtual reality (VR) project Their Memory and details the development and evaluation of virtual reality environments and experiences with respect to its impact on young people (14-35 demographic) with the narratives of veterans in Scotland. As part of the AHRC Immersive Experiences program, Their Memory was created to explore how game design techniques and immersive technology could be used to enhance existing historical research and enrich narratives to bring expansive experiences to hard-to-reach audiences. The project worked directly with the veterans’ charity, Poppyscotland, to create an environment and experience that would resonate with new audiences, and explore documentary and storytelling techniques for the commemoration of war and conflict. The design of the project evolved through co-design sessions with veterans and young people and culminated in the creation of a short, thought-provoking, narrative-driven experience. The VR experience enabled players to connect with the memories of veterans in Scotland and exploring the different conflicts or situations they experienced and how they make sense of them. The project brought together cross-sector expertise to research how immersive experiences can help memory-based organizations in engaging with wider audiences, raise awareness, and diversify current learning outputs. The paper details the design and development of the Virtual Reality project, through co-design, and how this engaged the audience and evolved the experience created. The paper includes a summative evaluation of events conducted with schoolchildren to assess the project and concludes with how the project evidences impact upon audiences and the potential for both technology and the experience

Efficient Probabilistic Performance Bounds for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance bounds in the inverse reinforcement learning setting---where the true reward function is unknown and only samples of expert behavior are given. We propose a sampling method based on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning that uses demonstrations to determine practical high-confidence upper bounds on the $\alpha$-worst-case difference in expected return between any evaluation policy and the optimal policy under the expert's unknown reward function. We evaluate our proposed bound on both a standard grid navigation task and a simulated driving task and achieve tighter and more accurate bounds than a feature count-based baseline. We also give examples of how our proposed bound can be utilized to perform risk-aware policy selection and risk-aware policy improvement. Because our proposed bound requires several orders of magnitude fewer demonstrations than existing high-confidence bounds, it is the first practical method that allows agents that learn from demonstration to express confidence in the quality of their learned policy.Comment: In proceedings AAAI-1

Baseline Update for US Agricultural Markets

This document serves as a mid-year update to the 2007 FAPRI baseline prepared in January 2007. It reflects market developments and incorporates estimate information available in early August 2007.This report examines the impacts of the commodity provisions of the legislation introduced by U.S. Representative Ron Kind entitled the “Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007.”Agricultural and Food Policy,

Impacts of the Commodity Provisions of the Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007 (FARM 21)

This report examines the impacts of the commodity provisions of the legislation introduced by U.S. Representative Ron Kind entitled the “Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act of 2007.”Agricultural and Food Policy,

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008: Preliminary Analysis of Selected Provisions

This report provides preliminary analysis of impacts of selected Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (FCEA) provisions.Agricultural and Food Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

An instinct for detection: psychological perspectives on CCTV surveillance

The aim of this article is to inform and stimulate a proactive, multidisciplinary approach to research and development in surveillance-based detective work. In this article we review some of the key psychological issues and phenomena that practitioners should be aware of. We look at how human performance can be explained with reference to our biological and evolutionary legacy. We show how critical viewing conditions can be in determining whether observers detect or overlook criminal activity in video material. We examine situations where performance can be surprisingly poor, and cover situations where, even once confronted with evidence of these detection deficits, observers still underestimate their susceptibility to them. Finally we explain why the emergence of these relatively recent research themes presents an opportunity for police and law enforcement agencies to set a new, multidisciplinary research agenda focused on relevant and pressing issues of national and international importance