Language technologies for a multilingual Europe

This volume of the series “Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing” includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe”, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups “Text Technology” and “Machine Translation” (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu)

Urbanising the event: how past processes, present politics and future plans shape London’s Olympic legacy

The aim of this thesis is to investigate issues connected with planning urban futures from scratch and, conversely, with the development of long‐term planning frameworks, by focussing on designs for the ‘Legacy’ transformation of the 2012 Olympic site. 2012 Games bid organisers claimed that Olympic‐related investments would stimulate in east London – a region characterised by de‐industrialisation and deprivation  ‐  the ‘regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there’ (IOC, p. 19). The development of a long‐term plan for the Olympic site post‐2012 was said to be key in realising this objective, providing the basis for leveraging ongoing investment and restructuring east London’s economy. I am interested in how conceptions of regeneration and legacy are formulated and evidenced in plans for the site’s future and in what these mean for ‘community’ – historic, present and imagined constituencies of local residents and workers. Olympic sceptics argue that the problem with projected Olympic legacies is that there is all too little guarantee that they will actually come to fruition. Meanwhile, regenerations of other post‐industrial sites in London are said to have produced unevenly distributed benefits, least advancing the prospects of those dispossessed by redevelopment and poorer, residual constituencies. This research considers how urban designs: a) frame future benefits connected with London 2012, and; b) mediate between the Olympic site as found, the needs and interests of local people and urban policy and planning objectives. Mixed methods and interdisciplinary perspectives are employed in examining conceptions and in empirically exploring the site’s transformation from 2005 to 2010. Aside from the major themes of legacy and regeneration, chapters are linked through attention on how transforming relationships between authorities and owners influence forms of urbanisation and use. These transformations help to reveal both actual and potential outcomes of 2012’s legacy plans

Harnessing innovation for open flood risk models and data

The harnessing of recent and future innovations in designing effective risk platforms, models, and data is essential to the reduction of flood risk. Doing so ensures those assets can gain long-term traction for disaster risk reduction, while realistically reflecting an uncertain world. Although the central concepts of flood risk analysis are well established, fragmentation around them is considerable in the data and models used in practice. The following discusses the reasons for this fragmentation and provides recommendations for addressing it

5G-PPP Technology Board:Delivery of 5G Services Indoors - the wireless wire challenge and solutions

The 5G Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) has focused its research and innovation activities mainly on outdoor use cases and supporting the user and its applications while on the move. However, many use cases inherently apply in indoor environments whereas their requirements are not always properly reflected by the requirements eminent for outdoor applications. The best example for indoor applications can be found is the Industry 4.0 vertical, in which most described use cases are occurring in a manufacturing hall. Other environments exhibit similar characteristics such as commercial spaces in offices, shopping malls and commercial buildings. We can find further similar environments in the media & entertainment sector, culture sector with museums and the transportation sector with metro tunnels. Finally in the residential space we can observe a strong trend for wireless connectivity of appliances and devices in the home. Some of these spaces are exhibiting very high requirements among others in terms of device density, high-accuracy localisation, reliability, latency, time sensitivity, coverage and service continuity. The delivery of 5G services to these spaces has to consider the specificities of the indoor environments, in which the radio propagation characteristics are different and in the case of deep indoor scenarios, external radio signals cannot penetrate building construction materials. Furthermore, these spaces are usually “polluted” by existing wireless technologies, causing a multitude of interreference issues with 5G radio technologies. Nevertheless, there exist cases in which the co-existence of 5G new radio and other radio technologies may be sensible, such as for offloading local traffic. In any case the deployment of networks indoors is advised to consider and be planned along existing infrastructure, like powerlines and available shafts for other utilities. Finally indoor environments expose administrative cross-domain issues, and in some cases so called non-public networks, foreseen by 3GPP, could be an attractive deployment model for the owner/tenant of a private space and for the mobile network operators serving the area. Technology-wise there exist a number of solutions for indoor RAN deployment, ranging from small cell architectures, optical wireless/visual light communication, and THz communication utilising reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. For service delivery the concept of multi-access edge computing is well tailored to host virtual network functions needed in the indoor environment, including but not limited to functions supporting localisation, security, load balancing, video optimisation and multi-source streaming. Measurements of key performance indicators in indoor environments indicate that with proper planning and consideration of the environment characteristics, available solutions can deliver on the expectations. Measurements have been conducted regarding throughput and reliability in the mmWave and optical wireless communication cases, electric and magnetic field measurements, round trip latency measurements, as well as high-accuracy positioning in laboratory environment. Overall, the results so far are encouraging and indicate that 5G and beyond networks must advance further in order to meet the demands of future emerging intelligent automation systems in the next 10 years. Highly advanced industrial environments present challenges for 5G specifications, spanning congestion, interference, security and safety concerns, high power consumption, restricted propagation and poor location accuracy within the radio and core backbone communication networks for the massive IoT use cases, especially inside buildings. 6G and beyond 5G deployments for industrial networks will be increasingly denser, heterogeneous and dynamic, posing stricter performance requirements on the network. The large volume of data generated by future connected devices will put a strain on networks. It is therefore fundamental to discriminate the value of information to maximize the utility for the end users with limited network resources

Cooperative Enterprises in Australia and Italy

This book arises from a three-year comparative research program concerning co-operative enterprises in Australia and Italy. The book explores the historical development, legal framework and the peak organisations of co-operatives in the two countries. Specific comparative chapters focus on consumer, credit, and worker-producer co-operatives. The book deepens the analysis of co-operatives by containing chapters that examine specific theoretical and empirical issues such as the theory of co-operative firms as collective entrepreneurial action. Monographic chapters include more in depth analysis of specific typologies of co-operatives, such as social and community oriented co-operatives, some of which were created to contrast organized crime in Southern Italy. The book concludes with an assessment of the implications of the project for public policy

IMPACT UMaine Research, June 2022

A busy year for the UMaine Portland Gateway and the EMPOWER program participants. Featured stories include: The UMaine Portland Gateway completes inaugural year; UMaine EMPOWER program hosts workshop; New Garnegie R1 Classification webpage launched; 2022 Faculty Research Funds Announced; UMaine and lobster industry team up on innovative collaboration

A critique of the Maastricht road to European Monetary Union: Bringing labour market analysis back in.

This thesis criticises the current project of European Monetary Union, based on the Maastricht convergence criteria. It attempts to reinterpret the issue of economic convergence by looking into structural aspects from a political economic point of view. Taking a structural approach, I examine the socio-political sustainability of EMU. The thesis applies the theoretical framework set forth by the French regulation school. Drawing on the regulationists' notion of 'regime', the concept of structural / regime compatibility among member states is introduced. The need to study non-monetary regimes in assessing the viability of monetary union is stressed by drawing on the historical experiences of monetary unions in the 19th century - the Latin Monetary Union, the Scandinavian Monetary Union and the American Monetary Union. Among the non-monetary structural regimes, the examination of national labour market regimes is crucial. After the loss of exchange rates as a means of adjustment, labour market adjustment becomes the key in coping with asymmetric economic shocks. Labour market flexibility is considered to be the main weapon of adjustment in post-EMU Europe. The comparison of three main labour market regimes in Europe - France, Germany and Britain - shows that they diverge substantially in their adjustment mechanisms and in the nature of their flexibility. Following Robert Boyer, I argue that there is fundamental incompatibility in national ideologies, concepts and practices of labour market policies in Europe. Without a common labour market regime, such differences could lead to major tensions between the Anglo-Saxon model of'external flexibility' and the continental European model of 'internal flexibility'. The thesis aims to show where the difficulties lie for the management of the future 'Euroland', including Britain, in order to indicate the tremendous task facing European policy makers

Sustainable Industrial Engineering along Product-Service Life Cycle/Supply Chain

Sustainable industrial engineering addresses the sustainability issue from economic, environmental, and social points of view. Its application fields are the whole value chain and lifecycle of products/services, from the development to the end-of-life stages. This book aims to address many of the challenges faced by industrial organizations and supply chains to become more sustainable through reinventing their processes and practices, by continuously incorporating sustainability guidelines and practices in their decisions, such as circular economy, collaboration with suppliers and customers, using information technologies and systems, tracking their products’ life-cycle, using optimization methods to reduce resource use, and to apply new management paradigms to help mitigate many of the wastes that exist across organizations and supply chains. This book will be of interest to the fast-growing body of academics studying and researching sustainability, as well as to industry managers involved in sustainability management