The changing dynamics of security in an enlarged European Union. Challenge Paper No. 12, 24 October 2008

The relation between liberty and security has been highly contestable over the past 10 years in the EU integration process. With the expansion of the EU’s powers into domains falling within the scope of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, liberty and its relation to security has brought a new range of issues, struggles and debates. Acts of political violence labelled as ‘terrorism’ and human mobility at the European and international levels have justified the construction of these phenomena as threats to the security and safety of the nation state. They have legitimised the development of normative responses that go beyond traditional configurations and raise fundamental dilemmas for the security and liberty of the individual. This paper assesses the ways in which the notions and perceptions of security and insecurity in the EU have evolved as political values and legal/policy goals, and how they are being transformed. It aims at synthesising the results of the research conducted since 2004 by the Justice and Home Affairs Section of CEPS through the CHALLENGE project (Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security). The research has been premised upon one basic, but determining question: To what extent has the evolution of the international context altered the dynamics of liberty and security in the EU

Representing the family: how does the state 'think family'?

Over the last decade the family and family-centred policies and practices have received increasing attention within the public service agenda, culminating in the emphatic instruction to ‘think family’ individually, collectively and institutionally. This has occurred at a time when the sociology of the family has increasingly emphasised the difficulties of thinking family in a coherent way. In this article we explore this agenda through an examination of the representational tools with which public service professionals and managers have been recently equipped. We conclude by questioning the adequacy of these tools for effectively representing family relations

Extend Commitment Protocols with Temporal Regulations: Why and How

The proposal of Elisa Marengo's thesis is to extend commitment protocols to explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included in the thesis.Comment: Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium and Poster Session of the 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI), pages 1-8 (arXiv:1107.1686

On systematic approaches for interpreted information transfer of inspection data from bridge models to structural analysis

In conjunction with the improved methods of monitoring damage and degradation processes, the interest in reliability assessment of reinforced concrete bridges is increasing in recent years. Automated imagebased inspections of the structural surface provide valuable data to extract quantitative information about deteriorations, such as crack patterns. However, the knowledge gain results from processing this information in a structural context, i.e. relating the damage artifacts to building components. This way, transformation to structural analysis is enabled. This approach sets two further requirements: availability of structural bridge information and a standardized storage for interoperability with subsequent analysis tools. Since the involved large datasets are only efficiently processed in an automated manner, the implementation of the complete workflow from damage and building data to structural analysis is targeted in this work. First, domain concepts are derived from the back-end tasks: structural analysis, damage modeling, and life-cycle assessment. The common interoperability format, the Industry Foundation Class (IFC), and processes in these domains are further assessed. The need for usercontrolled interpretation steps is identified and the developed prototype thus allows interaction at subsequent model stages. The latter has the advantage that interpretation steps can be individually separated into either a structural analysis or a damage information model or a combination of both. This approach to damage information processing from the perspective of structural analysis is then validated in different case studies

FlexMM:A standard method for material descriptions in FEM

This article discusses a number of key issues concerning simulation-based digital twins in the domain of multistage processes. Almost all production processes are multistage in nature, and so most digital twins involve multiple physical phenomena, process steps and different solvers for the simulations. Good interoperability between model solvers and processes are key to achieving a functional digital twin. Passing information between steps can be challenging, complex and time consuming, especially for material data, because the constitutive model interacts with the full modeling environment: material behavior is interdependent with the history of the process, the solver subroutines and the boundary conditions. This work proposes a flexible yet robust standardization approach, called FlexMM, for dealing with material data, constitutive models, measurement data or mathematical models to overcome part of the abovementioned complexity. The implementation of FlexMM consists of a general rule structure in which constitutive behavior is described, as well as its interaction with the subroutines used by the finite element solver. The definition of the constitutive model is stored in a separate file, in which the material behavior can be described in a user selected format, such as look-up tables, standard statistical models, machine learning or analytical expressions. After a calculation step, the new local material properties are mapped to a file to facilitate the next history-dependent step. In this way, the interaction between the different fabrication steps and processes can be incorporated. A material/process case study is presented to demonstrate the flexibility and robustness of FlexMM

Geospatial data integration with Semantic Web services: the eMerges approach

Geographic space still lacks the semantics allowing a unified view of spatial data. Indeed, as a unique but all encompassing domain, it presents specificities that geospatial applications are still unable to handle. Moreover, to be useful, new spatial applications need to match human cognitive abilities of spatial representation and reasoning. In this context, eMerges, an approach to geospatial data integration based on Semantic Web Services (SWS), allows the unified representation and manipulation of heterogeneous spatial data sources. eMerges provides this integration by mediating legacy spatial data sources to high-level spatial ontologies through SWS and by presenting for each object context dependent affordances. This generic approach is applied here in the context of an emergency management use case developed in collaboration with emergency planners of public agencies

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Interoperability and governance in the European Health Data Space regulation

The proposal for a regulation on the European Health Data Space (EHDS) is a much-awaited project. It aspires to create a harmonised framework – a common European data space – for the administration of health data (primary use) across Member States and the promotion of healthcare research and innovation (by establishing rules for the secondary use of health data). As such, although the EHDS proposal is a legal document, in its essence, it includes provisions that introduce not only legal, but also institutional, and technical-infrastructural changes. Overall, together with the Regulation 2017/745 on medical devices, the Data Governance Act (DGA), the Data Act, the AI Act, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EHDS proposal will complete the regulatory canvas for the use of health data in the European Union. Although we are supportive of the EHDS initiative, there are aspects of the proposal that require further debate, reconsideration, and amendments. Following previous work on potential power asymmetries encapsulated in the Proposal, in this commentary, we focus on the provisions of/for interoperability of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems (Ar. 14–32) as well as the provisions on the structure of Health Data Access bodies and their cross-border organisation (section 3). We recommend a series of amendments to orientate the EHDS project better to its constitutive goals: the promotion of public health research and respect for the rights of the individuals