Mechanism-Based Thinking on Policy Diffusion. A Review of Current Approaches in Political Science

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has ended up in a diverse and often unconnected array of theoretical assumptions relying both on rational as well as constructivist reasoning – a circumstance calling for more theoretical coherence and consistency. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews and streamlines diffusion literature in political science. Diffusion mechanisms largely cluster around two causal arguments determining the desires and preferences of actors for choosing alternative policies. First, existing diffusion mechanisms accounts can be grouped according to the rationality for policy adoption, this means that government behavior is based on the instrumental considerations of actors or on constructivist arguments like norms and rule-driven actors. Second, diffusion mechanisms can either directly impact on the beliefs of actors or they might influence the structural conditions for decision-making. Following this logic, four basic diffusion mechanisms can be identified in mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: emulation, socialization, learning, and externalities.policy diffusion

Performance Debugging and Tuning using an Instruction-Set Simulator

Instruction-set simulators allow programmers a detailed level of insight into, and control over, the execution of a program, including parallel programs and operating systems. In principle, instruction set simulation can model any target computer and gather any statistic. Furthermore, such simulators are usually portable, independent of compiler tools, and deterministic-allowing bugs to be recreated or measurements repeated. Though often viewed as being too slow for use as a general programming tool, in the last several years their performance has improved considerably. We describe SIMICS, an instruction set simulator of SPARC-based multiprocessors developed at SICS, in its rôle as a general programming tool. We discuss some of the benefits of using a tool such as SIMICS to support various tasks in software engineering, including debugging, testing, analysis, and performance tuning. We present in some detail two test cases, where we've used SimICS to support analysis and performance tuning of two applications, Penny and EQNTOTT. This work resulted in improved parallelism in, and understanding of, Penny, as well as a performance improvement for EQNTOTT of over a magnitude. We also present some early work on analyzing SPARC/Linux, demonstrating the ability of tools like SimICS to analyze operating systems

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Is European Inter Regionalism a Relevant Approach for the World or Just for Europe? Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 7 No. 14 September 2007

[Introduction]. Most of the literature on inter regionalism seems to accept that, as a region, the European Union (EU) stimulates interregional cooperation in such a way that it may be responsible for adding a new category of relevant actors to world politics. This development is usually viewed by academics, mostly Europeans, positively, as a situation born from the affirmation of a European “soft power” vis-à-vis other alternatives of world order. Additionally, it is often assumed that the successful integration model of the EU is responsible for creating the conditions for emulation in other regional integration projects elsewhere, and implicitly that it could be the cornerstone of future world order. This paper explores this argument in order to provide a more accurate reading of European actions in the international landscape. Our starting point is the fact that the characteristics of the power that a nation state, or a group of nations such as the EU, exercises can be extrapolated from its internal make-up but should not be divorced from its actual behavior in the international arena. So far the behavior of the EU in that arena has been patterned along traditional lines of behavior of aspiring powers within historical settings dominated by a nation who faces problems in maintaining its hegemony. Thus, we argue that most of the literature on European “soft power” exceptionality is based on a reading of the EU internal make-up that is not paying attention to its actual behavior in the international arena. We accept that internal factors weigh on the foreign policy decisions made by a nation state or a group of nations, but also that the feeling of exceptionality – that a nation or group can develop because of its internal make-up – does not necessarily “spill over” to its international relations. So, we are going to test the proposition that, in order to protect its exceptionality, a nation state or group of nations applies different mechanisms to its international dealings, but those mechanisms are not different from the ones employed in similar international situations by nation states whose internal make-ups differ. In other words, the participation of a group of nations in the world order does not translate into a different behavior than that of previously isolated nation states, exemplified by the realist proposition that nation states and groups of nations still “value survival above all else.” And, in the case of the EU, this implies the survival of an internal make-up that has been successful for its members. As a consequence, inter regionalism can be seen as a European centered approach aimed at defending the permanence of the gains achieved by means of regional integration, but with little relevance in the medium and long term for a more democratic or more meaningful world order for developing nations. This paper contends that hegemony and emulation are just two faces of the power exercised by an actor within the international system. When a nation or group of nations has enough power to do so, it imposes its hegemony. When it does not have enough power, especially enough power to compete with an existing hegemon1 -- or it is unwilling to do so-- it would tend to emphasize other elements (its value system, for example) as an emulation horizon for other nations. Both behaviors translate into active foreign policies toward the rest of the world, and activism in foreign policy almost always is born out of the need to defend itself. In the case of the EU, its behavior towards Eastern European countries is that of a hegemon, according to the definition of hegemony in “Theorizing Regional Integration and Inter-Regional Relations (2)” (2006) – the EU establishes the goals, monitors the course of action, and supports the instruments required to carry out the undertakings agreed upon.(3) However, beyond Eastern Europe and Turkey, the EU lacks the power to impose its hegemony and is limited to resorting to an alleged “soft power” deal –i.e., inter regionalism. In the first section of this paper, we provide historical examples of the U.S., a nation state which has employed both hegemony and emulation as defense mechanisms at different stages in its history. This will demonstrate that, though much is made out of the European Union emulation, it is a mechanism to assert economic and political power that has been used before by individual nation states. And, in the second section, we discuss aspects of EU foreign policy towards developing nations that, when taken together, suggest that the adding of new relevant actors to world order by way of inter regionalism may help create a new balance of power under European tutelage, but this balance will not necessarily lead to a more democratic or lasting world order

Design of testbed and emulation tools

The research summarized was concerned with the design of testbed and emulation tools suitable to assist in projecting, with reasonable accuracy, the expected performance of highly concurrent computing systems on large, complete applications. Such testbed and emulation tools are intended for the eventual use of those exploring new concurrent system architectures and organizations, either as users or as designers of such systems. While a range of alternatives was considered, a software based set of hierarchical tools was chosen to provide maximum flexibility, to ease in moving to new computers as technology improves and to take advantage of the inherent reliability and availability of commercially available computing systems

Comprehensive Evaluation of OpenCL-based Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs

Deep learning has significantly advanced the state of the art in artificial intelligence, gaining wide popularity from both industry and academia. Special interest is around Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which take inspiration from the hierarchical structure of the visual cortex, to form deep layers of convolutional operations, along with fully connected classifiers. Hardware implementations of these deep CNN architectures are challenged with memory bottlenecks that require many convolution and fully-connected layers demanding large amount of communication for parallel computation. Multi-core CPU based solutions have demonstrated their inadequacy for this problem due to the memory wall and low parallelism. Many-core GPU architectures show superior performance but they consume high power and also have memory constraints due to inconsistencies between cache and main memory. FPGA design solutions are also actively being explored, which allow implementing the memory hierarchy using embedded BlockRAM. This boosts the parallel use of shared memory elements between multiple processing units, avoiding data replicability and inconsistencies. This makes FPGAs potentially powerful solutions for real-time classification of CNNs. Both Altera and Xilinx have adopted OpenCL co-design framework from GPU for FPGA designs as a pseudo-automatic development solution. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of Altera and Xilinx OpenCL frameworks for a 5-layer deep CNN is presented. Hardware resources, temporal performance and the OpenCL architecture for CNNs are discussed. Xilinx demonstrates faster synthesis, better FPGA resource utilization and more compact boards. Altera provides multi-platforms tools, mature design community and better execution times