Towards resilience through systems-based plant breeding. A review

How the growing world population can feed itself is a crucial, multi-dimensional problem that goes beyond sustainable development. Crop production will be affected by many changes in its climatic, agronomic, economic, and societal contexts. Therefore, breeders are challenged to produce cultivars that strengthen both ecological and societal resilience by striving for six international sustainability targets: food security, safety and quality; food and seed sovereignty; social justice; agrobiodiversity; ecosystem services; and climate robustness. Against this background, we review the state of the art in plant breeding by distinguishing four paradigmatic orientations that currently co-exist: community-based breeding, ecosystem-based breeding, trait-based breeding, and corporate-based breeding, analyzing differences among these orientations. Our main findings are: (1) all four orientations have significant value but none alone will achieve all six sustainability targets; (2) therefore, an overarching approach is needed: “systems-based breeding,” an orientation with the potential to synergize the strengths of the ways of thinking in the current paradigmatic orientations; (3) achieving that requires specific knowledge development and integration, a multitude of suitable breeding strategies and tools, and entrepreneurship, but also a change in attitude based on corporate responsibility, circular economy and true-cost accounting, and fair and green policies. We conclude that systems-based breeding can create strong interactions between all system components. While seeds are part of the common good and the basis of agrobiodiversity, a diversity in breeding approaches, based on different entrepreneurial approaches, can also be considered part of the required agrobiodiversity. To enable systems-based breeding to play a major role in creating sustainable agriculture, a shared sense of urgency is needed to realize the required changes in breeding approaches, institutions, regulations and protocols. Based on this concept of systems-based breeding, there are opportunities for breeders to play an active role in the development of an ecologically and societally resilient, sustainable agriculture

Multi-objective design of robust flight control systems

The aim of this work is to demonstrate the capabilities of evolutionary methods in the design of robust controllers for unstable fighter aircraft in the framework of H1 control theory. A multi–objective evolutionary algorithm is used to find the controller gains that minimize a weighted combination of the infinite–norm of the sensitivity function (for disturbance attenuation requirements) and complementary sensitivity function (for robust stability requirements). After considering a single operating point for a level flight trim condition of a F-16 fighter aircraft model, two different approaches will then be considered to extend the domain of validity of the control law: 1) the controller is designed for different operating points and gain scheduling is adopted; 2) a single control law is designed for all the considered operating points by multiobjective minimisation. The two approaches will be analysed and compared in terms of efficacy and required human and computational resources

Biometric presentation attack detection: beyond the visible spectrum

The increased need for unattended authentication in multiple scenarios has motivated a wide deployment of biometric systems in the last few years. This has in turn led to the disclosure of security concerns specifically related to biometric systems. Among them, presentation attacks (PAs, i.e., attempts to log into the system with a fake biometric characteristic or presentation attack instrument) pose a severe threat to the security of the system: any person could eventually fabricate or order a gummy finger or face mask to impersonate someone else. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and i i) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-theart techniques based on both handcrafted and deep learning features. The approach is evaluated on a database comprising over 4700 samples, stemming from 562 different subjects and 35 different presentation attack instrument (PAI) species. The results show the soundness of the proposed approach with a detection equal error rate (D-EER) as low as 1.35% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks

Enhancing sustainable biowaste management in the UK: the role of the commercial and community composting sectors

This paper considers the different roles of the commercial and community composting sectors in contributing to sustainable biowaste management in the UK. Legislation and policy have driven the rapid development of a diverse composting sector. The next section sets out this policy context. This is followed with an analysis of the growth in, and characteristics of, the commercial composting sector and then the community composting sector. It is contended that both sectors have different strengths in contributing to sustainable biowaste management. For commercial composting this is based around large-scale composting and quality products, for the community sector this is based around services in difficult collection environments, local sustainability, promoting social cohesion and building stronger communities. The extent to which the benefits from the commercial and composting sectors will be realised in the future will depend on whether the sectors can develop synergistically and the extent to which this is encouraged by national and local policies

Optimal dynamic operations scheduling for small-scale satellites

A satellite's operations schedule is crafted based on each subsystem/payload operational needs, while taking into account the available resources on-board. A number of operating modes are carefully designed, each one with a different operations plan that can serve emergency cases, reduced functionality cases, the nominal case, the end of mission case and so on. During the mission span, should any operations planning amendments arise, a new schedule needs to be manually developed and uplinked to the satellite during a communications' window. The current operations planning techniques over a reduced number of solutions while approaching operations scheduling in a rigid manner. Given the complexity of a satellite as a system as well as the numerous restrictions and uncertainties imposed by both environmental and technical parameters, optimising the operations scheduling in an automated fashion can over a flexible approach while enhancing the mission robustness. In this paper we present Opt-OS (Optimised Operations Scheduler), a tool loosely based on the Ant Colony System algorithm, which can solve the Dynamic Operations Scheduling Problem (DOSP). The DOSP is treated as a single-objective multiple constraint discrete optimisation problem, where the objective is to maximise the useful operation time per subsystem on-board while respecting a set of constraints such as the feasible operation timeslot per payload or maintaining the power consumption below a specific threshold. Given basic mission inputs such as the Keplerian elements of the satellite's orbit, its launch date as well as the individual subsystems' power consumption and useful operation periods, Opt-OS outputs the optimal ON/OFF state per subsystem per orbital time step, keeping each subsystem's useful operation time to a maximum while ensuring that constraints such as the power availability threshold are never violated. Opt-OS can provide the flexibility needed for designing an optimal operations schedule on the spot throughout any mission phase as well as the ability to automatically schedule operations in case of emergency. Furthermore, Opt-OS can be used in conjunction with multi-objective optimisation tools for performing full system optimisation. Based on the optimal operations schedule, subsystem design parameters are being optimised in order to achieve the maximal usage of the satellite while keeping its mass minimal