60,282 research outputs found
Mobile transitions : exploring synergies for urban sustainability research
Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the social studies of technology (SST or ‘transition studies’). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies, specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through (2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation. The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations
Adaptation to criticality through organizational invariance in embodied agents
Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other
regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at
phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality
suggests that there may be general principles inducing this behaviour, yet
there is no well-founded theory for understanding how criticality is generated
at a wide span of levels and contexts. In order to explore how criticality
might emerge from general adaptive mechanisms, we propose a simple learning
rule that maintains an internal organizational structure from a specific family
of systems at criticality. We implement the mechanism in artificial embodied
agents controlled by a neural network maintaining a correlation structure
randomly sampled from an Ising model at critical temperature. Agents are
evaluated in two classical reinforcement learning scenarios: the Mountain Car
and the Acrobot double pendulum. In both cases the neural controller appears to
reach a point of criticality, which coincides with a transition point between
two regimes of the agent's behaviour. These results suggest that adaptation to
criticality could be used as a general adaptive mechanism in some
circumstances, providing an alternative explanation for the pervasive presence
of criticality in biological and cognitive systems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1704.0525
Sustainability experiments in the agri-food system : uncovering the factors of new governance and collaboration success
In recent years, research, society and industry recognize the need to transform the agri-food system towards sustainability. Within this process, sustainability experiments play a crucial role in transforming the structure, culture and practices. In literature, much attention is given to new business models, even if the transformation of conventional firms toward sustainability may offer opportunities to accelerate the transformation. Further acceleration could be achieved through collaboration of multiple actors across the agri-food system, but this calls for a systems approach. Therefore, we developed and applied a new sustainability experiment systems approach (SESA) consisting of an analytical framework that allows a reflective evaluation and cross-case analysis of multi-actor governance networks based on business and learning evaluation criteria. We performed a cross-case analysis of four agri-food sustainability experiments in Flanders to test and validate SESA. Hereby, the key factors of the success of collaboration and its performance were identified at the beginning of a sustainability experiment. Some of the key factors identified were risk sharing and the drivers to participate. We are convinced that these results may be used as an analytical tool for researchers, a tool to support and design new initiatives for policymakers, and a reflective tool for participating actors
On the right track? : evaluation as a tool to guide spatial transitions
Spatial developments are becoming more and more non-linear, dynamic and complex with a wide range of possible actors. The awareness of uncertainty in spatial planning is growing and therefore, projects need to integrate a high level of flexibility. But at the same time, a growing demand for taking more informed and well-argued decisions is noticeable. Predictions out of the ‘best estimated model’ are no longer credible and no longer accepted, because they are too fragile and uncertain. How can we keep these long-lasting, multi-actor projects in permanent transition on the right track?
This article presents an evaluation methodology that goes beyond the traditional, rational evaluation attitudes with a low level of flexibility being too linear to match the current spatial developments. There is a need for more interrelated, alert and flexible means of evaluation, co-evolving with the processes and current dynamics in spatial planning. Therefore, different evaluation approaches are introduced, depending on the specific interdependencies of the object of evaluation and its context. Subsequently, the theoretical framework is translated towards a more practical level. A case study conducted in Flanders illustrates the current spatial developments and a possible evaluation approach, incorporated from the beginning of the process, to guide this kind of projects
Partitioning Relational Matrices of Similarities or Dissimilarities using the Value of Information
In this paper, we provide an approach to clustering relational matrices whose
entries correspond to either similarities or dissimilarities between objects.
Our approach is based on the value of information, a parameterized,
information-theoretic criterion that measures the change in costs associated
with changes in information. Optimizing the value of information yields a
deterministic annealing style of clustering with many benefits. For instance,
investigators avoid needing to a priori specify the number of clusters, as the
partitions naturally undergo phase changes, during the annealing process,
whereby the number of clusters changes in a data-driven fashion. The
global-best partition can also often be identified.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech,
and Signal Processing (ICASSP
Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Directed Small-World Networks
Many social, biological, and economic systems can be approached by complex
networks of interacting units. The behaviour of several models on small-world
networks has recently been studied. These models are expected to capture the
essential features of the complex processes taking place on real networks like
disease spreading, formation of public opinion, distribution of wealth, etc. In
many of these systems relations are directed, in the sense that links only act
in one direction (outwards or inwards). We investigate the effect of directed
links on the behaviour of a simple spin-like model evolving on a small-world
network. We show that directed networks may lead to a highly nontrivial phase
diagram including first and second-order phase transitions out of equilibrium.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX format, 4 postscript figs, uses eps
StreamLearner: Distributed Incremental Machine Learning on Event Streams: Grand Challenge
Today, massive amounts of streaming data from smart devices need to be
analyzed automatically to realize the Internet of Things. The Complex Event
Processing (CEP) paradigm promises low-latency pattern detection on event
streams. However, CEP systems need to be extended with Machine Learning (ML)
capabilities such as online training and inference in order to be able to
detect fuzzy patterns (e.g., outliers) and to improve pattern recognition
accuracy during runtime using incremental model training. In this paper, we
propose a distributed CEP system denoted as StreamLearner for ML-enabled
complex event detection. The proposed programming model and data-parallel
system architecture enable a wide range of real-world applications and allow
for dynamically scaling up and out system resources for low-latency,
high-throughput event processing. We show that the DEBS Grand Challenge 2017
case study (i.e., anomaly detection in smart factories) integrates seamlessly
into the StreamLearner API. Our experiments verify scalability and high event
throughput of StreamLearner.Comment: Christian Mayer, Ruben Mayer, and Majd Abdo. 2017. StreamLearner:
Distributed Incremental Machine Learning on Event Streams: Grand Challenge.
In Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Distributed and
Event-based Systems (DEBS '17), 298-30
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