Glider Routing and Trajectory Optimisation in disaster assessment

In this paper, we introduce the Glider Routing and Trajectory Optimisation Problem (GRTOP), the problem of finding optimal routes and trajectories for a fleet of gliders with the mission of surveying a set of locations. We propose a novel MINLP formulation for the GRTOP. In our approach, we consider the gliders' flight dynamics during the definition of the routes. In order to achieve better convergence, we linearise the gliders' dynamics and relax the dynamic constraints of our model, converting the proposed MINLP into a MISOCP. Several different discretisation techniques and solvers are compared. The formulation is tested on 180 randomly generated instances. In addition, we solve instances inspired by risk maps of flooding-prone cities across the UK

Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Political and Media Discourses about Integrating Refugees in the UK

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article addresses political and media discourses about integrating refugees in the UK in the context of the “refugee crisis”. A discursive psychological approach is presented as the best way to understand what talk about the concept is used to accomplish in these debates. A large corpus of political discussions (13 hours of debate featuring 146 politicians) and 960 newspaper articles from the UK were discourse analysed. The analysis identified five dilemmas about integration: Integration is positive and necessary, but challenging; Host communities are presented as welcoming, but there are limits to their capacity; Refugees are responsible for integration, but host communities need to provide support; Good refugees integrate, bad ones don't; Refugees are vulnerable and are skilled. All are used to warrant the inclusion or exclusion of refugees. The responsibility of western nations to support refugees is therefore contingent on the refugees behaving in specific ways

Institutions, Democracy and Growth:A Long Run Analysis

In this paper, based on our past research, we have set ourselves the goal of testing the following hypothesis: the fundamental precondition for the due protection of private property is personal immunity in the broad sense, i.e. guarantees of rights such as the protection of life, personal freedoms and the inviolability of private property, including the requisite institutions for the enforcement of the same, often conceived of in political terms.Property Rights, Democracy

Gendered mobilities and vulnerabilities: refugee journeys to and in Europe

Recent refugee flows across the Mediterranean have been heterogeneous despite often being represented as predominantly male. However, there exist relatively little disaggregated data for adults and children which would enable us to achieve a better understanding of gendered mobilities in refugee journeys and settlement. Furthermore, such mobilities are affected by notions of vulnerability applied to those in need of protection, which prioritise the mobility of some categories. These include single parents, pregnant women, the elderly and unaccompanied minors. Drawing on data collected by international organisations and national sources (Greece, Italy) as well as a project EVI-MED (Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migration) (2015-2107), this article argues for the need to generate more disaggregated data (gender, age, family status) reflecting complex gendered mobilities and experiences of vulnerability

Between Bare Life and Everyday Life: Spatializing Europe’s Migrant Camps

The migrant and refugee camps that proliferated in Europe over recent years reflect extreme, if not bipolar, architectural conditions. While fenced carceral camps with prefabricated units were created top-down by state and municipal authorities, informal makeshift camps of tents and selfmade shelters were formed bottom-up along Europe’s migration routes. These contrasting spatial typologies often appear side by side in the open landscapes of rural fields, in urban landscapes at the heart or in the fringes of cities, and in the architectural landscapes of abandoned institutions and facilities such as factories, prisons, airports, and military barracks. The different ways in which camps are created, function, and are managed by multiple and changing actors and sovereignties, substantially influence the form of these spaces. So far, however, the radically different spatial typologies of the camp and the intersections between them have not been comparatively analysed. Based on empirical studies of the recently created migrant camps in Europe, this paper sets out to investigate their various configurations, what they reflect, and how they correspond with the culture and politics that shape them. While this paper mainly focuses on three particular camps in northern France – the container camp in Calais, the makeshift camp in Calais known as the “Jungle,” and La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe – it offers observations and analytical strategies relevant to camp spaces in other spaces and contexts and to camp studies more broadly

Leveraging Compositional Methods for Modeling and Verification of an Autonomous Taxi System

We apply a compositional formal modeling and verification method to an autonomous aircraft taxi system. We provide insights into the modeling approach and we identify several research areas where further development is needed. Specifically, we identify the following needs: (1) semantics of composition of viewpoints expressed in different specification languages, and tools to reason about heterogeneous declarative models; (2) libraries of formal models for autonomous systems to speed up modeling and enable efficient reasoning; (3) methods to lift verification results generated by automated reasoning tools to the specification level; (4) probabilistic contract frameworks to reason about imperfect implementations; (5) standard high-level functional architectures for autonomous systems; and (6) a theory of higher-order contracts. We believe that addressing these research needs, among others, could improve the adoption of formal methods in the design of autonomous systems including learning-enabled systems, and increase confidence in their safe operations.Comment: 2023 International Conference on Assured Autonomy (ICAA