Labour activism and social movement unionism in the gig economy. Food delivery workers' struggles in Italy

This article aims to explore the forms of collective actions that are emerging in new sectors of digital capitalism. In particular, it enquires into the mobilisation of food delivery workers that has been de-veloping since 2016 in four Italian cities: Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence. Despite the high level of pre-carisation and atomisation that characterise this subset of gig economy jobs, the so-called riders were able to organise into self-organised workers' collectives, which not only gave rise to many protest events, but also drew the attention of the institutions and the media. What are the conditions and the strategies that made this possible? And, more broadly, what does this case tell us about the possibility of labour activism in gig economy work? We argue that the high level of activation of food delivery workers is to be related to their capability to provide resources for reconstructing social ties among workers and, in turn, for translat-ing them into political engagement and contentious action. This is realised through the combination of three factors that will be scrutinised in the paper. The analysis points out that although precarisation cre-ates significant obstacles to organisation and mobilisation, collective action does actually take place also in the gig economy, in certain conditions

Target-Aware Neural Architecture Search and Deployment for Keyword Spotting

Keyword spotting (KWS) utilities have become increasingly popular on a wide range of mobile and home devices, representing a prolific application field for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are commonly exploited to perform keyword classification. Addressing the challenges of targeting such resource-constrained platforms, requires a careful definition of the CNN architecture and the overall system implementation. These reasons have led to a growing need for design and optimization flows, able to intrinsically take into account the system's performance when ported on the target platform. In this work, we present a design methodology based on Neural Architecture Search, exploited to combine the exploration of the optimal network topology, the audio pre-processing scheme, and the data quantization policy. The proposed design flow includes target-awareness in the exploration loop, comparing the different design alternatives according to a model-based pre-evaluation of metrics like execution latency, memory footprint, and energy consumption, evaluated considering the application's execution on the target processing platform. We have tested our design flow to obtain target-specific CNNs for a resource-constrained commercial platform, the ST SensorTile. Considering two different application scenarios, enabling the comparison with the state-of-the-art of efficient CNN-based models for KWS, we have obtained up to a 1.8% accuracy improvement and a 40% footprint reduction in the most favorable case

Sociology and its public

In this interview, Craig Calhoun retraces his peculiar trajectory that, from his first interests in realist cinema and anthropology, brought him to become one of the most original contemporary public sociologists. Discussing his multidisciplinary education between Columbia, Manchester and Oxford he reassembles his own particular intellectual path that mixes his youth activism in the peace movement and engagement in the Western Marxist debate of the 1970s, while at the same time studying Hegel, German classic philosophy and Continental social theorists. But it is through these apparent digressions that his peculiar way of practicing social research took shape. From his first anthropological inquiries on the Tallensi in Ghana and on the historical sociology of working class movements, Calhoun’s incursions into different disciplinary fields do indeed constitute his critical approach to social sciences that always tries to trace back the specific and contextual outcomes of empirical research to general historical-sociological dynamics