External Stresses in West Africa: Cross-border Violence and Cocaine Trafficking

The 2011 World Development Report on conflict, security and development highlights the centrality of ‘external stresses’ for generating insecurity and increasing the risk of violence in fragile areas. West African states are particularly vulnerable, with serious concerns around cross-border violence and illicit drug-trafficking. Policy responses need to: tackle the region’s recent legacy of conflict and violent upheaval; address weak governance and entrenched corruption; improve regional cooperation; and support border and outlying communities that have been marginalised by insecurity, poverty and unemployment.UK Department for International Developmen

Global modeling approach to the design of an MMIC amplifier using Ohmic Electrode-Sharing Technology

An innovative technique for high--density, high-frequency integrated circuit design is proposed.The procedure exploits the potentialities of a global modeling approach,previously applied only at device level,enabling the circuit designer to explore flexible layout solutions imed at important reduction in chip size and cost.The new circuit design technique is presented by means of an example consisting of a wide-band amplifier,implemented with the recently proposed Ohmic Electrode-Sharing Technology (OEST).The good agreement between experimental and simulated results confirms the validity of the proposed MMIC design approach

Millimeter-wave FET modeling based on a frequency extrapolation approach

An empirical distributed model, based on electromagnetic analysis and standard S-parameter measurements up to microwave frequencies, is shown to be capable of accurate small-signal predictions up to the millimeter-wave range. The frequency-extrapolation approach takes advantage from a physically-expected, smooth behavior of suitably defined elementary active devices connected to a passive distributed network. On this basis, small-signal millimeter-wave FET modeling becomes an affordable task in any laboratory equipped with a standard microwave vector network analyzer and electromagnetic simulation capabilities. In the paper, wide experimental validation of the proposed model up to 110GHz is presented for PHEMT devices with different sizes and bias conditions

Addressing and Mitigating Violence: Uptake Strategy, Year Four Update

The overarching purpose of the Addressing and Mitigating Violence (AMV) theme is to generate useful analysis to tackle policy dilemmas relating to ‘newer’ forms of violence and organised crime. Such a focus is becoming increasingly pertinent following the complex crises that have emerged, particularly in the Middle East, and which are dominating global foreign policy. Year four of the AMV programme showcased and built on the following sub-themes: strengthening core state functions and citizen agencies to mitigate and prevent routine forms of violence as well as organised violence and crime; improving access to livelihoods, jobs and basic services in violent contexts, including in large urban settings; and external stresses and violence mitigation in fragile contexts.UK Department for International Developmen

Innovative Thinking and Practice in Local Governance

The outline of research papers contained in this overview identifies knowledge gaps, proposes practical approaches, and scans new horizons that enhance development thinking and practice. The goal of these research summaries – and their corresponding papers – is to help inform and expand development initiatives of the Swiss Development Cooperation Agency (SDC) and their Decentralisation and Local Governance Network (DLGN) partners. Some of these papers have surveyed latest development thinking to challenge and propose fresh questions: "Why and when do citizens prefer local informal institutions to provide ways of service delivery?" or "How can social accountability be enhanced in a post conflict context?" Other papers like the 'Practice guide to political economy and power analysis' offer guidance to practitioners to maximise SDC's development impact. Our overall goal is to stimulate innovative thinking on how to produce improved, inclusive, transparent and sustainable development interventions at the local level.SD

Learning With Few Examples the Semantic Description of Novel Human-Inspired Grasp Strategies From RGB Data

Data-driven approaches and human inspiration are fundamental to endow robotic manipulators with advanced autonomous grasping capabilities. However, to capitalize upon these two pillars, several aspects need to be considered, which include the number of human examples used for training; the need for having in advance all the required information for classification (hardly feasible in unstructured environments); the trade-off between the task performance and the processing cost. In this letter, we propose a RGB-based pipeline that can identify the object to be grasped and guide the actual execution of the grasping primitive selected through a combination of Convolutional and Gated Graph Neural Networks. We consider a set of human-inspired grasp strategies, which are afforded by the geometrical properties of the objects and identified from a human grasping taxonomy, and propose to learn new grasping skills with only a few examples. We test our framework with a manipulator endowed with an under-actuated soft robotic hand. Even though we use only 2D information to reduce the footprint of the network, we achieve 90% of successful identifications of the most appropriate human-inspired grasping strategy over ten different classes, of which three were few-shot learned, outperforming an ideal model trained with all the classes, in sample-scarce conditions

Addressing and Mitigating Violence: Uptake Strategy, Year Two Update

The overarching purpose of the Addressing and Mitigating Violence (AMV) theme is to generate useful analysis to tackle policy dilemmas relating to ‘newer’ forms of violence and organised crime. Across the contexts where we work, we will undertake a multilevel governance analysis with a multi-actor governance approach to better understand the contributions of and possibilities for convergence between state and non-state stakeholder efforts in different policy spaces. An important goal of work across the AMV theme will be to increase the capabilities of partners and stakeholders in each of the contexts where we work to identify more effective ways of influencing policy.UK Department for International Developmen