The European community’s response to the central European challenge the Genesis of a European common foreign policy

This MA thesis deals with the European Community's response to the Central European challenge. The lack of explanatory and normative theories to explain the European integration process as a whole demonstrates that it has been driven by Member States' interests and could be heavily influenced by external aspects. Despite the different political models of organisation (i.e. federation, confederation or international organisation) at the disposition of several states to organise themselves to tackle international problems, West European member states did not completely subscribe to any of these and that makes the European Union the political invention of this century. The politico-administrative model of the European Union is the result of a original and unprecedented bargaining to preserve national interests and supranational efficiency both at the same time. This process is both the source of its originality and the reason of its relative inefficiency when compared to the United States of Germany. However the European Union survives and proves the relevance in the international scene when confronted to external effects. Our argument is that Central Europe could be considered as one of the external factors that might push the European Union to strengthen its decision making process and to render its action more efficient and responsive to Central European needs. This thesis deliberately limits itself to the economic and political sides of European external policy and shows the evolution of the methods, structures and concepts that the European Union used to build up a Common Commercial Policy and to set up the Common Foreign and Security Policy

Contrastive Learning-Based Audio to Lyrics Alignment for Multiple Languages

Lyrics alignment gained considerable attention in recent years. State-of-the-art systems either re-use established speech recognition toolkits, or design end-to-end solutions involving a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. However, both approaches suffer from specific weaknesses: toolkits are known for their complexity, and CTC systems use a loss designed for transcription which can limit alignment accuracy. In this paper, we use instead a contrastive learning procedure that derives cross-modal embeddings linking the audio and text domains. This way, we obtain a novel system that is simple to train end-to-end, can make use of weakly annotated training data, jointly learns a powerful text model, and is tailored to alignment. The system is not only the first to yield an average absolute error below 0.2 seconds on the standard Jamendo dataset but it is also robust to other languages, even when trained on English data only. Finally, we release word-level alignments for the JamendoLyrics Multi-Lang dataset.Comment: 5 pages, accepted at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 202

Implementation feedback of the IVOA Provenance data model

The IVOA Provenance Data model defines entities, agents and activities as container classes to describe the provenance of datasets, with the executed tasks and responsibilities attached to agents. It also provides a set of classes to describe the activities type and their configuration template, as well as the configuration applied effectively during the execution of a task. Here we highlight lessons learned in the implementation of the CDS ProvHiPS service distributing provenance metadata for the HST HiPS data collections, and for the HST archive original images used to produce the HiPS tiles. ProvHiPS is based on the ProvTAP protocol, the emerging TAP standard for distributing provenance metadata. ProvTAP queries may rapidly become very complex. Various graph representation strategies, including ad hoc solutions, triplestore and SQL CTE have been considered and are discussed shortly.Comment: 4 pages, to appear in proceedings of ADASS XXIX, ASP Conf. Serie

Genetic algorithms for Air Traffic Control systems

International audienceThe Air Traffic Control system of a country manages all the aircrafts that fly in its airspace, designs control sectors, manages the flows between the different airports and beacons, ensures separation between aircraft during their flight, take off and landing. Thus, it operates at different levels, each one of them designed to provide control, ensure safety, and limit the traffic passed to the following level. In this paper, we show how Genetic Algorithms can improve some of the tasks manually done by the ATC system. After a brief description of GAs, some of the improvements used (simulated annealing, sharing), we study three applications of GAs to ATC. We first show an application of GAs to en-route conflict resolution. Then we give an example on GAs used to optimize air space sectoring. The last part gives an application of GAs to traffic assignment

Condiciones de edentulismo y fragilidad en un grupo de personas mayores que acudieron a la clínica odontológica de la Universidad San Martín de Porres de Lambayeque, Perú.

Introduction: Dentistry should contribute to achieving healthy aging based on the identification of the well-being and oral health needs of the elderly. Objective: To evaluate the conditions of edentulism and frailty in a group of elderly people treated at the dental clinic of Universidad San Martín de Porres in Lambayeque, Peru, between the years 2016 and 2018. Material and Methods: An observational, descriptive, retrolective, and cross-sectional study was conducted. Two hundred and seven medical records that included an odontogram were randomly selected to identify cases of total or partial edentulism according to the Kennedy classification. The files were assessed with Fried’s test to evaluate the conditions of frailty. The association between variables was estimated by means of a significance analysis using the Chi square test. Results: There was a statistically significant difference between edentulism in both jaws and conditions of frailty (p<0.05). An association of edentulism with physical inactivity and weakness was also demonstrated. Additionally, a statistically significant difference between degrees of edentulism was observed regarding poor diet (p<0.05). Conclusion: The absence of teeth in the elderly acts as a risk factor leading to negative changes in diet, weight, and physical activity. These changes may be associated with frailty, as masticatory insufficiency results in a poor diet and subsequent weakness.Introducción: El aporte de la Odontología debe contribuir a lograr un envejecimiento saludable, basado en la identificación de las necesidades de bienestar y salud bucal de las personas mayores. Objetivo: Evaluar la condición de edentulismo y de fragilidad en un grupo de personas mayores atendidas en la Clínica Odontológica de la Universidad San Martín de Porres de Lambayeque, entre los años 2016 y 2018. Material y Métodos: Se diseñó un estudio observacional, descriptivo, retrolectivo y transversal, seleccionando de manera aleatoria 207 historias clínicas que incluyeron un odontograma para identificar casos de edentulismo total o parcial de acuerdo a la clasificación de Kennedy: mientras que para evaluar las condiciones de fragilidad fueron revisadas las fichas con el test de Fried. Diferencias entre variables fueron evaluadas con un análisis de significancia mediante la prueba Chi cuadrado. Resultado: Se mostró una diferencia estadísticamente significativa entre edentulismo en ambos maxilares y condiciones de fragilidad (p<0,05). Se evidenció además asociación de edentulismo con inactividad física y debilidad; observándose adicionalmente una diferencia estadísticamente significativa entre grados de edentulismo en relación a la mala alimentación (p<0,05). Conclusion: La ausencia de dientes en las personas mayores funge como un factor de riesgo que contribuye a cambios desfavorables en la dieta, el peso y la actividad física, mismos que se asocian con la fragilidad, donde la insuficiencia masticatoria puede conducir a una deficiente alimentación y la consecuente debilidad

IVOA Recommendation: VOTable Format Definition Version 1.3

This document describes the structures making up the VOTable standard. The main part of this document describes the adopted part of the VOTable standard; it is followed by appendices presenting extensions which have been proposed and/or discussed, but which are not part of the standard