Efforts to involve youth in policy making in Egypt post-2014

Egypt has a large youth population; youth between 18 - 29 years represent one fifth of the population. Egypt has long faced challenges adopting serious national policies for youth inclusion and participation. There has been an absence of political commitment towards preparing youth for leadership in addition to promoting youth engagement in policy making. Reviewing youth participation literature reveals that the absence of such strategy can potentially contribute to social and political unrest in the society. Following the announcement of the year of youth in 2016 by the current political leadership, there were a number of initiatives and activities to engage youth in public discussions. These efforts involved the initiation of governmental leadership programs,such as the Presidential Leadership Program, National Youth Conferences and the establishment of the National Academy for Youth Training and Empowerment. This study aims at understanding the recent governmental efforts in promoting youth inclusion and participation in public policy making. The study follows a qualitative methodology through conducting in-depth interviews with field professionals, in addition to desk review that draws on the guidelines of youth involvement. Interviews were conducted with representatives from the National Specialized Councils, National Academy for Youth Training and Empowerment, in addition to young men and women who participated in governmental youth initiatives and are currently working in public leadership positions. Moreover, interviews were held with civil society representatives and youth volunteers in National Youth Conferences who shared their insights on the issue of youth participation in public policies and decision-making in Egypt. The analysis shows noticeable progress in the youth preparation for participation starting from 2016 in addition to governmental progress in raising the percentages of female participants in decision and policy making processes. The analysis shows that the establishment of the National Academy for Youth Training and Empowerment as an independent institution is a promising indicator for the state commitment towards youth. However, there is a need to expand the youth representation in these initiatives through empowering civil society organizations and maintaining a comprehensive set of policies to ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of these efforts and the re-establishment of trust between youth and the government

Limits on the Capacity of In-Band Full Duplex Communication in Uplink Cellular Networks

Simultaneous co-channel transmission and reception, denoted as in-band full duplex (FD) communication, has been promoted as an attractive solution to improve the spectral efficiency of cellular networks. However, in addition to the self-interference problem, cross-mode interference (i.e., between uplink and downlink) imposes a major obstacle for the deployment of FD communication in cellular networks. More specifically, the downlink to uplink interference represents the performance bottleneck for FD operation due to the uplink limited transmission power and venerable operation when compared to the downlink counterpart. While the positive impact of FD communication to the downlink performance has been proved in the literature, its effect on the uplink transmission has been neglected. This paper focuses on the effect of downlink interference on the uplink transmission in FD cellular networks in order to see whether FD communication is beneficial for the uplink transmission or not, and if yes for which type of network. To quantify the expected performance gains, we derive a closed form expression of the maximum achievable uplink capacity in FD cellular networks. In contrast to the downlink capacity which always improves with FD communication, our results show that the uplink performance may improve or degrade depending on the associated network parameters. Particularly, we show that the intensity of base stations (BSs) has a more prominent effect on the uplink performance than their transmission power

Driver Distraction Identification with an Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.25 million deaths yearly due to road traffic accidents worldwide and the number has been continuously increasing over the last few years. Nearly fifth of these accidents are caused by distracted drivers. Existing work of distracted driver detection is concerned with a small set of distractions (mostly, cell phone usage). Unreliable ad-hoc methods are often used.In this paper, we present the first publicly available dataset for driver distraction identification with more distraction postures than existing alternatives. In addition, we propose a reliable deep learning-based solution that achieves a 90% accuracy. The system consists of a genetically-weighted ensemble of convolutional neural networks, we show that a weighted ensemble of classifiers using a genetic algorithm yields in a better classification confidence. We also study the effect of different visual elements in distraction detection by means of face and hand localizations, and skin segmentation. Finally, we present a thinned version of our ensemble that could achieve 84.64% classification accuracy and operate in a real-time environment.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0949