A Policy Overview, and Implications for the EU

The post-Cold War international security environment has changed dramatically however, the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) continues to be one of the major global challenges and threats to security. In 2003, the European Union declared in the European Security Strategy (ESS) its aim to promote 'effective multilateralism', and established a strategic partnership with China. Focusing on major current multilateral regimes in export controls, this policy paper uses China as a case country and provides an overview of China's export control policies.It then discusses the implications of promoting European norms and paradigms such as multilateralism to China, especially in the area of international export controls

Read, Watch, and Move: Reinforcement Learning for Temporally Grounding Natural Language Descriptions in Videos

The task of video grounding, which temporally localizes a natural language description in a video, plays an important role in understanding videos. Existing studies have adopted strategies of sliding window over the entire video or exhaustively ranking all possible clip-sentence pairs in a pre-segmented video, which inevitably suffer from exhaustively enumerated candidates. To alleviate this problem, we formulate this task as a problem of sequential decision making by learning an agent which regulates the temporal grounding boundaries progressively based on its policy. Specifically, we propose a reinforcement learning based framework improved by multi-task learning and it shows steady performance gains by considering additional supervised boundary information during training. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on ActivityNet'18 DenseCaption dataset and Charades-STA dataset while observing only 10 or less clips per video.Comment: AAAI 201

An open framework for semantic code queries on heterogeneous repositories

To help developers understand and reuse programs, semantic queries on the source code itself is attractive. Although programs in heterogeneous languages are being controlled for collaborative software development, most queries supported by various source code repositories are based either on the metadata of the repositories, or on indexed identifiers and method signatures. Few provide full support to search for structures that are common across different programming languages and different viewpoints (hence heterogeneous). To facilitate understanding and reuses, in this paper, we propose a novel source code query framework that (1) transforms source code to a unified abstract syntax format, and handles heterogeneity (non-isomorphism) at the abstract syntax level; (2) stores source code on a cloud-based NoSQL storage in MongoDB; (3) rewrites semantic query patterns into the NoSQL form. The efficiency of the framework has been evaluated to support several open-source hosting platforms

NFG Final Report 2015

In order to discuss intermediate findings and progress of the project "External Views on the EU as a Civilian Power – India and China in Comparison", the NFG held international conferences on 'Asian Views of the European Union as a Security Actor: Perspectives from India and China' in China, India and Germany, with participants from Europe, China, India, the US and Australia. The conference reports cover major points of the presentations and discussions on external perceptions of the EU, and the EU’s role of norm diffusion in the cases of peacekeeping and export controls. Read Working Paper

Europe’s Role for Security in a Multipolar World: Views from India and China

The Third NFG Academic Council Meeting was held in New Delhi, India, on 26-27 September, 2013 in association with Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Observer Research Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung India. The Conference on ‘Europe’s Role for Security in a Multipolar World: the Views from India and China’ brought together academics, practitioners, and policy makers from Europe, India and China, with the aim of bridging the gap between academic and policy debates in Asia and Europe

Asian Views of the European Union as a Security Actor: perspectives from China and India

The second NFG Academic Council Meeting was held at Peking University, Beijing on 20-21 September, 2012 in cooperation with the School of International Studies, Peking University, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Chinese Association for European Studies (CAES). The conference theme was 'Asian Views of the European Union as a Security Actor: Perspectives from India and China' and saw participants from Europe, India, China and the US

A Sensor-Based Visual Effect Evaluation of Chevron Alignment Signs’ Colors on Drivers through the Curves in Snow and Ice Environment

The ability to quantitatively evaluate the visual feedback of drivers has been considered as the primary research for reducing crashes in snow and ice environments. Different colored Chevron alignment signs cause diverse visual effect. However, the effect of Chevrons on visual feedback and on the driving reaction while navigating curves in SI environments has not been adequately evaluated. The objective of this study is twofold: (1) an effective and long-term experiment was designed and developed to test the effect of colored Chevrons on drivers’ vision and vehicle speed; (2) a new quantitative effect evaluation model is employed to measure the effect of different colors of the Chevrons. Fixation duration and pupil size were used to describe the driver’s visual response, and Cohen’s d was used to evaluate the colors’ psychological effect on drivers. The results showed the following: (1) after choosing the proper color for Chevrons, drivers reduced the speed of the vehicle while approaching the curves. (2) It was easier for drivers to identify the road alignment after setting the Chevrons. (3) Cohen’s d related to different colors of Chevrons have different effect sizes. The conclusions provide evident references for freeway warning products and the design of intelligent vehicles

Optimization criteria for the important parameters of an irreversible Otto heat-engine

An irreversible cycle model of an Otto heat-engine is established, in which the main irreversibilities result from the non-isentropic compression and expansion processes; finite-time processes and heat loss through the cylinder wall are taken into account. The power output and efficiency of the cycle are derived. The curves of the power output and efficiency varying with the compression ratio of two isochoric processes are presented. It is found from the curves that there are optimal values of the compression ratio at which the power output and efficiency attain their maxima. Moreover, the maximum power-output and efficiency and the corresponding relevant parameters are calculated, and consequently, the optimization criteria of some important parameters such as the power output, efficiency, compression ratio, and temperatures of the working substance are obtained.Otto heat engine Irreversibility Compression ratio Power output Efficiency Optimum criterion

Estimating Bus Loads and OD Flows Using Location-Stamped Farebox and Wi-Fi Signal Data

Electronic fareboxes integrated with Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems can provide location-stamped records to infer passenger boarding at individual stops. However, bus loads and Origin-Destination (OD) flows, which are useful for route planning, design, and real-time controls, cannot be derived directly from farebox data. Recently, Wi-Fi sensors have been used to collect passenger OD flow information. But the data are insufficient to capture the variation of passenger demand across bus trips. In this study, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate trip-level OD flow matrices and a period-level OD flow matrix using sampled OD flow data collected by Wi-Fi sensors and boarding data provided by fareboxes. Bus loads on each bus trip are derived directly from the estimated trip-level OD flow matrices. The proposed method is evaluated empirically on an operational bus route and the results demonstrate that it provides good and detailed transit route-level passenger demand information by combining farebox and Wi-Fi signal data