Self or other: Directors’ attitudes towards policy initiatives for external board evaluation

Recurrent crises in corporate governance have board practice and created policy pressure to assess the effectiveness of boards. Since the 1990s boards have faced calls to undertake regular, formal evaluation. Since 2010, the UK Corporate Governance Code has urged large corporations to engage outside parties to conduct them at least every three years, a move that other jurisdictions have copied. Despite this policy importance, little research has been conducted into processes or outcomes of board evaluation. This study explores the attitudes of directors on evaluation, whether self-administered or facilitated by others. We find acceptance of the principle but reservations about the value and even honesty in questionnaire-based approaches. We find scepticism about, but also acknowledgement of, the benefits of using outside facilitators, especially for their objectivity and because their interviewing elicits insights into board dynamics. As this practice expands beyond listed companies to non-listed ones, charities, and even governance branches of government, our findings point to a need to professionalise outside facilitation

Evolving spiking neural networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive literature survey on the evolving Spiking Neural Network (eSNN) architecture since its introduction in 2006 as a further extension of the ECoS paradigm introduced by Kasabov in 1998. We summarize the functioning of the method, discuss several of its extensions and present a number of applications in which the eSNN method was employed. We focus especially on some proposed extensions that allow the processing of spatio-temporal data and for feature and parameter optimisation of eSNN models to achieve better accuracy on classification/prediction problems and to facilitate new knowledge discovery. Finally, some open problems are discussed and future directions highlighted