Tourism in the post Covid-19 era: An opportunity for expansion of the tourism season; The case of Crete

Tourism worldwide has been affected by Covid-19 and many tourism destinations have been hit hard. The effects of the virus on the tourism sector will be long-lasting and economic losses inevitable. Nonetheless, there is a strong positive correlation between tourism and economic growth. As a result of this, the tourism season expansion can, under specific circumstances, lead to greater economic growth. Global crises can help countries that effectively deal with them, to evolve and effectively expand their seasonality, along with specific measures taken by the local governments to restore tourism and even more to expand it (Beirman, 2003).For Greece, and Crete in particular, that heavily depends on its tourism sector, the economic losses are expected to be devastating. However, based on the development of Covid-19, so far, Greece is presented with a unique opportunity to improve its comparative position and prolong the duration of its tourism season.Crete is the ideal holiday destination to take advantage of the current situation, in order to prolong its season. Crete is an island with a very diverse landscape and a mild climate, all year round. The region of Crete, over the course of the past decade, has put significant effort in promoting its own brand and has already succeeded in extending the islands tourism season by at least one more month, with season starting mid-March and ending early November (Enterprise Greece, 2018). Moreover, in low season, there have been attempts by local Tour Operators and there has been a small but steady flow of Tourists, even in the extremely low season, between November and February. Of course, all initiatives taken by the locals, are important but are not sufficient. Coordinated support is needed by the government and the prefecture of Crete to boost the island and create a viable extent tourism season

Deep affect prediction in-the-wild: aff-wild database and challenge, deep architectures, and beyond

Automatic understanding of human affect using visual signals is of great importance in everyday human–machine interactions. Appraising human emotional states, behaviors and reactions displayed in real-world settings, can be accomplished using latent continuous dimensions (e.g., the circumplex model of affect). Valence (i.e., how positive or negative is an emotion) and arousal (i.e., power of the activation of the emotion) constitute popular and effective representations for affect. Nevertheless, the majority of collected datasets this far, although containing naturalistic emotional states, have been captured in highly controlled recording conditions. In this paper, we introduce the Aff-Wild benchmark for training and evaluating affect recognition algorithms. We also report on the results of the First Affect-in-the-wild Challenge (Aff-Wild Challenge) that was recently organized in conjunction with CVPR 2017 on the Aff-Wild database, and was the first ever challenge on the estimation of valence and arousal in-the-wild. Furthermore, we design and extensively train an end-to-end deep neural architecture which performs prediction of continuous emotion dimensions based on visual cues. The proposed deep learning architecture, AffWildNet, includes convolutional and recurrent neural network layers, exploiting the invariant properties of convolutional features, while also modeling temporal dynamics that arise in human behavior via the recurrent layers. The AffWildNet produced state-of-the-art results on the Aff-Wild Challenge. We then exploit the AffWild database for learning features, which can be used as priors for achieving best performances both for dimensional, as well as categorical emotion recognition, using the RECOLA, AFEW-VA and EmotiW 2017 datasets, compared to all other methods designed for the same goal. The database and emotion recognition models are available at http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources/first-affect-wild-challenge

Diaspora as a diplomatic tool in the era of New Diplomacy : A Comparative Case Study of Greece and Ireland - Lessons learned from Ireland

Diplomacy has been changing and evolving for some time now. Diplomacy has gone public and new types of diplomacy and diplomatic tools have emerged. The number of actors has pluralised. The emergence of new technologies, like social media, also offers a new addition on how diplomacy is being conducted. However, a far less discussed diplomatic tool is diaspora. The diaspora of a country can also be used to conduct diplomacy. “Both ‘diaspora’ and ‘diplomacy’ are concepts that have undergone considerable expansion in recent years, marking a shift away from understanding diaspora as a descriptive category and diplomacy as the practice of state officials respectively” (Ho & McConnell, 2017, p. 15). The study aims to gain a better understanding of how the diaspora of a country can be used as a diplomatic tool in the world of ‘New Diplomacy’. The theoretical framework builds upon the notions of New Diplomacy, Diaspora Studies and the existing pre-understanding of Diaspora Diplomacy. The study pursues a qualitative research approach by means of a Comparative Case Study conducted with the method of Most-Similar Case Comparison. The two cases analysed are those of Greece and Ireland, in which the former is identified as the case facing challenges in relation to modern-day diaspora diplomacy, while the latter is identified as a successful case. The research uses both primary and secondary data. The secondary data was collected by means of the empirical research method of Participant Observation. The researcher identified four independent variables in order to explain the dependent variable which is ‘Successful Diaspora Diplomacy’. Three independent variables, ‘Nature of their diaspora’, ‘Recent socio-economic developments’ and ‘Structure of ministry of foreign affairs & the position of the diaspora unit within it’ were concluded to be too similar among the two countries in order to explain the difference in successfulness of their diaspora diplomacy. The analysis conducted indicated that the fourth independent variable ‘New Diplomacy-Culture’, however, was significantly different among the two cases and leads to an explanation of the difference in the outcome. The findings of this research indicated that a ‘New Diplomacy-Culture’ should incorporate the following characteristics and initiatives: a concrete diaspora strategy; individual initiatives all need to be linked to the strategy, but at the same time be tailor-made for the different types of diaspora members; all actions need to be monitored and evaluated; and technology needs to be utilised. Furthermore, governments should adopt a facilitating role instead of an implementing role. Knowledge sharing and access to networks constitute two of the main benefits that a country can achieve through Diaspora Diplomacy. In general, new diplomacy initiatives are not sufficient for achieving successful diaspora diplomacy if foreign ministries do not adopt a new diplomacy mentality as a whole. Countries should focus on communication, cooperation and a culture of openness, flexibility and transparency. In New Diplomacy the notion that citizens play a more prominent role than they used to in the past, is central. This idea can be expanded to include diasporas as well. Furthermore, not only should New Diplomacy include diaspora, but also the other way around; in order for Diaspora Diplomacy to be successful, it should include New Diplomacy in its practices. This brings us to the conceptualisation of a new subfield of New Diplomacy and Diaspora Diplomacy, that of New Diaspora Diplomacy. New Diaspora Diplomacy is Diaspora Diplomacy that incorporates a high degree of elements of 21st century’s New Diplomacy, in order to successfully achieve diaspora engagement on contemporary issues of strategical importance

Smart materials in aeronautics

121 σ.Η ανάπτυξη έξυπνων υλικών, ή καλύτερα έξυπνων συστημάτων, βασίζεται στην αξιοποίηση των λειτουργικών ιδιοτήτων μιας σειράς υλικών με κυριότερους εκπροσώπους τα υλικά με μνήμη σχήματος, τα μαγνητο/ηλεκτρορεολογικά υλικά και τα πιεζοηλεκτρικά στοιχεία. Το επιστημονικό και τεχνολογικό πεδίο των “έξυπνων υλικών” επιχειρεί να αναπτύξει συστήματα υλικών των οποίων η επιτυχία δε θα βασίζεται στην εκπλήρωση πολύ υψηλών και σταθερών προδιαγραφών, αλλά στη δυνατότητα ελεγχόμενης μεταβολής της συμπεριφοράς τους. Στόχος της παρούσας εργασίας ήταν η μελέτη των έξυπνων υλικών που χρησιμοποιούνται στην Αεροναυπηγική. Για τον λόγο αυτό τα τρία πρώτα κεφάλαια της εργασίας αφιερώθηκαν στην εκτενή ανάλυση των έξυπνων υλικών, ενώ στο τελευταίο κεφάλαιο έγινε ανάλυση των εφαρμογών των έξυπνων υλικών στην Αεροναυπηγική. Στη συνέχεια δίνεται μια συνοπτική περιγραφή της διάρθρωσης της παρούσης εργασίας. Στο πρώτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται λόγος για τα έξυπνα (ευφυή) υλικά. Ως έξυπνα υλικά αναφέρονται συστήματα που έχουν την ικανότητα να μεταβάλλουν τη συμπεριφορά τους ή ορισμένα χαρακτηριστικά τους (σχήμα, ιδιοσυχνότητα, συντελεστή απόσβεσης δονήσεων και άλλα) με δεδομένο και ελεγχόμενο τρόπο, εξ’ αιτίας μιας διέγερσης. Τα συστήματα αυτά ενσωματώνουν αισθητήρες και ενεργοποιητές, οι οποίοι συνδέονται μεταξύ τους με έναν κατάλληλο βρόχο ελέγχου. Στο ίδιο κεφάλαιο αναφέρονται τα υλικά που μπορούν να χρησιμοποιηθούν ως αισθητήρες και ενεργοποιητές και οι τύποι τους, τα είδη ελέγχου που έχουν επιτευχθεί, καθώς και εφαρμογές των έξυπνων συστημάτων. Στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο περιγράφονται οι κατηγορίες και τα είδη των έξυπνων υλικών. Τα έξυπνα υλικά χωρίζονται σε δύο κατηγορίες: Τύπου Ι και Τύπου ΙΙ. Έξυπνα υλικά Τύπου Ι είναι εκείνα τα οποία μεταβάλουν μία ή περισσότερες από τις ιδιότητες τους, ενώ έξυπνα υλικά Τύπου ΙΙ είναι εκείνα στα οποία παρατηρείται μετασχηματισμός ενέργειας από μία μορφή σε μία άλλη. Σε αυτό το κεφάλαιο αναλύονται επίσης τα χαρακτηριστικά κάθε είδους έξυπνου υλικού, και αναφέρονται εφαρμογές αυτών σε βιομηχανικά προϊόντα. Στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο περιγράφονται οι τρόποι με τους οποίους παρασκευάζονται ορισμένες από τις πιο συχνά χρησιμοποιούμενες κατηγορίες έξυπνων υλικών. Στο τέταρτο κεφάλαιο παρουσιάζονται εφαρμογές των έξυπνων υλικών στην Αεροναυπηγική. Αναφέρονται νέες τεχνολογίες και έρευνες πάνω στα έξυπνα υλικά, από πολλά διάσημα ερευνητικά κέντρα στον κόσμο, όπως το Γερμανικό Κέντρο Αεροδιαστημικής και το ερευνητικό κέντρο Langley της NASA. Τέλος αναφέρονται τεχνολογίες για μελλοντικά αεροπορικά συστήματα και μελλοντικές κατασκευές διαστημοπλοίων.Exploiting the functional properties of materials such as shape memory alloys, magneto/electrorheological materials and piezoelectric elements results in the development of smart materials or systems. In the scientific and technological field of smart materials the major achievement is not related to the values of specific physical properties but to the “adopted” ability to control their own behaviour. The aim of this paper was the study of smart materials used in aeronautics. For this reason the first three chapters of the paper were devoted to the comprehensive analysis of smart materials, while in the last chapter the applications of smart materials in Aeronautics were analyzed. Following, is a brief description of the structure of this paper. The first chapter gives an introduction to smart materials. Composite systems, which under the influence of an external cause, can vary their behaviour or some characteristics (shape, natural vibration frequency, damping coefficient etc) in a specific and controllable way, are referred as smart materials. These systems incorporate sensors and actuators, which in turn are connected by a suitable control loop. Suitable materials for being employed as sensors and actuators, as well as the types of the, up to now, achieved control are also discussed. The second chapter describes the categories and types of smart materials. Smart materials are divided into two categories: Type I and Type II. Type I Smart materials are those which alter one or more of their properties, while Type II Smart Materials are those which transform one form of energy to another. This chapter also describes the properties for every type of smart material, and are mentioned applications of these in industrial products. Chapter three describes analytically the fabrication methods for some of the most common types of smart materials. The fourth chapter presents applications of smart materials in Aeronautics. New technologies and research on smart materials are mentioned, from many famous research centers in the world such as the German Aerospace Center and Langley Research Center of NASA. Finally the technology for future flight systems construction and future spacecraft is included in this chapter.Δημήτριος Α. Τζιράκη