The Future of Migration to Europe

Even as the 2013-2017 “migration crisis” is increasingly in the past, EU countries still struggle to come up with alternative solutions to foster safe, orderly, and regular migration pathways, Europeans continue to look in the rear-view mirror. This Report is an attempt to reverse the perspective, by taking a glimpse into the future of migration to Europe. What are the structural trends underlying migration flows to Europe, and how are they going to change over the next two decades? How does migration interact with specific policy fields, such as development, border management, and integration? And what are the policies and best practicies to manage migration in a more coherent and evidence-based way

PADDLE: Proximal Algorithm for Dual Dictionaries LEarning

Recently, considerable research efforts have been devoted to the design of methods to learn from data overcomplete dictionaries for sparse coding. However, learned dictionaries require the solution of an optimization problem for coding new data. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose an algorithm aimed at learning both a dictionary and its dual: a linear mapping directly performing the coding. By leveraging on proximal methods, our algorithm jointly minimizes the reconstruction error of the dictionary and the coding error of its dual; the sparsity of the representation is induced by an $\ell_1$-based penalty on its coefficients. The results obtained on synthetic data and real images show that the algorithm is capable of recovering the expected dictionaries. Furthermore, on a benchmark dataset, we show that the image features obtained from the dual matrix yield state-of-the-art classification performance while being much less computational intensive

Using SPICES for a better service consumption

In this poster we present SPICES (Semantic Platform for the Interaction and Consumption of Enriched Services), a Web based tool that automates the process of consuming a Web service by making use of the semantic annotations that describe them. SPICES supports both traditional WSDL services and RESTful ones and offers end-users the possibility of interacting with them in an easy yet personalised manner, without the need of advanced technical skills -which were traditionally required-, being the complexity that lies underneath hidden to them. SPICES is being developed within the European project SOA4All

Mining Significant Temporal Networks Is Polynomial

A Conditional Simple Temporal Network with Uncertainty and Decisions (CSTNUD) is a formalism that tackles controllable and uncontrollable durations as well as controllable and uncontrollable choices simultaneously. In the classic top-down model-based engineering approach, a designer builds a CSTNUD to model, validate and execute some temporal plan of interest. Instead, in this paper, we investigate the bottom-up approach by providing a deterministic polynomial time algorithm to mine a CSTNUD from a set of execution traces (i.e., a log). This paper paves the way for the design of controllable temporal networks mined from traces that also contain information on uncontrollable events

Endemism in recently diverged angiosperms is associated with polyploidy

Endemic (range restricted or precinctive) plant species are frequently observed to exhibit polyploidy (chromosome set duplication), which can drive shifts in ecology for angiosperms, but whether endemism is generally associated with polyploidy throughout the flowering plants has not been determined. We tested the hypothesis that polyploidy is more frequent and more pronounced (higher evident ploidy levels) for recently evolved endemic angiosperms. Chromosome count data, molecular dating and distribution for 4210 species (representing all major clades of angiosperms and including the largest families) were mined from literature-based databases. Upper boundary regression was used to investigate the relationship between the maximum number of chromosomes and time since taxon divergence, across clades and separately for families, comparing endemic with non-endemic species. A significant negative exponential relationship between maximum number of chromosomes and taxon age was evident across angiosperms (R2adj = 0.48 for all species, R2adj = 0.49 for endemics; R2adj = 0.44 for non-endemics; p always < 0.0001), recent endemics demonstrating greater maximum chromosome numbers (y intercept = 164 cf. 111) declining more rapidly with taxon age (decay constant = 0.12, cf. 0.04) with respect to non-endemics. The majority of families exhibited this relationship, with a steeper regression slope for endemic Campanulaceae, Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Poaceae, Caryophyllaceae and Rosaceae, cf. non-endemics. Chromosome set duplication is more frequent and extensive in recent angiosperms, particularly young endemics, supporting the hypothesis of recent polyploidy as a key explanation of range restriction. However, as young endemics may also be diploid, polyploidy is not an exclusive driver of endemism

INSPIRE Network Services SOAP Framework

The goal of this document is to provide a definition and rationale for a proposed INSPIRE SOAP framework (SOAP nodes policy, RPC, attachments, WS-I, WSDL) and description of issues and solutions for the specific geospatial domain, for example GML handling in SOAP messages or interfaces definition of the OGC specifications.JRC.H.6-Spatial data infrastructure

SOAP Primer for INSPIRE Discovery and View Services

This document demonstrates the use of the proposed INSPIRE SOAP Framework for the INSPIRE Discovery and View services. This document focuses on the analysis of the WSDL itself (for both the Discovery and View services), explaining its parts and characteristics, as well as on the analysis of SOAP request and response messages, including headers and potential attachments. Moreover, the primer is providing also examples of user scenarios, with specific code samples.JRC.H.6-Spatial data infrastructure

Freigabe ab 11.05.2018 Iron Complexes with Nitrogen Ligands for Catalytic Hydrogenation of Olefins

The aim of this thesis was the investigation of different approaches towards the development of hydrogenation catalytic systems based on iron as cheap and environmentally friendly metal. The first chapter offers an overview of the last developments in the field of iron-catalyzed hydrogenation systems, special attention has been devoted on catalysts based on non-innocent ligand containing iron complexes, with the description of selected examples. The implementation of this redox active moieties granted to these complexes unseen properties resulting in astonishing results. In the second chapter a practical and simple hydrogenation system was described, the use of widespread available iron trichloride and lithium aluminumhydride as precursors allow facile implementation of this methodology in synthetic laboratories. Mono- and di-substituted olefins were converted under mild reaction conditions. Different functional groups were tolerated and mechanistic investigations indicated the presence of a homogeneous catalyst in the early stage of the reaction, less reactive nanoparticles are subsequently formed as result of aggregation. A different hydrogenation protocol was described in chapter 3. This catalyst, based on iron(II) bis(1,1,1,3,3,3-hexamethyl-disilazan-2-ide) or on a most friendly in situ generated iron amide, upon activation with diisobuthylaluminum hydride, resulted in an unprecedented active system. Tri- and tetra-substituted alkenes were efficiently hydrogenated under mild reaction conditions. Novel low-valent nanoclusters with planar Fe4, Fe6, and Fe7 geometries were isolated during the study. These structures standing on the border between homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts furnish new insights about the growth of metal nanoparticles. In the fourth chapter the easy synthesis of novel iron complexes coordinated to non-innocent bis(imino)acenaphthene ligands was described. The morphology of the resulting complex can be predicted on the basis of the sterical hinderance of the selected BIAN ligand. Sterically demanding backbones led to the formation of high-spin tetrahedral complexes while less bulky ligands resulted in the creation of low-spin octahedral complexes. The electrochemical properties of both the set of iron species were investigated, showing interesting ligand centered reduction events.The potential catalytic application of these Fe complexes coordinated to redox-active BIAN scaffolds was investigated and described in the fifth chapter. Tetrahedral iron(II) species did not show any hydrogenation capacity, nevertheless, activation of these complexes with different reducing agents led to an active species able to catalyze olefins hydrogenation. Different reductants have been screened and hydrogenation of mono-, di-, tri- and even tetra-substituted olefins was observed employing the optimized conditions. Preliminary mechanistic studies indicated in a reduced anionic iron complex, a ferrate, the competent active catalyst operating in these transformations. Intrigued by the redox properties of bis(imino)acenaphthene moieties further studies were carried on aiming at the isolation of aluminum hydride complexes coordinated to pre-reduced BIAN ligand. The results were described in chapter 6. The synthesis of novel aluminum complexes was efficiently achieved in a single step, mixing the desired ligand and lithium aluminumhydride. In the last chapter an analysis of the different hydroamination approaches known in literature was proposed. The remarkable results obtained in this field thanks to iron-catalyzed hydrogen atom transfer were then discussed