FDI another day: Russian reliance on European investment. Bruegel Policy Contribution Issue n˚3 | February 2020

Most foreign direct investment into Russia originates in the European Union: European investors own between 55 percent and 75 percent of Russian FDI stock. This points to a Russian dependence on European investment, making the EU paramount for Russian medium-term growth. Even if we consider ‘phantom’ FDI that transits through Europe, the EU remains the primary investor in Russia. Most phantom FDI into Russia is believed to originate from Russia itself and thus is by construction not foreign

THE STATE OF CHINA-EUROPEAN UNION ECONOMIC RELATIONS. Bruegel Working Paper Issue 09 20 November 2019

China and the European Union have an extensive and growing economic relationship. The relationship is problematic because of the distortions caused by China’s state capitalist system and the diversity of interests within the EU’s incomplete federation. More can be done to capture the untapped trade and investment opportunities that exist between the parties. China’s size and dynamism, and its recent shift from an export-led to a domesticdemand- led growth model, mean that these opportunities are likely to grow with time. As the Chinese economy matures, provided appropriate policy steps are taken, it is likely to become a less disruptive force in world markets than during its extraordinary breakout period

Deep Neural Networks for the Recognition and Classification of Heart Murmurs Using Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Auscultation is one of the most used techniques for detecting cardiovascular diseases, which is one of the main causes of death in the world. Heart murmurs are the most common abnormal finding when a patient visits the physician for auscultation. These heart sounds can either be innocent, which are harmless, or abnormal, which may be a sign of a more serious heart condition. However, the accuracy rate of primary care physicians and expert cardiologists when auscultating is not good enough to avoid most of both type-I (healthy patients are sent for echocardiogram) and type-II (pathological patients are sent home without medication or treatment) errors made. In this paper, the authors present a novel convolutional neural network based tool for classifying between healthy people and pathological patients using a neuromorphic auditory sensor for FPGA that is able to decompose the audio into frequency bands in real time. For this purpose, different networks have been trained with the heart murmur information contained in heart sound recordings obtained from nine different heart sound databases sourced from multiple research groups. These samples are segmented and preprocessed using the neuromorphic auditory sensor to decompose their audio information into frequency bands and, after that, sonogram images with the same size are generated. These images have been used to train and test different convolutional neural network architectures. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the AlexNet model, achieving 97% accuracy (specificity: 95.12%, sensitivity: 93.20%, PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2016 score: 0.9416). This tool could aid cardiologists and primary care physicians in the auscultation process, improving the decision making task and reducing type-I and type-II errors.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

NAVIS: Neuromorphic Auditory VISualizer Tool

This software presents diverse utilities to perform the first post-processing layer taking the neuromorphic auditory sensors (NAS) information. The used NAS implements in FPGA a cascade filters architecture, imitating the behavior of the basilar membrane and inner hair cells and working with the sound information decomposed into its frequency components as spike streams. The well-known neuromorphic hardware interface Address-Event-Representation (AER) is used to propagate auditory information out of the NAS, emulating the auditory vestibular nerve. Using the information packetized into aedat files, which are generated through the jAER software plus an AER to USB computer interface, NAVIS implements a set of graphs that allows to represent the auditory information as cochleograms, histograms, sonograms, etc. It can also split the auditory information into different sets depending on the activity level of the spike streams. The main contribution of this software tool is that it allows complex audio post-processing treatments and representations, which is a novelty for spike-based systems in the neuromorphic community and it will help neuromorphic engineers to build sets for training spiking neural networks (SNN).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0

Stereo Matching in Address-Event-Representation (AER) Bio-Inspired Binocular Systems in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

In stereo-vision processing, the image-matching step is essential for results, although it involves a very high computational cost. Moreover, the more information is processed, the more time is spent by the matching algorithm, and the more ine cient it is. Spike-based processing is a relatively new approach that implements processing methods by manipulating spikes one by one at the time they are transmitted, like a human brain. The mammal nervous system can solve much more complex problems, such as visual recognition by manipulating neuron spikes. The spike-based philosophy for visual information processing based on the neuro-inspired address-event-representation (AER) is currently achieving very high performance. The aim of this work was to study the viability of a matching mechanism in stereo-vision systems, using AER codification and its implementation in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Some studies have been done before in an AER system with monitored data using a computer; however, this kind of mechanism has not been implemented directly on hardware. To this end, an epipolar geometry basis applied to AER systems was studied and implemented, with other restrictions, in order to achieve good results in a real-time scenario. The results and conclusions are shown, and the viability of its implementation is proven.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

From climate change to cyber-attacks: incipient financial-stability risks for the euro area. Bruegel Policy Contribution Issue n˚2 | February 2020

The European Central Bank’s November 2019 Financial Stability Review highlighted the risks to growth in an environment of global uncertainty. It also discusses sovereign-debt concerns in case interest rates increase, and risks arising from household and corporate debt. It assesses the risks from a possible overvaluation of asset prices, and evaluates risks within the banking and non-banking system, and climate risks. On the whole, the ECB report is comprehensive and covers the main risks to euro-area financial stability. However, some issues deserve more attention. • First, the assessment of risks in the housing market should be more nuanced. Current housing markets relative to those pre-crisis seem to be far less driven by mortgage credit, and the size of the construction sector has not increased. This is possibly good news for financial stability because a house price correction would transmit less into mortgage defaults and corrections to economic activity. • Second, there should be greater emphasis on changes in market expectations of interest rates, which can have substantial effects on asset prices. This could be particularly relevant if interest rate changes are not driven by real-economy developments. • Third, the financial system relies on a safe asset as a reference. We show that the supply of safe sovereign assets in the euro area has fallen dramatically, driven by deteriorating sovereign credit ratings and reduced supplies of bonds from the safest countries. More safe assets would support financial stability. • Fourth, though climate risks to financial stability must be taken seriously, risk weights on green assets should not be reduced since they still contain normal financial stability risks. Instead, risk weights for brown assets should be increased. • Fifth, the ECB does not consider cybersecurity and hybrid threats in its assessment. These threats are significant risks for financial institutions and at the more systemic level. • Policies to address financial-stability concerns include macroprudential measures. In this respect, we discover discrepancies between EU countries: countries with the same levels of house-price overvaluation have adopted very different macroprudential measures. Some countries might thus have done too much, while others have done too little. • When it comes to preventing the next recession or reducing its impact, we argue that EU policymakers need to be better prepared to use discretionary fiscal policy earlier and more forcefully, in particular because the ability of monetary authorities to react to the next cyclical downturn is very limited

Cultura y televisión, una relación necesaria

La relación entre cultura y televisión suele presentarse como conflictiva e incluso imposible. En este artículo se hace un repaso histórico a la presencia de contenidos culturales en la televisión pública española, TVE, tanto a nivel nacional como regional, para defender la necesidad de la presencia de espacios culturales en televisión

Los animales extraños

Los animales extraños reflexiona acerca de los límites entre realidad y ficción mediante el relato visual de carácter fantástico. En nuestras experiencias se mezclan habitualmente la vida ordinaria con las imágenes que nos proporcionan el mundo de la cultura y con la recreación de nuestra imaginación. Este proyecto pone en valor la fantasía como vehículo de escape del mundo real, cuya saturación de catastróficas noticias provocan el anhelo y la búsqueda de alternativas liberadas de la presión de los medios. El propósito de Los animales extraños es reflexionar en torno a la continua mutación de la apariencia del exterior a través de escenas detenidas en el tiempo y de la búsqueda de un espacio de meditación, de un tiempo muerto.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Bellas Arte

Multilayer Spiking Neural Network for Audio Samples Classification Using SpiNNaker

Audio classification has always been an interesting subject of research inside the neuromorphic engineering field. Tools like Nengo or Brian, and hardware platforms like the SpiNNaker board are rapidly increasing in popularity in the neuromorphic community due to the ease of modelling spiking neural networks with them. In this manuscript a multilayer spiking neural network for audio samples classification using SpiNNaker is presented. The network consists of different leaky integrate-and-fire neuron layers. The connections between them are trained using novel firing rate based algorithms and tested using sets of pure tones with frequencies that range from 130.813 to 1396.91 Hz. The hit rate percentage values are obtained after adding a random noise signal to the original pure tone signal. The results show very good classification results (above 85 % hit rate) for each class when the Signal-to-noise ratio is above 3 decibels, validating the robustness of the network configuration and the training step.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130