Of Clouds and Clocks: When Art Met the Web-Sciences: International launch symposium for ICAS, Oct 16-17, 2009

The Institute for the Converging Arts & Sciences (ICAS) links artists, scientists, designers, social theorists, legal scholars and inventive thinkers in a community directed at fostering transformational research and the dissemination of high impact knowledge Practice, and Performance both locally and globally. The historical setting of the Institute is without peer: the Royal Observatory on the hill overlooking the campus, the Cutty Sark Clipper at the edge of The Thames, the naval history stretching along the peninsula into the English Channel, mark out a territory where the convergence of the arts and sciences has been the standard. ICAS will draw from this rich historical legacy extending it into the future via Electronic & Media Arts Practice, Performance, Philosophy and the New Sciences! Located in King William Court, with strong ties to the Greenwich Maritime Institute and the Schools of Humanities & Social Sciences and Computing Mathematical Sciences, the Institute will create a network of Research Fellows focused on applied projects that will position the University at the centre of enterprises directly engaged with social, cultural, artistic, legal and creative events. Our launch, an international symposium entitled, Of Clouds and Clocks, will be held on the 16-17th October, in the Council Chamber Room (QA 063). Set up as an interactive Roundtable with 25 speakers over two intensive days, speakers will include Dame Wendy Hall (Director, Web-Science Research Institute, South Hampton), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Founder of the Web, MIT, tbc) Professor Arthur Kroker (Director & Digital Arts Philosopher, Pacific Centre for Technology, Art and Culture, Victoria); Caroline Arscott (Prof of 19thC British Art, The Courtauld Institute), Olga Kisseleva (NANO-Artist, Plastik.Arts, The Sorbonne), Dick Rijken (Director: STEIM) and Joel Ryan (Composer & Physicist, STEIM), Norbert Finzsch (Historian, Univ of Cologne), Mary Bryson (Director, Centre for Cross-Faculty Education, Univ British Columbia), Art Clay (Composer/Mathematician, ETH, Zurich), Steve Gibson & Stefan Muller-Arisona (game arts/sound-light composers, Centre for Creative Technologies, De Montfort University and ETH, Zurich), Fox Harrell (robotics-games, Georgia Tech), Jackson 2 Bears (artist, Univ of Victoria, CA), Michaela Hampf (Historian, the JFK Institute, Frei Univ of Berlin), Ecke Bonk (Designer, ZKM Karlshrue), Pascal Brannan (Artist, London), Stephen Kennedy (Media-Arts Philosopher and DJ/composer, Univ Greenwich), Aya Walfaren (holographic technologies, UBC), Maureen Thomas (Media Arts/theatre Director, Cambridge), Ted Hiebert (media-arts-writer/Univ of Seattle)

Providing an alternative to silence: Towards greater protection and support for whistleblowers in Belgium

Transparency International Belgium publishes an overview of whistleblowing schemes in the Belgian public and private sector One of the biggest challenges in preventing and combating corruption detection and uncovering bribery, fraud, theft of public funds and other forms of misconduct. One of the most direct ways to bring corruption to light is whistleblowing (the "whistleblowing"). Unfortunately, whistleblowers are often the victims of reprisals in the form of harassment, dismissal, threats and even physical violence, and their revelations are systematically ignored. Transparency International Belgium (TI-B) is working towards the establishment of accessible reporting points for whistleblowers and aiming to provide sufficient protection for whistleblowers against retaliation. In this context, TI-B conducted research on whistleblowing schemes in operation in Belgium, both in the public and private sectors. An evaluation of these systems supplemented with recommendations can be viewed in the report 'Providing an alternative to silence: towards greater protection and support for whistleblowers in Belgium

Whistleblowing: the inside story - a study of the experiences of 1,000 whistleblowers

This report presents the findings of a collaborative research project by the University of Greenwich and Public Concern at Work, on how the whistleblowing process develops from internal to external whistleblowing. Data consists of 1,000 cases from the Public Concern at Work advice line

Multiple Mobile Robots Controlled by Artificial Neural Networks

Multiple small mobile robots have been created that were controlled by individual artificial neural networks. Each mobile robot was self-contained and capable of independent actions, as determined by the on-board artificial neural network. Information about the environment was collected from sensors mounted on each individual mobile robot chassis. Different sensors were available that were capable of providing information about different aspects of the environment. Currently there were sensors for detecting and following a black line as well as short range distance sensors for detecting and interacting with objects and other mobile robots. The artificial neural networks on the individual mobile robots were all provided with the same training data and a standard back-propagation training algorithm was used. However the randomised component of training the artificial neural networks did mean that there could have been subtle differences in the responses of individual mobile robots to the same sensor data. This effect was eliminated when needed by using an off-line training process and programming all the mobile robots with the same trained ANN. The small group of mobile robots was used to investigate two simple aspects of swarm behaviour; that of flocking and also of follow-my-leader, which are examples where the swarm appeared to operate with more intelligence than the individual members

Seven international cases of water remunicipalisation

Sol·licitant de l’informe: Barcelona Cicle de l'Aigua, S.A

The effect of change in evolution parameters on evolutionary robots

One of the recent trends of robot design involves the evolution of morphology and controller of robots using techniques from evolutionary computation. In this co-evolution process, the evolution system utilises the stochastic and heuristic nature of artificial evolution to evolve robots for specific tasks. Inspired by natural evolution, a population of initial solutions are randomly created and selected parents are mated to produce offspring. Based on the performance or fitness of individual solutions including children, next generation is chosen and this process continues until a solution of satisfactory performance is reached. Among various methods of evolution, Genetic Algorithms (GA) is commonly used for evolution of morphology. In this paper, the effect of change in various evolution parameters in the GA on the final solution is studied. Parameters such as size of population, number of generations evolved and several variation parameters are varied. Experiments are conducted to evolve mobile robots primarily for locomotion on a flat surface on an open source evolutionary robots design platform called RoboGen. Robots are evolved from a specific set of parts which includes various structural components, active and passive joints and sensors

Deriving Machine to Machine (M2M) Traffic Model from Communication Model

© 2018 IEEE. The typical traffic models proposed in literature can be considered as heuristic models since they only reflect the stochastic characteristic of the generated traffic. In this paper, we propose a model for M2M communications that generates the traffic. Therefore, the proposed model is able to capture a wider picture than the state-of-the-art traffic models. The proposed model illustrates the behaviour of M2M uplink communication in a network with multiple-access limited information capacity shared channels. In this paper, we analyzed the number of transmitted packets using the traffic model extracted from our proposed communication model and compared it with the state-of- the-art traffic models using simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed model has a significantly higher accuracy in estimating the number of transmitted packets compared with the liteature model

Tourism in contemporary cities. Proceedings of the International Tourism Studies Association Conference: University of Greenwich, London, UK 17–19 August 2016 Conference Proceedings

The 6th International Tourism Studies Association (ITSA) Biennial conference was held at the University of Greenwich, London, England from 17‐19 August 2016. This was the first time that the conference had been held in Europe and it provided a unique opportunity to meet, hear from and network with tourism scholars and professionals from across Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. ITSA has a mission to encourage interaction and cooperation between developing and developed countries and the conference was successful in attracting 130 delegates from 29 countries. The main theme of the conference was 'Tourism in Contemporary Cities' with four conference sub‐themes of ‘Tourism Cities and Urban Tourism’, ‘The Chinese Market for European Tourism’, ‘River, Cruise and Maritime Tourism’, and ‘Heritage Tourism in Cities’, The subthemes were chosen to reflect the unique location of the conference on the UNESCO Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, and London which is Europe’s most visited tourist destination. The conference also presented ‘Dark Tourism and Cities’ and ‘Tourism and Communist Heritage’ as special sessions

A firm-level dataset for analyzing entry, exit, employment and R&D expenditures in the UK: 1997-2012

This data article is related to the research article entitled “Inverted-U relationship between R&D intensity and survival: Evidence on scale and complementarity effects in UK data” (Ugur et al., In press) [1]. It describes the trends in R&D expenditures, employment of R&D personnel and firm entry and exit rates in the UK from 1998 to 2012. We also provide statistics on net employment creation and net R&D investments due to firm entry and exits. In addition, we compute the correlation coefficients between entry and exit rates at the two digit industry level so as to examine whether the correlations are contemporaneous or inter-temporal. Finally, we provide information about the underlying dataset to which secure access is available through UK Data Service Archive 7716 at http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7716-1