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New graduate John Barrson’s first field mission ends in tragedy, when he sacrifices himself to save the life of a fellow agent in the Earth’s Planetary Atmospheric Protection Society, only to find he’s been “resurrected” in a new body, with his memories downloaded and intact. John meets his saviors, the Curators - an alien race controlling the faraway artificial planet called the Library. The Curators created the Library a billion years ago to record and preserve knowledge from all known species in the galaxy, using recruits called Watchers. Upon awakening, John is given the choice between becoming a Library Watcher or death. John reluctantly begins his training among aliens from various worlds, but when conflict erupts between the Curators and the Departed, a splinter Library faction, he is drawn into the fray as an unwilling pawn. Torn between what he knows is right and what the Curators’ rigid rules of non-interventionism allow, John takes matters into his own hands and brings together a team that, against all odds, tries to find a way to thwart the Departed’s plan for murder on a planetary scale.

Die Fotografien von Stefan Heyne (*1965) sind gegenstandslos - bewusst und betont. Er lässt weg, was Fotografie gemeinhin ausmacht, verzichtet auf jede Identifizierbarkeit des Motivs. Heyne treibt die Abstraktion auf die Spitze, reduziert seine Bilder auf ein unscharfes Wechselspiel aus Licht und Schatten, bei einer völligen Offenheit der Form. In seiner jüngsten Serie verzichtet der Künstler jedoch ausdrücklich auf die Unschärfe als künstlerisches Mittel und setzt nun im Gegenteil auf die gestochen scharfe Reproduktion des vielleicht puristischsten aller Motive: Aus dem Flugzeugfenster fotografiert er in der Dämmerung den wolkenlosen Himmel. Die sich in diesen Aufnahmen zeigenden Farbspektren des reinen Lichts erscheinen weich gezeichnet und unscharf, sind es jedoch nicht. Damit wirft Stefan Heyne die Frage auf, ob die Wirklichkeit nicht doch letztlich unscharf ist, und erreicht die in seinem Werk bisher radikalste Abstraktion. Diese Bilder konfrontieren den Betrachter mit der endlosen Tiefe des Raumes, mit der Unendlichkeit. Ausstellung/Exhibition: Städtische Galerie Dresden 13.6.-14.9.201

Alien Buddha PressBy Alien Buddha, Jeff Weddle (Authored by),Jason Baldinger (Authored by),Ryan Quinn Flanagan (Authored by),Nathan Tompkins (Authored by),Marcel Herms (Authored by),Robert JW (Authored by),Stefan Bohdan (Authored by),Mark Borczon (Authored by),Richard J Cronborg (Authored by),Clinton J Ruttan (Authored by),Chelsea Bergeron (Authored by),John Grochalski (Authored by),Jay Passer (Authored by),Ammi Romero (Cover design or artwork by),R Keith (Authored by),Mark Hartenbach (Authored by),Kevin Ridgeway (Authored by),Gabriel Ricard (Authored by),Thasia Anne (Authored by),Luke Kuzmish

In order to meet the climate targets as set out in the Paris agreement - i.e., to stay "well below 2 °C" of global warming - a transformation of the socio-economic system towards climate neutrality is required. This transformation is connected to radical changes in most aspects of our daily lives, especially with respect to mobility and housing. This poses the questions of how well-being might change due to these changes and ultimately how to quantitatively measure such changes. In the present paper we make a first steps towards answering these fundamental questions. We do so by making use of the concept of energy services, or "functionalities", which take a demand and sufficiency perspective. To quantify effects, we operationalise this concept by using and extending existing macroeconomic models (Input-Output and Computable General Equilibrium). In terms of results we provide standard economic indicators but contrast them with - in our view - more relevant indicators, such as a more comprehensive measure for well-being, as well as distributional effects and co-benefits. Our results clearly show increases in well-being emerging from the climate neutral transformation, whereas conventional indicators such as GDP are declining. We thus demonstrate the importance of looking at the "right" indicators, when assessing socio-economic effects of climate policy and at the same time provide a concrete alternative to state-of-the-art modelling approaches.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 5 March 2016-3 July 2016.

In this paper we take up the challenge to integrate new aspects into macroeconomic modelling and to consider economic activities from an outcome-oriented perspective, so called functionalities. The basic idea is, that functionalities lie behind the demand for commodities and services and therefore are the actual reason for economic activities. Functionalities describe (basic) human needs, such as housing, nutrition, or mobility, and are determinants of human well-being. A crucial aspect of functionalities is the interaction between stocks and flows. The paper presents the operationalisation of functionalities within the framework of an Input-Output (IO) model. Three extensions of the IOT are performed: Firstly, an appropriate allocation of energy supply, transformation and demand to sectors is made. This allows linking the monetary structure with physical units of the total energy and useful energy balances. Secondly, greenhouse gas emissions and other material consumption were additionally allocated to sectoral production. Thirdly, groups of goods of private and public consumption as well as exports were allocated to specific functionalities.

Despite many years of work in robotics, there is still a lack of established software architecture and middleware for multi-robot systems. A robotic middleware should be designed to abstract the low-level hardware architecture, facilitate communication and integration of new software. This PhD thesis is focusing on middleware for multi-robot system and how we can improve existing frameworks for fleet purposes by adding multi-robot coordination services, development and massive deployment tools. We expect robots to be increasingly useful as they can take advantage of data pushed from other external devices in their decision making instead of just reacting to their local environment (sensors, cooperating robots in a fleet, etc). This thesis first evaluates one of the most recent middleware for mobile robot(s), Robot operating system (ROS) and continues with a state of the art about the commonly used middlewares in robotics. Based on the conclusions, we propose an original contribution in the multi-robot context, called SDfR (Service discovery for Robots), a service discovery mechanism for Robots. The main goal is to propose a mechanism that allows highly mobile robots to keep track of the reachable peers inside a fleet while using an ad-hoc infrastructure. Another objective is to propose a network configuration negotiation protocol. Due to the mobility of robots, classical peer to peer network configuration techniques are not suitable. SDfR is a highly dynamic, adaptive and scalable protocol adapted from Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). We conduced a set of experiments, using a fleet of Turtlebot robots, to measure and show that the overhead of SDfR is limited. The last part of the thesis focuses on programming model based on timed automata. This type of programming has the benefits of having a model that can be verified and simulated before deploying the application on real robots. In order to enrich and facilitate the development of robotic applications, a new programming model based on timed automata state machines is proposed, called ROSMDB (Robot Operating system Model Driven Behaviour). It provides model checking at development phase and at runtime. This contribution is composed of several components: a graphical interface to create models based on timed automata, an integrated model checker based on UPPAAL and a code skeleton generator. Moreover, a ROS specific framework is proposed to verify the correctness of the execution of the models and to trigger alerts. Finally, we conduct two experiments: one with a fleet of Parrot drones and second with Turtlebots in order to illustrates the proposed model and its ability to check properties.

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2020). This edition of the conference is held in Bologna and organised by the University of Bologna. The CLiC-it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after six years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges.