A Vision For Horizon 2020

An international all-star cast of thinkers, artists, and policy makers joins forces for a transparent, united, democratic Europe. This 2020 Edition features contributions by Kate Aronoff, Bill McKibben, Evgeny Morozov, Jerome Roos, and more. The European Union was an exceptional achievement. It brought together and in peace peoples speaking different languages and submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was not long ago tormented by murderous chauvinism, racism, and barbarity. It could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of age-old conflict and bigotry. But things turned out differently. Today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide Europeans who were beginning to unite despite their different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials, and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating people and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened. With contributions from some of the world’s foremost thinkers, artists and politicians covering the full spectrum of concerns for the future of the Union, this volume presents realistic and viable alternatives to the mainstream barrage of dreadful prospects - a true vision for Europe.

In everyday communication, Europe’s citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. The agenda was prepared by META-NET, a European Network of Excellence. META-NET consists of 60 research centres in 34 countries, who cooperate with stakeholders from economy, government agencies, research organisations, non-governmental organisations, language communities and European universities. META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all European languages. “The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.” — Dr. Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime-Minister of Portugal) “It is imperative that language technologies for Slovene are developed systematically if we want Slovene to flourish also in the future digital world.” — Dr. Danilo Türk (President of the Republic of Slovenia) “For such small languages like Latvian keeping up with the ever increasing pace of time and technological development is crucial. The only way to ensure future existence of our language is to provide its users with equal opportunities as the users of larger languages enjoy. Therefore being on the forefront of modern technologies is our opportunity.” — Valdis Dombrovskis (Prime Minister of Latvia) “Europe’s inherent multilingualism and our scientific expertise are the perfect prerequisites for significantly advancing the challenge that language technology poses. META-NET opens up new opportunities for the development of ubiquitous multilingual technologies.” — Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research)

Between 1960 and 2020, the population of West Africa will have increased fivefold, even with the most optimistic assumptions of increased contraceptive use. This unprecedented demographic explosion is accompanied by another major change: Exposure to ...

This book lays the groundwork for a new field of study and research in the intersection between science and diplomacy. It will review the multi-disciplinary research in this burgeoning area in providing the scientific foundation for the application of psychological principles to understanding and facilitating political decisions in an international context. Focusing on how people think, act, and feel on both individual and collective levels, this book takes into account a realistic perspective from which transformative processes can emerge. It follows the ongoing debate in the EU and the world in providing a better understanding of the tools that can be deployed to improve communication and cooperation between scientists, politicians, and diplomats in this field. The failure of communication in this COVID-19 planetary crisis has not been about whether or not objectives have been achieved, but about the ability of major actors to cooperate to forge links with people. The way policymakers and scientists will manage their interpersonal negotiations will be of great importance in fostering international cooperation and coordinated problem-solving behaviours. Otherwise, science diplomacy will lose sight of its most important purpose: that of helping to solve problems, conflicts, and diplomatic processes for the sake of humanity.

PDF can be downloaded for free from: http://martenscentre.eu/publications/model-implementing-sustainable-and-qualitative-growth-eu The period since the outbreak of the financial, economic and social crises in Europe has witnessed a renewed focus on the need to develop a more sustainable and qualitative growth model. A model where the traditional focus on economic growth (i.e. GDP growth) is complemented by an adherence to a wider range of qualitative indicators. Indicators which more broadly characterise the well-being of society as a whole. This paper defines a model for Sustainable and Qualitative Growth (SQG) in the EU and questions if existing EU economic and social governance arrangements are consistent with this wider approach to building a sustainable growth model. This paper identifies a number of key recommendations. First, a more encompassing, balanced and multi-dimensional EU strategy for growth should be adopted. This refined strategy should take into account the broader indicators underpinning the SQG model and should be addressed in key EU documents such as the Annual Growth Survey. Second, a symmetric and Ôtime consistentÕ macroeconomic strategy, allowing for investments in SQG related domains, should be pursued. These growth-enhancing investments should primarily target relevant policy areas such as education and training, technological innovation and lifelong learning strategies. Third, a common automatic stabiliser in the EU should be set up in order to provide a minimum level of EU investment across all member states.

The 30-volume set, comprising the LNCS books 12346 until 12375, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020, which was planned to be held in Glasgow, UK, during August 23-28, 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1360 revised papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 5025 submissions. The papers deal with topics such as computer vision; machine learning; deep neural networks; reinforcement learning; object recognition; image classification; image processing; object detection; semantic segmentation; human pose estimation; 3d reconstruction; stereo vision; computational photography; neural networks; image coding; image reconstruction; object recognition; motion estimation.

This book presents the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Visions (AICV 2020), which took place in Cairo, Egypt, from April 8 to 10, 2020. This international conference, which highlighted essential research and developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer visions, was organized by the Scientific Research Group in Egypt (SRGE). The book is divided into sections, covering the following topics: swarm-based optimization mining and data analysis, deep learning and applications, machine learning and applications, image processing and computer vision, intelligent systems and applications, and intelligent networks.