The aftermath of the Greek elections: who voted for who?

Of course, the main story, apart from the fact that Syriza won, was that more people than ever before didn’t vote at all. Abstention reached a record level of 44 per cent

Greek higher education: Another patient of austerity in the operating room

As the strike by the administrative staff of the Greek universities continues into its third month, Greek society is experiencing another drama that might end up having itself as the only victim. The latest stress-test for Greece stems, this time, from higher education

Who wanted what? An aftermath of the public debate on Greek elections

The debate on the Greek elections organized by the Hellenic Observatory on 4th February, offered some interesting food for thought. What struck us was a casual comment by Dionyssis Dimitrakopoulos at the beginning of the talk, namely that SYRIZA had scored well amongst most social groups but rather less well amongst pensioners. After all, these people had suffered pretty draconian cuts, with the 2010 Memorandum and its successors reducing pensioners’ incomes – in some cases by up to 40%– and making benefits harder to claim. Later Daphne Halikiopoulou presented results from exit polls showing support for the parties by different categories of the population. But whilst she talked about public sector workers, private sector workers and unemployed people, she showed no results for pensioners. We decided to look at the data in more detail. We used data from Kapa Research[1] and performed our own analysis. The voting behaviour depicted by these data could offer useful insights into who voted which way and to suggest why and what this could mean

Improvement for detection of microcalcifications through clustering algorithms and artificial neural networks

A new method for detecting microcalcifications in regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from digitized mammograms is proposed. The top-hat transform is a technique based on mathematical morphology operations and, in this paper, is used to perform contrast enhancement of the mi-crocalcifications. To improve microcalcification detection, a novel image sub-segmentation approach based on the possibilistic fuzzy c-means algorithm is used. From the original ROIs, window-based features, such as the mean and standard deviation, were extracted; these features were used as an input vector in a classifier. The classifier is based on an artificial neural network to identify patterns belonging to microcalcifications and healthy tissue. Our results show that the proposed method is a good alternative for automatically detecting microcalcifications, because this stage is an important part of early breast cancer detectio

Vertical Industries Requirements Analysis & Targeted KPIs for Advanced 5G Trials

Just before the commercial roll out of European 5G networks, 5G trials in realistic environments have been recently initiated all around Europe, as pat of the Phase 3 projects of 5GPPP H2020 program [1]. The goal is to showcase 5G's capabilities and to convince stakeholders about its value adding business potential. The approach is to offer advanced 5G connectivity to real vertical industries and showcase how it enables them to overcome existing 4G network limitations and other long standing issues. The 5G EVE H2020 5GPPP project [2] offers cutting edge 5G end to end facilities (in 4 countries) to diversified vertical industry experimenters. The objective is to understand the needs of prominent industries across Europe and to offer tailor made 5G experience to each and every one of them. This paper contributes to the understanding of vertical services' needs, by offering a thorough and concise vertical requirements analysis methodology, including an examination of the 4G limitations. It also provides real life values for the targeted KPIs of three vertical sectors namely, Smart Industry (4.0), Smart Cities / Health and Smart Energy, while assisting market roll out by prioritizing their connectivity needs.Comment: EuCNC 201

Prediction-led prescription: Optimal decision-making in times of turbulence and business performance improvement

Can you have prescription without prediction? Most scholars and practitioners would argue that a good forecast drives an optimal decision, thus promoting the concept of prediction-led prescription. In times of turbulence, Special events like promotions and supply chain disruptions are impacting businesses severely. Nevertheless, limited research has been carried out to date to accurately forecast the impact of, and consequentially prescribe in the presence of special events. Nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) predictive analytics methods and heuristics imitate and even improve human intelligence, progressively leading towards innovative cognitive analytics solutions. This research aims to contribute to applying advancements in AI-based predictive analytics to improve business performance. We provide empirical evidence that these AI solutions outperform the popular (especially among practitioners) linear regression models. We corroborate the stream of literature arguing that AI predictive analytics could − via a natural path-dependent process − enhance prescriptive analytics solutions, and thus improve business performance

All-optical regeneration of phase-encoded signals

In this Chapter we review the need, general principles and approaches used to regenerate phase encoded signals of differing levels of coding complexity. We will describe the key underpinning technology and present the current state-of-the-art, incorporating an appropriate historic perspective throughout. The chapter finishes with a discussion of emerging research trends and broader future perspectives

The design and evaluation transmit and receive antennas for an ionospheric communications probe system: B. Sloping-vee beams

The purpose of this study was to design and evaluate the performance of a transmitting antenna for an HF communications probe system. Monterey, CA, was selected as the transmit site, and San Diego, CA, was selected as the receive site to establish an ionospheric communication link to test the equipment involved in the probe system.http://archive.org/details/thedesignndevalu1094538502Lieutenant, Hellenic NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited