TAXATION OF ALCOHOL AND CONSUMER ATTITUDE IS THE ECJ SOBER?

Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

EDA and EU defence procurement integration

The chapter reflects upon the ten years since the establishment of the European Defence Agency (EDA) and analyses its role in the process of European integration in the area of defence procurement. The chapter examines the various initiatives undertaken so far by the EDA in the process of Europeanisation of a policy area that has been linked to core functions of the state and for that reason, based upon a decision making process carried out primarily at national level. Contrary to received wisdom that the EDA’s impact and role has been of limited importance – particularly after the advent of the Defence and Security Procurement Directive 2009/81/EC, proposed by the European Commission and adopted by the Council of the EU and the European Parliament – the chapter argues that the EDA’s contribution in the process of European integration in the field of defence procurement has been especially noteworthy. The chapter submits in particular that the EDA played a crucial role in two ways: First, it demystified and rendered more acceptable the deliberation at the EU level of issues pertaining to the design, rules and policies of defence procurement. Second, by doing so it provided additional political “legitimisation” to the European integration process in this area which led to the enactment of the Defence and Security Procurement Directive. Finally the chapter argues that the EDA must continue its important contribution to the European defence procurement integration and identifies the areas that it may do so

Modeling of Facial Aging and Kinship: A Survey

Computational facial models that capture properties of facial cues related to aging and kinship increasingly attract the attention of the research community, enabling the development of reliable methods for age progression, age estimation, age-invariant facial characterization, and kinship verification from visual data. In this paper, we review recent advances in modeling of facial aging and kinship. In particular, we provide an up-to date, complete list of available annotated datasets and an in-depth analysis of geometric, hand-crafted, and learned facial representations that are used for facial aging and kinship characterization. Moreover, evaluation protocols and metrics are reviewed and notable experimental results for each surveyed task are analyzed. This survey allows us to identify challenges and discuss future research directions for the development of robust facial models in real-world conditions

High-speed, in-band performance measurement instrumentation for next generation IP networks

Facilitating always-on instrumentation of Internet traffic for the purposes of performance measurement is crucial in order to enable accountability of resource usage and automated network control, management and optimisation. This has proven infeasible to date due to the lack of native measurement mechanisms that can form an integral part of the network‟s main forwarding operation. However, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) specification enables the efficient encoding and processing of optional per-packet information as a native part of the network layer, and this constitutes a strong reason for IPv6 to be adopted as the ubiquitous next generation Internet transport. In this paper we present a very high-speed hardware implementation of in-line measurement, a truly native traffic instrumentation mechanism for the next generation Internet, which facilitates performance measurement of the actual data-carrying traffic at small timescales between two points in the network. This system is designed to operate as part of the routers' fast path and to incur an absolutely minimal impact on the network operation even while instrumenting traffic between the edges of very high capacity links. Our results show that the implementation can be easily accommodated by current FPGA technology, and real Internet traffic traces verify that the overhead incurred by instrumenting every packet over a 10 Gb/s operational backbone link carrying a typical workload is indeed negligible

Investigating the Potential of the Inter-IXP Multigraph for the Provisioning of Guaranteed End-to-End Services

In this work, we propose utilizing the rich connectivity between IXPs and ISPs for inter-domain path stitching, supervised by centralized QoS brokers. In this context, we highlight a novel abstraction of the Internet topology, i.e., the inter-IXP multigraph composed of IXPs and paths crossing the domains of their shared member ISPs. This can potentially serve as a dense Internet-wide substrate for provisioning guaranteed end-to-end (e2e) services with high path diversity and global IPv4 address space reach. We thus map the IXP multigraph, evaluate its potential, and introduce a rich algorithmic framework for path stitching on such graph structures.Comment: Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS '15, pages 429-430, 1/1/2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.0264

Shallow Water Bathymetry Mapping from UAV Imagery based on Machine Learning

The determination of accurate bathymetric information is a key element for near offshore activities, hydrological studies such as coastal engineering applications, sedimentary processes, hydrographic surveying as well as archaeological mapping and biological research. UAV imagery processed with Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi View Stereo (MVS) techniques can provide a low-cost alternative to established shallow seabed mapping techniques offering as well the important visual information. Nevertheless, water refraction poses significant challenges on depth determination. Till now, this problem has been addressed through customized image-based refraction correction algorithms or by modifying the collinearity equation. In this paper, in order to overcome the water refraction errors, we employ machine learning tools that are able to learn the systematic underestimation of the estimated depths. In the proposed approach, based on known depth observations from bathymetric LiDAR surveys, an SVR model was developed able to estimate more accurately the real depths of point clouds derived from SfM-MVS procedures. Experimental results over two test sites along with the performed quantitative validation indicated the high potential of the developed approach.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Forecasting Exchange-Rates via Local Approximation Methods and Neural Networks

There has been an increased number of papers in the literature in recent years, applying several methods and techniques for exchange - rate prediction. This paper focuses on the Greek drachma using daily observations of the drachma rates against four major currencies, namely the U.S. Dollar (USD), the Deutsche Mark (DM), the French Franc (FF) and the British Pound (GBP) for a period of 11 years, aiming at forecasting their short-term course by applying local approximation methods based on both chaotic analysis and neural networks.Key Words: Exchange Rates, Forecasting, Neural Networks