Publications

The issue contains abstracts of the 32nd World Congress of the International Project Management Association (IPMA). Authors from 25 countries submitted papers in five thematic areas — Project management perspective, Project management practice, Project management people, Project management methodology and approaches, Agility and projects..

This book analyses Russia-Europe/EU relations by exploring their practical essence and conceptualizing them in terms of the main categories of international relations research. It argues that the liberal world order, established in Cold War days, whereby international relations are underpinned by a global balance of power and a highly institutionalized framework of international relations, thereby balancing power and morality, continued after the Cold War, with high hopes in the early 1990s for a new order of security and cooperation for all Europe, including Russia. It goes on to show how the liberal world order has broken down, one manifestation of this being the new conflict between Russia and Europe in recent years, a conflict resulting from the failure of European countries/the EU to acknowledge the actual balance of military, economic and political power, the lack of limits on the policy of European countries in terms of infringing on Russia’s interests, and Russia’s consequent revision, after 1999, of its policy of co-operation. Overall, the book provides huge insight into the nature of Europe-Russia relations.

 Strategic documents related to the socio-economic development of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation are considered. The role of system-forming projects that have a significant impact on the development of engineering and transport infrastructure in the Arctic is determined. The place of St. Petersburg as a historically developed center for the study and development of the Arctic zone in various directions is shown. The article analyzes a systematic approach to the development of mineral resources in the Arctic on the basis of a broad interdepartmental and interregional interaction of various economic entities in the real sector of the economy and government authorities.

Waste Management Policies and Practices in BRICS Nations explores recent developments in waste management. BRICS nations are the emerging economies of the world. Increasing populations, urbanization, industrialization and uses of chemical fertilizer and pesticide in agriculture for enhanced productivity of food, especially in India and China, to support the large populations harm the natural environment. The rise in the living standards of the human population has increased environmental pollution manifold, resulting in the huge generation of biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste simultaneously, which has contaminated natural resources such as soil, water and air. It has led to undesirable effects on the environment and human health.

 

The book offers comprehensive coverage of the most essential topics, including:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waste management problems with special reference to MSW in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa Solid waste management in BRICS nations Hazardous waste management in BRICS nations Policies and laws in BRICS nations

This book contains both policies and methods used for the management of waste in BRICS nations. The chapters incorporate both policies and practical aspects.

Merab Mamardashvili (1930-1990) is a legend of Russian and Russian-Soviet philosophy. His work sought to cultivate an “awakening to thought,” to help his interlocuters distinguish between truth and falsity. This book serves as an in-depth investigation into the life and work of one of the most prominent philosophers of Russian and Russian-Soviet history, collecting his ideas here in one book. Diana Gasparyan explains the philosophical foundations of his ideas, as they relate to the broader traditions of philosophy of consciousness, phenomenology, existentialism, transcendental philosophy, and Continental philosophy. However, his ideas also lead much further - deep into philosophy itself, its cultural origins, and to the basis and roots of all human thought.

With the convening of the BRICS summits in China in 2017, in South Africa in 2018 and in Brazil in 2019, the BRICS cooperation mechanism has entered its second decade and been expanded to the “BRICS+” countries. “Partnership for New Industrial Revolution” and “Innovation-driven Development” have become the highlights and focus of BRICS cooperation in the new decade and have attracted much attention. The first BRICS Comprehensive Innovation Competitiveness Report was published in August 2017. Compared to it, the BRICS Comprehensive Innovation Competitiveness Report 2020 has four distinctive features. First, all the 32 level-three indicators in the indicator system for evaluating innovation competitiveness of BRICS countries, such as R&D expenditure, patents and R&D personnel, have been calculated and analyzed. Second, considering the importance of agriculture, three thematic reports on agriculture have been included. Third, the reports on the STI development in the provinces or regions of China and Russia, the efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change through STI in India and new energy development in South Africa have been added to the section of country reports, with the aim to promote BRICS cooperation at the sub-national level and in industrial sectors. Fourth, the 2017 report was mainly written by Chinese experts with the support of Russian experts, while the 2020 report is mainly written by Chinese and Russian experts, with input contributed by experts from Brazil, India, South Africa and other African countries. 

This report mainly consists of three parts. Part 1 consists of two general reports on “Assessment and Prediction of Innovation Competitiveness, Status Quo and Suggestions for STI Cooperation Among BRICS Countries” and “Science and Technology Priority Areas in BRICS+ Countries”, respectively. They provide an assessment of the “innovation competitiveness” and “comprehensive innovation competitiveness” of BRICS countries and a forecast of the development trend of their “comprehensive innovation competitiveness”. Meanwhile, they review the status and progress of STI cooperation between China and other BRICS countries, and identify the priority areas for STI cooperation among “BRICS+” countries, providing valuable input for policymaking that would accelerate the improvement of their national innovation competitiveness. Part 2 consists of country reports and thematic reports. The country reports assess and analyze the innovation competitiveness of the BRICS countries and examine STI cooperation within the BRICS framework. The thematic reports provide in-depth analysis of current situation and challenges of relevant countries in agriculture areas. Part 3 is annexes, including a collection of relevant documents concerning BRICS STI cooperation framework. 

This book seeks to open the box of emission pathways, by considering the multidimensional feasibility conditions-i.e. the technical, economic, political, social and institutional- that will enable the required far-reaching and systemic transformation towards the long-term goal. A detailed understanding of the transformations is indeed key to support the adoption of more ambitious emission targets by countries (and other actors), and to guide more effective implementation. On the one hand indeed, the revision of emission targets needs to be guided by an assessment of how drivers should change to trigger transformative shifts rather than an aggregation of marginal mitigation actions in key emitting sectors. On the other hand, converting emissions’ targets into pertinent concrete actions requires a clear and detailed vision of the main levers to be activated, which in turn depends on understanding the end goal of the required transformations as well as the standing point of the necessary conditions for implementation.

Despite empirical research showing that countries with higher level of voice and accountability are less prone to suffer from terrorism, it is not yet clear what type of terrorist activity is more likely to appear when vertical accountability is absent. This article investigates the effect of voice and accountability on suicide bombing attacks growth in countries with different institutional conditions. The results are obtained by using QOG and GTD databases for regression analysis. The results lend support to the two hypotheses tested: 1) voice and accountability has significant reductive effect on suicide bombing growth; 2) the effect of voice and accountability on suicide bombing is more profound than the effect on other types of terrorist attacks.

This book examines the projects of administrative and territorial reconstruction of Arab countries as an aftermath of the “Arab Spring”. Additionally, it looks into an active rethinking of the former unitary model, linked by its critics with dictatorship and oppression.

The book presents decentralization or even federalization as newly emerging major topics of socio-political debate in the Arab world. As the federalist recipes and projects are specific and the struggle for their implementation has a pronounced variation, different case studies are presented. Countries discussed include Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

The book looks into the background and prerequisites of the federalist experiments of the “Arab Spring”, describes their evolution and current state, and assesses the prospects for the future. It is, therefore, a must-read for scholars of political science, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of previous and current developments in the Arab countries.

The purpose of this short manual: to acquaint the reader who speaks English, but doesn`t know Russian, with fundamentals of contract law in Russia, with its most vital concepts and principles. The fundamental issues of contractual law of Russia are also considered: the conclusion, execution, alteration, termination of the contract, methods of ensuring the fulfillment of an obligation, the liability for the breach of a contract. At the end of the manual, some additional resources are provided, the study of which may help to better understand Russian contract law.

This study guide is intended for English-speaking students and lecturers of law universities, graduate students and researchers, practicing lawyers, as well as anyone interested in the issues of contract law of various states.

How legacies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) have survived in the politics, economic development, culture, and society of post-Communist regions in the 21st Century? The book shows how this impact is not driven by Communist ideology but by the clientelistic practices, opportunism and cynicism prevalent in the CPSU. Their study is built on a novel dataset of the CPSU membership rates in Russian regions in the 1950s-1980s, alongside case studies, interviews and an analysis of mass media previously only available in Russian and discussed here in English for the first time. It will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and Eastern European politics and history, and anyone who wants to better understand countries which live or have lived through Communism: from Eastern Europe to China and East Asian Communist states.

This book tries to debate on the significance of circular economy, underlying the necessity to change our way of producing, consuming, and traveling on a daily basis. The passage from a linear economy to a circular economy will help us to reduce the degradation of the environment for avoiding future disastrous consequences, such as depletion of biodiversity, scarcity of raw materials and drinking water, rising waters, etc. The circular economy, therefore, involves designing a product so that it can be recycled or its components reused. Reuse consists of introducing the product back into the economic circuit in its original condition; repair makes it possible to fix a broken good; and recovery consists of reusing its components. This is the significance of the so-called 3R strategy, illustrated in this book.

This book aims to introduce a new framework of analysis for competition law and policy, but also the broader field of regulation of the food economy, drawing on the concept of global value chains. These global value chains are  structures of organisation of economic activity, which are characterised by their systemic, coordination-driven nature. They rely on various systems of transnational governance and different sorts of linkages, some traditional such as contract law, others novel and relying on corporate law, property law or some more informal mechanisms, relying on information technology. For instance, GVCs are becoming a primary conduit for the transfer of intellectual property (‘IP’) globally, with the creators of intellectual products relying less on traditional IP regimes to enable them to limit access to their material, and more on a combination of contractual rights and technological protections.

Bioinformatics Institute 2020/21. Project abstracts. Bioinformatics Summer School 2021. Abstracts.

В начале XXI века возникла и стала активно развиваться занятость населения через онлайн-платформы. Это стало отличительной чертой новой цифровой экономики. В настоящей работе прослеживается развитие платформенной занятости фрилансеров в Российской Федерации и на постсоветском пространстве в целом. В исследовании используются уникальные данные четырех онлайн-опросов, проведенных авторами в 2009, 2011, 2014 и 2019 годах на ведущей русскоязычной бирже удалённой работы для творческого и интеллектуального труда FL.ru. Общая методология, используемая для сбора и анализа данных каждого обследования, даёт возможность пролить свет на динамику ключевых показателей за десятилетний период. В исследовании рассматриваются социально-демографические характеристики фрилансеров, их карьерные траектории, мотивация, условия работы и удовлетворённость ею, а также проблемы, с которыми фрилансеры сталкиваются в своих отношениях с клиентами. В целом результаты указывают на возросшее значение платформ, распространение новой модели работы среди более широких слоев населения и распространённость неформальных отношений, которые могут препятствовать будущему развитию онлайн-рынка труда. Отсутствие основных трудовых прав, коллективного представительства и социальной защиты фрилансеров также вызывает серьёзную озабоченность.

An approach to ensuring the quality of functioning of automated enterprise systems based on the concept of the ISO/IEC 15026 standard providing the necessary level of system integrity in its life cycle. The problem statement and methods suitable for solving the problem are considered.

Large old trees and decaying logs are key-retained structures for the retention forestry approach, but quantitative estimations of the role of fallen logs in the overall diversity and composition of forest vascular species are few and controversial. Particularly for mesic deciduous forests only a small number of such estimates are known. Our study aimed to partly fill this gap using data collected in the Reserve Kaluzhskie Zaseki where large Quercus robur individuals of more than 300 years old and fallen logs are frequent. We found 44 fallen oak logs supporting vascular plants within a 200-ha forest tract. The vegetation in plots of 1 m² located on the fallen logs and on the forest floor adjacent to the logs was surveyed together with vegetation in fifteen 10 × 10 m plots randomly placed in patches without large fallen logs. NMDS and PERMANOVA were applied to examine differences in composition between fallen logs and forest floor. Generalized linear models were used to examine the relationships between environmental variables and species richness. Additive diversity partitioning was performed to examine differences in species richness and to estimate the contribution of the fallen logs to the general diversity in vascular species. In total, 71 vascular plant species in 108 1 m²-plots were identified. Twenty-five and 16 species were detected only on fallen logs and on the forest floor, respectively. More than 60% of the studied logs were in early stages of decomposition; their mean diameter was 75.4 ± 25.6 cm. Fallen logs significantly affected species richness and composition in terms of both woody seedlings and herbaceous species. The diameter of logs significantly and positively affected species diversity and composition. Large logs with cracked bark at the first two stages of decay were places of successful vascular plant establishment and growth. The abundance and frequency of tree seedlings were higher on the logs than on the forest floor and seven out of ten tree species appeared to be significant indicator species for the log-plots. Illumination varied over the observed sites and directly influenced the richness of herbaceous species and the overall species composition, but had no effect on woody species richness. We conclude that retention of large fallen logs can be an effective tool for maintaining and restoring the vascular species richness and composition in mesic broad-leaved forests.

In an attempt to overcome the current WTO Appellate Body crisis, a number of WTO Members agreed to participate in the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement pursuant to Article 25 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (MPIA). The majority of the WTO Members have not yet agreed to participate in the MPIA have been attempting to assess the effectiveness of the MPIA in meeting their interests. This leads to the question as to whether the MPIA can serve as the temporary solution for the Appellate Body crisis. Is it a practically effective mechanism for dispute resolution, or is it simply a political declaration by MPIA participants that they stick to the two-tier dispute settlement system? To respond to these questions, this article analyses the legal basis of the MPIA and its negotiating history. This article also addresses the differences between the appeal mechanisms provided for in the MPIA and the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) and provides a conceptual discussion with regard to the legal nature of the MPIA. Finally, the article identifies the main advantages and drawbacks of MPIA. It should be taken into account that the effectiveness of the MPIA will only be assessed when any of the disputes submitted for consideration under the MPIA rules is resolved.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an enormous social and economic impact on societies in 2020. The epidemiological situation is evolving on a daily basis, and the methodology of how to evaluate the impact of the pandemic and the severity of its consequences is lacking. The only available high-frequency data now are the number of people who have contracted the illness, and the restrictive measures that authorities have implemented to contain the outbreak. The most important question now is whether authorities can prevent subsequent waves. The contribution of the paper is a dynamic model of COVID-19 outbreaks, on the basis of which we investigated the possible impact of the socio-economic behavior and restrictions on its waves. To build the model, a large database for different countries with a wide range of economic and social institutions was collected. We give a detailed description of the model and a comparison of the results with trajectories of the outbreaks in the countries under consideration. The proposed model describes the empirical results and can be used for timely and contemporary predictions of the stages of pandemics. Despite this, the model needs future development and verification because the pandemic is not over, and the accumulation of empirical information continues. Yet the model might also be useful as a basis for researching the impacts of other socioeconomic and medical actions for containing pandemics.

One of the most promising enablers for the secure distributed operation of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems could be based on a mathematical construct widely known as blockchain that aims to neglect the system’s centralization and scalability properties. This paper aims to map the requirements and features of both systems, highlight the main co-existence challenges and technological candidates for smoother integration of IoT and blockchain, as well as provide the standartization outlook. Moreover, an architectural approach to an integrated solution is identified based on classic literature review methodology aiming to consider the IoT versus blockchain characteristics mapping and outlining related challenges. Critical solutions to address the integration bottlenecks include moving from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Distributed Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus, adding a Fog overlay to the architecture model, and leveraging the synergies combining the benefits of blockchain and IoT technology are highlighted

We consider an interesting class of composite optimization problems with a gradient dominance condition and introduce corresponding analogue of the recently proposed concept of an inexact oracle. This concept is applied to some classes of smooth functional.

We study geometrical and dynamical properties of the so-called discrete Lorenz-like attractors. We show that such robustly chaotic (pseudohyperbolic) attractors can appear as a result of universal bifurcation scenarios, for which we give a phenomenological description and demonstrate certain examples of their implementation in one-parameter families of three-dimensional Hénon-like maps. We pay special attention to such scenarios that can lead to period-2 Lorenz-like attractors. These attractors have very interesting dynamical properties and we show that their crises can lead, in turn, to the emergence of discrete Lorenz shape attractors of new types.

The introduction to the archival documents published in this issue of Ab Imperio frames the broad context of the political reform of 1905–1906 in the Russian Empire and highlights the imperial dimension in the elabora- tion of the first electoral law (the Bulygin Duma law). The authors explore the multisided and layered nature of political conflicts as well as divergent political imaginaries with regard to the institution of political representation in the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. In particular, the text explicates the nationalizing and colonializing imaginary of social engineering that guided the work of Sergey Kryzhanovskii on electoral principles and mecha- nisms. That imaginary stood in contradiction to the vision and practice of imperial citizenship that was shared by more senior officials in the central government of the empire such as Count Dmitry Sol’skii and Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov. The concept of imperial citizenship can be traced to the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which created the universalizing framework of norms and institutions for diverse space and groups of population in the empire. At the same time, the political logic of the Great Reforms allowed the incorporation of imperial particularisms into universalizing norms and institutions. Analyzing responses to ministerial proposals of the electoral law by high-ranking officials of various imperial peripheries, the authors demonstrate how the institutions of imperial citizenship framed the campaign of information-gathering marshaled by the imperial center and how the language of imperial citizenship conditioned the approach of local officials to the phenomenon of political representation.

In this paper we study the so-called sigma form of the second Painleve hierarchy. To obtain this form, we use some properties of the Hamiltonian structure of the second Painleve hierarchy and of the Lenard operator.

During the short period of Donald Trump’s presidency, U.S. foreign policy underwent significant changes. The visible decline in the activity in the southern and south-eastern Mediterranean in previous years gave way to Washington’s increased diplomatic activity in the settlement process. Although the lion’s share of U.S. foreign policy in the MENA region was aimed at resolving the Arab-Israel confrontation, it did not ignore local conflicts such as the Libyan crisis, which at first glance has little to do with the main goals of the U.S. policy the region.

Washington’s participation in the August 2020 negotiation process made it, along with Moscow and Ankara, a guarantor of a truce between the two main camps: the “Western bloc” represented by the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) led by Fayez al-Sarraj, and the “Eastern bloc” represented by Commander-in-Chief of the Libyan National Army (LNA) Khalifa Haftar. In many ways, the U.S. efforts facilitated the election of Libya’s interim government, which came as a peculiar result of Trump’s regional policy and charted a new vector to developments in Libya.

Even though Russia did not get involved in settling the Libyan crisis immediately after the civil war broke out in the country in 2011, it has strengthened its position on the Libyan track as a mediator in negotia- tions while formally remaining barely interested in supporting a particular Libyan side.

In this regard, two questions arise: How will the change in the U.S. policy in the region affect Moscow’s position on the Libyan issue and on the developments in the eastern Mediterranean in general? And what new threats and challenges will Russia face in the event of a radical change in the United States’ role in the region?

This paper is focused on the finetuning of acoustic models for speaker adaptation goals on a given gender. We pretrained the Transformer baseline model on Librispeech-960 and conducted experiments with finetuning on the gender-specific test subsets. The obtained word error rate (WER) relatively to the baseline is up to 5% and 3% lower on male and female subsets, respectively, if the layers in the encoder and decoder are not frozen, and the tuning is started from the last checkpoints. Moreover, we adapted our base model on the complete L2 Arctic dataset of accented speech and finetuned it for particular speakers and male and female genders separately. The models trained on the gender subsets obtained 1-2% lower WER when compared to the model tuned on the whole L2 Arctic dataset. Finally, it was experimentally confirmed that the concatenation of the pretrained voice embeddings (x-vector) and embeddings from a conventional encoder cannot significantly improve the speech recognition accuracy.

Critical thinking is recognized as a key skill of the 21st century. The basis for the development of critical thinking can be integrated scientific disciplines and the associated scientific method. The learning model should be based on the essence of science as a process of discovering something new and teaching materials should become simulators of 'making discoveries' by recreating the situation of scientific search. The article describes a relatively new type of educational materials – natural-scientific cases (NSC). NSC is based on real-world problem situations, which are solved with the help of a chain of tasks that guides the student along the path of the scientific method. The formulations of the tasks are aimed at the development and diagnosis of critical thinking. An experiment on the introduction of cases into the educational process of two Moscow universities is described in the article. The results obtained indicate that the use of a set of NSC has a double positive effect: the natural science complex serves as an excellent basis for the development of critical thinking, and an increase in the level of thinking contributes to a more productive assimilation of natural science material.

In the modern quickly changing business environment the role of the project management continuously increases in activity of the companies. Since 2014 methodical recommendations about introduction of project management in executive authorities were developed. It is established that mistakes at implementation of projects lead to multimillion losses. It doesn't remain unaddressed.

When performing any work of the project there can be a mistake, which is also a deviation from the established requirements. Verification of compliance of the final product to the established requirements is an obligatory stage of implementation of any project. If mistakes in works are revealed only at this stage, then a lot of time for their localization will be required. Localization here will be detection of the works performed incorrectly. In practice the similar situation almost inevitably leads to failure to meet time constraints of end of the project and the corresponding material losses. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out checks of correctness of performance of work during implementation of the project. If to carry out check of compliance of result to all established requirements for each work and to correct errors, then compliance of the final product of the project to all to the established requirements will be guaranteed, but at the same time terms of the project and its cost can increase to unacceptable values. The problem of the choice of control points is relevant as its decision allows to reduce losses from a delay of the termination of the project caused by mistakes in works. These losses are directly bound to time of restoring a regularity of implementation of the project, and for VRP ratio is non-linear and losses quickly increase. In certain cases, such ratio is exponential.

The rational choice of control points is an effective method of decrease in time of restoring a regularity of implementation of the project when mistakes in works appeared.

Several methods of arrangement of control points are offered. They are based on the principle of maximization of the information. The diagnostic model of the project and the mathematical model of emergence of mistakes in works of the project are developed for using these methods. The criteria for comparison of options of arrangement of control points is developed as well as the algorithms and the software for the experimental check of effectiveness of the offered methods and their practical application to arrangement of control points in real projects. The experiment directed to assessment of effectiveness of each of the offered methods is made. Results of an experiment showed expediency of use of all methods as a part of a complex and its high performance.

The common approach to the analysis of natural texts implies that semantic analysis should following the stage of parsing. However, medical texts are known as very complicated and written in a very specific language. Traditional parsers are demonstrating relatively small productivity here. In this article, we are demonstrating an opposite approach: ontology-based entailing of words in combination with simple shallow parsing rules. It allows us to increase UAS metrics from 0.82 for SpaCy to 0.834 for our approach.

This article analyzes new promising topological solutions for the on-chip communication subsystem for network-on-chip (NoCs). A study of Paley graphs as a subclass of circulant graphs is given. The main parameters (diameter, average path length, graph density, number of edges and degrees of vertices) of modifications of Paley graphs are studied using the direct product of Paley graphs with Paley graphs and ring graph. Other types of products of graphs are considered, namely strong, tensor and lexicographic. Due to the more preferable characteristics, the direct product of the graphs was chosen as the most suitable among the considered ones. A comparative analysis of obtained graphs is provided.

Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers should consider blockchain vulnerabilities and eliminate them before the deployment of the system. In this paper, we demonstrate a statistical model checking approach for the verification of blockchain systems on three real-world attack scenarios. We build and verify models of DNS attack, double-spending with memory pool flooding, and consensus delay scenario. After that, we analyze experimental results and propose solutions to avoid these kinds of attacks.

This paper is devoted to the problem concerning the chromatic number of a random 3-uniform hypergraph. We consider the binomial model H(n, 3, p) and show that if p=p(n) decreases fast enough then the chromatic number of H(n, 3, p) is concentrated in 2 or 3 consecutive values which can be found explicitly as functions of n and p. This result is derived as an application of the solution of an extremal problem for doubly stochastic matrices.

While Masked Language Models (MLM) are pre-trained on massive datasets, the additional training with the MLM objective on domain or task-specific data before fine-tuning for the final task is known to improve the final perfor- mance. This is usually referred to as the do- main or task adaptation step. However, unlike the initial pre-training, this step is performed for each domain or task individually and is still rather slow, requiring several GPU days com- pared to several GPU hours required for the final task fine-tuning.

We argue that the standard MLM objective leads to inefficiency when it is used for the adaptation step because it mostly learns to pre- dict the most frequent words, which are not necessarily related to a final task. We pro- pose a technique for more efficient adaptation that focuses on predicting words with large weights of the Naive Bayes classifier trained for the task at hand, which are likely more rel- evant than the most frequent words. The pro- posed method provides faster adaptation and better final performance for sentiment analysis compared to the standard approach.

In this paper we describe our work that we have done to participate in Task1 of ConferencingSpeech2021 challenge. This task set a goal to develop the solution for multi-channel speech enhancement in a real-time manner. We propose a novel system for streaming speech enhancement. We employ Wave-U-Net architecture with temporal convolutions in encoder and decoder. We incorporate self-attention in decoder to apply attention mask retrieved from skip-connection on features from down-blocks. We explore history cache mechanisms that work like hidden states in recurrent networks and implemented them in proposal solution. It helps us to run inference with chunks length 40 ms and Real-Time Factor 0.4 with the same precision

Using the Painlev\e--Kovalevskaya test, we find several new matrix generalizations of the Painleve-4 equation. Some limiting transitions reduces them to known matrix PPainainleve-2 equations.

Visual object recognition in the real world is not performed in isolation, but is instead dependent on contextual information such as the visual scene an object is found in. And our perceptual experience is not just visual: objects generate specific and unique sounds which can readily predict which objects are outside of our field of view. Here, we test whether and how naturalistic sounds influence visual object processing and demonstrate that auditory information both accelerates visual information processing and modulates the perceptual representation of visual objects. Specifically, using a visual discrimination task and a novel set of ambiguous object stimuli, we find that naturalistic sounds shift visual representations towards the object features that match the sound (Exp. 1a- 1b). In a series of control experiments, we replicate the original effect and show that these effects are not driven by decision- or response biases (Exp. 2a-2b) and are not due to the high-level semantic content of sounds generating explicit expectations (Exp.3). Instead, these sound-induced effects on visual perception appear to be driven by the continuous integration of multisensory inputs during perception itself. Together, our results demonstrate that visual processing is shaped by auditory context which provides independent supplemental information about the entities we encounter in the world.

In this paper, we investigate whether CEO characteristics (owner-manager status, age and gender) influence firm innovative performance and test empirically if the effect differs for market and transition economies. We use cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms in six EU countries and in Russia. To address heterogeneity, we explore innovation performance by size among SMEs and large businesses and by Pavitt sector. In both institutional settings, the presence of a family CEO either has no effect or improves innovative performance. On the contrary, the role of CEO gender is different in Russia and in the EU. In the EU, female CEOs are associated with less innovation, especially in SMEs and in the traditional sector. In Russia, CEO gender is not associated with differences in innovative performance and when it is (for the traditional sector), it favors female-run firms. For CEO age, considering product innovations, the oldest group of CEOs are less active in European firms while mature CEOs are more innovative in Russia.

Despite their impressive performance in object recognition and other tasks under standard testing conditions, deep networks often fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (o.o.d.) samples. One cause for this shortcoming is that modern architectures tend to rely on "shortcuts" - superficial features that correlate with categories without capturing deeper invariants that hold across contexts. Real-world concepts often possess a complex structure that can vary superficially across contexts, which can make the most intuitive and promising solutions in one context not generalize to others. One potential way to improve o.o.d. generalization is to assume simple solutions are unlikely to be valid across contexts and avoid them, which we refer to as the too-good-to-be-true prior. A low-capacity network (LCN) with a shallow architecture should only be able to learn surface relationships, including shortcuts. We find that LCNs can serve as shortcut detectors. Furthermore, an LCN's predictions can be used in a two-stage approach to encourage a high-capacity network (HCN) to rely on deeper invariant features that should generalize broadly. In particular, items that the LCN can master are downweighted when training the HCN. Using a modified version of the CIFAR-10 dataset in which we introduced shortcuts, we found that the two-stage LCN-HCN approach reduced reliance on shortcuts and facilitated o.o.d. generalization.

We introduce a family of dense subalgebras of the Toeplitz algebra and give conditions under which our algebras are quasi-free. As a corollary, we show that the smooth Toeplitz algebra introduced by Cuntz is quasi-free.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed daily life across the world and affected multiple social institutions. It may also have modified parents’ gendered division of labour. Current research on family functioning during the pandemic has provided mixed evidence on the influence of at-home work and at-home schooling on mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in childcare, child’s education and housework. In this paper, we use data from 1359 Russian mothers to study whether fathers' participation in these activities was influenced by the increased need for parental help in schooling and more opportunities for help due to remote work during the lockdown. We find that fathers’ involvement was higher if they worked remotely during the lockdown and if the child needed much additional help with schooling after school closures. These results hold true even after controlling for fathers’ pre-pandemic involvement. In line with conditional fatherhood theory, mothers’ engagement with remote schooling was almost unrelated to their employment status and work arrangement. Overall, our evidence supports the ‘needs exposure’ hypothesis that additional family needs in combination with switching to remote work can increase fathers’ involvement. However, evaluating the duration of these changes and their long-term influence on families’ functioning would require further research.

This paper investigates the effects of trade liberalisation induced labour demand shocks on informal employment in China. We employ a local labour market approach to construct a regional measure of exposure to import tariffs by exploiting initial differences in industrial composition across prefectural cities and then link it with the employment status of individuals. Using three waves of household survey data between 1995 and 2007, our results show that workers from regions that experienced a larger tariff cut were more likely to be employed informally. Further results based on firm-level data reveal a consistent pattern; tariff reductions increased the share of informal workers within firms. Such effects are more salient among smaller and less productive firms. Our findings suggest an important margin of labour market adjustment in response to trade shocks in developing countries, i.e. employment adjustment along the formal-informal dimension. 

Vulnerability to manipulation is a threat to successful matching market design. However, some manipulation is often inevitable and the mechanism designer wants to compare manipulable mechanisms and pick the best. Real-life examples include reforms in the entry-level medical labor market in the US (1998), school admissions systems in New York (2004), Chicago (2009-2010), Denver (2012), some cities in Ghana (2007-2008), and England (2005-2010). We provide a useful criterion for these design decisions: we count the number of agents with an incentive to manipulate each mechanism under consideration during these reforms, and show that this number decreased as a result of the reforms. Our conclusion is robust to further additional strategic assumptions.

In this study we analyze the convergence of GDP per capita from 2000 to2013 (current prices and euro exchange rates) for eight countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) of the European Union (CEE8). Some convergence indicators are also calculated for the CEE8 as a whole. The main purpose of this study is to shed some light on the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) on regional convergence in advanced emerging countries, like the CEE8. The main result of random effects panel regressions for unconditional beta-convergence is that significant convergence is found for the whole period from 2000-2013, but not for sub-periods on either end of the sample, except for Hungary and Poland. This means that convergence in most CEECs is only significant if the GFC is included in the estimation period. The role of capital regions for the convergence process is an item for future research.

This study investigates a dynamic political economy model that provides a link between the intensity of social mobility in society and the barriers to entry on markets in modern democracies. We use overlapping generation model in which all agents are divided by three groups: unskilled workers, skilled workers and capitalists. Social mobility is determined by the parental endogenous education decision and by the level of barriers to entry on markets, which is a political outcome. We show that a majority of voters may support high barriers to entry if perspectives of upward mobility for high-skilled workers is sufficiently low for every institutional set-up and there are direct payments from incumbent capitalists to a group of unskilled workers. This outcome also leads to persistently lower social mobility for every social group and to a lower level of education in the society. The model provides a theoretical justification of the empirical evidence, suggesting that a higher level of economic inequality is associated with a lower quality of economic institutions in democracies.

We develop a general equilibrium model with three primary production factors—land, skilled, and unskilled labor—and three sectors—construction, intermediate inputs, and final consumption—to study how different intensities of telecommuting affect the efficiency of firms that embrace home working, as well as its impact on the whole economy. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the effects of increasing working from home (WFH) that go through changes in the production and consumption of buildings: more WFH reduces firms’ demands for office space, but increases workers’ demand for living space since additional room is required to work from home. We find that more WFH is a mixed blessing: the relationship between telecommuting and productivity or GDP is inverse U-shaped, whereas telecommuting raises income inequality. Hence, WFH is not a panacea since an excessive downscaling of workspaces may be damaging to all and exacerbate economic inequality.

This paper focuses on the relationship between film content and human values in Europe. Our research fills in two research gaps. For one thing, it reveals the links between people’s values and visual cultural production that can showcase the effects of changing values on culture. The other part of our research concerns the use of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as a data set reflecting changes in modern societies. We track the changes in film topics provided by the IMDb and European Values Study (EVS) data to see how the changes in people’s values are linked to the popularity of related topics. Our special focus lies on the link between choice values and the probability of nudity depiction in films. The sample contained all European countries across 1960-2013. Using multilevel regression analysis, we found that the probability of female nudity is associated with the level of choice values, whereas the male nudity is more likely to appear in films related to the topic of homosexuality.

The topic of the interview data are the personal memories and family stories about the tour of French-Italian singer-actor Yves Montand in the Soviet Union in 1956-57. It was collected in September-November 2019 in Russia (and in distant communication method abroad). It was part of Oral History – Theory, Practice and Uses. Case Montand in the USSR course held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow by Dr. Mila Oiva (University of Turku, Finland) and Dr. Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk (Associate Professor, Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, Higher School of Economics, Moscow). Twenty two out of total twenty four interviews were allowed by the respondent to be used in the book by Bruce Johnson, Mila Oiva and Hannu Salmi Yves Montand, Cultural Diplomacy, and the USSR (tentative title, Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming). 

This paper investigates the effects of trade liberalisation induced labour demand shocks on informal employment in China. We employ a local labour market approach to construct a regional measure of exposure to import tariffs by exploiting initial differences in industrial composition across prefectural cities and then link it with the employment status of individuals. Using three waves of household survey data between 1995 and 2007, our results show that workers from regions that experienced a larger tariff cut were more likely to be employed informally. Further results based on firm-level data reveal a consistent pattern; tariff reductions increased the share of informal workers within firms. Such effects are more salient among smaller and less productive firms. Our findings suggest an important margin of labour market adjustment in response to trade shocks in developing countries, i.e. employment adjustment along the formal-informal dimension.

In this paper we generalize the notion of the Taylor spectrum to modules over an arbitrary Lie algebra and study it for finite-dimensional modules. We show that the spectrum can be described as the set of simple submodules in case of nilpotent and semisimple Lie algebras. We also show that this result does not hold for solvable Lie algebras and obtain a precise description of the spectrum in case of Borel subalgebras of semisimple Lie algebras.

We prove a conjecture of A. Goncharov about so-called strong reciprocity laws. The main idea of the proof is the construction of the norm map on these strong reciprocity laws. This construction is very similar to the construction of the norm map on Milnor K-theory. As an application, we prove a new relation for Bloch-Wigner dilogarithm parameterized by four non-zero rational functions on any smooth projective algebraic surface.

Postnikov constructed a cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. The poset of cells can be described (in particular) via Grassmann necklaces. We study certain quiver Grassmannians for the cyclic quiver admitting a cellular decomposition, whose cells are naturally labeled by Grassmann necklaces. We show that the posets of cells coincide with the reversed cell posets of the cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. We investigate algebro-geometric and combinatorial properties of these quiver Grassmannians. In particular, we describe the irreducible components, study the action of the automorphism groups of the underlying representations and describe the moment graphs. We also construct a resolution of singularities for each irreducible component; the resolutions are defined as quiver Grassmannians for an extended cyclic quiver.