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This book highlights cutting-edge research in the field of network science, offering scientists, researchers, students, and practitioners a unique update on the latest advances in theory and a multitude of applications. It presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2019), which took place in Lisbon, Portugal, on December 10–12, 2019. The carefully selected papers cover a wide range of theoretical topics such as network models and measures; community structure, and network dynamics; diffusion, epidemics, and spreading processes; resilience and control as well as all the main network applications, including social and political networks; networks in finance and economics; biological and neuroscience networks; and technological networks.

This book is devoted to classical and modern achievements in complex analysis. In order to benefit most from it, a first-year university background is sufficient; all other statements and proofs are provided.

We begin with a brief but fairly complete course on the theory of holomorphic, meromorphic, and harmonic functions. We then present a uniformization theory, and discuss a representation of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces of a fixed topological type as a factor space of a contractible space by a discrete group. Next, we consider compact Riemann surfaces and prove the classical theorems of Riemann-Roch, Abel, Weierstrass, etc. We also construct theta functions that are very important for a range of applications.

After that, we turn to modern applications of this theory. First, we build the (important for mathematics and mathematical physics) Kadomtsev-Petviashvili hierarchy and use validated results to arrive at important solutions to these differential equations. We subsequently use the theory of harmonic functions and the theory of differential hierarchies to explicitly construct a conformal mapping that translates an arbitrary contractible domain into a standard disk – a classical problem that has important applications in hydrodynamics, gas dynamics, etc.

The book is based on numerous lecture courses given by the author at the Independent University of Moscow and at the Mathematics Department of the Higher School of Economics.

This book presents the main findings of a study on school learning environments and student outcomes, which the World Bank conducted in 2019 in three regions of the Russian Federation. Using data collected through the OECD School User Survey and the pilot “Trends in Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS), the book analyzes how a school’s infrastructure and learning environment may affect the progress and success of students in math and science. It also delves into teaching practices, analyzing their impact on learning and highlighting the important nexus between learning environments and teaching methods. The book concludes by recommending areas in which focused attention by educational authorities could improve educational policy and help maintain high-quality learning environments. The book will be useful for educators, school principals, architects, and policy makers who are involved in school infrastructure projects and are interested in increasing their knowledge of school design planning.

In the last 30 years a new pattern of interaction between mathematics and physics emerged, in which the latter catalyzed the creation of new mathematical theories. Most notable examples of this kind of interaction can be found in the theory of moduli spaces. In algebraic geometry the theory of moduli spaces goes back at least to Riemann, but they were first rigorously constructed by Mumford only in the 1960s. The theory has experienced an extraordinary development in recent decades, finding an increasing number of connections with other fields of mathematics and physics. In particular, moduli spaces of different objects (sheaves, instantons, curves, stable maps, etc.) have been used to construct invariants (such as Donaldson, Seiberg-Witten, Gromov-Witten, Donaldson-Thomas invariants) that solve longstanding, difficult enumerative problems. These invariants are related to the partition functions and expectation values of quantum field and string theories. In recent years, developments in both fields have led to an unprecedented cross-fertilization between geometry and physics. These striking interactions between geometry and physics were the theme of the CIME School Geometric Representation Theory and Gauge Theory. The School took place at the Grand Hotel San Michele, Cetraro, Italy, in June, Monday 25 to Friday 29, 2018. The present volume is a collection of notes of the lectures delivered at the school. It consists of three articles from Alexander Braverman and Michael Finkelberg, Andrei Negut, and Alexei Oblomkov, respectively.

The paper provides findings of the research work and scientific discussions under the “Global Sustainability Strategy Forum” (GSSF) that aims to develop evidence-informed judgments on challenges and solutions. It views attaining sustainability as a set of closely-coupled societal and environmental challenges and opportunities that require integration of multiple disciplines, new research methods, and new knowledge sources with sensitivity to regional and cultural diversities. The project is designed to produce innovative insights and strategies to support effective governance of transitions to sustainability of our complex global social-ecological system within its inherent resource limitations, and to develop sustainable lifestyles that are practical and appealing in the different regions and cultures of the world. 

The global climate change is one of the most dangerous threats to human society in the 21st Century. The dramatic losses have already been observed, and the risks are rising over time. CEECCA region experiences many negative impacts of global warming, which is faster and stronger than the world average. Numerous adaptation and resilience measures are required to protect people, but regional governments often underestimate and ignore the social implications of climate policies.This paper explores what are the priority challenges for CEECCA countries and how to address them effectively.

The IEEE Russia North West Section  and the European Centre for Quality (Moscow) are pleased to present the Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference "Quality Management, Transport and Information Security, Information Technologies" (IT&QM&IS). The Conference was held in Sochy, Russia on September  23–2, 2019. The Organizing Committee believes and trusts that we have been true to the spirit of collegiality that members of IEEE value whilst also maintaining a high standard as we reviewed papers, provided feedback and now present a strong body of published work in this collection of proceedings.  The themes for this year's conference were chosen as a means of bringing together academics and industrialists, engineering and management research, manufacturing and teaching, and providing a basis for discussion of issues arising across the engineering and business community in relation to Quality Management, Information Technologies, Transport and Information Security aimed at developing engineers and managers for the future. The goal of  these proceedings has been to present high quality work in an accessible medium, for use in a wide community of academics, engineers, managers, and industrialists, the community united by the key words Science, Education, Quality, Innovations in engineering. To achieve this aim, all abstracts were blind reviewed, and full papers submitted for publication in this journal of proceedings were subjected to a rigorous reviewing process.

The book focuses most of all on women's and partly on men's agency, to discuss variant ways in which women and men actively use their scopes of action - through political activism, protest, movements, in the military. The book is aiming to dicuss variant perspectives on these issues in different contexts witin Eastern Europe.  How do these in change affect conservative societies and the concepts of masculinity?

The volume is structured in four parts:

I) Floating concepts of Femininities and Masculinities

    (essentially this is a discussion on the role of feminism in the transformation period in Eastern Europe)

II) Political Activism

    (this part deals with political participation of women - also within conservative parties - and of variant forms of protest)

III) Nationalism and Militarization of societies

 (also papers on violence)

IV) Social Roles and Concepts of Women and Men

A Student's Guide

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference Actual Problems of System and Software Engineering

Moscow, Russia, 12-14 November, 2019.

Edited by

 

Ana Rosa Cavalli * Alexander Petrenko ** Boris Pozin ***

* TELECOM & Management SudParis, Department of Network Software, Paris, France ** National Research University Higher School of Economics, Joint Department with the RAS Institute for System Programming, Moscow, Russia *** National Research University Higher School of Economics, HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, Department of Information and Analytical Systems: Joint Department with EC-leasing Co, Moscow, Russia  

Written in conjunction with The National Society for Education in Art and Design, the International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education offers an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and researchers working in the field of art and design education. It contains accessible introductions to key topics, concepts, and thinkers, as well as sophisticated debates on contentious areas, covering the whole age range from early years to post-university in formal and informal settings.

This multi-volume reference work examines historical and contemporary art and design education worldwide, from over thirty different countries, in Africa, Europe Asia, Middle East, Australasia and the Americas. It includes topics such as Epistemic Disobedience in Contemporary Latin American Art; Visual Arts Education in Museums; Elementary Art and Design Curricula; Social and Mobile Media in Art and Design Curriculum; Performative Literacy; Postmodern Pedagogical Principles of Museum-Informed Art Education and much more.

The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education defines the conversation for the entirety of the art and design community through authoritative reference of peerless quality.

Written in conjunction with The National Society for Education in Art and Design, the International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education offers an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and researchers working in the field of art and design education. It contains accessible introductions to key topics, concepts, and thinkers, as well as sophisticated debates on contentious areas, covering the whole age range from early years to post-university in formal and informal settings.

This multi-volume reference work examines historical and contemporary art and design education worldwide, from over thirty different countries, in Africa, Europe Asia, Middle East, Australasia and the Americas. It includes topics such as Epistemic Disobedience in Contemporary Latin American Art; Visual Arts Education in Museums; Elementary Art and Design Curricula; Social and Mobile Media in Art and Design Curriculum; Performative Literacy; Postmodern Pedagogical Principles of Museum-Informed Art Education and much more.

The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education defines the conversation for the entirety of the art and design community through authoritative reference of peerless quality.

The volume consists of scientifi c and research papers of the Sixth International Conference “Actual Problems of System and Software Engineering” (APSSE-2019). The Conference was held at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” from November 12 to November 14, 2019 in Moscow, Russia. The conference was devoted to the analysis of the status, contemporary trends, research issues and practical results obtained by national and foreign scientists and experts in the system and software engineering area, as well as information and analytical systems development area using Big Data technologies. The target audience of the conference came to be the experts, students and postgraduates working in the area of ordering, designing, development, implementation, operation, and maintenance of information and analytical systems for various applications and their software, also working on custom software development. Plenary papers were delivered by the leading domestic and foreign specialists and were aimed at developing the views on the most important and fundamental aspects of the information technology development. Submitted articles were selected for publication. All the submitted articles were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee as well as by the independent reviewers.

This proceedings presents the result of the 8th International Conference in Network Analysis, held at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, in May 2018. The conference brought together scientists, engineers, and researchers from academia, industry, and government.  Contributions in this book focus on the development of network algorithms for data mining and its applications. Researchers and students in mathematics, economics, statistics, computer science, and engineering find this collection a valuable resource filled with the latest research in network analysis. Computational aspects and applications of large-scale networks in market models, neural networks, social networks, power transmission grids, maximum clique problem, telecommunication networks, and complexity graphs are included with new tools for efficient network analysis of large-scale networks. Machine learning techniques in network settings including community detection, clustering, and biclustering algorithms are presented with applications to social network analysis.

This work is devoted to the study of application of new topologies in the design of networks‑on‑chip (NoCs). It is proposed to use two‑dimensional optimal circulant topologies for NoC design, and it is developed an optimized routing algorithm with the decreased memory usage. The proposed routing algorithm was compared with Table routing, Clockwise routing, and Adaptive routing algorithms, previously developed for ring circulant topologies, and specialized routing algorithm for multiplicative circulants. The results of synthesis of routers implementing proposed routing algorithms are presented. The cost of ALM and register resources for the implementation of communication subsystems in NoCs with circulant topologies is estimated.

2-Azidomethyl-5-ethynylfuran, a new ambivalent compound with both azide and alkyne moieties that can be used as a self-clickable monomer, is synthesized starting directly from renewable biomass. The reactivity of the azide group linked to furfural is tested via the efficient preparation of a broad range of furfural-containing triazoles in good to excellent yields using a ‘green’ copper(I)-catalyzed azide–alkyne cycloaddition procedure. Access to new bio-based chemicals and oligomeric materials via a click-chemistry approach is also demonstrated using this bio-derived building block.

Oxidative esterification of biomass-derived 5-(hydroxymethyl) furfural (HMF) and furfural and their derivatives has been performed using a simple MnO2/NaCN system. The developed method allows the selective one-pot transformation of HMF to dimethyl furan-2,5-dicarboxylate (FDME) in 83% isolated yield without the formation of a free acid. Simplification of FDME production provides the missing link for manufacturing sustainable value-added materials from biomass. Addition of water to the oxidative system allows finetuning of reaction selectivity to obtain the previously difficult-to-access pure methyl 5-(hydroxylmethyl) furan-2-carboxylate in one step directly from the unprotected HMF without chromatographic separation.

  The purpose of this paper is   to answer two questions left open in [B. Durand, A. Shen, and N. Vereshchagin, Descriptive Complexity of Computable Sequences, Theoretical Computer Science 171 (2001), pp. 47--58].   Namely, we consider   the following two   complexities of an infinite computable 0-1-sequence $\alpha$:   $C^{0'}(\alpha )$, defined as   the minimal length of a program with oracle $0'$ that prints   $\alpha$,   and  $\MM(\alpha)$,  defined as $\limsup C(\alpha_{1:n}|n)$, where   $\alpha_{1:n}$ denotes the length-$n$ prefix of $\alpha$   and $C(x|y)$ stands for conditional Kolmogorov complexity.   We show that $C^{0'}(\alpha )\le \MM(\alpha)+O(1)$ and   $\MM(\alpha)$ is not bounded by any computable function of $C^{0'}(\alpha )$,   even   on the domain of computable sequences.

This article contains an analysis of the judiciary of post-Soviet

Russia in its social context. The study is based on opinion polls. The

majority of Russians take a negative attitude to the judiciary. They have no

respect for, or confidence in, their country’s judicial system. They believe

that the court system is dependent on the other branches of government and

is manipulated by political and economic actors. Judges are not seen as

defenders of people’s rights and are considered to be corrupt, unjust, and

inhumane. This is assumed to explain the accusatory nature of the Russian

judiciary. The majority of Russian judges are vehicles of administrative

bureaucratic professional subculture who have their entire professional conduct

determined by superior authorities. The judicial system is controlled

by court chairpersons who received their professional training and accumulated

most of their experience in the Soviet period. The judicial branch of

post-Soviet Russia has inherited major problems from the Soviet judicial

system and is incapable of being an impartial arbiter and the conscience of

the state.

Hannah Arendt is well-studied in Russia; her legacy is noticeable in academic discussions. However, her theoretical positions can hardly bring about a significant change in the present state of local political and philosophical affairs. The reason is the same for both the unusual popularity of her theoretical concepts and their lack of practical relevance. Her non-traditional approach to politics seamlessly fits into recurrent patterns of Russian social life which are no-less distant from the established forms of Western political culture. Being uncritically transplanted into different soil, her unorthodox way of thinking about politics found an immediate enthusiastic reception in Russia, but not at the same level of scrutiny as was in the West. Paradoxically, this proves that Arendt’s views may confirm the local status-quo, rather than challenging it. In this paper, I will try to explain this paradox by presenting both the elements of her theory that remain under-appreciated by her Russian followers, and her dogmatic positions shared with her school of thought, which can be elucidated by reading them against the Russian context. Arendt’s theory features hidden, but distinct, elitist, and liberal tendencies; to some degree, her theory goes well with the Machiavellian character of contemporary Russian politics. However, at the exact point when she finds an unlikely ally in Isaiah Berlin, her normative solutions mostly go unnoticed. On the other hand, reading her texts against the Russian experience exposes some of her preconceptions about human existence, the meaning of political life, and our relations to history, all of which weaken the practical relevance of her thoughts.

 

 

Independent domination is one of the rare problems for which the complexity of weighted and unweighted versions is known to be different in some classes of graphs. Trying to better understand the gap between the two versions of the problem, in the present paper we prove two complexity results. First, we extend NP-hardness of the weighted version in a certain class to the unweighted case. Second, we strengthen polynomial-time solvability of the unweighted version in the class of P2+P3-free graphs to the weighted case. This result is tight in the sense that both versions are NP-hard in the class of P3+P3-free graphs, i.e. P3+P3 is a minimal graph forbidding of which produces an NP-hard case for both versions of the problem.

In the decade of the 2010s, the pace of economic growth in Russia slowed down to an annual rate of below 2% and most forecasts suggest that this is will be the new “normal” for the Russian economy at least in the medium-term. While politically and socially disappointing, such a growth slowdown is unavoidable due to adverse demographic trends. A combination of a shrinking working-age population and population aging must lead to a lower growth pace as compared to the period when the working-age population was still increasing and the effects of population aging were limited (the decade of the 2000s). Compensatory measures such as a gradual increase in the retirement age and an open labor migration policy, although economically positive, can only partly mitigate the negative effects of a shrinking domestic labor force. In this respect, Russia does not differ from other European countries and some Asian countries. However, demography and shrinking labor supply cannot fully explain low potential growth. Stagnation in total factor productivity is another reason. It results from a poor business and investment climate, difficulty in diversifying away from the dominant role of the hydrocarbon sector, and deteriorating political and economic relations with the US and EU which limit trade, investment and innovation opportunities. To increase its potential growth, Russia needs comprehensive economic and institutional reforms that, in turn, will be conditioned by political reforms and by improved economic and political relationships with the US, the EU and Russia’s neighbors.

Present research is devoted to the comparative analysis of the quality of classification for some methods of descriptive and predictive analytics in the case when most (or all) of independent variables are measured in quality scale with large amount of levels. In this case, some classification methods or their popular realizations calls for conversion of quality variables into systems of dummy variables. If quality scales have large amount of levels which are presented in almost equal proportions in the training set, i.e. it doesn't make sense to enlarge levels, above mentioned requirement will lead to the dramatically rise of problem dimension. As a result, researcher is faced with the curse of dimensionality. It means that, if the problem dimension rise, it'll be necessary to rise the sample size to preserve factors impact estimation accuracy. At the same time, it's not always possible to arrange appropriate growth of the training set volume. In some cases, it's limited by specific properties of the body of interest (system). If such situation appears, it'll be extremely important to evaluate the sensitivity of prediction/classification methods to the curse of dimensionality. Authors of this research focused on the four method of classification, which earn first lines in the lists of the popular methods of business analysis long ago. There are: • Two methods of classification tree building — CART and C4.5 • Logistic regression • Classification on the basis of random forest The first three are descriptive methods, which let's get interpreting (man ready) models, the fourth belongs to predictive analytics. Selection is not random. Descriptive analytics problems extremely important for the process of planning, when it's necessary to get answer on the question "What will be if …?". Particularly, one need to get target group description for organization of marketing communication. At the same time, it is quite conceivable that utilization of interpreting (man ready) models involves loss of prediction quality in comparison with methods of predictive analytics. The current research domain is the activity of microfinancing institutions (MFIs). Traditional problem here is the potential client assessment. The main challenge, which arise in the process of above mentioned problem solution, is the constraints on the volume, composition and type of data, which is available for prediction of default or default probability assessment. Thus, it's necessary to evaluate the abilities of classification methods which were designed for work with large amount of data (it means big size of the training set and a lot of variables, from which the most important should be selected). In real practice of microfinancing organization, the most of recorded factors are measured on the qualitative scales with large amount of levels, what is the origin of the above-mentioned problems. The empirical part of the research is grounded on the data of real microfinancing organization. Some hypotheses about the reasons of default were tested as byproduct of this research.

Two versions of the mathematical model that detect different glycemia cases using heart rate variability (HRV) values taking into account the patient age have been developed and evaluated. HRV and glucose data have been obtained from 128 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Based on the evaluation results, the fundamental possibility of developing a non-invasive glycemia monitoring system based on one of the model variants has been confirmed. To increase the accuracy of the model, it is necessary to conduct a similar study involving patients without annotated type 2 diabetes.

The author examines one of the most important aspects of family life, namely the practice of power over the family budget between men and women. According to her study, agreement and the lack of agreement on the family budget is one of the most important predictors of long cohabitation or divorce. The probability of expected developments, however, are influenced by the family status of the couple: in the case of married couples, the likelihood of financial arguments and possible splitting up is lower than it is for those living together unmarried.

Numerous cultural events take place around the world every year. Visitors leave digital footprint after attending such events, which is a good source of data analysis in tourist behavior and cultural studies. This research provides mapping of festival themes associated with the annual cultural event “Museum Night” on social networking site (SNS) VKontakte (VK) most popular in Russia. All posts containing the official event hashtag in Russian (#ночьмузеев) were collected from VK. To analyse the data, more than 38k posts spanning 2012 to 2019 are used. The results show the dynamic of the event web activity and changes over the last years.

Modern and advanced electronic equipment is developing along the way of miniaturization of electronic devices (EDs) and increasing their package density, accompanied by growth of heat emission. At the same time, EDs are continuously required to become more reliable and trouble-free.

In this paper we use the generally accepted definition of EDs as devices which operate utilizing electrical, thermal, optical or acoustic phenomena. One of such devices is a laser gyro (LG), composed of angular rotation sensors on ring lasers, and electronics to provide their functioning and signal processing.

In recent years, thermal simulation is being used in the designing of EDs in order to create competitive equipment in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost. It allows to check thermal calculations and to optimize the design at the early stages of projecting, to reduce the time of testing of developed devices and to exclude redesigning caused by pre-calculation errors.

Analysis of thermal processes in complex multi-boards assemblies of stack and cassette types with large number of electronic components (ECs) is particularly challenging. Especial problems appear when Russian engineers design a system of complex interconnected EDs for space rocket which launch several geophysical and communication satellites onto the Earth orbit. Such EDs include up to 1 million ECs with a dense package on printed circuit boards (PCBs) operating in a wide temperature range. There are many foreign software systems (SSs) for analysis of thermal processes in mechanical engineering. Much fewer SSs are able to simulate thermal processes in electronics. But none of them can be applied in Russia for the several reasons. First, descriptions of these SSs have no information on the analysis of thermal processes in the complex EDs featuring PCBs assemblies of stack and cassette types. Second, the use of foreign SSs will require their adaptation to the component database and typical designs used in Russia, as well as to Russian design standards.

Consequently, high price of foreign SSs and time required for their adaptation will significantly increase cost and time of development.

It is noteworthy that foreign literature does not provide any information on simulation of the distribution of thermal fields in 3-axis LG with electronics.

DNAsecondary structures are important functional elements thatmay influence cellular processes. One of theirpossible functions is regulation of nucleosome positioning. Here MNAse-seq and ssDNA-seq data were used to define patterns of positional relationship of DNA structures such as Z-DNA, H-DNA and G-quadruplexes with nucleosomes. Three types of patterns werefound: a structure is surrounded by nucleosomes from both sides, from one side, or nucleosome free region. Machine-learning models based on Random forest algorithm and XGBoost weretrained to recognize DNA region of 500 bp length containing a pattern of nucleosome positioning for three types of DNA struc-tures (Z-DNA, H-DNA and G-quadruplexes) based on DNAsequence composi-tional properties. The best performance (more than 86% for ROC-AUC, accu-racy, recall and presicion scores) wasreached for G-quadruplexes. 500 bp re-gions containing G-quadruplexes have distinct compositional properties and point to the preferential locations of the defined patterns, which regulatory functions require further investigation. For other DNA structures a region com-position is less powerful predictive factor and one should take into account oth-er physical and structural DNA properties to improve nucleosome-DNA-structure pattern recognition.

Digital transformation of organizations became a significant research and engineering challenge worldwide. In many cases digitalization requires extraction of tacit individual, interpersonal or organizational knowledge to explicit machine-readable forms and their conscious application during enterprise reengineering. Successful accomplishment of these tasks vitally relies on a rigorous scientific theory and formal methods. This work presents a new ontology modelling language and corresponding ontology patterns for comprehensive understanding of socio-technical systems, a new model-based approach to support transformation of semantics and syntax of evolvable domain-specific languages, and opportunities to fuse these results in order to support knowledge-based digital transformation of organizations. 

Methods for centralized planning of the collision-free trajectories for a fleet of mobile robots typically solve the discretized version of the problem and rely on numerous simplifying assumptions, e.g. moves of uniform duration, cardinal only translations, equal speed and size of the robots etc., thus the resultant plans can not always be directly executed by the real robotic systems. To mitigate this issue we suggest a set of modifications to the prominent prioritized planner - AA-SIPP(m) - aimed at lifting the most restrictive assumptions (syncronized translation only moves, equal size and speed of the robots) and at providing robustness to the solutions. We evaluate the suggested algorithm in simulation and on differential drive robots in typical lab environment (indoor polygon with external video-based navigation system). The results of the evaluation provide a clear evidence that the algorithm scales well to large number of robots (up to hundreds in simulation) and is able to produce solutions that are safely executed by the robots prone to imperfect trajectory following. The video of the experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/Fer_irn4BG0.

Vision-based depth reconstruction is a challenging problem extensively studied in computer vision but still lacking universal solution. Reconstructing depth from single image is particularly valuable to mobile robotics as it can be embedded to the modern vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) methods providing them with the metric information needed to construct accurate maps in real scale. Typically, depth reconstruction is done nowadays via fully-convolutional neural networks (FCNNs). In this work we experiment with several FCNN architectures and introduce a few enhancements aimed at increasing both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the inference. We experimentally determine the solution that provides the best performance/accuracy tradeoff and is able to run on NVidia Jetson with the framerates exceeding 16FPS for 320 × 240 input. We also evaluate the suggested models by conducting monocular vSLAM of unknown indoor environment on NVidia Jetson TX2 in real-time. Open-source implementation of the models and the inference node for Robot Operating System (ROS) are available at https://github.com/CnnDepth/tx2_fcnn_node.

Unlike in the 1990s and early 2000s, nowadays scholars rarely address the issue of international activity of Russian regions (phenomenon known as paradiplomacy). Due to the successful centralization efforts, Russian governors almost lost their domestic as well as external agency. However, there is still a considerable variation in the levels of their international activity which remains unexplained. Employing an original dataset on the international activity of Russian governors from 2005 to 2015 I investigate the effect local political regime, ethnicity and other factors have on the level of gubernatorial participation in paradiplomacy. Contrary to other studies I find that ethnicity has a positive effect on the external activity. I argue that paradiplomacy of republics serves as a tool of their ethnic policy. I also find that more democratic local political regimes bolster the willingness of the governors to participate in paradiplomacy. Varyag governors with no prior connections to the region are also more active internationally.

This paper investigates the underlying nature of the demand for state support in Russia in the labor market and employment, social investments, and material support. Based on recent findings from social policy studies, the authors tested four different mechanisms: (a) the demographic features of the population, (b) household incomes and disposable assets including human and social capital, (c) interests, and (d) locus of control and cultural attitudes. Drawing on an all-Russian representative monitoring survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2018, the authors argue that the popula- tion’s demand for state support has a very complex nature. The relative effect of income has a para- doxical nature. On the one hand, the Russian data confirm the hypothesis of ‘the altruistic rich’, de- veloped in recent studies, which predicts that, in societies with high inequalities, higher incomes boost the likelihood of demand for redistributive policies. On the other hand, higher incomes foster state escapism among those Russians who do not consider the state as a reliable agent capable of solving their problems.

This report aims at discovering the capacity of  WorldSkills approaches in objective and comparable skills assessment in vocational education. Authors study the best practices of the four countries (Russia, Australia, United Kingdom, Netherlands) in embedding WorldSkills standards and procedures to national TVET systems. Prospects of  WorldSkills approaches to objective skills assessment in building internationally comparable skills assessment in TVET are discussed. This report was produced at the initiative of the Union “WorldSkills Russia” in partnership with representatives of the WorldSkills movement in Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This paper shall be of interest for researchers and experts in the field of technical and vocational skills assessment, managers and policy-makers in technical and vocational education (TVET).

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradients. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have limited applicability when the number of possible outcomes becomes large. In this work, we consider models with latent permutations and propose control variates for the Plackett-Luce distribution. Our proof-of-concept experiment recasts optimization over permutations as a variational optimization w.r.t. the Plackett-Luce distribution and solves it using stochastic gradient descent.

This paper discusses an example of an early childhood development facility intervention in the Khanty-Mansyisk region of the Russian Federation and its potential to produce efficiency gains in the region and the country overall. The government of the region is introducing changes to the built environment of its early childhood development centers. The proposed new design is based on the concept of the learning environment as a third teacher. The smaller footprint of the new buildings will increase the amount of active space per child, and the new design will include energy efficiency measures. The economic impact of these measures will reduce operating costs throughout the lifecycle of the building and provide strong evidence to education policy makers in the rest of the region and the country as a whole in favor of child-centered, healthy, and energy efficient early childhood development infrastructure.

The paper is focused on the interrelations between citizens’ everyday mobilities and the ways they cope with urban fears. It describes situations when people expect and experience security threats that trigger their fears, while moving in the city. To deal with fears urban citizens develop coping strategies - a set of actions that helps them to manage their emotional experiences. Coping strategies transform various elements of everyday urban mobility and, thus, rearrange and redefine it. The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with Moscow residents and digital diaries of emotions.

We consider an economic geography setting in which firms are free to choose one of the following organizational types: (i) integrated firms, which perform all their activities at the same location, (ii) horizontal firms, which operate several plants producing the same good at different locations, and (iii) vertical firms, which perform distinct activities at separated locations. We show that there exists a unique organizational equilibrium, which typically involves the coexistence of various organizational forms. We also give necessary and sufficient conditions for the three types of firms to coexist within the same region and show that transportation and communication costs have opposite effects on firms’ organizational choices. This suggests that, depending on its nature, the supply of a new transportation infrastructure may lead to contrasted locational patterns.

In the recent years facial emotion recognition algorithms have evolved and in some cases top commercial algorithms detect emotions like happiness better than humans do. To evaluate the performance of these algorithms, the common practice is to compare them with human-labeled ground truth. This article covers monitoring of the advancements in automatic emotion recognition solutions, and here we suggest an additional criteria for their evaluation, that is the agreement between algorithms’ predictions. In this work, we compare the performance of four commercial algorithms: Affectiva Affdex, Microsoft Cognitive Services Face module Emotion Recognition, Amazon Rekognition Face Analysis, and Neurodata Lab Emotion Recognition on three datasets AFEW, RAVDESS, and SAVEE, that differ in terms of control over conditions of data acquisition. We assume that the consistency among algorithms’ predictions indicates the reliability of the predicted emotion. Overall results show that the algorithms with higher accuracy and f1-scores that were obtained for human-labeled ground truth (Microsoft’s, Neurodata Lab’s, and Amazon’s), showed higher agreement between their predictions. Agreement among algorithms’ predictions is a promising criteria in terms of further exploring the option to replace human data labeling with automatic annotation.

China’s initiative about “One Belt, One Road” could be treated ambiguously. On the one hand, it is intended to transform the newly acquired economic potential of that country into her higher status in the world. China invites a lot of nations to build up gigantic transit corridors by joint efforts, and doing so she applies productively her capital and technologies. International transactions in RMB are also being expanded. But, on the other hand, “One Belt, One Road” is also a necessity for China to cope with some evident problems of her current stage of development, such as industrial overcapacity, overdependence on imports of raw materials from a narrow circle of countries, and a subordinate status in global value chains. For Russia a participation in “One Belt, One Road” may be fruitful, since the very character of that project provides us with a space to manoeuvre. By now, Russian exports to China consist primarily of fuels and other commodities. More active industrial policy is needed to correct this situation. A flexible framework of “One Belt, One Road” is more suitable for this objective to be achieved, rather than traditional forms of regional integration, such as a free trade area.

Vocational schools are involved in partnerships with employers to generate extra resources and in the implementation of high - stake accountability reforms in Russia. We examine school capacity in the top-down implementation of performance-related pay (PRP) in Russia. We consider two cases of collaboration between schools and local employers that are either highly or loosely integrated with different companies. We elaborate the understanding of the resource and productivity dimensions of school capacity embed ded within the broader context of schools’ formal and informal ties. The findings indicate tensions that emerge in the implementation of a system of rewards with regard to the within schools’ trust and the trust developed with their partners and funders, e ducational goals, work arrangements, and the distribution of school finances generated in partnerships. These issues can be negotiated with local industrial partners at multiple levels.

We consider the projective arc schemes of the Veronese embeddings of the flag varieties for simple Lie groups of type ADE. The arc schemes are not reduced and we consider the homogeneous coordinate rings of the corresponding reduced schemes. We show that each graded component of a homogeneous coordinate ring is a cocyclic module of the current algebra and is acted upon by the algebra of symmetric polynomials. We show that the action of the polynomial algebra is free and that the localization at the special point of a graded component is isomorphic to an affine Demazure module whose level is the degree of the Veronese embedding. In type $A_1$ we give the precise list of generators of the reduced arc scheme structure of the Veronese curves. In general type we introduce the notion of the global higher level Demazure modules and identify the graded components of the homogeneous coordinate rings with these modules.

The article focuses on cases when the length of the constituent is relevant for Russian syntax and leads to ungrammaticality or partial acceptability of some structures. The list of phenomena under consideration includes ‘one-word restrictions’; differences between complement clauses of matrix verbs in indicative vs. imperative,  include constructions with ‘predicatives’, special properties of nominalizations, structures with short embedded clauses, and so on. I show that the ‘length restrictions’ are in fact of different nature: some are related to discourse factors (deictic / non-deictic semantics, discourse coherence, imperative addressee orientation), while others are related to parsing needs (grammatical units are typically shorter than lexical ones, main clauses are more explicit than embedded ones). Another feature of length restrictions is that they are never holistic / integral: the particular rule usually holds for a particular type of structure, not for the whole domain of syntax (this is what makes our data different from purely syntactic restrictions, such as c-command requirements and island restrictions, which often cover a broad set of constructions and grammatical contexts).

The paper examines collective memory of British and Russian youth. The authors use the results of surveys conducted among Russian and British students. They focus primarily on the structure of pride in the collective memory of young people. They propose to analyze the category of pride among young people across several dimensions. First, they look at the qualitative content of national pride: pride in the realization of tasks relating to “soft power” (for example, culture, education, sports), and pride in manifestations of “hard power” (for example, pride in military victories or power politics). Second, they analyze the temporal localization of national pride: were are the main events, personalities, and phenomena study participants take pride in, both in the past and in the present. Third, an important element of understanding pride in a country is the relationship of pride to shame. In this paper, two types of national cultures are identified: a culture where pride prevails over shape (we call this “culture of pride”), and cultures where shame prevails (“culture of shame”).

The paper discusses the linguistic architecture of conflicts occuring in present-day social media. It addresses both the sociology of a conflicts as well as the linguistic means used by the two parties to obtain a communicative victory.

In Russian, there are many ways to address a person by name. For instance, a man called Aleksandr may be addressed as Aleksandr, Aleksandr Ivanovič, Saša, Sašen′ka, Saška, Sanja, etc. This study aims at analyzing the use of various strategies of naming the listener throughout the last two centuries. It uses the data from the Russian National Corpus to establish the direction of change in address patterns and combines a statistical approach with a manual inspection of selected examples.

Despite the growing interest to the field of coproduction from the service-dominant logic literature, this concept is still being emerging and most of the existing papers do not provide any empirical evidence. The aim of the study is to investigate whether those KIBS firms that involve their customers in coproduction of services are more innovative. This paper explores the relationships between a set of innovation drivers and implementation of innovations in KIBS based on a sample of 441 firms operating in Russia. The results show that coproduction of services increases the possibility of both technological and non-technological innovations in KIBS to be implemented. This finding suggests that in addition to the service offerings quality improvement, coproduction of KIBS also acts as an innovation driver, which requires an attention from innovation managers.

The 1980 Olympiad in Moscow (the first Olympiad in Eastern Europe and the socialist  state) is viewed through the prism of the successes and failures of the cultural and sports diplomacy of the Soviet state. Olympics-80 as a kind of mega-project "developed socialism" promoted (albeit temporarily) not only to strengthening the position of the Soviet Union in the international arena (especially in the background of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), but also unity of Soviet citizens in the face of "Western threat". The situation was somewhat more complicated with attempts to use the Olympic project to strengthen the socialist camp.  The source base of the research was the materials of the State archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian state archive of socio-political history and the Central archive of Moscow, as well as the published documents of the Russian state archive of modern history.  It is shown that, despite the boycott of the Olympics, its consequences did not have a particularly strong impact on the development of sports ties and international tourism in the USSR. For example, in 1980, at the suggestion of the delegation of the USSR, the participants of the world conference on tourism, when adopting the Manila Declaration on world tourism, included in the Declaration all the initiatives of the Soviet delegation. And since 1982, the process of restoring international sports contacts began. 

The article analyzes how Russian students interpret and practice digital technologies of self-tracking (fitness trackers, apps and wearables), that allow to collect biometric and activity data. It is based on the results of reflective thematic analysis of students’ essays on this topic. How do students describe their experience in using self-tracking technologies? What discourses of self-tracking are represented in their essays? How do they imagine the digital future and further development of the systems of self-surveillance? The research demonstrated that many students have certain experience with quantified self-tracking, whereas some tend to limit it or refused from it for some reasons. Based on the students’ stories (former and active users), the author offers to distinguish three styles of self-tracking: ‘gamer’, ‘manager’ and ‘transformer’. A ‘gamer’ is looking for the feelings of thrill, pleasure and novelty; a ‘manager’ aims at putting one’s head and life in order; a ‘transformer’ wants to change one’s life and mind radically. In reality any self-tracker combines all three roles, though one of them might dominate. According to the students, the existing technologies of self-measuring cannot give strong enough motivation for self-optimization, but in the future their effectiveness may increase. This study also resulted in defining four types of discourse on self-tracking: ‘progressivist’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘critical’ and ‘anti-utopian’. They represent the differences in conceptualization of self-tracking as a cultural phenomenon. Some students are prone to optimistic or balanced evaluation of the potential of self-tracking technologies; others focus on risks and hazards of ‘datafication’ of people and social life. The outcomes of the study develop the previous research on styles of quantified self-tracking, providing additional analysis of the reflections of (non-)users, concerning self-tracking as a cultural phenomenon.