• Rural Digital Europe
• Preprint close
• Part of book or chapter of book close
• FR close
• English close
• Hyper Article en Ligne - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société close
• arXiv.org e-Print Archive close
• HAL-Pasteur close
• INRIA a CCSD electronic archive server close
• HAL Descartes close
• Rural Digital Europe close

The European response to COVID-19 has revealed an inconvenient truth. Despite having integrated public health concerns across all its policies – be it agriculture, consumer protection, or security –, the Union cannot directly act to save people’s lives. Only member states can do so. Yet when they adopted unilateral measures to counter the spread of the virus, those proved not only ineffective but also disruptive on vital supply chains, by ultimately preventing the flow of essential goods and people across the Union. These fragmented efforts in tackling cross-border health threats have almost immediately prompted political calls for the urgent creation of a European Health Union. Yet this call raises more questions than answers. With the aim to offer a rigorous and timely blueprint to decision-makers and the public at large, this Special Issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation contextualizes such a new political project within the broader constitutional and institutional framework of EU public health law and policy. By introducing the Special, this paper argues that unless the envisaged Health Union will tackle the root causes of what prevented the Union from effectively responding to COVID-19 – the divergent health capacity across the Union –, it might fall short of its declared objective of strengthening the EU’resilience for cross-border health threats.

Background: Tsetse flies transmit trypanosomes that cause the debilitating diseases human African trypanosomosis (HAT) or sleeping sickness in humans and animal African trypanosomosis (AAT) or nagana in livestock. The riverine tsetse species Glossina palpalis gambiensis Vanderplank (Diptera: Glossinidae) inhabits riparian forests along river systems in West Africa. The Government of Senegal has embarked on a project to eliminate a population of this tsetse species from the Niayes area with the objective to manage AAT in the area. The project is implemented following an area-wide integrated pest management approach with an SIT component. The SIT can only be successful when the sterile males that are released in the field are of high biological quality, i.e. have the same dispersal capacity, survival and competitiveness as their wild counterparts. To date, sterile tsetse males have been released by air using biodegradable cardboard cartons that were manually dropped from a fixed-wing aircraft or gyrocopter. The cardboard boxes are however expensive, and the system is rather cumbersome to implement. Methods: A new prototype of an automated chilled adult release system (Bruno Spreader Innovation, (BSI™)) for tsetse flies was tested for its accuracy (in counting numbers of sterile males as loaded into the machine), release rate consistency and impact on quality of the released males. The impact of the release process was evaluated on several performance indicators of the irradiated male flies such as flight propensity, survival, mating competitiveness, premating and mating duration, and insemination rate of mated females. Results: The BSI TM release system counted with a consistent accuracy and released homogenously tsetse flies at the lowest motor speed (0.6 rpm). In addition, the chilling conditions (6 ± 1 o C) and the release process (passing of flies through the machine) had no significant negative impact on the males' flight propensity. No significant differences were observed between the control males (no irradiation and no exposure to the release process), irradiated males (no exposure to the release process) and irradiated males exposed to the release process with respect to mating competitiveness, premating period and mating duration. Only survival of irradiated males that were exposed to the release process was reduced, irrespective of whether the males were held with or without feeding. Conclusion: Although the release process had a negative effect on survival of the flies, the data of the experiments indicate that the BSI machine holds promise for use in operational tsetse SIT programmes. The promising results of this study will now need to be confirmed under operational field conditions in West Africa.

Introduction The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! It was in 2002 that Stephen Greenblatt, in his role as president of the US Modern Language Association, urged his membership to recognise what he called a ‘crisis in scholarly publication’. It is easy to forget now that this crisis, as he then saw it, had nothing to do with the rise of digital technologies, e-publishing, or open access. Indeed, it puts his words in...

Grasp planning and most specifically the grasp space exploration is still an open issue in robotics. This article presents a data-driven oriented methodology to model the grasp space of a multi-fingered adaptive gripper for known objects. This method relies on a limited dataset of manually specified expert grasps, and uses variational autoencoder to learn grasp intrinsic features in a compact way from a computational point of view. The learnt model can then be used to generate new non-learnt gripper configurations to explore the grasp space. Comment: accepted at SYSID 2021 conference

International audience; It has been 35 years since Igbozurike and Raza (1983), and rural communities in Nigeria continue to face many of the challenges identified in the ARMTI seminar. Poverty and rural-urban migration remain widespread in Nigeria. Further issues of security and terrorism have also made their way into the array of problems facing rural communities in Nigeria. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review the issues affecting the quality of life in 21st century rural Nigeria, in order to ascertain what has changed or remained the same since 1983. In achieving the study aim, the parameters used by Igbozurike and Raza (1983) will be linked with current literature on the quality of life in rural Nigeria. The paper will look at the following parameters: socioeconomic indicators, social services and infrastructure, nutritional status, population structure and mobility, institutional frameworks and the role of Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs).

The bidirectional photometric properties of the surface of Mars describe how remote measurements of surface reflectance can be linked to hemispherical albedo used for energy balance calculations. A simple Lambert's law is frequently assumed for global data processing, even though several local studies have revealed the complexity of Mars surface phase functions. In this paper, we derive a mean Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) representative of widespread typical Martian terrains. OMEGA and CRISM orbital observations are used to provide observational constraints at solar wavelengths over a wide range of viewing conditions all over the planet. Atmospheric contribution is quantified and removed using a radiative transfer model. We observe a common phase behavior consisting of a 5%–10% backscattering peak and, outside the backscattering region, a 10%–20% reflectance increase with emergence angles. Consequently, nadir measurements of surface reflectance typically underestimate hemispherical reflectance, or albedo, by 10%. We provide a parameterization of our mean Mars surface phase function based on Hapke formalism (ω=0.85, θ=17, c=0.6, b=0.12, B0=1 and h=0.05), and quantify the impact of the diffuse illumination conditions which change surface albedo as a function of local time and season. Our average phase function can be used as a refinement compared to the Lambertian surface model in global data processing and climate modeling.

The agricultural sector jointly provides a series of marketed and non-marketed goods, among which environmental benefits play an increasingly important role. This positive characteristic of farming is acknowledged by the European Union's current policy with agri-environmental measures providing public financing of programs under several headings such as extensification, grassland maintenance, landscape, and nature protection. These policies are expected to be continued and even reinforced. They rely on voluntary agreements with farmers: entrants are compensated for complying with a package of prescribed farming practices designed to secure conservation goals. To be effective from an environmental perspective, uptake is a key factor.

In this paper we study the question of life long learning of behaviors from human demonstrations by an intelligent system. One approach is to model the observed demonstrations by a stationary policy. Inverse rein-forcement learning, on the other hand, searches a reward function that makes the observed policy closed to optimal in the corresponding Markov decision process. This approach provides a model of the task solved by the demonstrator and has been shown to lead to better generalization in un-known contexts. However both approaches focus on learning a single task from the expert demonstration. In this paper we propose a feature learn-ing approach for inverse reinforcement learning in which several different tasks are demonstrated, but in which each task is modeled as a mixture of several, simpler, primitive tasks. We present an algorithm based on an al-ternate gradient descent to learn simultaneously a dictionary of primitive tasks (in the form of reward functions) and their combination into an ap-proximation of the task underlying observed behavior. We illustrate how this approach enables efficient re-use of knowledge from previous demon-strations. Namely knowledge on tasks that were previously observed by the learner is used to improve the learning of a new composite behavior, thus achieving transfer of knowledge between tasks.

International audience; The 2-2 wire-driven parallel crane is the most simple planar parallel crane actuated by wires with two wires connected at two different points on the platform. We present original contributions on the kinematics of such robot, namely full inverse kinematics, trajectory, static and singularity analysis in the joint space.

In this paper, we report on the outputs and adoption of the Agrisemantics Working Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), consisting of a set of recommendations to facilitate the adoption of semantic technologies and methods for the purpose of data interoperability in the field of agriculture and nutrition. From 2016 to 2019, the group gathered researchers and practitioners at the crossing point between information technology and agricultural science, to study all aspects in the life cycle of semantic resources: Conceptualization, edition, sharing, standardization, services, alignment, long term support. First, the working group realized a landscape study, a study of the uses of semantics in agrifood, then collected use cases for the exploitation of semantics resources a generic term to encompass vocabularies, terminologies, thesauri, ontologies. The resulting requirements were synthesized into 39 hints for users and developers of semantic resources, and providers of semantic resource services. We believe adopting these recommendations will engage agrifood sciences in a necessary transition to leverage data production, sharing and reuse and the adoption of the FAIR data principles. The paper includes examples of adoption of those requirements, and a discussion of their contribution to the field of data science. © 2020 The Author(s). Brandon Whitehead acknowledges with thanks the support of the CABI Development Fund. CABI is an international intergovernmental organization and we gratefully acknowledge the core financial support from our member countries (and lead agencies) including the United Kingdom (Department for International Development), China (Chinese Ministry of Agriculture), Australia (Australian Center for International Agricultural Research), Canada (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), Netherlands (Directorate-General for International Cooperation), and Switzerland (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation). See https:// www.cabi.org/about-cabi/who-we-work-with/key-donors/ for details. Sophie Aubin, Clement Jonquet, Emna Amdouni, Romain David and Catherine Roussey were supported, in part, by the French National Research Agency (ANR) Data to Knowledge in Agronomy and Biodiversity (D2KAB – www.d2kab.org – ANR-18-CE23-0017). Romain David was partly supported by the EPPN2020 project (H2020 grant N°731013), the EOSC-Life european program (grant agreement N°824087), the ‘Infrastructure Biologie Sante’ PHENOME-EMPHASIS project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR-11-INBS-0012) and the ‘Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir’.