Smart Culture and Heritage, the “Rare” Category of SSC Classifications

ISO and ITU propose some classifications regarding the smart sustainable cities services: energy, transport, health, tourism, education, safety, environment, governance, commerce, buildings, community. Culture and heritage is a rare category in these classifications, despite the fact they have to be always been included in an SSC ecosystem. They could play a key role in achieving the 17 SDGs due to some critical reasons: their deep roots in humanity, their wide spread across city life and environment, hence their horizontal connections with all the other SSC categories. There are many options of SSC structures, which have the potential to be dedicated on culture and heritage. QR codes, GIS., VR, apps, IoT, virtual events are some of them, widely implemented by cities. Via these ways, culture and heritage could 1) contribute to the humans' welfare index and 2) interact with the other sectors of the city ecosystem. Their added value to the sustainability process creates the necessity to be a distinctive category in international SSC classifications.

Columnar processing of border ownership in primate visual cortex

To understand a visual scene, the brain segregates figures from background by assigning borders to foreground objects. Neurons in primate visual cortex encode which object owns a border (border ownership), but the underlying circuitry is not understood. Here, we used multielectrode probes to record from border ownership-selective units in different layers in macaque visual area V4 to study the laminar organization and timing of border ownership selectivity. We find that border ownership selectivity occurs first in deep layer units, in contrast to spike latency for small stimuli in the classical receptive field. Units on the same penetration typically share the preferred side of border ownership, also across layers, similar to orientation preference. Units are often border ownership-selective for a range of border orientations, where the preferred sides of border ownership are systematically organized in visual space. Together our data reveal a columnar organization of border ownership in V4 where the earliest border ownership signals are not simply inherited from upstream areas, but computed by neurons in deep layers, and may thus be part of signals fed back to upstream cortical areas or the oculomotor system early after stimulus onset. The finding that preferred border ownership is clustered and can cover a wide range of spatially contiguous locations suggests that the asymmetric context integrated by these neurons is provided in a systematically clustered manner, possibly through corticocortical feedback and horizontal connections.

Emergence of Lie Symmetries in Functional Architectures Learned by CNNs

In this paper we study the spontaneous development of symmetries in the early layers of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) during learning on natural images. Our architecture is built in such a way to mimic some properties of the early stages of biological visual systems. In particular, it contains a pre-filtering step ℓ0 defined in analogy with the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN). Moreover, the first convolutional layer is equipped with lateral connections defined as a propagation driven by a learned connectivity kernel, in analogy with the horizontal connectivity of the primary visual cortex (V1). We first show that the ℓ0 filter evolves during the training to reach a radially symmetric pattern well approximated by a Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG), which is a well-known model of the receptive profiles of LGN cells. In line with previous works on CNNs, the learned convolutional filters in the first layer can be approximated by Gabor functions, in agreement with well-established models for the receptive profiles of V1 simple cells. Here, we focus on the geometric properties of the learned lateral connectivity kernel of this layer, showing the emergence of orientation selectivity w.r.t. the tuning of the learned filters. We also examine the short-range connectivity and association fields induced by this connectivity kernel, and show qualitative and quantitative comparisons with known group-based models of V1 horizontal connections. These geometric properties arise spontaneously during the training of the CNN architecture, analogously to the emergence of symmetries in visual systems thanks to brain plasticity driven by external stimuli.

Circumscribing laser cuts attenuate seizure propagation in a mouse model of focal epilepsy

In partial onset epilepsy, seizures arise focally in the brain and often propagate, causing acute behavior changes, chronic cognitive decline, and increased mortality. Patients frequently become refractory to medical management, leaving neurosurgical resection of the seizure focus as a primary treatment, which can cause neurologic deficits. In the cortex, focal seizures are thought to spread through horizontal connections in layers II/III, suggesting that selectively severing these connections could block seizure propagation while preserving normal columnar circuitry and function. We induced focal neocortical epilepsy in mice and used tightly-focused femtosecond-duration laser pulses to create a sub-surface, open-cylinder cut surrounding the seizure focus and severing cortical layers II-IV. We monitored seizure propagation using electrophysiological recordings at the seizure focus and at distant electrodes for 3-8 months. With laser cuts, only 5% of seizures propagated to the distant electrodes, compared to 85% in control animals. Laser cuts also decreased the number of seizures that were initiated, so that the average number of propagated seizures per day decreased from 42 in control mice to 1.5 with laser cuts. Physiologically, these cuts produced a modest decrease in cortical blood flow that recovered within days and, at one month, left a ~20-μm wide scar with increased gliosis and localized inflammatory cell infiltration but minimal collateral damage. When placed over motor cortex, cuts did not cause notable deficits in a skilled reaching task. Femtosecond laser produced sub-surface cuts hold promise as a novel neurosurgical approach for intractable focal cortical epilepsy, as might develop following traumatic brain injury.

Columnar processing of border ownership in primate visual cortex

To understand a visual scene, the brain segregates figures from background by assigning borders to foreground objects. Neurons in primate visual cortex encode which object owns a border (border ownership), but the underlying circuitry is not understood. Here we used multielectrode probes to record from border ownership selective units in different layers in macaque visual area V4 to study the laminar organization and timing of border ownership selectivity. We find that border ownership selectivity occurs first in deep layer units, in contrast to spike latency for small stimuli in the classical receptive field. Units on the same penetration typically share the preferred side of border ownership, also across layers, similar to orientation preference. Units are often border ownership selective for a range of border orientations, where the preferred sides of border ownership are systematically organized in visual space. Together our data reveal a columnar organization of border ownership in V4 where the earliest border ownership signals are not simply inherited from upstream areas, but computed by neurons in deep layers, and may thus be part of signals fed back to upstream cortical areas or the oculomotor system early after stimulus onset. The finding that preferred border ownership is clustered and can cover a wide range of spatially contiguous locations, suggests that the asymmetric context integrated by these neurons is provided in a systematically clustered manner, possibly through corticocortical feedback and horizontal connections.

Thalamocortical and intracortical contributions to stimulus-evoked and oscillatory activity in rodent primary auditory cortex

Intracortical, horizontal connections seem ideally suited to contribute to cortical processing by spreading information across cortical space and coordinating activity between distant cortical sites. In sensory systems experiments have implicated horizontal connections in the generation of receptive fields and have in turn led to computational models of receptive field generation that rely on the contribution of horizontal connections. Testing the contribution of horizontal connections at the mesoscopic level has been difficult due to the lack of a suitable method to observe the activity of intracortical horizontal connections. Here, we develop such a method based on the analysis of the relative residues of the cortical laminar current source density reconstructions. In the auditory cortex of Mongolian gerbils, the method is then tested by manipulating the contribution of horizontal connections by surgical dissection. Our results indicate that intracortical horizontal connections contribute to the frequency-tuning of mesoscopic cortical patches. Futhermore, we dissociated a type of cortical gamma oscillation based on horizontal connections between mesoscopic patches from gamma oscillations locally generated within mesoscopic patches. The data further imply that global and local coordination of activity during sensory stimulation occur in a low and high gamma frequency band, respectively. Taken together the present data demonstrate that intracortical horizontal connections play an important role in generating cortical feature tuning and coordinate neuronal oscillations across cortex.

15. Free Movement of Persons

This chapter evaluates the sources of movement rights for persons, as well as the horizontal connections between them. It analyses the special free movement rights for economically active persons; that is, workers and self-employed professionals. Importantly, the freedom of establishment here also covers companies. The chapter then specifically looks at the free movement rights of companies (and their subsidiaries). It also introduces the horizontal provisions on EU citizenship and their relationship to the special movement rights for workers and the self-employed. Finally, the chapter considers the horizontal rules that govern the various justifications for national restrictions on the free movement of persons. In addition to the ordinary public policy justifications, the main derogation here is a public service exception that allows Member States to restrict access to professions that are linked to the exercise of public authority.

The Panama Papers

This chapter presents a case study of grassroots networks between the Spanish anarchist movement and migrant laborers working on the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914). Sources provided by the anarchist press of both areas reveal sustained material and ideological exchange across the Atlantic in these years, with print materials, remittances, solidarity campaigns and public debates binding radical workers in a new and challenging context to the one they had left behind. Sites of global industrial capital, such as the Canal Zone, are thus revealed to form a central locale in the conception and functioning of an alternative, radical geography in the early twentieth century, marked by the horizontal connections sustained by the publishers, contributors and readers of anarchist print.

THE STRUCTURE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS OF RUSSIAN POLITICAL PARTIES ON THE EVE OF ELECTIONS – 2021

The analysis of the structure of digital communications of political parties is actualized by the proximity to the electoral cycle of 2021. Referendum-2021 will show the level of public support for the current socio-political course and, possibly, will change the political balance in the State Parliament. The purpose of this study is to present the results of an automated analysis of the party communication digital markers and regulation strategies by online network communities of political parties. The methods of data collection and analysis were the analysis of social graphs (the structure and density of user connections within social media communities) using proprietary software and cognitive mapping of political party digital content with the creation of a database and its analysis via the SPSS Statistics 24.0. The cases of empirical analysis were the political parties of the Russian Federation - participants of the Referendum-2020. As a result of the study, all online party groups-analysis cases are segmented into three clusters: groups regulated by online macroleaders; communities managed by online microleaders; groups with «horizontal connections» that do not have influential influencers. For each type of community, the features of the social media communication content are defined. In conclusion, recommendations on the organization of social and media support for the activities of political parties are formulated.