SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION AS A PLATFORM FOR PROMOTING THE AGENDA OF CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

The article discusses main issues and tendencies of two China-proposed initiatives, namely Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The key focus of the research combines the major points and expected results of BRI and the growing role of SCO in current International Relations. While exploring these two structures, we conclude that SCO is pushing forward BRI, serving as a strong influential and effective platform. The organization helped China to build up unprecedentedly intense ties with local states, creating natural conditions to play an active and constructive role in BRI agenda. From the very beginning Chinese BRI is closely related with SCO sharing reciprocal approaches, common features, principles and goals. They are historically linked together both geographically and ideologically. Specific projects under BRI together with the existing economic cooperation structure of SCO are truly complementing each other. SCO members view the BRI favorably, and China’s effective usage of the SCO has already resulted in many of its foreign policy goals being reached or at least had significant progress.

Identification of Network Promoters in a Regional and Intersectoral Health Promotion Network: A Qualitative Social Network Analysis in Southern Germany

Health in all policies is a key approach to promote health and calls for cooperation between diverse levels of government and different sectors. In this paper, we analyze how a network called ‘Healthy Region Plus’ in Southern Germany addresses intersectoral cooperation at city and county levels. We aim to analyze the different roles of actors involved in the network based on the promoter model. We conducted two socio-material network mappings based on the Net-map approach by Schiffer and Hauck. The analysis followed three steps: data visualization, descriptive analysis of network properties, and interpretation of findings. Our findings reveal a complex intersectoral cooperation structure, with county and city level clusters, with network members who act as diverse power, expert, process, or relationship promoters. We also identified certain relevant sectors not to be part of the network. We discuss that the success of the network depends on the members’ active participation in and their outreach beyond the existing network, between city and county levels, and across sectors to promote health and build health-promoting structures in the region.

The First Decade of the BRICS Group: Evolution of the Cooperation Structure

This paper analyses the institutional development of the BRICS group throughout the first decade of its functioning, from 2009 to 2019. The evolution of the cooperation structure is studied through the analysis of the BRICS’ documents, such as multilateral declarations and communiqués, reports of state institutions of member countries, comments of the political leaders. The practical implementation of the agreements has been traced by studying the group’s reports and the online news archives of the mass media of the member states. The author proposes a periodisation of the BRICS structural development. 2009–2011 – the initial stage, the formation of the group’s structure. The key working mechanisms were formed at that stage. However, the first permanent institutions of BRICS were formed at the next stage, in 2012–2014, the stage of permanent structure formation for the group. Then, in 2015–2016, the group has undergone the stage of intensive structural diversification. And in 2017–2019, BRICS maintained this trend, but the key structural changes were related to the group’s joint contacts with the rest of the world. The structure of cooperation within BRICS has changed significantly during the decade. The group formed both non-institutionalised, but regular dialogue formats, and permanent institutions for cooperation. The system of the contacts between the member states covers all aspects of cooperation. At the same time, the group has not institutionalised as an international organisation and remained a forum. The reasons for this are the collective support of a non-integrating format and the divergence of the member states’ approaches to cooperation, which has also had its impact on the BRICS work.

Actor Relation In The Dynamic of Inter-Regional Cooperation Policy (Case Study: Development Program of Metropolitan Area of Banjar Bakula, South Kalimantan Province)

Several studies have shown that the success in the inter-regional cooperation was influenced by coordination, commitment, participation, variance of cooperation, structure and format of as a factor that contributes the determinant in the successful cooperation between regions. This research was a qualitative research, conducted on the object of policy of inter-regional cooperation Banjarbakula Program, South Kalimantan Province, February 2017-February The result of this study states that the success of cooperation to political will. In fact these factors did not stand alone since the aspect of actor relationship as the determinant aspect drove those factors effectively. This article aims to examine the aspect of actor relationship cooperation between regions was influenced by the dynamics of actor relationships in constructing factors as suggested by the previous experts. The actors involved in the inter- regional cooperation became the triggers of coordination, commitment and participation to the success and failure, as well as the effectiveness of regional cooperation policy. Structural obstacles, ego-centric, minimally budget and no visionary planning could be overcome as long as the dynamics of actor relationships were managed properly.

Comparative Analysis of FPGA-Based Pair-HMM Accelerator Structures

As one of the most important and computationally-intensive parts in bioinformatics analysis, the Pair Hidden Markov Model (Pair-HMM) forward algorithm is widely recognized and has great potential. Therefore, it is important to accelerate the process of this algorithm. There are various approaches to accelerate Pair-HMM, especially the accelerators stemmed from the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) due to the highly-customizable on-chip resources and deep pipeline potential available to the designer. In this paper, we focus on the FPGA-based accelerators for the Pair-HMM forward algorithm proposed in recent years. The non-cooperation structure, which was proposed in our previous work, is compared with the Systolic Array (SA) structure and PE ring structure in the structure characteristics, calculation mode, computational efficiency, and storage requirement. We build an analysis model to evaluate the performance of the ring structure and our non-cooperative structure. Furthermore, based on this, we provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of structures of different accelerators and of the selection of a suitable structure for different scenarios. Based on the non-cooperative PE structure, we design a new chain topology for the accelerator. Experimental results show that our non-cooperation structure is superior to the other structures in performance and execution efficiency, and our new topology improves the performance of the accelerator. Finally, we propose some ideas about the improvement of the non-cooperative structure accelerator for future work.