Publications

At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore’s law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics.

Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.

The needs of future digital data and computer systems are expected to be two to three orders of magnitude larger than for today’s systems, to take account of unprecedented amounts of heterogeneous hardware, lines of source code, numbers of users, and volumes of data. Ultrascale computing systems (UCS) are a solution. Envisioned as large-scale complex systems joining parallel and distributed computing systems, which can be located at multiple sites and cooperate to provide the required resources and performance to the users, these technologies will extend individual systems to provide the resources that are very much needed.

Based on the research work in the COST Action IC 1305 Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS) this book presents important results and methods towards achieving sustainable UCS. The authors present a wide range of emerging programming models that facilitate the task of scaling and extracting performance on continuously evolving platforms, while providing resilience and fault-tolerant mechanisms to tackle the increasing probability of failures throughout the entire software stack. These methods are needed to achieve scale handling, better programmability and adaptation to rapidly changing underlying computing architecture, data centric programming models, resilience, and energy-efficiency.

This book presents different challenges related to public open spaces and people, the relationships between them and possible roles of digital technology in this relationship. It is a book about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space and related different approaches, methods, empirical studies, open questions and concerns. It brings together research work results, ideas, discussions and experiences of different participants of the Project CyberParks, fostering knowledge about the relationship between information and communication technologies and public spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness (www.cyberparks-project.eu), that was founded by the H2020 European Programme Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) in the period of April 2014 to April 2018 (www.cost.eu/actions/ TU1306).

In response to climate change and limited fossil fuels, renewable energy is being heavily promoted throughout Europe. Despite general support for green energy, perceived landscape change and loss of landscape quality have featured heavily in opposition campaigns.

The COST Action “Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality” (RELY) systematically investigated the nexus between renewable energy production and landscape quality. Its aim was to analyze how landscape protection and renewable energy deployment can be reconciled to contribute to the sustainable transformation of energy systems.

This book compiles guidelines for assessing landscape suitability for, and vulnerability to, renewable energy projects together with a toolbox for landscape-aware public participation in planning. It furthermore elaborates a multilingual glossary of terms related to landscape and energy.

Authored by 115 experts, researchers and practitioners from 35 countries across Europe and beyond, this volume primarily focuses on traditional types of coppice, but also addresses more recent forms such as short rotation coppice. Besides extensive coverage of the themes silviculture, utilisation, conservation and governance, the volume provides information on each of the 35 countries and discusses management and policy options for the different situations in which coppice is currently found.

Femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, was until recently included in the category ‘homicide’, obscuring the special features of this social and gendered phenomenon. However, the majority of murders of women are perpetrated by men whom they know from family ties and are the result of intimate partner violence or so-called ‘honour’ killings. This book is the first one on femicide in Europe and presents the findings of a four-year project discussing various aspects of femicide. Written by leading international scholars with an interdiscplinary perspective, it looks at the prevention programmes and comparative quantitative and qualitative data collection, as well as the impact of culture. It proposes the establishment of a European Observatory on Femicide as a new direction for the future, showing the benefits of cross-national collaboration, united to prevent the murder of women and girls.

This white paper is authored by TREATme, the European Network on Individualized Psychotherapy Treatment of Young People with Mental Disorders (COST action CA16102). The network consists of youth psychotherapy experts and includes researchers and clinicians from 29 countries.

COST Action FP1402 is a research network established under the aegis of the “Forests, their Products and Services.” The aim of the Action was to overcome the gap between broadly available scientific results and the specific information needed by designers, industry, authorities and code committees, providing transfer for practical application in timber design and innovation.

The aim of this document is to report the state of the art in terms of research and practice of Timber-Concrete Composite (TCC) systems, in order to summarize the existing knowledge in the single countries and to develop a common understanding of the design of TCC.