The duty of loyalty: A Tool for Fundamental Rights Enforcement in the EU Legal System

in Frenkel, David-Arie; Emilio Nunez, Jorge (Eds.) International Law and Social Justice (2020)

The effective enforcement of rights within the European Union, understood as a legal system overarched by the duty of loyalty, depends upon judicial independence. This chapter introduces some recent legal ... [more ▼]

The effective enforcement of rights within the European Union, understood as a legal system overarched by the duty of loyalty, depends upon judicial independence. This chapter introduces some recent legal developments pertaining to its double dimension as a fundamental right and as a structural duty of the Member states to discuss four enforcing tools that concretise the duty of loyalty: the self-standing right to an independent tribunal, the infringement procedure, the preliminary ruling procedure and the technique of exceptional circumstances. In that context, the chapter rejects the idea that the multifaceted configuration of the European Union is detrimental to fundamental rights protection and stresses the relevance of all the actors of the legal system for the effective enforcement of rights. [less ▲]

Dwelling in (Un)Familiarity: Examples from the Luxembourg-German Borderland

in Boesen, Elisabeth; Schnuer, Gregor (Eds.) European Borderlands. Living with Barriers and Bridges (Border Regions Series) (2017)

Dwelling trends in border regions - towards an inter-urban discourse analysis

Scientific Conference (2015, June)

Effects of population mobility resulting from uneven development in border regions can be perceived very differently by city councils or planners and the local population. This paper focuses on the ... [more ▼]

Effects of population mobility resulting from uneven development in border regions can be perceived very differently by city councils or planners and the local population. This paper focuses on the perceptions of the effects of population mobility and dwelling in a transnational cross-border polycentric metropolitan region in Western Europe. The economic development of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg calls for a constant expansion of the labour market, attracting cross-border commuters and a ‘highly mobile elite’. The concomitant rise in property prices as well as the extreme housing shortages in Luxembourg have led to an expansion of the housing market into the border regions. So far studies have mostly dealt with the socio-demographic characteristics of the transmigrants. This research aims to detect people’s perceptions of the phenomenon by applying a discourse analysis, thus helping to trigger an increasing awareness for the emerging transnational housing market. [less ▲]

Dwelling trends in border regions – towards an inter-urban discourse analysis

Presentation (2016, October)

Dynamic Activity-Based Demand Estimation Considering Destination And Mode Choice

Doctoral thesis (2022)

Dynamic Adaptation of Software-defined Networks for IoT Systems: A Search-based Approach

in Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS'20) (2020, May)

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the development of many complex and critical systems such as smart emergency management systems. IoT-enabled applications typically depend on a ... [more ▼]

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the development of many complex and critical systems such as smart emergency management systems. IoT-enabled applications typically depend on a communication network for transmitting large volumes of data in unpredictable and changing environments. These networks are prone to congestion when there is a burst in demand, e.g., as an emergency situation is unfolding, and therefore rely on configurable software-defined networks (SDN). In this paper, we propose a dynamic adaptive SDN configuration approach for IoT systems. The approach enables resolving congestion in real time while minimizing network utilization, data transmission delays and adaptation costs. Our approach builds on existing work in dynamic adaptive search-based software engineering (SBSE) to reconfigure an SDN while simultaneously ensuring multiple quality of service criteria. We evaluate our approach on an industrial national emergency management system, which is aimed at detecting disasters and emergencies, and facilitating recovery and rescue operations by providing first responders with a reliable communication infrastructure. Our results indicate that (1) our approach is able to efficiently and effectively adapt an SDN to dynamically resolve congestion, and (2) compared to two baseline data forwarding algorithms that are static and non-adaptive, our approach increases data transmission rate by a factor of at least 3 and decreases data loss by at least 70%. [less ▲]

Dynamic and complex optical patterns from colloids of cholesteric liquid crystal droplets

in Proceedings of the SPIE (2015), 9384

Drops or shells of a planar-aligned short-pitch cholesteric liquid crystal exhibit unique optical properties due to the combination of Bragg reflection in the cholesteric helix and a radial orientation of ... [more ▼]

Drops or shells of a planar-aligned short-pitch cholesteric liquid crystal exhibit unique optical properties due to the combination of Bragg reflection in the cholesteric helix and a radial orientation of the helix axis. If such a droplet is illuminated from above, light is reflected into a continuous set of cones, the opening angles of which depend on where on the droplet the light hits its surface. For the wavelength that fulfills the Bragg condition the reflection is dramatically enhanced, yielding the light cones colored. A photonic cross communication scheme arises for certain angles, reflecting light back to the observer from a different droplet than the one originally illuminated. This gives rise to an intricate pattern of colored and circularly polarized spots. A number of interesting applications may be developed based on this pattern, e.g. in identification and authentication devices. We have carried out a detailed spectrophotometric analysis of the patterns, localized to individual spot maxima. A quantitative comparison between the measured spectra and the reflection wavelength expected from a model for the pattern generation allows us to conclude that the droplets are in fact not spherical but slightly ellipsoidal. [less ▲]

Dynamic and structural properties of orthorhombic rare-earth manganites under high pressure

in Physical Review. B (2014), 90(5),

We report a high-pressure study of orthorhombic rare-earth manganites AMnO3 using Raman scattering (for A = Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Tb, and Dy) and synchrotron x-ray diffraction (XRD), for A = Pr, Sm, Eu, and Dy ... [more ▼]

We report a high-pressure study of orthorhombic rare-earth manganites AMnO3 using Raman scattering (for A = Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Tb, and Dy) and synchrotron x-ray diffraction (XRD), for A = Pr, Sm, Eu, and Dy. In all cases, a phase transition was evidenced by the disappearance of the Raman signal at a critical pressure that depends on the A cation. For the compounds with A = Pr, Sm, and Dy, XRD confirms the presence of a corresponding structural transition to a noncubic phase, so that the disappearance of the Raman spectrum can be interpreted as an insulator-to-metal transition. We analyze the compression mechanisms at work in the different manganites via the pressure dependence of the lattice parameters, the shear strain in the ac plane, and the Raman bands associated with out-of-phase MnO6 rotations and in-plane O2 symmetric stretching modes. Our data show a crossover across the rare-earth series between two different kinds of behavior. For the smaller A cations considered in this study (Dy and Tb), the compression is nearly isotropic in the ac plane, with only small evolutions of the tilt angles and cooperative Jahn-Teller distortion. As the radius of the A cation increases, the pressure-induced reduction of Jahn-Teller distortion becomes more pronounced and increasingly significant as a compression mechanism, while the pressure-induced tilting of octahedra chains becomes conversely less pronounced. We finally discuss our results in light of the notion of chemical pressure and show that the analogy with hydrostatic pressure works quite well for manganites with the smaller A cations considered in this paper but can be misleading with large A cations. [less ▲]

A dynamic approach for combining abstract argumentation semantics

in Dynamics, Uncertainty and Reasoning (2019)

Abstract argumentation semantics provide a direct relation from an argumentation framework to corresponding sets of acceptable arguments, or equivalently to labeling functions. Instead, we study step-wise ... [more ▼]

Abstract argumentation semantics provide a direct relation from an argumentation framework to corresponding sets of acceptable arguments, or equivalently to labeling functions. Instead, we study step-wise update relations on argumentation frameworks whose fixpoints represent the labeling functions on the arguments. We make use of this dynamic approach in order to study novel ways of combining abstract argumentation semantics. In particular, we introduce the notion of a merge of two argumentation semantics, which is defined in such a way that the merge of the preferred and the grounded semantics is the complete semantics. Finally we consider how to define new semantics using the merge operator, in particular how meaningfully combine features of naive-based and complete-based semantics. [less ▲]

Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation and Edge Caching Optimization for Nonlinear Content Delivery through Flexible Multibeam Satellites

in IEEE International Conference on Communications (2022, May)

The next generation multibeam satellites open up a new way to design satellite communication channels with the full flexibility in bandwidth, transmit power and beam coverage management. In this paper, we ... [more ▼]

The next generation multibeam satellites open up a new way to design satellite communication channels with the full flexibility in bandwidth, transmit power and beam coverage management. In this paper, we exploit the flexible multibeam satellite capabilities and the geographical distribution of users to improve the performance of satellite-assisted edge caching systems. Our aim is to jointly optimize the bandwidth allocation in multibeam and caching decisions at the edge nodes to address two important problems: i) cache feeding time minimization and ii) cache hits maximization. To tackle the non-convexity of the joint optimization problem, we transform the original problem into a difference-of-convex (DC) form, which is then solved by the proposed iterative algorithm whose convergence to at least a local optimum is theoretically guaranteed. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed design is evaluated under the realistic beams coverage of the satellite SES-14 and Movielens data set. Numerical results show that our proposed joint design can reduce the caching feeding time by 50% and increase the cache hit ratio (CHR) by 10% to 20% compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, we examine the impact of multispot beams and multicarrier wide-beam on the joint design and discuss potential research directions. [less ▲]