Policy Space Research Articles

Theoretical and political foundations of Azerbaijan’s foreign policy in the post-soviet space

Theoretical and political foundations of Azerbaijan’s foreign policy in the post-soviet space

НАПРЯМИ І ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ ЦИФРОВІЗАЦІЇ І КОМП’ЮТЕРИЗАЦІЇ ПРОЦЕСУ НАДАННЯ МЕДИЧНИХ ПОСЛУГ

Ensuring the development and further development of the electronic health care system are priority conditions for achieving the goals and objectives of improving the quality of the provision of medical services, improving the health of the population, improving the quality of communication processes between interested parties, reducing the number of medical errors, ensuring effective control over circulation and the use of medical technologies and medicines, the formation of a unified policy and medical space with the EU. The purpose of the article is to analyze the implementation of strategic plans for the development of the electronic health care system of Ukraine, to determine the most priority directions for its improvement and prospects for further development in the light of providing strategic planning for the development of the health care sector. The results of the study of the state of the e-Health system, conducted by specialists of the Agency for Local Economic Development of Yavoriv Oblast within the project "Synergy of electronic health and digital skills in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine: a way to increase the resilience of civil societies of the Eastern Partnership in times of crisis" were analyzed; research by experts of the independent public association-coalition "Ukraine after Victory"; study "Primary medical care in Ukraine: progress achieved and next steps: data analysis for 2020-2021"; the study "Telemedicine in Ukraine: a situational analysis" conducted by the Charitable Fund "Patients of Ukraine" and the Ukrainian Center for Health Care within the framework of the "Sustainable Development of National Health Care Systems" (LHSS) and USAID "Integrated Health Systems IDIQ" projects, and as well as the content of the Law of Ukraine "On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding the Functioning of Telemedicine", the explanatory note to it and "Strategy for the Development of Telemedicine in Ukraine". It was determined that 50% of the tasks of the "Concept for the Development of Electronic Healthcare" approved in 2020 have not been completed, 36% of the tasks have been partially completed, and only 24% of the tasks have been completed to a sufficient extent. The implementation of telemedicine as one of the most priority areas of development of the e-health system in Ukraine as of 2023 is unsatisfactory. The adoption of the Law "On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding the Functioning of Telemedicine" and the approval of the "Strategy for the Development of Telemedicine in Ukraine" do not create prerequisites for solving the accumulated problems due to the determination of technical assistance funds from international institutions, organizations and foreign countries as the only source of funding , the absence of measures to minimize possible risks of strategy implementation, as well as a contradictory statement regarding the participation in the implementation of the tasks of the main stakeholders.

Інноваціонно-екологічні аспекти розвитку вітчизняного підприємництва

The aim of the article is to provide a theoretical substantiation of the formation of innovative and ecological aspects of the development of domestic entrepreneurship in conditions of turbulence. The main motives for the introduction of ecological innovations at domestic enterprises are considered, the possibility of creating a new management system on the basis of innovation policy and synergetic space is considered. The ways and mechanisms of increasing innovation and ecological activities are described and methods of implementation are proposed. It is analyzed that the improvement of the innovation management system and the development of the internal business environment involves changes in the sphere of planning, employment of the population of the region, promotion of products, interaction of the authorities, domestic entrepreneurship, as well as knowledge management. Innovations in the field of business management will provide a long-term competitive advantage to specific areas and contribute to their development, taking into account and combining scientific and technological solutions with administration and innovation management. Particular attention is paid to domestic enterprises in the ecological aspect – for the implementation of innovative and ecological activities, business strategies and the search for a balance between profit, ecological protection and social justice. On the basis of the carried out analysis of the ecological aspects of innovation activity, important characteristics of innovative development of domestic enterprises have been allocated and an understanding of this economic category has been provided. Based on the results of the analysis of scientific papers, the main directions of innovative development of enterprise are determined, as well as the main motivational principles in this area are considered. Today, in order to overcome the innovation and ecological crisis, it is important to develop and implement ecologically friendly and cost-effective innovations. Ecological innovations, like other types of innovation, are aimed at making a profit and reducing costs, but their specificity is manifested in social, cultural and ethical contexts.

Driver Modeling Using a Continuous Policy Space: Theory and Traffic Data Validation

Driver Modeling Using a Continuous Policy Space: Theory and Traffic Data Validation

Вовлечение неарктических субъектов в развитие Арктической зоны Российской Федерации: кейс Санкт-Петербурга

The development of the Arctic territories is a priority in the policy of the Russian Federation, primarily due to the vast resource wealth of the Arctic. In this paper is observed how the state, seeking to ensure the development of the zone, engages non-Arctic actors in the process, facilitating the establishment of interregional and international relations. Saint Petersburg has a special role in this process. The study leads to the conclusion that St. Petersburg should have occupied an intermediary position, accumulating information about the needs and opportunities of the Arctic actors and presenting the information in the foreign policy space. However, problems of an external nature did not allow this vision to be fully realised.

Reindustrialização na convenção de desenvolvimento sustentável

ABSTRACT This article assumes the importance of the manufacturing industry to long-term growth and examines Brazil’s deindustrialization process since its economic opening. The manufacturing sector’s recovery is analyzed in light of the proposal to reindustrialize the economy in the ongoing global climate emergency. In line with the new-developmentalist literature, reindustrialization implies widening policy space to recover public and private investment in productive assets, providing financial conditions compatible with long-term returns. It assumes an active role in state intervention. In this sense, the New Brazilian Industry industrial policy should anchor long-term expectations to enhance productive investment committed to the green transition. This approach positions industrial policy as the anchor to build a sustainable development convention.

Long-Term Tracking of Evasive Urban Target Based on Intention Inference and Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in urban target-tracking tasks, where long-term tracking of evasive targets is of great significance for public safety. However, the tracked targets are easily lost due to the evasive behavior of the targets and the unstructured characteristics of the urban environment. To address this issue, this article proposes a hybrid target-tracking approach based on target intention inference and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, a target intention inference model based on convolution neural networks (CNNs) is built to infer target intentions by fusing urban environment information and observed target trajectory. Then, the prediction of the target trajectory can be inspired by the inferred target intentions, which can further provide effective guidance to the target search process. In order to fully explore the policy space, the target search policy is developed under a DRL framework, where the search policy is modeled as a deep neural network (DNN) and trained by interacting with the task environment. The simulation results show that the inference of the target intentions can effectively guide the UAV to search for the target and significantly improve the target-tracking performance. Meanwhile, the generalization results indicate that the proposed DRL-based search policy has high robustness to the uncertainty of the target behavior.

Outlining Inconsistencies in the Indian Space Policy 2023

Outlining Inconsistencies in the Indian Space Policy 2023

항공우주자위대 창설을 통해 본 일본 우주정책의 변화와 전망

항공우주자위대 창설을 통해 본 일본 우주정책의 변화와 전망

Challenges justifying the necessary harmonization of economic and financial criminal laws in O.H.A.D.A. space

Some African countries have decided to create the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (O.H.A.D.A.) to build a common legal space to meet their economic and social needs. This organization results from their desire to standardize their legislation to find solutions to the persistent economic sluggishness generating endemic mass unemployment. Its primary purpose is to restore confidence to investors who, for a long time, have turned their backs on Africa because of the obsolescence, scattering, and extreme heterogeneity of its legislation of an economic nature. With this in mind, the Community body has introduced several uniform laws conducive to economic activity between Member States. That raises the question of security within this regional space. Appearing as a strategic weapon, the regional legislator has put legal means of protection on the civil level, which unfortunately proves to be insufficient. Because of this, recoursing to criminal law is necessary. However, we note that the member states of the O.H.A.D.A. consider the penal field their preserve. The corollary of this national character results in a need to move towards unifying the penal field within the framework of an organization of integration, which is O.H.A.D.A. That constitutes a problematic challenge regarding determining a penal policy in the regional space.

PREFACE

PREFACE

Tendencje behawioralne w polityce zagranicznej Turcji w okresie rządów Partii Sprawiedliwości i Rozwoju

Behavioral trends in Turkish foreign policy during the rule of the Justice and Development Party Turkey’s foreign policy behavior in a given period can be understood by examining the ruling party and domestic relations, the interests and composition of the governing coalition and prevalent international dynamics. The aim of the article is to show, that paradigmatic shifts in foreign policy and the drivers of Turkey’s quest for autonomous policy space can be understood as an outcome of interrelated transformations at global, regional and domestic levels. After 2010, Turkish foreign policy was marked by a period of „autonomization”, in which the ruling party decided to fill the geopolitical vacuum created in the region after the failure of negotiations with the European Union in the gradual withdrawal of the United States from the local diplomatic chessboard.

Evolution of techno-nationalism: The role of the space factor

Technological changes of the last four decades (1980s ‒ 2020s) encourage scientists of various fields to assess the impact of technologies on the transformation of the system of international relations and national strategies of states. In particular, the main focus of many studies is devoted to the system of relations between countries with conflicting technological interests. Therefore, in the presented article, let’s focus on the theoretical understanding of the evolution of the concept of techno-nationalism. Consideration of techno-nationalism through the prism of space policy, in particular US-China relations, is appropriate from the point of view of determining the relevance of the obtained research results. In view of this, the research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach, which made it possible to look at the problem through the perspective of historical, economic, political sciences and the theory of international relations. The analysis of publications on this issue shows that the development of techno-nationalism took place in a dichotomous relationship with techno-globalism. In the context of the end of the Cold War, techno-nationalism was used to refer to the protectionist policies of states that opposed the free exchange of technology. Space technology, which is an indicator of leadership and has a dual purpose, has become an important element of interstate communication in the post-bipolar era. Changes in this system led to an attempt by the United States to balance the interests of national security and commercial benefits from the use of space. However, these efforts led to a further strengthening of the export control regime from the second half of the 1990s. These restrictions were mainly based on concerns about the transfer of space technology to China, which was showing signs of military modernization. Thus, the leadership challenge facing the US and China in the space industry continued to strengthen the techno-nationalist elements of innovation systems throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Based on the views of the studied scientists, the author of the article provides his own definition of techno-nationalism as a state policy, scientific approach and ideology where national factors play a key role. The results of the study showed that the components of technological systems can be affected by the process of globalization to varying degrees. And therefore, techno-globalism and techno-nationalism are components of these systems and demonstrate interdependence. In this light, such categories as digital nationalism, digital identity, and techno-authoritarianism need further development.

LESSONS FROM FOUR DECADES IN AGING POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: WHAT A LONG FINE TRIP IT’S BEEN

Abstract Aging policy has come a long way over the last four decades. Building on the history of leadership in policy and aging at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, we offer six lessons from the intersection of policy, practice, and research for researchers and for those interested in careers as policy gerontologists. Lessons include: 1) Researchers must communicate scientific truths clearly, humbly, often, relevantly, and broadly to a wide array of key stakeholders; 2) To continue to build the bench for the next generation of leaders, interested educators should convene to plan a Policy Leadership Program 2.0. 3) Researchers and practitioners should remember: If everything is going according to plan, something is wrong; 4) Those considering policy research, program development, or program evaluation should recognize that it can be funded by a variety of sources with different strengths and constraints; 5) Given a host of innovative ideas, perspectives, programs and services, in the aging policy space, evaluators and researchers will learn far more from those doing policy and practice work than they can ever hope to repay; 6) Progress is not linear nor does it consistently advance in the hoped for direction. It requires patience, persistence, and stamina.

The Language Resources of the Russia’s Foreign Humanitarian Policy: The Digital Components

The rapidly changing geopolitical situation has dictated the need for a conceptual design of the humanitarian policy of the Russian Federation abroad as a direction of foreign policy that is gaining priorities. The formation of an objective perception of Russia in the world involves systematic interaction with foreign audiences through digital infrastructure. Numerous digital platforms, being created by foreign tech giants, with their own rules and standards, compete with states, influence public opinion and public discourse. The “Russian language” of one of the largest segments of the digital space is ambivalent: in other words, it does not always mean a complimentary attitude towards Russia and Russian culture. Based on the available and collected data of Internet statistics, an assessment is made of the role of Russian-language digital resources as an opportunity to achieve the goals of Russia’s foreign humanitarian policy. On the example of the RuWiki, the Russian-language section of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, it is shown how social media can be used in an ideological and value confrontation. In a comparative vein, Russian initiatives in the creation and promotion of national digital platforms are described on the example of encyclopedic portals - “Knowledge” based on the Great Russian Encyclopedia and Runiversalis. The main directions of humanitarian policy in the digital space are outlined, considering the geopolitical context. It is concluded that the development of domestic digital infrastructure will create a common semantic field for gravitation towards Russia, the Russian language and culture, regardless of the geopolitical situation. It is suggested that the formation of a more pronounced Russian-speaking segment of the global network reflects the idea of a multipolar world defended by Russia.

Counterproductive evolution: the long-term effects of short-term interventionism following the Great Financial Crisis

Following the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers in advanced economies employed unconventional economic interventions that were meant to be short-term but continued for more than a decade and were followed by unconventional interventions in non-financial markets. What causal mechanisms connect short-term unconventional interventions with long-term policy change? By developing a constructivist-evolutionary framework, we suggest that employing unconventional policy ideas for the sake of securing the pre-crisis growth regime, in a volatile economic environment, has repeatedly failed policymakers’ expectations. The gap between expectations and outcomes expanded the policy space for unconventional policy ideas, and activated an evolutionary process, through which expanding ‘temporary’ interventions have been adopted in additional areas, became hard to reverse and modified macroeconomic priorities. A comparative process-tracing analysis of two case studies – the UK and Israel – demonstrates how short-term employment of innovative policy ideas and long-term change in economic policy are tightly connected via causal ideational evolutionary mechanisms.

Reference Motion Quality and Design Choices for Bipedal Walking with PPO

This paper investigates the influence of reference motion quality and other design choices on the performance of deep reinforcement learning for bipedal walking with Proximate Policy Optimization (PPO). We use parametrized Cartesian quintic splines to generate reference actions for an omnidirectional walk policy. By using parameter sets with different qualities, we show that the performance of the trained policy correlates to the quality of the reference motion. We also show that a policy in Cartesian space performs superior to a joint-space-based one if an advantageous representation of orientation is chosen. Additionally, we show that using an initial bias for the policy speeds up the training and leads to higher performances for policies using position control. We also show that we can achieve a stable omnidirectional walk on a wide variety of simulated humanoid robots.

Distributed adaptive sliding-mode control for 2-D plane vehicle platoon with prescribed performance and angle constraint

This paper focuses on the distributed adaptive sliding-mode control problem for two-dimensional (2-D) plane vehicle platoon with prescribed performance, angle constraints, and actuator faults. The quadratic spacing policy (QSP) is first adopted for the 2-D plane vehicle platoon to adjust the inter-vehicle spacing. The spacing error can converge within a finite time to the small region predetermined by a new finite-time performance function (FTPF). Meanwhile, a new transformed error function is introduced to convert the FTPF-constrained spacing errors into equivalent unconstrained ones. Besides, the property of the invertible nonlinear mapping function is used for the original system with the angle constraint to get a new unconstrained system. Moreover, a new controller based on hyperbolic tangent function is designed to handle actuator faults occurring multiple times over a period. Furthermore, the stability and string stability of the 2-D plane vehicle platoon are achieved through sliding-mode control. Finally, the simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Risk‐sensitive Markov decision processes with long‐run CVaR criterion

CVaR (Conditional value at risk) is a risk metric widely used in finance. However, dynamically optimizing CVaR is difficult, because it is not a standard Markov decision process (MDP) and the principle of dynamic programming fails. In this paper, we study the infinite‐horizon discrete‐time MDP with a long‐run CVaR criterion, from the view of sensitivity‐based optimization. By introducing a pseudo‐CVaR metric, we reformulate the problem as a bilevel MDP model and derive a CVaR difference formula that quantifies the difference of long‐run CVaR under any two policies. The optimality of deterministic policies is derived. We obtain a so‐called Bellman local optimality equation for CVaR, which is a necessary and sufficient condition for locally optimal policies and only necessary for globally optimal policies. A CVaR derivative formula is also derived for providing more sensitivity information. Then we develop a policy iteration type algorithm to efficiently optimize CVaR, which is shown to converge to a local optimum in mixed policy space. Furthermore, based on the sensitivity analysis of our bilevel MDP formulation and critical points, we develop a globally optimal algorithm. The piecewise linearity and segment convexity of the optimal pseudo‐CVaR function are also established. Our main results and algorithms are further extended to optimize the mean and CVaR simultaneously. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments relating to portfolio management to demonstrate the main results. Our work sheds light on dynamically optimizing CVaR from a sensitivity viewpoint.

Offline Model-Based Adaptable Policy Learning for Decision-Making in Out-of-Support Regions.

In reinforcement learning, a promising direction to avoid online trial-and-error costs is learning from an offline dataset. Current offline reinforcement learning methods commonly learn in the policy space constrained to in-support regions by the offline dataset, in order to ensure the robustness of the outcome policies. Such constraints, however, also limit the potential of the outcome policies. In this paper, to release the potential of offline policy learning, we investigate the decision-making problems in out-of-support regions directly and propose offline Model-based Adaptable Policy LEarning (MAPLE). By this approach, instead of learning in in-support regions, we learn an adaptable policy that can adapt its behavior in out-of-support regions when deployed. We give a practical implementation of MAPLE via meta-learning techniques and ensemble model learning techniques. We conduct experiments on MuJoCo locomotion tasks with offline datasets. The results show that the proposed method can make robust decisions in out-of-support regions and achieve better performance than SOTA algorithms.