When “port-out – city-in” becomes a strategy: is the port–city interface conflict in Amsterdam an observation or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Within the majority of port city literature, the evolution of port cities is still explained as an inevitable or ‘logical’ process whereby maritime land-uses gradually migrate from city centres towards waterfront zones with deep water access. Between the 1950s and 2000s, obsolete port areas around the world have surely become waterfront...

Abstraction as a Tool to Bridge the Reality Gap in Evolutionary Robotics

Automatically optimizing robotic behavior to solve complex tasks has been one of<br/>the main, long-standing goals of Evolutionary Robotics (ER). When successful, this<br/>approach will likely fundamentally change the rate of development and deployment<br/>of robots in everyday life. Performing this optimization on real robots can be risky<br/...

Universality caused: The case of renormalization group explanation

Recently, many have argued that there are certain kinds of abstract mathematical explanations that are noncausal. In particular, the irrelevancy approach suggests that abstracting away irrelevant causal details can leave us with a noncausal explanation. In this paper, I argue that the common example of Renormalization Group (RG) explanations of...

Abstraction as a Mechanism to Cross the Reality Gap in Evolutionary Robotics

One of the major challenges of Evolutionary Robotics is to transfer robot controllers evolved in simulation to robots in the real world. In this article, we investigate abstraction on the sensory inputs and motor actions as a potential solution to this problem. Abstraction means that the robot uses preprocessed sensory inputs and closed loop low...

Logistics Takes Command

The term "logistics" derives from the Greek logizomai standing for the art of reckoning, organising, planning. Through time it achieved a strict military connotation, dealing with the composition, lodging and movements of troops, the arrangement of provisions in hostile territories, the transportation and storage of artillery, food, medicines...