Behaviour and learning in completely autonomous mobile robots

A number of Intelligent Mobile Robots have been developed at the University of Reading. They are completely autonomous in that no umbilical cord attaches to them to extra power supplies or computer station: further, they are not radio controlled. In this paper, the robots are discussed, in their various forms, and the individual behaviours and characteristics which appear are considered.

Learning in neural networks and stochastic approximation methods with averaging

The problem of adjusting the weights (learning) in multilayer feedforward neural networks (NN) is known to be of a high importance when utilizing NN techniques in various practical applications. The learning procedure is to be performed as fast as possible and in a simple computational fashion, the two requirements which are usually not satisfied practically by the methods developed so far. Moreover, the presence of random inaccuracies are usually not taken into account. In view of these three issues, an alternative stochastic approximation approach discussed in the paper, seems to be very promising.

Resilient responses to climate change: exploring organisational learning in networked development organisations

Drawing from the organisational learning and governance literature, this paper assesses four internationally networked governmental and non‐governmental organisations in the UK addressing climate change. We analyse how those concerned understand the climate change crisis, what mechanisms are put in place to address information flows, and what evidence there is of learning through sharing information between the organisational headquarters and their regional offices. The most striking finding is the evidence of learning that largely depends on ad‐hoc informal processes and shadow networks.

'Your secret language': classics in the British colonies of West Africa

What were the cultural politics of classics in British colonies? Did classical education operate as a sign of oppression, or as a tool for forging an anti-colonial politics? Why did Europeans bring the classics to West Africa, and how did they manage the developing dynamic when West Africans laid independent claim to the classical heritage? This ground-breaking study examines the ways in which European colonisers and West African nationalists clashed, or collaborated, over the uses of Latin, Greek and the classics.