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The EU-funded FET Proactive Environmental Intelligence project “I-Seed” (Grant Agreement n. 101017940, https://www.iseedproject.eu/) targets towards the development of a radically simplified and environmentally friendly approach for environmental monitoring. Specifically, I-Seed aims at developing a new generation of self-deployable and biodegradable soft miniaturized robots, inspired by the morphology and dispersion abilities of plant seeds, able to perform low-cost, environmentally responsible, in-situ measurements. The natural functional mechanisms of seeds dispersal offer a rich source of robust, highly adaptive, mass and energy efficient mechanisms, and behavioral and morphological intelligence, which can be selected and implemented for advanced, but simple, technological inventions. I-Seed robots are conceived as unique in their movement abilities because inspired by passive mechanisms and materials of natural seeds, and unique in their environmentally friendly design because made of all biodegradable components. Sensing is based on a chemical transduction mechanism in a stimulus-responsive sensor material with fluorescence-based optical readout, which can be read via one or more drones equipped with fluorescent LiDAR technology and a software able to perform a real time georeferencing of data. The I-Seed robotic ecosystem is envisioned to be used for collecting environmental data in-situ with high spatial and temporal resolution across large remote areas where no monitoring data are available, and thus for extending current environmental sensor frameworks and data analysis systems.

Understanding and monitoring natural ecosystems is necessary for an efficient implementation of sustainable strategies to tackle climate and environmental-related challenges, such as: protect and improve the quality of air, water, and soil; safeguard species biodiversity; and effectively manage natural resources. A longstanding challenge for environmental monitoring is the low spatial and temporal resolution of available data for many regions. Also, new approaches for the design of sustainable technologies is urgently needed to reduce current problems related to energy costs and e-waste produced. With this in mind, the EU-funded FET Proactive Environmental Intelligence project "I-Seed" (Grant Agreement n. 101017940, https://www.iseedproject. eu/) targets towards the development of a radically simplified and environmentally friendly approach for analysing and monitoring topsoil and air. Specifically, I-Seed aims at developing a new generation of self-deployable and biodegradable soft miniaturized robots, inspired by the morphology and dispersion abilities of plant seeds, able to perform a low-cost, environmentally responsible, and in-situ detection. The natural functional mechanisms of seeds dispersal offer a rich source of robust, highly adaptive, mass and energy efficient mechanisms, and behavioural and morphological intelligence, which can be selected and implemented for advanced, but simple, technological inventions. I-Seed robots are conceived as unique in their movement abilities because inspired by passive mechanisms and materials of natural seeds, and unique in their environmentally friendly design because made of all biodegradable components. Sensing is based on a chemical transduction mechanism in a stimulus-responsive sensor material with fluorescence-based optical readout, which can be read via one or more drones equipped with fluorescent LiDAR technology and a software able to perform a real time georeferencing of data. The I-Seed robotic ecosystem is envisioned to be used for collecting environmental data in-situ with high spatial and temporal resolution across large remote areas where no monitoring data are available, and thus for extending current environmental sensor frameworks and data analysis systems.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are recently gaining remarkable attention as a low-cost, hardware-efficient, and highly scalable technology capable of offering dynamic control of electro-magnetic wave propagation. Their envisioned dense deployment over various obstacles of the, otherwise passive, wireless communication environment has been considered as a revolutionary means to transform them into network entities with reconfigurable properties, providing increased environmental intelligence for diverse communication objectives. One of the major challenges with RIS-empowered wireless communications is the low-overhead dynamic configuration of multiple RISs, which according to the current hardware designs have very limited computing and storage capabilities. In this paper, we consider a typical communication pair between two nodes that is assisted by a plurality of RISs, and devise low-complexity supervised learning approaches for the RISs' phase configurations. By assuming common tunable phases in groups of each RIS's unit elements, we present multi-layer perceptron Neural Network (NN) architectures that can be trained either with positioning values or the instantaneous channel coefficients. We investigate centralized and individual training of the RISs, as well as their federation, and assess their computational requirements. Our simulation results, including comparisons with the optimal phase configuration scheme, showcase the benefits of adopting individual NNs at RISs for the link budget performance boosting., 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2020

Culture and globalization are intertwined and mutually conditioned not only due to the common culture interaction, but also primarily because of technological transfers shaping the global economy. The entire social development is thus adapted to various cultures and to culture in general. Perceived from one perspective, the market and globalization affect the culture in a negative manner. As a set of permanent material and immaterial values and human creations, culture, as such, is exposed to a multitude of problem, countercultural and degrading processes stemming from conflicts of interest and, sometimes, from very rapid changes and uncritically accepted innovations, forms and standards. In that sense, degradation of culture can cause deterioration of the quality of economic activity. Environmental culture and sustainability culture are only a part of a relatively new business culture and behaviour. In fact, ecological behaviour and “green intelligence” are typical human characteristics, and are a part of the universal human culture, as well as of a sustainable relationship with nature and with future generations. In spite of common understanding and prejudice, most research shows that globalization and market development have a positive net effect on environmental culture and sustainable development. Humanity is experiencing a chance to utilize such positive permeation and to impose the culture of globalization as a stimulating factor for sustainable development.

La aplicación de las tecnologías digitales en todos los ámbitos de la vida humana está provocando la aparición de una nueva manera de entender el espacio arquitectónico derivado de su integración en él. Ello se puede extrapolar a la arquitectura más íntimamente ligada al habitar humano, la de la vivienda. Para ello se establecen una serie de paralelismos conceptuales con aquel otro momento clave en la evolución del espacio doméstico ocurrido a finales del siglo XX en el que los objetos técnicos cobraron protagonismo sobre el espacio que los albergaba. Estos paralelismos se fundamentan en el cambio de estatus sufrido por dichos objetos, hoy ya terminales de información conectados en red e implementados tanto en los espacios naturales y artificiales como en la propia persona y su vestimenta, sin olvidar los profundos cambios sufridos por el sujeto actual y sus relaciones sociales. En base a ello, se ilustra la evolución que ha sufrido el concepto de “espacio residencial” ligada a los nuevos modos de habitar contemporáneos. The application of digital technologies in all areas of human life is causing the emergence of a new way of understanding our integration with architectural space. This can be extrapolated to the architectural design that is most closely linked to humans – our homes. A series of conceptual parallels are established with the other key moment in the development of domestic space that happened at the end of the 20th century when technical objects became more important than the space that housed them. These parallels are based on the change of status suffered by these objects when they were converted into networked information terminals and implemented in natural and artificial spaces (such as on the person and their clothing). People and their social relations have also suffered profound changes. This article illustrates the changes in the concept of ‘residential space’ linked to new ways of occupying habitats.