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A common feature of many psychopathological states (going from anxiety, depression to schizophrenia or addictions) is to show cognitive alterations. These cognitive deficits clearly impact on the onset of clinical symptoms. Therefore, recent studies showed that increasing cognitive skills have a positive effect on patients' quality of life, and decrease the severity of clinical symptoms. However, a main problem consists in the fact that some minor cognitive restrictions, even if not observable at the behavioral level, may induce a state of "vulnerability" that can, in some circumstances, lead the patients to relapse. For instance, in alcohol dependence, it is well-known that, despite detoxification cure, psychological intervention and medication, 50 to 90% of patients resume in alcohol consumption within 1 year post-detoxification cure. In this view, it could be really important to find biological markers for even minor cognitive alterations, that can help clinicians to identify which patients are more "at-risk" to relapse, in order to improve treatment through best suited medication and specialized programs of cognitive rehabilitation. In this topic, our aim is to illustrate how and why cognitive event-related potentials (ERPs) may help in different psychopathological populations to adapt the treatment of individual patients on the basis of their specific neuro-cognitive alterations.

Event-related potentials --- biomarkers --- Cognitive Processes --- Psychopathology --- relapse

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Interactions between people are ubiquitous. When people make phone calls, transfer money, connect on social network sites, or visit each other, these actions can be collected as dyadic, directed, relational events. Each of those events can be understood as driven by multiple individual decisions that at least partially involve rational considerations. This book aims at developing models that allow to understand individual event decisions in the context of large social networks.

Stochastic Actor-oriented Framework Dynamic Event Processes Social Networks

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The monograph disseminates the very topical issue of retirement and its timing as the key to one of the greatest challenges facing ageing societies. Postponing retirement is now almost universally regarded as indispensable in order to relieve European welfare states from the demography-related financial pressures. This seminal study, derived from a statistical analysis of a large-scale survey data, provides a thorough understanding of the micro- and macro-level determinants of retirement timing in contemporary Western Europe. The book is the first monograph to combine the analysis of the retirement attitudes with the analysis of the retirement behaviour within one research. It tackles the question as to whether early retirement can be explained by “early exit culture”, triangulating life course theory with a social stratification approach. The author used a novel and innovative approach to obtain the results. The methodology includes: tobit models of proscriptive age norms; simulations of the impact of class structure on a country’s average retirement age; competing risks models of different work-exit modalities; duration selection models of retirement timing.

Life course, ageing, social stratification, gender, social norms, Western Europe, international comparison, event-history analysis

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Neuromorphic engineering has just reached its 25th year as a discipline. In the first two decades neuromorphic engineers focused on building models of sensors, such as silicon cochleas and retinas, and building blocks such as silicon neurons and synapses. These designs have honed our skills in implementing sensors and neural networks in VLSI using analog and mixed mode circuits. Over the last decade the address event representation has been used to interface devices and computers from different designers and even different groups. This facility has been essential for our ability to combine sensors, neural networks, and actuators into neuromorphic systems. More recently, several big projects have emerged to build very large scale neuromorphic systems. The Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 1994) and the CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 2009) have been instrumental not only in creating a strongly connected research community, but also in introducing different groups to each other’s hardware. Many neuromorphic systems are first created at one of these workshops. With this special research topic, we showcase the state-of-the-art in neuromorphic systems.

neuromorphic engineering --- event-based --- dynamic vision sensor --- Floating gate --- spike-based --- network --- simulation --- Learning --- Neural Network

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Economic losses from disasters are now reaching an average of US$250–$300 billion a year. In the last 20 years, more than 530,000 people died as a direct result of extreme weather events; millions more were seriously injured. Most of the deaths and serious injuries were in developing countries. Meanwhile, highly infectious diseases will continue to emerge or re-emerge, and natural hazards will not disappear. But these extreme events do not need to turn into large-scale disasters. Better and faster responses are possible. The authors contend that even though there is much generosity in the world to support the responses to and recovery from natural disasters, the current funding model, based on mobilizing financial resources after disasters take place, is flawed and makes responses late, fragmented, unreliable, and poorly targeted, while providing poor incentives for preparedness or risk reduction. The way forward centres around reforming the funding model for disasters, moving towards plans with simple rules for early action and that are locked in before disasters through credible funding strategies—all while resisting the allure of post-disaster discretionary funding and the threat it poses for those seeking to ensure that disasters have a less severe impact.

extreme event --- time inconsistency --- natural disaster --- disaster risk finance --- pandemic --- planning --- behavioural psychology --- commitment device --- politics of disaster relief