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In a rebuke of Hungary's controversial solo diplomatic efforts on Ukraine, the EU's informal meeting of foreign and defence ministers will take place in Brussels instead of Budapest, the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell said on Monday (22 July).

RÉCIT - Les députés du Rassemblement national n’ont obtenu aucun poste-clé au Palais Bourbon. Il s’agit pourtant du parti politique le plus représenté dans l’hémicycle. Un «déni de démocratie», fustigent de nombreux sympathisants du parti à la flamme.

Tensions between Meta and the EU intensified on Monday (22 July), with the European Commission and European consumer authorities saying the US tech giant may be breaching consumer protection law with its “pay or OK” model.

Das Biotech-Unternehmen Vifor muss potenziell irreführende Mitteilungen über intravenöse Eiseninjektionen zurücknehmen. Zuvor hatte die EU-Kommission eine Untersuchung wegen marktverzerrendem Verhalten eingeleitet.

L’inclusion surprise par la France d’un objectif de production d’énergie renouvelable pour 2030 dans son plan national intégré énergie-climat a semblé désamorcer un long conflit avec la Commission européenne, mais les experts ont du mal à comprendre ce que les nouveaux chiffres signifient réellement.

Dans cet article, Euractiv se penche sur la composition officielle de la nouvelle commission de l’Agriculture et du Développement rural du Parlement européen pour la législature 2024-2029.

Die am DIW Berlin angesiedelte forschungsbasierte Infrastruktureinrichtung Sozio-oekonomische Panel (SOEP) ist eine der größten und am längsten laufenden multidisziplinären Panelstudien weltweit, für die derzeit jährlich etwa 30.000 Menschen in knapp 15.000 Haushalten befragt werden. Das SOEP hat den Anspruch den gesellschaftlichen Wandel zu erfassen und steht somit immer neuen und vielfältigen Themen- und Aufgabenfeldern gegenüber. Seine Datenerhebung und -generierung folgt dem Konzept des Survey bzw. Data Life Cycle.

Zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt suchen wir für den Bereich Wissenstransfer des SOEP eine*n

 Postdoc (w/m/div) (Vollzeit/39 Stunden)

Diese Stelle ist zur wissenschaftlichen Qualifizierung gemäß § 2 (1) WissZeitVG geeignet.

The European Commission has accepted commitments by Vifor, part of the global biotechnology giant CSL, to redress what it said was possible unfair "disparagement" of Danish company Pharmacosmos.

 

In view of the explosion in the AI chip market, the shortage of Nvidia GPUs and their exorbitant prices, many American, European and Taiwanese companies dream of overtaking Jensen Huang’s company. Nvidia’s hegemony is set to endure, given the excellence of its GPUs for AI and the software empire it has built around them. However, there is room for alternative designers and manufacturers. Rémi Bourgeot is an Economist, Engineer, and Associate Fellow at IRIS. Estelle Prin is the Founder of The Semiconductors Observatory.

Beyond investors’ focus on Nvidia’s AI chip empire, tentative alternatives are beginning to take shape. Various credible options are emerging to push back the limits of existing chips. However, Nvidia’s competitors, whether Big Tech giants or cutting-edge start-ups, are faced not only with the technical supremacy of Jensen Huang’s company, but also with the closed environment it has developed around Cuda, its proprietary platform.

Its market capitalization has exploded to around $3,000 billion, making Nvidia the third most valuable American company in the world… Since January 2023, its share price has jumped by almost 450 %. Sales for the last quarter of 2023 reached $22.6 billion, compared with $6 billion for the same period the previous year. As fanciful as Nvidia’s share price may seem, it is in line with the company’s near-monopolistic business reality.

Nvidia rides the AI wave

The company controls between 70 % and 95 % of the design of the various AI chips, positioning itself at the forefront of the current boom. It is crushing competition from AMD, Qualcomm, Amazon and Google. Some Big Tech companies have started designing their own chips for their data centers, in line with the AI boom. But this is a recent phenomenon compared to the long experience of a pure design company like Nvidia.

The latter owes its success primarily to its decade-long focus on AI, the result of a visionary gamble. Parallel computing on GPUs has proven to be well-suited to the countless linear algebra operations that underlie the training of giant neural networks. This resolute reorientation towards AI was not an obvious choice for a company originally specializing in GPUs for video games.

Nvidia also benefits from another major asset: Cuda, its software platform, which enables customers to adapt their own AI models very quickly using the company’s chips. Huang describes Cuda as the operating system (OS) of AI. Owned by Nvidia, it makes customers captive. Developed since 2007 and constantly upgraded, this software platform is now used by the majority of AI model developers worldwide. Cuda has become an international standard.

Emerging alternatives

Alternative approaches to Cuda are emerging. The Triton platform was launched by OpenAI in 2021. Meta, Google and Microsoft are contributing. Intel and AMD are also investing in it to bypass the Nvidia ecosystem.

Given the explosion of the AI chip design market, the shortage of Nvidia chips and their exorbitant prices, many North American, European and Taiwanese companies are dreaming of dethroning the company headed by Jensen Huang. In addition to the efforts of Intel, AMD and giants like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon in the AI cloud, start-ups are demonstrating their boundless creativity.

In California, Cerebras and Groq are developing alternative architectures to increase chip speed at lower cost. The aim of these rival companies is to surpass the efficiency of Nvidia chips, with architectures that are more efficient, less expensive… and consume less energy. For example, Cerebras is developing large chips rather than stacking GPUs, in order to reduce latency.

Nvidia’s hegemony is set to continue, given the excellence of its AI GPUs and the software empire it has built around Cuda to exploit them. However, the demand and interest from investors and Big Tech is such that alternative designers and manufacturers of AI chips can exist. It’s a matter of betting on original, even disruptive approaches, focusing on chip efficiency, as well as availability and price.

 

This article was originally published by Les Echos in French.

Les gouvernements européens doivent redoubler d’efforts pour inciter le secteur privé à investir en Ukraine afin de financer le redressement et la reconstruction du pays, a déclaré la semaine dernière un haut fonctionnaire de l’UE.

Litauen will in Sicherheitsfragen künftig enger mit Deutschland zusammenarbeiten und arbeitet deshalb an einer eigenen Deutschlandstrategie. Damit soll auch der stärkeren Führungsrolle Deutschlands in der EU Rechnung getragen werden. 

RÉCIT - Après une semaine de tensions et de tractations, les députés se sont réparti les postes clés de l’institution. Et se donnent rendez-vous en septembre, sans grandes perspectives législatives.

L’UE devrait éviter les mesures « contre-productives » en abordant la question de la position des agriculteurs dans la chaîne d’approvisionnement et supprimer les barrières à l’investissement, a expliqué à Euractiv la directrice générale d’EuroCommerce.

‘Decenter:  to cause to lose or shift from an established center or focus. Especially: to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence’ (Thesaurus dictionary, 2024).

 

The call for decentring European studies has grown stronger and louder by the year. The need for a re-thinking of Eurocentrism in EU external action has been undeniable – one could think about the example of the (in)famous speech Borrell delivered in November 2022 at the College of Europe, whereby he made clear that the EU is a well-tended garden whose ‘gardeners’ shall, at all costs, protect it from the jungle threatening its borders.

 

Even though the decentring agenda is known mainly in academia and selected policy circles, the importance of bringing this discussion one step further is increasingly such in a growing complex world, whereby issues of race, inequality, and coloniality are becoming increasingly central. This blog argues that this agenda should be further radicalised and (re)constructed because, in its current formulation, it carries two main dangers: creating dynamics of ‘Othering’ and promoting forms of ‘narcissistic recentering’. This argument is based on the draft review paper on decentring presented at the UACES Graduate Forum, where I critically analyse over 30 academic publications that embrace and operationalise the decentring agenda.

 

The decentring framework as it is currently conceived welcomes us to reason in three fundamental steps: provincializing, engaging, and reconstructing. The three intellectual steps would allow both academics (and, one day, policymakers) to engage in an interesting exercise: first, provincializing means abandoning Eurocentric ontological and epistemological frames, moving beyond the ever-historical, cultural, racial, political, and social centrality of Europe as the ultimate model to imitate economically, socially, and politically. Secondly, engaging means entering relations with partners (or ‘Others’ more in general) to discover their own historical, cultural, social, and political structures – how they matter, how they came to be, and how they relate to “ours”. Finally, reconstructing means bringing the two perspectives together – but in an optic to make the European Union a more legitimate and stronger actor on the global scene, rather than to even more strongly recognize the need to provincialize our understanding of the world.

 

These intellectual steps come together as a sort of Hegelian dialectics, whereby a thesis (the EU) meets an antithesis (the ‘Others’) to engage in a synthesis (understanding each other better) which, however, is dangerously producing and reproducing hierarchies of power that are currently structuring our world.

 

First, the provincializing exercise should be one of re-learning, more than un-learning, first and foremost to understand that ‘Others’ also form part of our shared history, and their values, world views, struggles and identities have been profoundly shaped, altered, and directed by their relationship to Europe, through colonial exploitation and violence. Ignoring dynamics of co-constitution, especially with specific regions of the world where colonialism had its most significant impact, means rejecting in the first place the provincialisation effort that the framework prays for in the first place. Re-learning, rather than unlearning, is fundamental in disentangling complex dynamics of co-creation, while, at the same time also seeking to understand, to uncover and to incorporate those epistemologies and ontologies that were silenced during colonial times. This intellectual engagement is much more complex than simply looking into how “different” others seemingly are from the European model. Decentring would mean eliminating the idea that Europe is the model in the first place.

 

Secondly, from this reasoning, it naturally follows that the step of engagement derives directly from the genuine need to re-learn, together with un-learning, to abandon existing hierarchies that put Europe at the center.

 

Thirdly, reconstruction should not consist of a ‘narcissistic recentering’ exercise – reconstruction should not be about making the European Union stronger, more legitimate, and more capable of ‘extracting’ good deals from its partners. It should be about reparative justice, the destruction of built-in hierarchies, and the end of Western capitalism as the go-to models that the world should adhere to. It should be about recovering and uncovering common epistemologies and ontologies that would make the world a more diverse, inclusive, and just.

 

To do so, the European Union – and by that, I mean both the academics studying it, and the policymakers building it – should come to terms with a complex past, built around civilisational hierarchies and race, whose consequences are still impacting third countries and ‘internal Others’ in the EU to this day, but are too often left invisible.

The post A reflection around decentering European studies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On sait depuis longtemps qu'un mode de vie sain permet de rester en bonne santé plus longtemps. Aujourd'hui, des scientifiques ont décidé de vérifier si la nouvelle technologie pouvait également contribuer à ralentir le vieillissement de notre cerveau.

La Namibie va commencer à appliquer le principe du visa à l'arrivée pour les dizaines de pays qui n'ont pas encore appliqué sa politique d'exemption de visa.

L’European Cockpit Association, qui représente les pilotes de ligne, mènera une campagne de sensibilisation dans les toilettes de l’aéroport de Bruxelles pour manifester contre un éventuel passage à un seul pilote dans le cockpit, contre deux actuellement, sur certains vols.

Morocco's Noor Slaoui will become the first person from the Middle East and North Africa region to compete in eventing at the Olympics.

With over 400 million tons of plastic produced annually worldwide, half of which is designed for single use, and less than 10% recycled, the need to improve circularity is imperative. The upcoming delegated act from the Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUPD) could provide much-needed clarity on recycled plastic content and support this innovative solution for greater plastic circularity.

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