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Machine learning tools are widely used for knowledge extraction, modeling, and decision tasks; a range of problems that Control Theory also tackles. Their relations have been largely explored by looking at stochastic control and Markov Decision Processes, due to the proximity of their formulations. However, novel links between machine learning and deterministic control are emerging; combining both approaches, e.g. by performing identification with learning, or controlling the training process. The recent flourishing literature is vast: there is a need to identify challenges, trends and opportunities on this interface. This survey contributes i) to the compared analysis of both fields. ii) Based on literature review, a categorization of combinations of learning and control is drawn. In the control framework, learning has been used for modeling, controllers tuning or adaptation, generating a controller or as a controller itself, for translating complex objectives, or checking controlled systems. Conversely, in the learning framework, control is used for tuning hyperparameters, selecting or generating training data, as the training or decision-making algorithm itself or to guarantee learning properties. iii) Finally, discussions on the literature open novel promising combinations to be explored, such as control of neural networks' training process.

The ineluctability of the spectral ensures that there is no definitive answer to the question of when imperfections should be condoned and when, conversely, they should be fixed. The concept of spectrality underlines the prime importance of attending to the material without being furtively driven by a yearning for perfection. The general condition of spectrality carries a heterogeneity of material effects, and in certain situations repair might encourage calamity rather than prosperity. Repair should therefore not be undertaken as a practice that sets out to reach perfection, but rather should be handled with a sensitivity to the constant mutations that come with life’s spectral nature. While this haunting finitude constitutes everything that exists, it is within those objects and structures that are framed as imperfect, or in need of repair and maintenance, that finitude has become highly legible and that the spectral structure of existence is especially palpable.

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In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection in a positive rather than negative light has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world regions. This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies. With this framework, the editors offer scholars and students across various disciplines tools to craft more historically grounded and critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect.

In this editorial introduction, Russian Literature Editor-in-chief Ellen Rutten uses four images to share with readers a selection of recent and upcoming publications issued by the journal. On the basis of this selection, she explains which types of publications the current editorial board aims to bring together. As Rutten argues, Russian Literature today acts as a) a platform for the publication of relevant archival finds and empirical analyses of Slavic literatures; b) a space for debates about the theoretical and methodological study of these materials; and c) a place for thinking about fan fiction, rap, and other practices that scholars may not yet have ranked as literature per se.

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This chapter asks how an aesthetic practice which surfaces across multiple world localities can be analyzed, taking as a case study the trend to aestheticize or celebrate imperfection. This trend flourishes today across different social disciplines and world localities – from American pleas to embrace the imperfections that are a part of our everyday lives to purportedly raw-looking Danish cinema. The author uses two Russophone examples of this trend – a claim that ‘imperfection … makes us unique’ on an online dating sate and an essay on the ‘The Eroticism of Imperfection’ by art theoretician Boris Groys – to underline the importance of reading aesthetic practices transculturally. To conduct such a reading, the chapter introduces ‘transcultural thickenings’ – a concept that media theorists Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp employ to unpack translocal meaning-making processes. According to Couldry and Hepp, to fully understand cultural developments we must unravel the various regional, national, social, and other communicative ‘thickenings’ or layers that feed them. By using ‘transcultural thickenings’ as a tool to study aesthetic developments, the chapter illustrates that transcultural analysis defies both universalist and strictly nation-bound aesthetic analysis. What it promotes instead is a transnational, multi-layered approach to the study of aesthetic objects.

This chapter consists of two parts. The first half of the text offers a short genealogy of post-Soviet sincerity rhetoric. That part of the chapter builds on my research for Sincerity after Communism: A Cultural History (Rutten 2017). For my thinking in that book, as well as in most of my early research, I am indebted at least in part to the addressee of this Festschrift. In the second half, I express my thanks to him by undertaking a more modest and more recent inquiry: a reflection on the nexus between thinking about sincerity and time. As I argue below, the passing of time matters to post-Soviet sincerity rhetoric on at least three levels: on the level of, first, memory; second, novelty; and, third, wear.

The present study investigated the associations between self-construal, acculturation, and autonomy–connectedness, as well as the relations between autonomy–connectedness and psychopathological symptoms, controlling for self-construal and acculturation. Participants were 1,209 Dutch individuals, of whom 693 (57.3%) were immigrants with a non-Western background. Results showed that an independent self-construal was positively associated with self-awareness and capacity for managing new situations, and was negatively associated with sensitivity to others (which are the three components of autonomy–connectedness). Moreover, an interdependent self-construal was negatively associated with self-awareness and capacity for managing new situations, and was positively associated with sensitivity to others. Importantly, the latter associations were similar for both Dutch natives and immigrants, and the associations between acculturation and autonomy–connectedness were small and nonsignificant. Autonomy–connectedness, after controlling for self-construal and acculturation, explained a large amount of additional variance in anxiety (12.7%) and depression (14.1), and a medium amount of additional variance in drive for thinness (3.7%) and bulimia (4.8%). Autonomy–connectedness, thus, seems to be an important construct for people with a Western background, as well as for immigrants with a non-Western background.

By the late 2010s, the Russian avant-garde continues to merit our close attention.1 Some of today’s most influential Russian poets rediscover and revitalize its artistic and political legacy (Bozovic under review). In Amsterdam curators revive Malevich’s conviction that ‘the entire living world is ready to fly into space’ (Waag 2019), while slavist Sjeng Scheijen brought to life ‘the magic, the exaltation, and the drama of the Russian avant-garde’ in a study that is spawning raving reviews in leading Dutch dailies (Veraart 2019 on Scheijen 2019). Meanwhile, a transnational range of cultural theorists and practitioners claim that ‘the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance’ today, ‘in these times of global political crisis’ (Legèr 2014). The ongoing relevance of the avant-garde outlook on life has long been self-evident to the addressee of this Festschrift. With this analysis, we honor both the legacy of her work and of the Russian avant-garde by highlighting the diversity within avant-gardist art and thinking. In 1975, in an influential essay on contemporary cinema, film theoretician Peter Wollen already argued that, rather than speaking of the avant- garde, we should distinguish between ‘two avant-gardes’ – one that shared an interest in painting, another that operated primarily in theatre and sound-poetry (Wollen 2018). In Wollen’s wake, several scholars have reverted to the plural form to underline diversity and heterogeneity among avant-garde practitioners and their heirs (among others, see Harding 2013; Seita 2019; Scheijen 2019). Despite this insistence on diversity, in popular usage ‘the avant-garde’ is still imagined as a neatly undifferentiated whole. In the analysis that follows, we contribute to the scholarly move away from this monolithic approach by comparing how influential Russian avant-gardists conceptualized two notions that played a perennial role in theorizing of the time: the concepts of imperfection and perfection.

As depressive symptoms are widespread in current society, continued research focusing on the involved emotional, interpersonal, and cognitive characteristics, is vital to improve both preventive and curative interventions. This dissertation focuses on possible cognitive characteristics of depressive symptoms. More specifically, we investigated whether depressive symptoms could be associated with distortions in the organization and categorization of perceptual material. In particular, all studies investigated analytical processing, with the first chapter focusing on analytical reasoning during category learning with non-emotional material and all other chapters focusing on analytical attention for different dimensions or aspects of emotional stimuli. In Chapter 1, we performed a conceptual replication study, to test whether people with high depressive symptoms would show a deficit in flexible analytic processing during a category learning task involving non-emotional verbal material. No difference in flexible analytic processing was found between people with more versus less depressive symptoms. In Chapter 2, using a prototype categorization task involving pictures of human faces showing varying emotional expressions, we investigated whether depressive symptoms could be associated with a stronger focus on sad emotional expressions, compared to happy expressions. A prototype categorization model was fitted to the data, which included an attentional weight (AW) parameter, reflecting selective attention for the emotional stimulus dimension. Depressive symptoms were not found to be associated with the AW for sad emotional expressions, nor for happy emotional expressions. In Chapter 3, the same task and model was used as in chapter 2, to assess an attentional bias (AB) for sad emotional expressions in people with a major depressive disorder (MDD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), comorbid MDD and BPD, and healthy controls. There was no evidence for a difference between the different diagnostic groups and the heathy controls in their attentional preference for sad expressions, conceptualized as the AW parameter. Chapter 4 did not involve a categorization task to assess selective attention for negative emotional expressions, instead a similarity rating task was used to investigate attentional processing. In a first study, again attention for sad versus happy expressions was investigated, and in a second study, attention for angry versus happy expressions was investigated. In this second study, the effect of rumination induction on attentional preferences was investigated as well. However, for both studies, no evidence was found for associations between depressive symptoms and selective attention for sad, angry, or happy expressions. In Chapter 5, we assessed attentional encoding using the category confusion or "who said what" paradigm. The first question we addressed was whether people encoded other's facial expressions when forming a first impression, and second whether depressive symptoms would be related to stronger encoding of angry, compared to happy expressions. We indeed found that people implicitly encoded angry and happy facial expressions, however there was no meaningful association between depressive symptoms and encoding of angry or happy expressions. To conclude, using different paradigms, populations, and manipulations, we found no evidence for a difference in the organization and categorization of emotional and non-emotional material, related to depressive symptoms. status: published

Onder president Poetin zijn in de afgelopen jaren politici en activisten, maar ook demonstranten, kunstenaars en gewone brugers aangeklaagd in politiek gemotiveerde processen. De rechtszaken tegen punkband Pussy Riot, oppositieleider Aleksej Navalny en oliemagnaat Michail Chodorkovski zijn een paar bekende voorbeelden. 'Poetins rechtbank' is een verzameling 'laatste woorden', de toespraak waar iedere veroordeelde in de Russische rechtbank recht op heeft. De 'laatste woorden' in deze bundeling zijn zeer openhartig, onverbloemd kritisch, soms grappig en vaak stilistisch verfijnd. Elke tekst van een veroordeelde begint met een korte inleiding over de geschiedenis en maatschappelijke betekenis van de rechtszaak. Het 'laatste woord' heeft zich inmiddels in Rusland tot een literair genre ontwikkeld en wint aan relevantie in het steeds autocratischer Rusland.

To what extent do media-specific communication modes colour the debate on Russian politics and/as postmodernism? Which affective norms dominate the emotional community among whose members Mark Lipovetsky observes a reactionary postmodern turn? This article argues that insights from media studies and emotion studies can help us to unpack the complex story of Russian reactionary postmodernism. To illustrate this point, the author zooms in on the concept of sincerity — a concept that sparked vivid attention among postmodern Russian writers, filmmakers, curators, and theoreticians — and the reactionary turn that we witness in post-Soviet sincerity rhetoric between the perestroika era and today.

This book presents the compelling study of “new sincerity” as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows. The global cultural practice of a “new sincerity” in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. This book traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. This study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. It explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by “cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization” and how, under Vladimir Putin, “new sincerity” talk merges with transnational pleas to “revive sincerity”.

Wat maakt het werk van Vasilij Grossman bijzonder? Waarom is deze Russische auteur zo geliefd bij lezers binnen en buiten Rusland? In welke literaire tradities past hij? Op uitnodiging van debatcentrum De Balie, dat in de lente van 2015 een avond wijdde aan Grossmans werk, overdacht ik deze vragen in een korte lezing. Deze analyse is een bewerkte versie. Centraal in de analyse staat Grossmans status als auteur van oorlogsproza.

In contemporary discourse about human emotions, concerns about the sincerity of individuals, groups, and institutions thrive. This article thickens recent scholarship on sincerity rhetoric with an analysis of emotional regimes in Soviet Russia – a time and place where the notion of sincerity acquired a buzzword status that, in Russia, it pertains to this day. More specifically, I analyze the rhetoric of sincerity as employed in debates about Osip Mandel'stam's Ode to Stalin. These debates tell us that the practice that, in Soviet Russia, we call “staying true to oneself” operates in more layered ways than existing studies acknowledge.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides excellent soft-tissue contrast and allows for specific scanning sequences to optimize differentiation between various tissue types and properties. Moreover, it offers the potential for real-time motion imaging. This makes magnetic resonance imaging an ideal candidate imaging modality for radiation treatment planning in lung cancer. Although the number of clinical research protocols for the application of magnetic resonance imaging for lung cancer treatment is increasing (www.clinicaltrials.gov) and the magnetic resonance imaging sequences are becoming faster, there are still some technical challenges. This review describes the opportunities and challenges of magnetic resonance imaging for radiation treatment planning in lung cancer.

Digital Russia provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which new media technologies have shaped language and communication in contemporary Russia. It traces the development of the Russian-language internet, explores the evolution of web-based communication practices, showing how they have both shaped and been shaped by social, political, linguistic and literary realities, and examines online features and trends that are characteristic of, and in some cases specific to, the Russian-language internet.

This book examines the online memory wars in post-Soviet states - where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism. To this day, former socialist states face the challenge of constructing national identities, producing national memories, and relating to the Soviet legacy. Their pasts are principally intertwined: changing readings of history in one country generate fierce reactions in others. In this transnational memory war, digital media form a pivotal discursive space - one that provides speakers with radically new commemorative tools. Uniting contributions by leading scholars in the field, Memory, Conflict and New Media is the first book-length publication to analyse how new media serve as a site of political and national identity building in post-socialist states. The book also examines how the construction of online identity is irreversibly affected by thinking about the past in this geopolitical domain. By highlighting post-socialist memory’s digital mediations and digital memory’s transcultural scope, the volume succeeds in a twofold aim: to deepen and refine both (post-socialist) memory theory and digital-memory studies. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, post-Soviet studies, Eastern European Politics, memory studies and International Relations in general.

Die für Russland seit jeher charakteristische symbolische Aufladung von nationalen Identitätskonflikten mit Geschlechtermetaphern zeigt sich auch in der postsowjetischen Zeit in ausgeprägter Form. Die Öffnung nach Westen geht einher mit der Konjunktur eines Geschlechtermodells, das den Mann als starken Macho und die Frau als schönes Sexobjekt preist. Daneben führt die Rückbesinnung auf eigene vorsowjetische Traditionen zur Propagierung patriarchalisch-orthodoxer Rollenbilder. Schließlich hinterlassen die gescheiterten Unisex-Experimente der Sowjetzeit, die zu einer massiven Verschiebung und Verunsicherung von Geschlechtsidentitäten geführt haben, bis heute unübersehbare Spuren in der russischen Gesellschaft. Auf diese Weise ergibt sich ein faszinierender Einblick in die Eigenart nationaler Identitätsdiskurse in Russland und in die Werkstatt kultureller Konstruktions- und Projektionsmechanismen überhaupt. Im vorliegenden Band werden die gegenwärtige Situation und die sowjetische Zeit am Beispiel von Literatur, Film und Neuen Medien untersucht.

This book examines the online memory wars in post-Soviet states - where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism. To this day, former socialist states face the challenge of constructing national identities, producing national memories, and relating to the Soviet legacy. Their pasts are principally intertwined: changing readings of history in one country generate fierce reactions in others. In this transnational memory war, digital media form a pivotal discursive space - one that provides speakers with radically new commemorative tools. Uniting contributions by leading scholars in the field, Memory, Conflict and New Media is the first book-length publication to analyse how new media serve as a site of political and national identity building in post-socialist states. The book also examines how the construction of online identity is irreversibly affected by thinking about the past in this geopolitical domain. By highlighting post-socialist memory’s digital mediations and digital memory’s transcultural scope, the volume succeeds in a twofold aim: to deepen and refine both (post-socialist) memory theory and digital-memory studies. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, post-Soviet studies, Eastern European Politics, memory studies and International Relations in general.

n the last decades of the twentieth century, the humanities and social sciences in Western Europe and North America experienced a 'memory boom' that gave rise to new research agendas and provoked interdisciplinary exchange. Less known are the ways in which academic practices of Memory Studies have been applied, adapted, and transformed in the countries of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Proceeding from a clear-eyed interrogation of the 'memory boom' paradigm itself - and its theoretical portability into a new cultural context - this volume collects new and varied perspectives on the challenges of post-catastrophic memory, offering a novel approach to a paradigm that has become canonical and crystallized.

Внутренняя колонизация есть применение практик колониального управления и знания внутри политических границ государства. Это особый тип отношений между государством и подданными, при котором государство относится к подданным как к покоренным в ходе завоевания, а к собственной территории — как к захваченной и загадочной, требующей заселения и «окультуривания», направляемых из одного центра. Такой тип господства использовался многими империями и особенно характерен для России. Поэтому изучение внутренней колонизации позволяет увидеть в новом свете важнейшие особенности российской политики, общественной жизни, литературы и искусства XVIII—XXI веков. Этот международный и междисциплинарный сборник представляет первый мас­штабный опыт исторического исследования культурных практик внутренней колонизации. Среди авторов книги — историки, филологи, философы, киноведы.