In this position paper, we present our vision on the future of the logistics business domain and the use of information technology (IT) in this domain. The vision is based on extensive experience with Dutch and European logistics in various contexts and from various perspectives. We expect that the vision also holds for logistics outside Europe. We build our vision in a number of steps.

Contemporary astronomy is undergoing a revolution, perhaps even more important than that which took place with the advent of radioastronomy in the 1960s, and then the opening of the sky to observations in the other electromagnetic wavelengths. The gravitational wave detectors of the LIGO/Virgo collaboration have observed since 2015 the signals emitted during the collision and merger of binary systems of massive black holes at a large astronomical distance. This major discovery opens the way to the new astronomy of gravitational waves, drastically different from the traditional astronomy based on electromagnetic waves. More recently, in 2017, the detection of gravitational waves emitted by the inspiral and merger of a binary system of neutron stars has been followed by electromagnetic signals observed by the γ and X satellites, and by optical telescopes.

The cooling of a quantity of boiling water all the way down to freezing by simply thermally connecting it to a thermal bath held at ambient temperature without external intervention would be quite unexpected. We describe the equivalent of a ‘thermal inductor’ composed of a Peltier element and an electric inductance, which can drive the temperature difference between two bodies to change sign by imposing a certain inertia on the flow of heat, thereby enabling continuing heat transfer from the chilling body to its warmer counterpart. We show theoretically and experimentally that such a process is possible and fully complies with the second law of thermodynamics. With further progress in thermoelectric materials, it could serve to cool hot materials well below ambient temperature without external energy supply.

In this paper, I endeavour to construct a new model, by extending the classic exogenous economic growth model by including a measurement which tries to explain and quantify the size of technological innovation ( A ) endogenously. I do not agree technology is a “constant” exogenous variable, because it is humans who create all technological innovations, and it depends on how much human and physical capital is allocated for its research. I inspect several possible approaches to do this, and then I test my model both against sample and real world evidence data. I call this method “dynamic” because it tries to model the details in resource allocations between research, labor and capital, by affecting each other interactively. In the end, I point out which is the new residual and the parts of the economic growth model which can be further improved.

In this paper we explore several fundamental relations between formal systems, algorithms, and dynamical systems, focussing on the roles of undecidability, universality, diagonalization, and self-reference in each of these computational frameworks. Some of these interconnections are well-known, while some are clarified in this study as a result of a fine-grained comparison between recursive formal systems, Turing machines, and Cellular Automata (CAs). In particular, we elaborate on the diagonalization argument applied to distributed computation carried out by CAs, illustrating the key elements of Godel’s proof for CAs.

As quantum computers have become available to the general public, the need has arisen to train a cohort of quantum programmers, many of whom have been developing classic computer programs for most of their career. While currently available quantum computers have less than 100 qubits, quantum computer hardware is widely expected to grow in terms of qubit counts, quality, and connectivity. Our article aims to explain the principles of quantum programming, which are quite different from classical programming, with straight-forward algebra that makes understanding the underlying quantum mechanics optional (but still fascinating). We give an introduction to quantum computing algorithms and their implementation on real quantum hardware. We survey 20 different quantum algorithms, attempting to describe each in a succintc and self-contained fashion; we show how they are implemented on IBM’s quantum computer; and in each case we discuss the results of the implementation with respect to differences of the simulator and the actual hardware runs. This article introduces computer scientists and engineers to quantum algorithms and provides a blueprint for their implementations.

In this paper we consider the question what is the scientific and career performance of principal investigators (PIs) of publicly funded research projects compared to scientific performance of all researchers. Our study is based on high quality data about (i) research projects awarded in Slovenia in the period 1994–2016 (7508 projects with 2725 PIs in total) and (ii) about scientific productivity of all researchers in Slovenia that were active in the period 1970-2016 – there are 19598 such researchers in total, including the PIs. We compare average productivity, collaboration, internationality and interdisciplinarity of PIs and of all active researchers. Our analysis shows that for all four indicators the average performance of PIs is much higher compared to average performance of all active researchers. Additionally, we analyze careers of both groups of researchers. The results show that the PIs have on average longer and more fruitful career compared to all active researchers, with regards to all career indicators.

A fundamental problem in technological studies is how to measure the evolution of technology. The literature has suggested several approaches to measuring the level of technology (or state-of-the-art) and changes in technology. However, the measurement of technological advances and technological evolution is often a complex and elusive topic in science. The study here starts by establishing a conceptual framework of technological evolution based on the theory of technological parasitism, in broad analogy with biology. Then, the measurement of the evolution of technology is modelled in terms of morphological changes within complex systems considering the interaction between a host technology and its subsystems of technology. The coefficient of evolutionary growth of the model here indicates the grade and type of the evolutionary route of a technology.

In the last years complex networks tools contributed to provide insights on the structure of research, through the study of collaboration, citation and co-occurrence networks. The network approach focuses on pairwise relationships, often compressing multidimensional data structures and inevitably losing information. In this paper we propose for the first time a simplicial complex approach to word co-occurrences, providing a natural framework for the study of higher-order relations in the space of scientific knowledge. Using topological methods we explore the conceptual landscape of mathematical research, focusing on homological holes, regions with low connectivity in the simplicial structure. We find that homological holes are ubiquitous, which suggests that they capture some essential feature of research practice in mathematics.

It is usual to identify initial conditions of classical dynamical systems with mathematical real numbers. However, almost all real numbers contain an infinite amount of information. Since a finite volume of space can’t contain more than a finite amount of information, I argue that the mathematical real numbers are not physically real. Moreover, a better terminology for the so-called real numbers is “random numbers”, as their series of bits are truly random. I propose an alternative classical mechanics that uses only finite-information numbers. This alternative classical mechanics is non-deterministic, despite the use of deterministic equations, in a way similar to quantum theory. Interestingly, both alternative classical mechanics and quantum theories can be supplemented by additional variables in such a way that the supplemented theory is deterministic.