A first-principles approach to physics based on locality and   operationalism
  Starting from the guiding principles of spacetime locality and operationalism, a general framework for a probabilistic description of nature is proposed. Crucially, no notion of time or metric is assumed, neither any specific physical model. Remarkably, the emerging framework converges with a recently proposed formulation of quantum theory, obtained constructively from known quantum physics. At the same time the framework also admits statistical theories of classical physics. 
Robert Oeckl (CCM-UNAM)
quant-ph