Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Optimization-Based Approach to the Funding of a Loan Portfolio

This thesis grew out of a problem encountered by a subsidiary of a Swedish multinational industrial corporation. This subsidiary is responsible for the corporation’s customer financing activities. In the thesis, we refer to these entities as the Division and the Corporation. The Division needed to find a new approach to finance its customer loan portfolio. Risk control and return maximization were important aspects of this need. The objective of this thesis is to devise and implement a method that allows the Division to make optimal funding decisions, given a certain risk limit. We propose a funding approach based on stochastic programming. Our approach allows the Division’s portfolio manager to minimize the funding costs while hedging against market risk. We employ principal component analysis and Monte Carlo simulation to develop a multicurrency scenario generation model for interest and exchange rates. Market rate scenarios are used as input to three different optimization models. Each of the optimization models presents the optimal funding decision as positions in a unique set of financial instruments. By choosing between the optimization models, the portfolio manager can decide which financial instruments he wants to use to fund the loan portfolio. To validate our models, we perform empirical tests on historical market data. Our results show that our optimization models have the potential to deliver sound and profitable funding decisions. In particular, we conclude that the utilization of one of our optimization models would have resulted in an increase in the Division’s net income over the past 3.5 years.
Unsupervised feature extraction for hyperspectral images using combined low rank representation and locally linear embedding

Hyperspectral images(HSIs) provide hundreds of narrow spectral bands for the land-covers, thus can provide more powerful discriminative information for the land-cover classification. However, HSIs suffer from the curse of high dimensionality, therefore dimension reduction and feature extraction are essential for the application of HSIs. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised feature extraction method for HSIs using combined low rank representation and locally linear embedding (LRR LLE). The proposed method can simultaneously use both the spectral and spatial correlation within HSIs, with LRR modelling the intrinsic property of union of low-rank subspaces and LLE considering the correlation within spatial neighbours. Experiments are conducted on real HSI datasets and the classification results demonstrate that the features extracted by LRR LLE are more discriminative than the state-of-art methods.
Self-crossover-a new genetic operator and its application to feature selection

Crossover is an important genetic operation that helps in random recombination of structured information to locate new points in the search space, in order to achieve a good solution to an optimization problem. The conventional crossover operation when applied on a pair of binary strings will usually not retain the total number of is in the offsprings to be the same as that of their parents, but there are many optimization problems which require such a constraint. In this article, we propose a new crossover technique called ‘self-crossover’, which satisfies this constraint as well as retaining the stochastic and evolutionary characteristics of genetic algorithms. This new operator serves the combined role of crossover and mutation. We have proved that self crossover can generate any permutation of a given string. As an illustration, the effectiveness of this new technique has been demonstrated for the feature selection problem of pattern recognition. Performance of self-crossover for feature selection is .
Changes in risk perceptions in relation to self-reported colorectal cancer screening among first-degree relatives of colorectal cancer cases enrolled in a randomized trial.

OBJECTIVE This secondary data analysis was conducted to evaluate the applicability of the Risk Reappraisal Hypothesis, which has been proposed to explain the influence of performing a health behavior on perceived risk. Data were collected in the context of a randomized trial, which found that an individually tailored, multicomponent intervention was successful in increasing colorectal cancer (CRC) screening among first-degree relatives of CRC cases. METHOD The ethnically diverse study sample (N = 841; 29% Latino, 21% African American, 20% Asian) consisted of adult siblings and children (40-80 years) of CRC cases, identified through the California Cancer Registry. Data were collected at baseline and at 6- and 12-month follow-up. Changes in self-reported risk perception (perceived likelihood of developing CRC) were examined over the study period in relation to study condition and screening status. RESULTS Greater increases in perceived risk were observed among intervention versus control-group participants over the study period, but increases were limited to intervention participants who had not been screened. We also examined trajectories of perceived risk in relation to timing of screening receipt (e.g., before 6 months, 6-12 months, never). Continued upward shifts in risk were observed during the study period among intervention participants not screened during the study. In contrast, participants screened by 6 months displayed a reduction or leveling off in perceived risk between 6- and 12-month follow-up. CONCLUSION Results provide support for the applicability of the Risk Reappraisal Hypothesis within a high-risk sample enrolled in a CRC screening promotion trial. Future research is needed to explore the impact of short-term risk reductions on future CRC screening behavior.
A Numerical Technique for Computing the Values of Plane Wave Scattering Coefficients of a General Scatterer

The results of a numerical technique for computing the plane wave scattering coefficients of a general scatterer are presented. The technique is tailored herein to the case where the scatterer is a general slab and the technique is implemented with the FDTD method of the scattered field formulation. Since the technique relies on the use of a Maxwellian beam of dominant polarization as the excitation within the FDTD simulation, this paper presents also an improved scheme for synthesizing such a beam. Window averaging is also presented as a new scheme for mitigating the effects of aperture truncation. Validation of the technique revealed that the use of a non-Maxwellian Gaussian beam of uniform polarization produced erroneous values of the plane wave scattering coefficients. When used with a Maxwellian beam excitation, however, the technique showed to be trustworthy, stable and accurate, even for lossy media. Convergence test results revealed that the accuracy of the values of plane wave scattering coefficients decreased much faster as the conductivity of the medium increased than what would be expected from numerical anisotropy. Finally, poor accuracy results are reported when the scattered field illuminates strongly the edges or corners of the integration box around a finite-size slab.
Effect of lactulose on cerebral metabolism in patients with chronic portosystemic encephalopathy

Cerebral blood flow and cerebral metabolism were studied in six patients with moderately severe portosystemic encephalopathy before and after a 10-day course of lactulose. As a result of therapy there was a mean increase in cerebral oxygen utilization but no changes in either mean glucose consumption or in mean cerebral blood flow. It appears therefore that the abnormalities in cerebral metabolism that have been previously described in patients with hepatic encephalopathy can be improved by the oral administration of lactulose.
Architectural support for fast symmetric-key cryptography

The emergence of the Internet as a trusted medium for commerce and communication has made cryptography an essential component of modern information systems. Cryptography provides the mechanisms necessary to implement accountability, accuracy, and confidentiality in communication. As demands for secure communication bandwidth grow, efficient cryptographic processing will become increasingly vital to good system performance.In this paper, we explore techinques to improve the performance of symmetric key cipher algorithms. Eight popular strong encryption algorithms are examined in detail. Analysis reveals the algorithms are computaionally complex and contain little parallelism. Overall throughput on high-end microprocessor is quite poor, a 600 Mhz processor is incapable of saturation a T3 communication line with 3DES (triple DES) encrypted data.We introduce new instructions taht improve the efficiency of the analyzed algorithms. Our approach adds instruction set support for fast substitutions, general permutations, rotates, and modular arithmetic. Performance analysis of the optimized ciphers shows an overall speedup of 59% over a baseline machine with rotate instructions and 74% speedup over a baseline without rotates. Even higher speedups are demonstrated with optimized subtitutions (SBOXes) and additional functional unit resources. our analyses of the original and optimized algorithms suggest future directions for the design of high-performance programmable cryptographic processors.
The influence of mumber and ages of children on residential mobility

Married couples without children are more geographically mobile than those with children, at least through age 45. Among husband-wife couples with children, ages of children exercises a consistent mobility differential; when age of family head is controlled for, families with children under 6 years old only are the most mobile both within and between counties, followed by those with children under 6 and 6–17 years old, and followed in turn by families with children 6–17 years old only. The relationship between number of children and the probability of moving within counties has a reverse J-shape for family heads at each age under 45; after age 45 the relationship assumes a more normal J shape. Number of children is inversely related to the probability of migrating (moving between counties) for husband-wife families in which the husband is under 35; after age 35 the relationship is erratic. The effect of ages of children generally holds for each size of family. Female family heads with children are generally more geographically mobile than male family heads (wife present) at the same age and with the same number and ages of children present.
Histone deacetylase inhibitors enhance the chemosensitivity of tumor cells with cross‐resistance to a wide range of DNA‐damaging drugs

Although DNA‐damaging agents are among the most effective anticancer drugs in clinical use, their overall effectiveness is limited by the development of cross‐resistance to these drugs. Given that histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors increase the acetylation of core histones, resulting in an open chromatin configuration that is more accessible to DNA‐targeting agents, we examined whether HDAC inhibitors might enhance the cytotoxicity of DNA‐damaging drugs in six human ovarian tumor cell lines that exhibit different cisplatin sensitivities. Low concentrations of HDAC inhibitors, which alone exhibited little cytotoxicity, markedly enhanced the induction of apoptotic cell death not only by cisplatin but also by a wide variety of DNA‐targeting anticancer drugs in these tumor cell lines, irrespective of their sensitivities to the respective drugs. In contrast, HDAC inhibitors did not increase the cytotoxicity of metabolic antagonists or microtubule‐targeting agents. HDAC inhibitors potentiated both the phosphorylation of histone H2AX on serine‐139 (a marker of DNA double‐strand breaks) as well as the accumulation of reactive oxygen species induced by DNA‐damaging agents in tumor cells. The enhanced generation of reactive oxygen species appeared to be responsible for the enhanced apoptotic cell death induced by the combination of these drugs. These results indicate that the combination of an HDAC inhibitor with a wide variety of DNA‐damaging agents is a promising chemotherapeutic strategy for the eradication of tumor cells, regardless of whether the cells are sensitive or resistant to the DNA‐damaging anticancer drugs. (Cancer Sci 2008; 99: 376–384)
The Determinants of the Frequency of Board Meetings: Evidence from Categorical Analysis

This paper aims at investigating the determinants of the frequency of board meetings as an index for board activity including their monitoring role. The research sample is composed of 120 UK firms based on their market capitalization for the period from 2003 to 2008. The study applies Multinomial Logistic modelling and Conditional Logistic modelling to investigate the frequency of board meetings. I find that board size and structure are positively related to the frequency of board meetings. In addition, I detect a negative impact of audit committee diligence on the frequency board meetings. The study finds no evidence that the frequency board meetings are reduced when there is a CEO duality. Finally, the results show that firm size, leverage, free cash flows, and Tobin’s Q have an impact on the frequency of board meetings.The research offers the first major study to examine the determinants of the frequency of board meetings in UK non-financial firms. The paucity of the UK literature regarding board effectiveness in UK reinforces the empirical importance of the results for researchers, managers, and UK policy makers.
A Short Overview of the Components in Mass Spectrometry Instrumentation for Proteomics Analyses

Mass spectrometry has been widely used for analyses of biomolecules such as proteins. The soft ionization methods available nowadays, the faster and more accurate mass spectrome‐ ters, a diversity of protein databases resulting from large scale genome studies and the ad‐ vances in the bioinformatics field for optimized data mining, altogether significantly contributed to high quality outputs in the proteomics area [1-3].
THz Detector with an Antenna Coupled Stacked CMOS Plasma-Wave FET

We present an antenna coupled non-resonant plasma-wave CMOS detector operating at 502 GHz, with a PMOS load and NMOS stacked structure. The gates of the NMOS plasma wave FETs, which are located in the middle of the stack, in a differential structure, are connected to the voltage- maximum points of a patch antenna. It was found that the high-input impedance of the detector causes high responsivity as the loaded Q of the antenna is enhanced and because the resultant high-voltage swing at the input allows the detector to have high responsivity. High input impedance can be achieved via using the stacked structure in conjunction with a small input transistor and the sub-threshold bias. The responsivity of stacked structure was also affected by source-drain voltage in the plasma-wave FET and active load resistor by PMOS. Therefore, it was found that the responsivity is closely related to the Vds × Ids × rload* product of the stacked structure, where Ids is the bias current, Vds is the voltage across the input NMOS plasma-wave FET and rload* is the small signal resistance of the PMOS load parallel with plasma -wave FET channel resistance. The detector shows the higher response than a cold-FET detector by one order of magnitude.
Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in refractory rheumatoid arthritis: sustained response in two of four patients.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the safety and efficacy of immune ablation with subsequent autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Four patients with refractory RA and poor prognostic indicators were treated. Stem cells were collected and lymphocytes were depleted by 2.3-4.0 logs. The conditioning regimen included cyclophosphamide (200 mg/kg), antithymocyte globulin (90 mg/kg), and, for 1 patient, total body irradiation (TBI) with 400 cGy. Improvement was evaluated according to the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) preliminary definition of improvement in RA (ACR 20), and also according to the ACR 50 and ACR 70 criteria. RESULTS HSCT was well tolerated. Three patients fulfilled the ACR 70 criteria at 1 month and 3 months post-HSCT. One patient did not fulfill the ACR 20 criteria because of persistent joint tenderness, despite improvement of the joint swelling. At 6 months post-HSCT, 1 patient fulfilled the ACR 70 criteria and 1 fulfilled the ACR 50 criteria, and these 2 patients fulfilled the ACR 70 criteria at 9 months post-HSCT. The other 2 patients (including the patient who received TBI) did not meet the ACR 20 criteria at 6 months and 9 months post-HSCT. The only patient with followup of >9 months fulfilled the ACR 70 criteria at 20 months post-HSCT. CONCLUSION In this series, autologous HSCT was safe and effective in inducing major clinical response and maintained significant benefit for 2 patients at 9 months and 20 months posttreatment, respectively. Sustained response did not occur for 2 of 4 patients. A regimen dose-response effect may exist, but the addition of TBI did not prevent disease relapse for 1 of the patients. More aggressive T cell depletion of the autograft, use of a myeloablative regimen, or use of an allograft may be necessary to decrease relapse rates.
3D measurement of a surface point using a high-speed projector-camera system for augmented reality games

In this paper, we describe high-speed 3D position and normal measurement of a specified point of interest using a high-speed projector-camera systems. A special cross line pattern is adaptively projected onto the point of interest and the reflected pattern on an object surface is captured by the camera and analyzed to obtain the position and normal information. The experimental results show that the estimated normal directions were apparently correct and stable except for occasional large errors due to instantaneous detection failures. Based on this measurement system, we describe a game system by which real-time interaction with non-structured 3D real environment is achieved.
Macroprudential supervision in non-euro area European countries

In addition to monetary policy, macroprudential policy can be fundamentally used by countries to contain risks threatening the stability of their financial systems. As macroprudential policy becomes more important, European countries have also begun to consider the establishment of national macroprudential frameworks. This process is underway in two fields: creation of an institutional background, and the development and operation of an appropriate macroprudential toolkit. Concerning the first field, three basic options are available. In countries with microprudential oversight systems embedded in the central bank, the central bank typically takes on the role of a macroprudential authority. In the case of all other institutional arrangements, either a financial stability committee composed of representatives of the supervisory authority, the government and the central bank is set up, or the earlier institutional structure is maintained and the cooperation between the parties involved is reinforced in order to ensure the well-foundedness of systemic interventions. As for the other field, the establishment of a toolkit designed to enable the macroprudential authority to act in a direct way at the systemic level is underway. Some countries already have experience concerning the operation of such toolkits: the authorities have already made specific decisions concerning certain macroprudential interventions based on capital or liquidity requirements. Examining the current practices of the European countries analysed in this study, we can see that the Hungarian macroprudential framework currently being established is in many ways consistent with the practices described below. In many respects, the institutional background1 (competences and responsibilities) of the macroprudential supervision evolving in Hungary even appears to be more coherent than those set up in some of the countries discussed.
Key escrowing today

The objective of the US Government's Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES) and associated Key Escrow System (KES) is to provide strong security for communications while simultaneously allowing authorized government access to particular communications for law enforcement and national security purposes. The article describes the EES and the KES. Particular emphasis is given to security, since potential users have been concerned that the hooks which provide authorized government access could be exploited or abused. It describes many of the safeguards that have gone into the design of the KES in order to ensure that the risk of unauthorized access to EES-encrypted communications is negligible. <<ETX>>
Church's thesis is questioned by new calculation paradigm

Church's thesis claims that all effecticely calculable functions are recursive. A shortcoming of the various definitions of recursive functions lies in the fact that it is not a matter of a syntactical check to find out if an entity gives rise to a function. Eight new ideas for a precise setup of arithmetical logic and its metalanguage give the proper environment for the construction of a special computer, the ARBACUS computer. Computers do not come to a necessary halt; it is requested that calculators are constructed on the basis of computers in a way that they always come to a halt, then all calculations are effective. The ARBATOR is defined as a calculator with two-layer-computation. It allows for the calculation of all primitive recursive functions, but multi-level-arbation also allows for the calculation of other arbative functions that are not primitive recursive. The new paradigm of calculation does not have the above mentioned shortcoming. The defenders of Church's thesis are challenged to show that exotic arbative functions are recursive and to put forward a recursive function that is not arbative. A construction with three-tier-multi-level-arbation that includes a diagonalisation leads to the extravagant yet calculable Snark-function that is not arbative. As long as it is not shown that all exotic arbative functions and particularily the Snark-function are arithmetically representable Goedel's first incompleteness sentence is in limbo.
Review of the key technologies and applications in internet of vehicle

In recent years, traffic congestion, traffic accidents, environmental pollution and other issues are particularly prominent with the rapid development of urbanization, motorization. It is extremely important to send the road information to the user promptly so that the user can fully understand the road situation and make safer and smarter decisions on the road. Internet of Vehicle (IOV) as a typical application of the technology of Internet of Things (IOT) in the field of transportation system promotes the transportation system to move closer to the intelligent. This paper first introduces the basic concepts of IOV and the hierarchical architecture based on perception layer, network layer and application layer. Secondly, it points out several key technologies in the development of IOV. Finally, the related applications of the technology of IOV are briefly described.
A Visual Bug Report Analysis and Search Tool

According to recent work, duplicate bug report entries in bug tracking systems impact negatively on software maintenance and evolution productivity due to, among other factors, the increased time spent on report analysis and validation, what in some cases take over 20 minutes. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost mainly with duplicate bug report analysis. In order to solve this problem, this work presents and evaluates a tool based on Information Visualization techniques, aiming to assist developers during analysis and identification of duplicate bug reports. The tool features development was supported by a survey conducted with several developers in order to identify the best opportunities for visualization techniques, according to the cognitive process for understanding bug reports informa-