Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the pricing of Credit-Linked Notes : Evidence from the Swedish market

Based on international evidence of overpricing, we study the newly established creditlinked note (CLN) market in Sweden during the period 2012 – 2013. We derive a theoretical pricing model based on a reduced form framework and value the outstanding CLNs in the Swedish market. Our results suggest significant and consistent overpricing, ranging from 0.6% to 6.4%. Furthermore, when accounting for the counterparty credit risk exposure in the issuer, the overpricing increases substantially to a maximum of 8.5%. Given this considerable overpricing, it is possible that the counterparty risk is not priced in the CLNs. Plausibly, investors perceive the issuer as “too big to fail”, which is supported by previous findings of Arora et al. (2012). Lastly, our study indicates the existence of market frictions that influence the market pricing mechanism, obfuscating the relationship between observed prices and credit risk. Based on findings of Blanco et al. (2005), this could be a result of limited liquidity. We would like to thank our tutor Michael Halling (Department of Finance, SSE) for his support throughout the writing of our thesis.
Modelling compressive cracking in concrete by a modified lattice model

The article describes recent advances achieved within the Delft lattice model to improve its ability to simulate compressive cracking in brittle or quasi-brittle materials, like plain concrete. The main modification made to the conventional formulation of the beam lattice is the introduction of an extra step when the beams stiffness is removed. When the failure criterion for an element is first attained, the bending and shear stiffnesses are removed, and later the remaining axial stiffness is removed when the same beam fails again. Although the number of calculations needed increase, the model maintains its simplicity. The presented results are promising, as the model is now able to better localize the damage, giving more realistic crack patterns, load/deformation and rigidity-decay curves. A cube of 0.1 × 0.1 × 0.1 m is simulated using a 2-D model. The average beam length (lb,av) was set to 2.0 mm. Note that because of the mesh distortion, the true length of a beam (L) will vary. Using this lb,av the lattice model will consist of approximately 8730 beams. The ratio between lb,av and the dimension of the lattice model, will influence the material behaviour. The smaller the beams are the more brittle the material will react. However, for practical reasons, the length lb,av may be limited due to computational restrictions. The length lb,av also depends on the size of small material heterogeneities that we may still want to incorporate (as in the concrete composite model, where the size of the aggregates determines the choice lb,av, see section 5). Besides the difference in length, all beams have identical properties. The beams thickness is 0.1 m to account for the 3D to 2D simplification. The beam height is chosen equal to 0.54 × lb,av, which was found to better approximate the target Poisson ratio of 0.2. The elastic modulus of the beam (E) was set equal to 33.9 GPa, in order to approximate the macroscopic elastic modulus of 25.0 GPa. After selecting the geometry and elastic properties of the beams, the failure condition of the beams has to be chosen. A failure condition similar to the one described by Schlangen & Garboczi (1996), i.e. a tensile limiting failure stress (σlim), is used. The beam will fail, when the maximum stress in a beam section exceeds this limit. To calculate the stress in a beam a comparative stress (σcomp) is used, instead of the actual elastic stress. This comparative stress σcomp is determined by summing up the stress resulting from the beam axial force and partially the stress resulting from the moment, see Equation 1:
Aerial Robotic 44 . Aerial Robotics

A wide array of potential applications exist for robots that have the level of mobility offered by flight. The military applications of aerial robotics have been recognized ever since the beginnings of powered flight, and they have already been realized to sometimes spectacular effect in surveillance, targeting, and even strike missions. The range of civilian applications is even greater and includes remote sensing, disaster response, image acquisition, surveillance, transportation, and delivery of goods. This chapter first presents a brief history of aerial robotics. It then continues by describing the range of possible and actual applications of aerial robotics. The list of current challenges to aerial robotics is then described. Building from basic notions of flight, propulsion, and available sensor technology, the chapter then moves on to describe some of the current research efforts aimed at addressing the various challenges faced by aerial robots. The challenges faced by aerial robots span several and distinct fields, including state regulations, man–machine interface design issues, navigation, safety/reliability, collision prevention, and take-off/landing techniques. The size of aerial robots can considerably influence their flight dynamics, and small aerial robots can end up looking considerably different from their larger counterparts. Similar to their manned counterparts, aerial robots may enjoy diverse propulsion systems and operate over large speed ranges. Aerial robots must be equipped with reliable position and actuation equipment so as to be capable of controlled flight, and this constitutes a nontrivial requirement prior to doing research or development in this field. However, many universities, research centers, and industries have now met this requirement and are actively working on the challenges presented above. The largest obstacle to the commercial development of aerial robots is, however, the necessity to comply with and support a regulatory environment which is only beginning to address these rapidly developing systems.
Chapter 17 Techniques for Seamless Color Registration and Mapping on Dense 3 D Models

Today’s most widely used 3D digitization approach is a combination of active geometric sensing, mainly using laser scanning, with active or passive color sensing, mostly using digital photography. Producing a seamless colored object, starting from a geometric representation and a set of photographs, is a data fusion problem requiring effective solutions for image-to-geometry registration, and color mapping and blending. This chapter provides a brief survey of the state-of-the-art solutions, ranging from manual approaches to fully scalable automated methods.
Chapter 9 Network Analysis and Morphogenesis : A Neo-Structural Exploration

The goal of the Morphogenetic Society project is to develop an account of social stability and change at the macro-level in late modernity. It is thus different from the Morphogenetic Approach, as an explanatory framework presented as appropriate for analysis at all levels from the microto the macro-level and at all times (Archer 1988, 1995). According to this perspective, three elements are always involved in any social transformation—big or small: ‘structure’, ‘culture’, and ‘agency’. The challenge is always to specify their interplay as the basis of explanation for the stability or change of any social phenomenon chosen by the investigator, when using the Morphogenetic Approach or in exploring the notion of Morphogenetic Society. This chapter sketches one possible methodological and theoretical contribution to this project. An initial summary presents network analysis, in combination with other methodologies, as a technique that can help develop and specify the morphogenetic project by exploring some of its preliminary ideas about morphostatic and morphogenetic processes in relation to the meso-level of social reality. The present chapter initiates a dialogue between the neo-structural framing of network analysis and the Morphogenetic Project, based on an empirical illustration, in order to suggest that social processes driving the co-evolution of structure, culture, and
esponses of plants , earthworms , spiders and bees to geographic ocation , agricultural management and surrounding landscape in uropean arable fields

Farmland species provide key ecological services that support agricultural production, but are under threat from agricultural intensification and mechanization. In order to design effective measures to mitigate agricultural impact, simultaneous investigations of different taxonomic groups across several regions are required. Therefore, four contrasting taxonomic groups were investigated: plants, earthworms, spiders and bees (wild bees and bumblebees), which represent different trophic levels and provide different ecological services. To better understand underlying patterns, three community measurements for each taxonomic group were considered: abundance, species richness and species composition. In four European regions, ten potential environmental drivers of the four taxonomic groups were tested and assigned to three groups of drivers: geographic location (farm, region), agricultural management (crop type, mineral nitrogen input, organic nitrogen input, mechanical field operations and pesticide applications) and surrounding landscape in a 250 m buffer zone (diversity of habitats in the surroundings, proportion of arable fields and proportion of non-productive, non-woody habitats). First, the variation in abundance, species richness and species composition from 167 arable sites was partitioned to compare the relative contribution of the three groups of drivers (geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape). Second, generalized linear mixed-effects models were applied to estimate the effect of the individual explanatory variables on abundance and species richness. Our analysis showed a dominant effect of geographic location in all four taxonomic groups and a strong influence of agricultural management on plants, spiders and bees. The effect of the surrounding landscape was of minor importance and inconsistent in our data. We conclude that in European arable fields, the avoidance of mineral nitrogen and pesticides is beneficial for biodiversity, and that species protection measures should take into account regional characteristics and the community structure of the investigated taxonomic groups. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel. : +41 443777228; fax: +41 443777201. E-mail address: philippe.jeanneret@agroscope.admin.ch (P. Jeanneret). 167-8809/$ – see front matter © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ttp://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.agee. 2014.01. 020 © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Dynamic Analysis of Malicious Code and Response System

Malicious code detection and removal is critical to the security of a computer system. Virus scanners rely on a database of known signatures for viruses and malware for detection. This research paper presents novel methodologies and tools to detect any malicious code present on windows based machine dynamically, and can be used as a preventive measure to protect the system from being infected. Malicious code analysis can be static and dynamic. Dynamic code analysis has a greater edge over static code analysis as the instructions are analyzed at runtime. Thus polymorphic malware can also be detected. The work presented in this paper uses a newly designed dynamic code technique in conjunction with a developed minifilter driver for malware detection. It runs in a virtual environment to perform the analysis, thus making it impossible for malwares to detect the presence of the developed tool. The minifilter driver is used to monitor the windows API calls, registry changes and used to generate reports which are used to analyze a program as malware or normal. These reports can be analyzed to categorize a program as normal or malware. The developed tool is tested using Symantec malware database and compared with other pre-existing tools to evaluate its effectiveness.
Biointegrated fl exible inorganic light emitting diodes

Correspondence: Keon Jae Lee Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea Tel 824 2350 3343 Fax 824 2350 3310 Email keonlee@kaist.ac. kr Abstract: The use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as therapeutic tools has been actively studied over the past few decades due to their advantages of high safety, low cost, excellent portability, and wide bandwidth. In addition, their application in biomedical fields has been expanded to such areas as nerve stimulation, photodynamic therapy, and LED-based biosensors, and LED lights are thus receiving attention as alternatives to conventional biomedical light sources such as lasers. Recently, several developments in the area of flexible inorganic LEDs along with advanced nanoelectronic technologies have pointed toward the possibility of new innovative biomethodologies in the near future. In this paper, we review the salient features of high-performance biointegrated LED applications, together with future challenges for the realization of implantable, flexible biointegrated electronic devices.
Contrastive Opinion Modeling

This paper presents a novel opinion mining research problem, which is called Contrastive Opinion Modeling (COM). Given any query topic and a set of text collections from multiple perspectives, the task of COM is to present the opinions of the individual perspectives on the topic, and furthermore to quantify their difference. This general problem subsumes many interesting applications, including opinion summarization and forecasting, government intelligence and cross-cultural studies. We propose a novel unsupervised topic model for contrastive opinion modeling. It simulates the generative process of how opinion words occur in the documents of different collections. The ad hoc opinion search process can be efficiently accomplished based on the learned parameters in the model. The difference of perspectives can be quantified in a principled way by the Jensen-Shannon divergence among the individual topic-opinion distributions. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed model on two datasets in the political domain: 1) statement records of U.S. senators; 2) world news reports from three representative media in U.S., China and India, respectively. The experimental results with both qualitative and quantitative analysis have shown the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Congestion Control for Vertical Handover Across Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In the wireless/mobile networks, the vertical handover across heterogeneous networks becomes one of the critical issues in the future wireless/mobile networks [1]. In the vertical handover, it is required to provide seamless services for a mobile terminal that moves across different types of access networks. The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) [2] was proposed to support the vertical handover in the transport layer with the help of the multi-homing feature and dynamic address reconfiguration extension [3], which is called mobile SCTP (mSCTP) [4]. mSCTP handover allows a Mobile Node (MN) to dynamically add a new IP address or delete an old IP address to or from the current SCTP association, as MN moves across different IP networks. During mSCTP handover, MN is required to switch the primary path from the old IP address to a new IP address. In this paper, we consider the congestion control of mSCTP for vertical handover. The mSCTP is used for vertical handover between heterogeneous wireless networks. However, there are still a lot of challenging issues to be solved in the mSCTP vertical handover. One of them is how to enhance the throughput of data transmission during vertical handover. In the mSCTP handover, each time the primary path is switched, the congestion control parameters of the new primary path will be initialized, and further the congestion window begins in the slow start phase [2]. This may cause the data transmission throughput to be degraded during handover. Such the throughput degradation could be more severe when MN moves across heterogeneous networks with quite different network bandwidths, as shown in the example of the vertical handover between 3G wireless and WLAN. A couple of schemes have been made to enhance data transmission throughput during handover for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over Mobile IP (MIP) [5]~[7]. The work of [5] proposed to immediately initialize the congestion control parameters during vertical handover. In the works of [6],[7], the authors proposed 151
Topography-guided photo-refractive keratectomy followed by corneal collagen cross-linking for keratoconus

Background: KC is a bilateral, progressive, non-inflammatory corneal degeneration. Corneal deformation and thinning causes irregular astigmatism and leads to visual impairment. Aim of the work: this study aimed to evaluate simultaneous topography-guided partial PRK and CXL as a therapeutic intervention in patients with KC. Methodology: the present study was designed to evaluate simultaneous topography-guided partial PRK and CXL as a therapeutic intervention in patients with KC. It included 25 keratoconic eyes of 17 patients; 8 cases were bilateral and 9 cases were unilateral. All included cases underwent full history taking and ophthalmologic examinations for preoperative evaluation and postoperative assessment. Follow up was carried out at first postoperative day and at 1, 3 and 6 months post-operatively. Results: when comparing K1, K2, thinnest location and BCVA at 1, 3 and 6 months postoperatively to the corresponding values at first postoperative day, there was non-significant difference at any point of time. Conclusion: simultaneous topography-guided partial PRK and CXL as a therapeutic intervention in patients with keratoconus is an effective without significant complications; thus, it had a good efficacy, stability over time and safety.
LOGGING EFFECTS OF ILLEGAL CHAINSAW MILLING AND CONVENTIONAL LOGGING IN KROKOSUA HILLS FOREST RESERVE, GHANA

Illegal logging is widely believed to have a greater adverse impact on the forest resource base of many countries, but field studies comparing activities of illegal loggers with their conventional counterparts are few, with some not supporting this general notion. We conducted field assessments in Krokosua Hills Forest Reserve in Juaboso district of Ghana to compare operations of illegal chainsaw millers with conventional loggers in relation to species felled, adherence to regulation on minimum felling diameter, extent of collateral damage at stump site and regard for protection of water bodies in the reserve. We found a total of 139 felled trees belonging to 17 species. Felling by Illegal chainsaw millers constituted 37.4% of total felling. 94% of all trees felled by illegal loggers were below minimum felling diameter and were mainly class 1 species with scarlet star rating (and including species regarded as depleted in Ghanaian forests). By contrast, conventional loggers felled from a wider range of species and conservation priorities with 59% of felling done below minimum felling diameter. Collateral damage at stump site was higher for conventional than illegal loggers, with damage to residual stems being mainly broken stems. Average distance of stump sites to nearest water bodies was 24.2 ± 16.7m for conventional loggers, significantly greater than distance for illegal loggers at 15.2 ± 9.7m, suggesting that illegal loggers were felling closer to water bodies. Findings in this study have important implications for forest resource conservation.
Tramea , Quantum Dots , Transconductance , Single Electron Tunneling

Spin qubits in quantum dots are promising candidates towards quantum computation [1, 2]. However, a considerable amount of technical development is still necessary before the advent of a quantum computer. For quantum dots, this involves independently controlling and sweeping the voltages of a multitude of electrostatic gates and monitoring several charge sensing signals. Thus, a fast measurement device with a high number of inputs and outputs is critical for the efficiency of the development of multiple quantum dot devices. The group of Michel Pioro-Ladrière at Institut Quantique, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, have recently conducted measurements on quantum dots and related components using the Nanonis Tramea instrument, which will be discussed in this application note.
Numerical solution of hyperbolic-elliptic systems of conservation laws by multiresolution schemes

In this work we examine initial value problems for first-order systems of conservation laws ∂tφ1 + ∂xf1(φ1, φ2) = 0, ∂tφ2 + ∂xf2(φ1, φ2) = 0, (1) by applying WENO multiresolution schemes [8]. High resolution schemes that have been applied to multi-species kinematic models include WENO schemes [23] and central difference schemes, such as the Kurganov-Tadmor [20] and Nessyahu-Tadmor [21] schemes [4]. In [8] we demonstrated that the multiresolution technique applied to WENO schemes together with a sparse point representation (SPR) leads to an efficient and accurate scheme for multispecies kinematic flow models. The multiresolution method has been devised (at least, originally) to reduce the computational cost of high resolution methods. In standard situations, the solution of a conservation law exhibits strong variations (shocks) in small regions but behaves smoothly on the major portion of the computational domain. The multiresolution technique adaptively concentrates computational effort on regions of strong variation. It goes back to Harten [17] for hyperbolic equations and was used by Bihari [7] and Roussel et al. [22] for parabolic equations. Multiresolution methods for conservation laws in several space dimensions are analyzed by Dahmen et al. [12], while fully adaptive multiresolution finite volume schemes, including an optimized adaptive memory storage, are presented by Cohen et al. [11]. See Chiavassa et al. [10] for a recent review on multiresolution methods for hyperbolic conservation laws. Adaptive methods can be separated into two classes: one based on grid refinement to resolve gradients of a physically relevant quantity (see e.g. [19]), the other based on a posteriori error estimators, see e.g. [2] and the references therein. The present paper belongs to the first of these classes. Interpolating wavelets [13, 18] are efficiently combined with linear or nonlinear thresholding strategies in order to produce sparse approximations on a near optimal grid. It is this family of wavelets that are used in this paper. The sparse point representation technique has been also applied to partial differential equations in [14], where an adaptive block refinement (ABR) method has been designed with the quadtree structure of dyadic blocks. Recently an adaptive multiresolution method with local time stepping has been developed in [15], nevertheless the method considered here still has an explicit time stepping. We recall that the system (1) is called hyperbolic at a point (φ1, φ2) if the Jacobian Jf of
MULTI-LINGUAL AUTOMATIC PHONEME CLUSTERING

In this article, we describe an approach for automatic multi-lingual phoneme classification. The classes were obtained by agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We used a similarity measure based on the likelihood between the acoustic frames and the Hidden Markov Models. The method was applied to French, English, German, Spanish (IDEAL corpus), as well as to Italian and Portuguese (SPEECHDAT corpus). The analysis of the clusters demonstrated that, despite the acoustic mismatch between these corpora, this approach remains robust. For 90 clusters, the obtained classes correspond, to a large extent, to well defined linguistic groups. A qualitative analysis of the results is given.