66 research outputs found
A Blockchain Grand Challenge: Smart Financial Derivatives
No full textBlockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) research encompasses use cases ranging from social innovation to banking, and technical developments ranging from cryptography to semantics of legal text. Research in both academia and industry is highly interdisciplinary across domains such as computer science, linguistics, law, cryptography, banking, economics, and social sciences. The growing complexity of blockchain science and use cases, coupled with the interdisciplinary nature of the research, poses new challenges to our community. Research publication plays a key role in supporting this highly interdisciplinary work: supporting the need for rapid and reliable dissemination of preliminary and final results, and the need for longevity of results beyond the end of financial or management support for a research project. Industry teams rarely have subscriptions to academic journals, and an open access journal adds substantial value in supporting the research community. The field is young, with many research challenges to be addressed. One “grand challenge” for our research community is the implementation of high-value, long-lived, financial derivatives transactions running as smart contracts on DLT (“smart financial derivatives”). This is currently being explored by academia, banking practitioners, trade associations and technology vendors, and is driving research across a wide range of research groups, each focusing on a different aspect. What makes this a “grand” challenge is the need for a large number of diverse research problems to be solved simultaneously. The following outlines a few of the major research questions being investigated: some of these are general research problems that affect blockchain/DLT development broadly, whereas others are very specific to financial derivatives, but all of these aspects must be solved, and their solutions combined effectively, to provide efficient and resilient solutions to the grand challenge
AACR2 and catalogue production technology: The relevance of cataloguing principles to the online environment
No full textMore than thirty five years have passed since the Paris Conference and cataloguers have witnessed profound changes in many aspects of catalogue production technology and also in bibliographic control and access during this period of time. In comparison to the past, cataloguers are less involved in the design and production of catalogues and bibliographic databases particularly in terms of the interfaces, the types of indexes and the ways in which records and retrieval results are displayed. These changes and developments (see Appendix one) have presented cataloguers with some basic questions about the fundamental principles of record creation and catalogue construction.
Although present online catalogues are benefiting from more advanced hardware and software, there are still considerable, serious problems in searching, retrieval, and display of bibliographic information in present systems, which influence their functions and usefulness. This, as has been highlighted in the literature, may be because some of the present cataloguing principles and rules are inadequate, less relevant or irrelevant to the new electronic environment. A review of the literature of the last two decades indicates that, parallel to the increasing developments in online catalogues, the cataloguing community has been addressing the need for a re-thinking of cataloguing principles and rules in light of the new environment. It is often claimed that AACR2’s rules are based on concepts and principles from the pre-machine period and that they do not serve us well in giving guidance in the construction of electronic catalogues.
Given the influence of all the changes and developments in the world of catalogues and cataloguing, a fundamental re-examination of our cataloguing principles seems very necessary. In this paper some of the basic principles of AACR2 which have been highlighted in the literature as those most likely to be influenced by the new technology will be re-examined in the light of both the present and the potential characteristics and capabilities of the online environment. The aim is to examine the extent to which AACR2 matches or fails to match the capabilities of present systems and those of the near future, for searching, retrieval and display of bibliographic information. In other words, to address how catalogue form and production affects, or is in turn influenced by, the principles upon which AACR2 is based.
The approach used in this paper is to match individual capabilities of online catalogues with the basic principles of AACR2R. A major focus will be the basic concepts of the code’s principles, the logic of their application and the relationship of these principles to the logic of the online catalogue, as well as an examination of the types of principles and rules that are likely to change when moving from a manual catalogue to an online catalogue. In this regard, the needs and expectations of the different catalogue users are also taken into consideration
High throughput instrument to screen fluorescent proteins under two-photon excitation
No full textAuthor Posting. © Optical Society of America , 2020. This article is posted here by permission of Optical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Molina, R. S., King, J., Franklin, J., Clack, N., McRaven, C., Goncharov, V., Flickinger, D., Svoboda, K., Drobizhev, M., & Hughes, T. E. High throughput instrument to screen fluorescent proteins under two-photon excitation. Biomedical Optics Express, 11(12), (2020): 7192-7203, https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.409353.Two-photon microscopy together with fluorescent proteins and fluorescent protein-based biosensors are commonly used tools in neuroscience. To enhance their experimental scope, it is important to optimize fluorescent proteins for two-photon excitation. Directed evolution of fluorescent proteins under one-photon excitation is common, but many one-photon properties do not correlate with two-photon properties. A simple system for expressing fluorescent protein mutants is E. coli colonies on an agar plate. The small focal volume of two-photon excitation makes creating a high throughput screen in this system a challenge for a conventional point-scanning approach. We present an instrument and accompanying software that solves this challenge by selectively scanning each colony based on a colony map captured under one-photon excitation. This instrument, called the GIZMO, can measure the two-photon excited fluorescence of 10,000 E. coli colonies in 7 hours. We show that the GIZMO can be used to evolve a fluorescent protein under two-photon excitation.National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (F31 NS108593, U01 NS094246, U24 NS109107); Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Evolving robust GP solutions for hedge fund stock selection in emerging markets
No full textStock selection for hedge fund portfolios is a challenging problem for Genetic Programming (GP) because the markets (the environment in which the GP solution must survive) are dynamic, unpredictable and unforgiving. How can GP be improved so that solutions are produced that are robust to non-trivial changes in the environment? We explore an approach that uses subsets of extreme environments during training
Temporal aspects of smart contracts for financial derivatives
No full textImplementing smart contracts to automate the performance of high-value over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives is a formidable challenge. Due to the regulatory framework and the scale of financial risk if a contract were to go wrong, the performance of these contracts must be enforceable in law and there is an absolute requirement that the smart contract will be faithful to the intentions of the parties as expressed in the original legal documentation. Formal methods provide an attractive route for validation and assurance, and here we present early results from an investigation of the semantics of industry-standard legal documentation for OTC derivatives. We explain the need for a formal representation that combines temporal, deontic and operational aspects, and focus on the requirements for the temporal aspects as derived from the legal text. The relevance of this work extends beyond OTC derivatives and is applicable to understanding the temporal semantics of a wide range of legal documentation
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