26,774 research outputs found
Excessive Liability Dollarization in a Simple Signaling Model
No full textIf a dollar denominated external debt comes with so many risks, why do emerging economies allow for such an imbalance to accumulate ? The explanation provided in this paper builds on a simple signaling model. By assumption, lenders have no direct possibility to infer a firm’s financial stance. Therefore sound firms might want to borrow dollars and bear a high clearance cost, just in order to signal their type. The success of this policy depends on the behavior of bad firms. When dollar borrowing clearance costs are relatively small with respect to the clearance cost of borrowing in the local currency, the whole private sector would opt for liability dollarization. In this case the signaling effect vanishes, while all firms bear high clearance costs.Original sin; Signaling; Developing countries; Liability dollarization; Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium
Implementing the AIFMD: Success or failure? ECMI Commentary No. 34, 28 March 2013
No full textThis commentary considers the implementation of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) by the European Commission. The AIFMD creates an internal market for asset management and as an endeavour to develop market-based finance is an important piece of legislation for the European economy. The author, Mirzha de Manuel Aramendía, considers the implementation of some of the provisions that raised concern among industry participants. He finds that, on balance, a practical and flexible approach to implementation has been followed that should help secure the success of the framework, which at present is still uncertain. The commentary also considers the remuneration guidelines adopted recently by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). It encourages EU and national authorities to commit to the success of the AIFMD framework, as part of a broader effort to develop capital markets and reduce the historical reliance of the European economy on bank finance
The blood of sound comes rushing up
No full textThe work in The Blood of Sound Comes Rushing Up comes from a fixation on the role that communication plays in close, personal relationships. I have drawn from my successes and failures to connect with the people closest to me to create an atmosphere of introspection and emotional resonance. The works range from an installation of interconnected videos, to delicate drawings made with breath and soil, to evocative musical compositions that fill the gallery with sound
HAPTIC DEVICES AND TACTILE EXPERIENCES IN MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
No full textMuseums all around the globe are starting to adopt advanced technologies that enable the visitors to interact with digital replicas of their collections and artworks. Immersive and interactive virtual reality applications represent one of the most appealing and most used technologies within modern museum exhibitions areas. Using these types of applications the visitors can have access to additional layers of information which can be presented in different languages and presented to the visitor when they demand it using advanced digital interactivity. But the major drawback of these applications is that they don’t allow the users to experience tactile exploration regarding the shapes and ornaments of the cultural heritage artefacts. People are programmed to gather and receive sensory information using their sight, hearing but also using tactile experiences. In order to enable tactile experiences within museum exhibitions, modern technologies such as haptic devices can be installed to enable the visitors to examine the shape of the 3D digital replicas of real artefacts. This paper presents a case study of a haptic device instalment within a museum exhibition that can enable real time tactile exploration of digitized artefacts
Configuration Space Exploration for Digital Printing Systems
No full textWithin the printing industry, much of the variety in printed applications comes from the variety in finishing. Finishing comprises the processing of sheets of paper after being printed, e.g. to form books. The configuration space of finishers, i.e. all possible configurations given the available features and hardware capabilities, are large. Current control software minimally assists operators in finding useful configurations. Using a classical modelling and integration approach to support a variety of configuration spaces is suboptimal with respect to operatability, development time, and maintenance burden. In this paper, we explore the use of a modeling language for finishers to realize optimizing decision making over configuration parameters in a systematic way and to reduce development time by generating control software from models. We present CSX, a domain-specific language for high-level declarative specification of finishers that supports specification of the configuration parameters and the automated exploration of the configuration space of finishers. The language serves as an interface to constraint solving, i.e., we use low-level SMT constraint solving to find configurations for high-level specifications. We present a denotational semantics that expresses a translation of CSX specifications to SMT constraints. We describe the implementation of the CSX compiler and the CSX programming environment (IDE), which supports well-formedness checking, inhabitance checking, and interactive configuration space exploration. We evaluate CSX by modelling two realistic finishers. Benchmarks show that CSX has practical performance (<1s) for several scenarios of configuration space exploration.Programming Language
UNDERSEA:An Exemplar for Engineering Self-Adaptive Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
No full textRecent advances in embedded systems and underwater communications raised the autonomy levels in unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) from human-driven and scripted to adaptive and self-managing. UUVs can execute longer and more challenging missions, and include functionality that enables adaptation to unexpected oceanic or vehicle changes. As such, the simulated UUV exemplar UNDERSEA introduced in our paper facilitates the development, evaluation and comparison of self-adaptation solutions in a new and important application domain. UNDERSEA comes with predefined oceanic surveillance UUV missions, adaptation scenarios, and a reference controller implementation, all of which can easily be extended or replaced
A Lead-Lag Filter for Virtual Synchronous Machines with Improved Electromechanical Damping
No full textTraditional power systems based on synchronous generators often feature low frequency electromechanical oscillations. However, the integration of renewable energy sources through power converters can help tackling this issue. In fact, thanks to the concept of Virtual Synchronous Machine (VSM), it is possible to make the inverters behave as real synchronous machines (SMs). This way, the inverters can be integrated into the grid as traditional SMs and can even outperform them when it comes to damping low frequency oscillations in the power system. In order to do that, proper damping algorithms must be adopted in the VSM model. Therefore, this paper presents a simple and straighforward damping method for VSMs based on a single lead-lag filter acting on the VSM active power feedback. The proposed method and its integration in the VSM model are described. Then, the proposed solution has been experimentally compared to conventional methods, along with comparison metrics, to highlight its benefits
Efficient Learning of Communication Profiles from IP Flow Records
No full textThe task of network traffic monitoring has evolved drastically with the ever-increasing amount of data flowing in large scale networks. The automated analysis of this tremendous source of information often comes with using simpler models on aggregated data (e.g. IP flow records) due to time and space constraints. A step towards utilizing IP flow records more effectively are stream learning techniques. We propose a method to collect a limited yet relevant amount of data in order to learn a class of complex models, finite state machines, in real-time. These machines are used as communication profiles to fingerprint, identify or classify hosts and services and offer high detection rates while requiring less training data and thus being faster to compute than simple models.Accepted author manuscriptCyber Securit
A cross-format architecture for professional publishing
No full textWhen generating content for high-quality output, the issue of converting data from sources of any quality comes across. Even with just text, the use of desktop tools to produce input for high quality processes such as professional publishing or e-learning material generation requires professionals to convert the result, adjust it and produce the final output object. Since conversion is usually unidirectional, re-use of content and minor amendments are prevented once the conversion is done, unless the same professionals are involved in all the production steps. This raises costs and stiffens the production process. In this paper we propose a flexible conversion architecture, an intermediate data format and automatic high-quality pagination tool that make the process of generating high-quality results from low quality sources almost automatic, and that require no quality adjustments after the conversion. The end result is that the original authoring tools can be used for all productions steps, thus returning the whole production process in the hand of the original author
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