A Unified Multilingual Handwriting Recognition System using multigrams sub-lexical units

We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time. While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongly reduces the lexicon size and thus decreases the language model complexity. This makes pos- sible the design of an end-to-end unified multilingual recognition system where both a single optical model and a single language model are trained on all the languages. We discuss the impact of the language unification on each model and show that our system reaches state-of-the-art methods perfor- mance with a strong reduction of the complexity.Comment: preprin

For What it’s Worth: The Political Construction of Quality in French and Italian Wine Markets

At the heart of political organization, we find weak and atomized individuals who aggregate their power to challenge concentrated power. Wine politics show us that within market economies we find the same political movements. Markets, like politics, consist of institutions that differentially embed, codify and distribute power. In the case of France, small, individually weak wine producers became powerful in the aggregate; unified French grape growers came together to force a deal with the economically dominant wine merchants. Their joint political power was institutionalized in power-sharing, state-backed corporatist producer organizations. In contrast, small Italian producers failed to cooperate systematically and aggregate their power. Stronger organization enabled the construction of an institutional comparative advantage and higher prices for regulated French terroir wines. Economic sociologists claim markets are ‘socially embedded’. This article demonstrates markets are ‘politically embedded’: French market dominance results from effective power sharing mechanisms across the supply chain.1. Introduction 2. Information and power: previous literature on quality signaling, supply chain structure and producer organization 3. Data and methods 4. A comparison of the French and Italian wine markets 5. Market failures in the supply chain 6. French wine: the politics of value construction 7. Italian wine politics 8. Conclusions Footnotes Acknowledgements Reference

Robust Multi-Cellular Developmental Design

This paper introduces a continuous model for Multi-cellular Developmental Design. The cells are fixed on a 2D grid and exchange "chemicals" with their neighbors during the growth process. The quantity of chemicals that a cell produces, as well as the differentiation value of the cell in the phenotype, are controlled by a Neural Network (the genotype) that takes as inputs the chemicals produced by the neighboring cells at the previous time step. In the proposed model, the number of iterations of the growth process is not pre-determined, but emerges during evolution: only organisms for which the growth process stabilizes give a phenotype (the stable state), others are declared nonviable. The optimization of the controller is done using the NEAT algorithm, that optimizes both the topology and the weights of the Neural Networks. Though each cell only receives local information from its neighbors, the experimental results of the proposed approach on the 'flags' problems (the phenotype must match a given 2D pattern) are almost as good as those of a direct regression approach using the same model with global information. Moreover, the resulting multi-cellular organisms exhibit almost perfect self-healing characteristics

A Universal Model of Commuting Networks

We test a recently proposed model of commuting networks on 80 case studies from different regions of the world (Europe and United-States) and with geographic units of different sizes (municipality, county, region). The model takes as input the number of commuters coming in and out of each geographic unit and generates the matrix of commuting flows betwen the geographic units. We show that the single parameter of the model, which rules the compromise between the influence of the distance and job opportunities, follows a universal law that depends only on the average surface of the geographic units. We verified that the law derived from a part of the case studies yields accurate results on other case studies. We also show that our model significantly outperforms the two other approaches proposing a universal commuting model (Balcan et al. (2009); Simini et al. (2012)), particularly when the geographic units are small (e.g. municipalities).Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Product complexity, quality of institutions and the pro-trade effect of immigrants

The paper assesses the trade-creating impact of foreign-born residents on the international imports and exports of the French regions where they are settled. The pro-trade effect of immigrants is investigated along two intertwined dimensions: the complexity of traded goods and the quality of institutions in partner countries. The trade-enhancing impact of immigrants is, on average, more salient when they come from a country with weak institutions. However, this positive impact is especially large on the imports of simple products. When we turn to complex goods, for which the information channel conveyed by immigrants is the most valuable, immigration enhances imports regardless of the quality of institutions in the partner country. Regarding exports, immigrants substitute for weak institutions on both simple and complex goods.trade ; immigration ; quality of institutions ; product complexity ; gravity

PRODUCT COMPLEXITY, QUALITY OF INSTITUTIONS AND THE PRO-TRADE EFFECT OF IMMIGRANTS

The paper assesses the trade-creating impact of foreign-born residents on the international imports and exports of the French regions where they are settled. The pro-trade effect of immigrants is investigated along two intertwined dimensions: the complexity of traded goods and the quality of institutions in partner countries. The trade-enhancing impact of immigrants is, on average, more salient when they come from a country with weak institutions. However, this positive impact is especially large on the imports of simple products. When we turn to complex goods, for which the information channel conveyed by immigrants is the most valuable, immigration enhances imports regardless of the quality of institutions in the partner country. Regarding exports, immigrants substitute for weak institutions on both simple and complex goods.MAUP; concentration; agglomeration; wage equations; gravity

Google matrix analysis of directed networks

In past ten years, modern societies developed enormous communication and social networks. Their classification and information retrieval processing become a formidable task for the society. Due to the rapid growth of World Wide Web, social and communication networks, new mathematical methods have been invented to characterize the properties of these networks on a more detailed and precise level. Various search engines are essentially using such methods. It is highly important to develop new tools to classify and rank enormous amount of network information in a way adapted to internal network structures and characteristics. This review describes the Google matrix analysis of directed complex networks demonstrating its efficiency on various examples including World Wide Web, Wikipedia, software architecture, world trade, social and citation networks, brain neural networks, DNA sequences and Ulam networks. The analytical and numerical matrix methods used in this analysis originate from the fields of Markov chains, quantum chaos and Random Matrix theory.Comment: 56 pages, 58 figures. Missed link added in network example of Fig3

A Comparison of U. S. and European University-Industry Relations in the Life Sciences

We draw on diverse data sets to compare the institutional organization of upstream life science research across the United States and Europe. Understanding cross-national differences in the organization of innovative labor in the life sciences requires attention to the structure and evolution of biomedical networks involving public research organizations (universities, government laboratories, nonprofit research institutes, and research hospitals), science-based biotechnology firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We use network visualization methods and correspondence analyses to demonstrate that innovative research in biomedicine has its origins in regional clusters in the United States and in European nations. But the scientific and organizational composition of these regions varies in consequential ways. In the United States, public research organizations and small firms conduct R&D across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of the development process. Ties within and across these regions link small firms and diverse public institutions, contributing to the development of a robust national network. In contrast, the European story is one of regional specialization with a less diverse group of public research organizations working in a smaller number of therapeutic areas. European institutes develop local connections to small firms working on similar scientific problems, while cross-national linkages of European regional clusters typically involve large pharmaceutical corporations. We show that the roles of large and small firms differ in the United States and Europe, arguing that the greater heterogeneity of the U. S. system is based on much closer integration of basic science and clinical development

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Spatial Theory, Temporality and Public Action

Innovation and information combined with ICTs constitute a new framework which questions the theories on the functioning of classic space and stresses the need to think of new frames. The principle of acentrality proposed here highlights the role of politics in the structuring of space, as well as the role of temporality. For public planning policies to be relevant, acentrality and temporality must be taken into account