Connecting Tax Time to Financial Security: Designing Public Policy with Evidence from the Field

The ability to accumulate and access savings is a fundamental determinant of economic security for many families, especially those with low incomes and limited resources. Since every family's circumstance is different, so too are their savings needs, which can range both in time horizon and flexibility of purpose. Current federal policy favors longer-term, targeted purposes, such as savings for retirement, leaving a void in policy supports for households whose savings needs are more immediate. This impedes a household's ability to build up a stock of flexible use savings that are accessible to buffer against financial shocks or to invest in ways that may improve their future, roles that serve as the underpinning for economic mobility. Policy solutions to fill this gap need to address both the lack of resources that lower-income households can dedicate to saving and the lack of products that facilitate saving for flexible purposes. In response, the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation has developed a proposal, The Financial Security Credit, which offers lower- and middle-income households the option to open an account and an incentive to save in that account at a moment when they are receiving an influx of resources -- tax time

Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD) Partnership’s work in Latin America

The Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD) Partnership is a private-public collaboration led by USAID, which aims to increase resilience to climate change in developing countries through the development and dissemination of climate services. The partnership began with initial projects in three countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) was the lead organization for the Colombian CSRD efforts – which then expanded to encompass work in the whole Latin American region

Information-Driven Housing

This paper suggests a new information-driven framework is needed to help consumers evaluate the sustainability of their housing options. The paper provides an outline of this new framework and how it would work

Quasiphasematched concurrent nonlinearities in periodically poled KTiOPO_4 for quantum computing over the optical frequency comb

We report the successful design and experimental implementation of three coincident nonlinear interactions, namely ZZZ ("type-0"), ZYY (type-I), and YYZ/YZY (type-II) second harmonic generation of 780 nm light from a 1560 nm pump beam in a single, multigrating, periodically poled KTiOPO_4 crystal. The resulting nonlinear medium is the key component for making a scalable quantum computer over the optical frequency comb of a single optical parametric oscillator.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figs, submitted for publicatio

Scalable video transcoding for mobile communications

Mobile multimedia contents have been introduced in the market and their demand is growing every day due to the increasing number of mobile devices and the possibility to watch them at any moment in any place. These multimedia contents are delivered over different networks that are visualized in mobile terminals with heterogeneous characteristics. To ensure a continuous high quality it is desirable that this multimedia content can be adapted on-the-fly to the transmission constraints and the characteristics of the mobile devices. In general, video contents are compressed to save storage capacity and to reduce the bandwidth required for its transmission. Therefore, if these compressed video streams were compressed using scalable video coding schemes, they would be able to adapt to those heterogeneous networks and a wide range of terminals. Since the majority of the multimedia contents are compressed using H.264/AVC, they cannot benefit from that scalability. This paper proposes a technique to convert an H.264/AVC bitstream without scalability to a scalable bitstream with temporal scalability as part of a scalable video transcoder for mobile communications. The results show that when our technique is applied, the complexity is reduced by 98 % while maintaining coding efficiency

HELIN Consortium LORI Grant Applicant Information

Completed grant application for HELIN\u27s successful Library of Rhode Island grant. Project Synopsis: The purpose of this project is to collaborate with Rhode Island library and information management professionals, community and business leaders, government and education professionals, and college and university scholars to gather information in preparation for writing a grant to create a statewide digital repository for Rhode Island

Principles of Neuromorphic Photonics

In an age overrun with information, the ability to process reams of data has become crucial. The demand for data will continue to grow as smart gadgets multiply and become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Next-generation industries in artificial intelligence services and high-performance computing are so far supported by microelectronic platforms. These data-intensive enterprises rely on continual improvements in hardware. Their prospects are running up against a stark reality: conventional one-size-fits-all solutions offered by digital electronics can no longer satisfy this need, as Moore's law (exponential hardware scaling), interconnection density, and the von Neumann architecture reach their limits. With its superior speed and reconfigurability, analog photonics can provide some relief to these problems; however, complex applications of analog photonics have remained largely unexplored due to the absence of a robust photonic integration industry. Recently, the landscape for commercially-manufacturable photonic chips has been changing rapidly and now promises to achieve economies of scale previously enjoyed solely by microelectronics. The scientific community has set out to build bridges between the domains of photonic device physics and neural networks, giving rise to the field of \emph{neuromorphic photonics}. This article reviews the recent progress in integrated neuromorphic photonics. We provide an overview of neuromorphic computing, discuss the associated technology (microelectronic and photonic) platforms and compare their metric performance. We discuss photonic neural network approaches and challenges for integrated neuromorphic photonic processors while providing an in-depth description of photonic neurons and a candidate interconnection architecture. We conclude with a future outlook of neuro-inspired photonic processing.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figure