Finding interest in the stream

Interest, the curious emotion, plays a crucial role as an intrinsic motivator to encounter new things. It also plays a role in the establishment of longer term interests that people develop. Providing support for the experience of interest, and managing the development of enduring interests has potential to augment the effectiveness of information streaming applications. This poster briefly surveys 'interest' and considers the implications of a hypothetical Interest Machine that is able to measure interest and model interests

Investment, income, incompleteness

The utility-maximizing consumption and investment strategy of an individual investor receiving an unspanned labor income stream seems impossible to find in closed form and very dificult to find using numerical solution techniques. We suggest an easy procedure for finding a specific, simple, and admissible consumption and investment strategy, which is near-optimal in the sense that the wealthequivalent loss compared to the unknown optimal strategy is very small. We first explain and implement the strategy in a simple setting with constant interest rates, a single risky asset, and an exogenously given income stream, but we also show that the success of the strategy is robust to changes in parameter values, to the introduction of stochastic interest rates, and to endogenous labor supply decisions

Online Data Reduction for the Belle II Experiment using DATCON

The new Belle II experiment at the asymmetric $e^+ e^-$ accelerator SuperKEKB at KEK in Japan is designed to deliver a peak luminosity of $8\times10^{35}\text{cm}^{-2}\text{s}^{-1}$. To perform high-precision track reconstruction, e.g. for measurements of time-dependent CP-violating decays and secondary vertices, the Belle II detector is equipped with a highly segmented pixel detector (PXD). The high instantaneous luminosity and short bunch crossing times result in a large stream of data in the PXD, which needs to be significantly reduced for offline storage. The data reduction is performed using an FPGA-based Data Acquisition Tracking and Concentrator Online Node (DATCON), which uses information from the Belle II silicon strip vertex detector (SVD) surrounding the PXD to carry out online track reconstruction, extrapolation to the PXD, and Region of Interest (ROI) determination on the PXD. The data stream is reduced by a factor of ten with an ROI finding efficiency of >90% for PXD hits inside the ROI down to 50 MeV in $p_\text{T}$ of the stable particles. We will present the current status of the implementation of the track reconstruction using Hough transformations, and the results obtained for simulated \Upsilon(4S) $\rightarrow \, B\bar{B}$ events

Continuous survey of Australia's migrants: cohort 1 report – August 2014

This study of almost nine thousand recent migrants examines their labour market integration. Executive summary Between October and December 2013, almost nine thousand recent migrants participated in the first Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants (CSAM) since 2011. This cohort – known as CSAM Cohort 1 – comprised Skill Stream Primary Applicants and their Migrating Unit Spouses plus Partner Migrants who arrived in Australia, or received a permanent or provisional visa onshore around six months earlier. In this report we look at the outcomes of CSAM Cohort 1 at this six-month stage of settlement, focusing on their labour market integration. Future reports will show how these outcomes change in the ensuing 12 months and will describe the early outcomes of newer migrant cohorts. The key finding of this report was that Skill Stream Primary Applicants achieved good employment outcomes at the six-month stage of settlement. This included a moderate unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent, a very high participation rate of 95.6 per cent, high income levels and high rates of employment in highly-skilled and full-time work. Skill Stream Primary Applicants outperformed the general population on most of these measures. Employment outcomes (particularly the unemployment rate) of Migrating Unit Spouses and Partner Migrants were generally not as good. This is not unexpected, given that these migrants were not selected for migration on the basis of their employment prospects. However, what is encouraging is a participation rate for these groups that is substantially higher than the general Australian population, and indicative of an interest in finding work. Among Skill Stream Primary Applicants, Employer Sponsored migrants achieved the best employment outcomes – just a 1 per cent unemployment rate, with almost all working full-time in skilled work. Onshore Independent migrants and State/Territory Nominated migrants also achieved positive employment outcomes, albeit to a lesser extent. Employed Skill Stream Primary Applicants were most likely to be working in Professional fields – that is, in jobs requiring at least a Bachelor’s degree – and in the Health care and social assistance industry. Their likelihood of professional employment was about twice that of the Australian workforce. There was also strong alignment with existing skills, with the majority working in their nominated field, or in a field with a similar or higher skill level. Skill Stream Primary Applicants were also well-educated – nine-in-ten had at least one post-school qualification – with over half having an Australian qualification and three-quarters holding a qualification from overseas. Bachelor degrees, followed by Master degrees, were the most popular qualifications obtained by skilled migrants. The field of study for qualifications were largely consistent with the most common occupations of migrants, which shows most skilled migrants are utilising their skills in Australia. Consistent with these outcomes, Skill Stream Primary Applicants were, on average, employed for longer and held more jobs in the previous 12 months compared to other migrant categories. More than eight-in-ten migrants were from countries where English was not the main language spoken. Despite this, almost nine-in-ten migrants reported high levels of spoken English – an important pre-requisite to finding work. Skill Stream Primary Applicants migrated to Australia mostly to improve their future for themselves and their family or for economic opportunities. As expected, Partner Migrants migrated to join family in Australia. Consistent with this different focus, Migrating Unit Spouses and Partner Migrants were more likely to have provided unpaid care and assistance for family members and children

Simulating Auxiliary Inputs, Revisited

For any pair $(X,Z)$ of correlated random variables we can think of $Z$ as a randomized function of $X$. Provided that $Z$ is short, one can make this function computationally efficient by allowing it to be only approximately correct. In folklore this problem is known as \emph{simulating auxiliary inputs}. This idea of simulating auxiliary information turns out to be a powerful tool in computer science, finding applications in complexity theory, cryptography, pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge. In this paper we revisit this problem, achieving the following results: \begin{enumerate}[(a)] We discuss and compare efficiency of known results, finding the flaw in the best known bound claimed in the TCC'14 paper "How to Fake Auxiliary Inputs". We present a novel boosting algorithm for constructing the simulator. Our technique essentially fixes the flaw. This boosting proof is of independent interest, as it shows how to handle "negative mass" issues when constructing probability measures in descent algorithms. Our bounds are much better than bounds known so far. To make the simulator $(s,\epsilon)$-indistinguishable we need the complexity $O\left(s\cdot 2^{5\ell}\epsilon^{-2}\right)$ in time/circuit size, which is better by a factor $\epsilon^{-2}$ compared to previous bounds. In particular, with our technique we (finally) get meaningful provable security for the EUROCRYPT'09 leakage-resilient stream cipher instantiated with a standard 256-bit block cipher, like $\mathsf{AES256}$.Comment: Some typos present in the previous version have been correcte

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy Under Sticky Prices

This paper studies optimal .scal and monetary policy under sticky product prices. The theoretical framework is a stochastic production economy without capital. The government finances an exogenous stream of purchases by levying distortionary income taxes, printing money, and issuing one-period nominally risk-free bonds. The main findings of the paper are: First, for a miniscule degree of price stickiness (i.e., many times below available empirical estimates)the optimal volatility of in.ation is near zero. This result stands in stark contrast with the high volatility of inflation implied by the Ramsey allocation when prices are flexible. The finding is in line with a recent body of work on optimal monetary policy under nominal rigidities that ignores the role of optimal fiscal policy. Second, even small deviations from full price flexibility induce near random walk behavior in government debt and tax rates, as in economies with real non-state-contingent debt only. Finally, sluggish price adjustment raises the average nominal interest rate above the one called for by the Friedman rule.

Online Local Communities

A community in a network is a group of nodes that are densely and closely connected to each other, get sparsely connected to the nodes outside the community. Finding communities in a large network helps solve many real-world problems. But detecting such communities in a complex network by focusing on the whole network is not feasible. Instead, we focus on finding communities around one or more seed node(s) of interest. Therefore, in this project, we find local communities. Moreover, we consider the online setting where the whole graph is unknown in the beginning and we get a stream of edges, i.e., pair of nodes, or a stream of higher order structures, i.e., triangles of nodes. We created a new dataset that consists of web pages and their links by using the Internet Archive. We extended an existing online local graph community detection algorithm, called COEUS, for higher order structures such as triangles of nodes. We provide experimental results and comparison of the existing method and our proposed method using two public datasets, the Amazon and the DBLP as well as for our new Webpages dataset. In the experimental results, we see that the proposed method performs better than the existing method for one out of three test cases for the public dataset but not for our Webpages dataset. This is because the Webpages dataset has a large number of nodes with degree 1 which poses a problem for modified COEUS because it takes triangles as an input stream

Semantic Video Indexing Using MPEG Motion Vectors

With the diffusion of large video databases and "electronic program guides", the problem of semantic video indexing is of great interest. In literature we can found many video indexing algorithms, based on various types of low-level features, but the problem of semantic video indexing is less studied and surely it is a great challenging one. In this paper we present a particular semantic video indexing algorithm based on the motion information extracted from MPEG compressed bit-stream. This algorithm is an example of solution to the problem of finding a semantic event (scoring of a goal) in case of specific type of sequences (soccer video)