Currency Wars in the Advanced World. Resisting Appreciation at a Time of Change in Central Banking Monetary Consensus

The purpose of this paper is to consider certain consequences of large post- crisis capital flows in advanced economies. Specifically, I offer an examination of the Swiss response to large capital inflows during the early stages of the global financial crisis. Why did the Swiss National Bank (SNB) intervene in the foreign exchange market and introduce an exchange rate floor? Why did the SNB gamble with its highly valued anti-inflationary reputation in attempting to stem the appreciation of the Swiss franc? To answer these questions, this paper suggests a broader and more complete explanation than one that focuses solely on the configuration of domestic interests. Specifically, the paper argues that a thorough explanation of the SNB\u2019s response requires accounting for the changing monetary paradigm of the central banking community. This emerging monetary paradigm influenced the SNB\u2019s policy decisions by making the SNB particularly sensitive to financial stability risks and by providing it with the policy space to experiment with (macroprudential) tools to manage these risks

Compute-and-Forward: Harnessing Interference through Structured Codes

Interference is usually viewed as an obstacle to communication in wireless networks. This paper proposes a new strategy, compute-and-forward, that exploits interference to obtain significantly higher rates between users in a network. The key idea is that relays should decode linear functions of transmitted messages according to their observed channel coefficients rather than ignoring the interference as noise. After decoding these linear equations, the relays simply send them towards the destinations, which given enough equations, can recover their desired messages. The underlying codes are based on nested lattices whose algebraic structure ensures that integer combinations of codewords can be decoded reliably. Encoders map messages from a finite field to a lattice and decoders recover equations of lattice points which are then mapped back to equations over the finite field. This scheme is applicable even if the transmitters lack channel state information.Comment: IEEE Trans. Info Theory, to appear. 23 pages, 13 figure

Enterprise Content Management - A Literature Review

Managing information and content on an enterprise-wide scale is challenging. Enterprise content management (ECM) can be considered as an integrated approach to information management. While this concept received much attention from practitioners, ECM research is still an emerging field of IS research. Most authors that deal with ECM claim that there is little scholarly literature available. After approximately one decade of ECM research, this paper provides an in-depth review of the body of academic research: the ECM domain, its evolution, and main topics are characterized. An established ECM research framework is adopted, refined, and explained with its associated elements and working definitions. On this basis, 68 articles are reviewed, classified, and concepts are derived. Prior research is synthesized and findings are integrated in a concept-centric way. Further, implications for research and practice, including future trends, are drawn

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement

Airport airside balanced capacity usage and planning

U doktorskoj disertaciji je predložen postupak za analizu kapaciteta vazdušne strane aerodroma, za zadata fizička i operativna ograničenja, i zadate karakteristike potražnje. Ovaj postupak podrazumeva povezivanje (postojećeg) modela za procenu kapaciteta sistema poletno-sletnih staza sa (proširenim) modelom za procenu kapaciteta pristanišne platforme, kroz njihovu funkcionalnu vezu. Cilj ove doktorske disertacije je bio vrednovanje i, po potrebi, modifikovanje i proširenje postojećih modela za procenu kapaciteta platforme, kao i definisanje funkcionalne veze između poletno-sletne staze i platforme za različite tipove saobraćaja. Postojeći modeli su prošireni tako da uzimaju u obzir ograničenja po tipu aviona i korisnicima (npr. aviokompanije), kao i po vrsti saobraćaja. U cilju analize osetljivosti, predlažene su obvojnice za prikazivanje kapaciteta platforme određene konfiguracije, u zavisnosti od strukture potražnje u odnosu na glavne uticajne faktore. Analiza je obuhvatila dva osnovna tipa aerodroma sa aspekta njihove uloge u mrežama vazdušnog saobraćaja, a to su: izvorno-ciljni aerodromi, sa dominantnim saobraćajem od-tačke-do-tačke, i hub aerodromi, sa dominantnim transfernim saobraćajem za koji je karakteristično da se koncentriše u talase. Dodatno su analizirani i aerodromi na kojima postoje oba tipa saobraćaja. Rezultati disertacije pokazuju da se za izvorno-ciljne aerodrome može koristiti standardni pristup prilikom analize ukupnog kapaciteta vazdušne strane aerodroma, u kome se poletno-sletna staza i pristanišna platforma posmatraju odvojeno, pri čemu manji kapacitet nameće ograničenje ukupnog kapaciteta. Sa druge strane, u slučaju hub aerodroma kapacitet platforme i kapacitet poletno-sletne staze se ne mogu posmatrati nezavisno jedan od drugog. S tim u skladu, u ovoj doktorskoj disertaciji predložen je model za procenu kapaciteta platforme na hub aerodromima, koji pored konfiguracije platforme i strukture potražnje uzima u obzir i kapacitet poletno-sletne staze, kao i parametre koji opisuju talasnu strukturu saobraćaja...The thesis proposes an approach to analyzing the capacity of the existing (built) system under given physical and operational constraints and for given demand characteristics. The approach considers the linking of the (existing) runway capacity model with the (extended) apron capacity model, through the runway-apron functional relationship. The objective of the thesis was to evaluate and, if necessary, to modify/expand the existing apron capacity estimation models, as well as to define functional relationship between the runway system and apron(s). Existing apron capacity models are modified to include constraints on both aircraft classes and users (e.g. airlines), considering also different traffic types. The thesis also suggests apron capacity envelopes to illustrate sensitivity of apron capacity to changes in the demand structure with respect to dominant users, provided for a given apron configuration. Two general airport categories with respect to the role of the airport in the air transport network are analyzed: origin-destination airports (serving primarily point-to-point flights) and hub airports (serving primarily airline/alliance coordinated flights). Furthermore, the thesis also considers the co-existence of point-to-point and coordinated flights at a single airport. The results of the thesis show that the common approach in the overall airside capacity analysis can be applied at origin-destination airports: the runway system and apron(s) can be observed independently of each other, deriving the conclusion on the overall airside capacity by comparing the two. On the other hand, the finding of the thesis is that capacities of the runway system and apron(s) at the hub airports have to be observed linked to each other. Consequently, a model to estimate apron capacity at hub airport is offered in the thesis. In addition to apron configuration and demand structure it also takes into consideration: hubbing parameters and the runway system performance..

A Parallel Distributed Strategy for Arraying a Scattered Robot Swarm

We consider the problem of organizing a scattered group of $n$ robots in two-dimensional space, with geometric maximum distance $D$ between robots. The communication graph of the swarm is connected, but there is no central authority for organizing it. We want to arrange them into a sorted and equally-spaced array between the robots with lowest and highest label, while maintaining a connected communication network. In this paper, we describe a distributed method to accomplish these goals, without using central control, while also keeping time, travel distance and communication cost at a minimum. We proceed in a number of stages (leader election, initial path construction, subtree contraction, geometric straightening, and distributed sorting), none of which requires a central authority, but still accomplishes best possible parallelization. The overall arraying is performed in $O(n)$ time, $O(n^2)$ individual messages, and $O(nD)$ travel distance. Implementation of the sorting and navigation use communication messages of fixed size, and are a practical solution for large populations of low-cost robots

M3PT: A Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging

POI tagging aims to annotate a point of interest (POI) with some informative tags, which facilitates many services related to POIs, including search, recommendation, and so on. Most of the existing solutions neglect the significance of POI images and seldom fuse the textual and visual features of POIs, resulting in suboptimal tagging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging, namely M3PT, which achieves enhanced POI tagging through fusing the target POI's textual and visual features, and the precise matching between the multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first devise a domain-adaptive image encoder (DIE) to obtain the image embeddings aligned to their gold tags' semantics. Then, in M3PT's text-image fusion module (TIF), the textual and visual representations are fully fused into the POIs' content embeddings for the subsequent matching. In addition, we adopt a contrastive learning strategy to further bridge the gap between the representations of different modalities. To evaluate the tagging models' performance, we have constructed two high-quality POI tagging datasets from the real-world business scenario of Ali Fliggy. Upon the datasets, we conducted the extensive experiments to demonstrate our model's advantage over the baselines of uni-modality and multi-modality, and verify the effectiveness of important components in M3PT, including DIE, TIF and the contrastive learning strategy.Comment: Accepted by KDD 202