Optimal control under uncertainty: Application to the issue of CAT bonds

We propose a general framework for studying optimal issue of CAT bonds in the presence of uncertainty on the parameters. In particular, the intensity of arrival of natural disasters is inhomogeneous and may depend on unknown parameters. Given a prior on the distribution of the unknown parameters, we explain how it should evolve according to the classical Bayes rule. Taking these progressive prior-adjustments into account, we characterize the optimal policy through a quasi-variational parabolic equation, which can be solved numerically. We provide examples of application in the context of hurricanes in Florida

Optimal control under uncertainty and Bayesian parameters adjustments

We propose a general framework for studying optimal impulse control problem in the presence of uncertainty on the parameters. Given a prior on the distribution of the unknown parameters, we explain how it should evolve according to the classical Bayesian rule after each impulse. Taking these progressive prior-adjustments into account, we characterize the optimal policy through a quasi-variational parabolic equation, which can be solved numerically. The derivation of the dynamic programming equation seems to be new in this context. The main difficulty lies in the nature of the set of controls which depends in a non trivial way on the initial data through the filtration itself

3. Discrimination, Othering, and the Political Instrumentalizing of Pandemic Disease

The complex history of pandemics has created a diversified array of anti-epidemic responses, which have allowed structures of authority to express their power in multiple ways. In this paper, by considering theories applicable to cases ranging from Europe to Asia, from the 11th to the 18th century, we conduct a comparative analysis capable of identifying common traits and radical differences, aiming to show how such deployment of power was not always commensurate with the medical theories of the age, and with the gravity of the epidemiological situation. Specifically, we analyse how Western European States, in their process of formation, employed the concept of ‘public health’ to create the grounds for an unprecedented exercise of power over the private sphere. Furthermore, we compare this attitude with the discrimination of the minority known as burakumin in Japan, which was destined to undertake any ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ occupation, to preserve the immunity of the community. In other words, we examine how structures of power have exploited states of exception to implement control measures beyond the needs of the situation through an increasingly hypertrophic apparatus of security; and ways in which political authorities have not aligned with medical or philosophical authorities of their times, for opportunistic reasons that benefited their own social, religious, or racial group. Keywords: Pandemics, Discrimination, Immunity, Purity, Burakumi

Agritempo: manual do usuário.

Descrição do sistema. Serviços e produtos disponíveis. Funções do sistema passo-a-passo-produtos. Produtos disponíveis apenas para alguns estados.bitstream/CNPTIA/11984/1/doc73.pd

Pequeno manual para escrita de artigos científicos: estrutura textual, dicas e compêndio gramatical.

Introdução. Estrutura textual. Recursos linguísticos. Tópicos gramaticais. relação autor-leitor. Refacção textual.bitstream/CNPTIA/11545/1/doc68.pdfAcesso em: 29 fev. 2008

The puzzle of yakuza’s longevity: the endurance of the yakuza and its implications for theories of organised criminality

While mainstream criminology has traditionally considered Japan a low-crime, law-abiding society, the Japanese crime syndicates collectively known as the yakuza have been active since the 17th century. Despite their longevity, research has often neglected this form of organised crime, both domestically and abroad. This study aims to solve the puzzle of the endurance of the yakuza within what is regarded as one of the safest societies in the world. Through recourse to government documents and primary bibliographical sources, as well as interviews with both current and ex-yakuza, researchers and journalists, this research explores the historical, social, economic, political, and legislative roots of the yakuza’s resilience. This study considers the role of social capital and ethnicity, the impact of 25 years of economic stagnation, the part played by emergent neoliberalism, as well as the ways in which corruption and ideological positions have connected the yakuza to other elements within Japanese society, in explaining the yakuza’s endurance. Moreover, the study also explores the significance of the increasingly restrictive anti-yakuza countermeasures that have been introduced in recent decades, and reflects on how these have variously impacted on the evolution of the yakuza and its prospects moving forward

Les toitures polychromes en Bourgogne du XIVe au XXe siècle

Les toitures de tuiles multicolores sont généralement considérées comme le troisième élément caractéristique de la Bourgogne après ses vins et sa gastronomie. Les affiches touristiques se sont emparées, depuis presque un siècle, de cette particularité si photogénique. L’Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, le château de La Rochepot, la cathédrale Saint-Bénigne et l’Hôtel de Voguë à Dijon constituent les quatre piliers de l’iconographie régionale. Dans le vocabulaire courant, la dénomination « toit bourguign..

Human Activity Recognition with Pose-driven Attention to RGB

International audienceWe address human action recognition from multi-modal video data involving articulated pose and RGB frames and propose a two-stream approach. The pose stream is processed with a convolutional model taking as input a 3D tensor holding data from a sub-sequence. A specific joint ordering, which respects the topology of the human body, ensures that different convolutional layers correspond to meaningful levels of abstraction. The raw RGB stream is handled by a spatio-temporal soft-attention mechanism conditioned on features from the pose network. An LSTM network receives input from a set of image locations at each instant. A trainable glimpse sensor extracts features on a set of pre-defined locations specified by the pose stream, namely the 4 hands of the two people involved in the activity. Appearance features give important cues on hand motion and on objects held in each hand. We show that it is of high interest to shift the attention to different hands at different time steps depending on the activity itself. Finally a temporal attention mechanism learns how to fuse LSTM features over time. State-of-the-art results are achieved on the largest dataset for human activity recognition, namely NTU-RGB+D

Cross-view and Cross-pose Completion for 3D Human Understanding

Human perception and understanding is a major domain of computer vision which, like many other vision subdomains recently, stands to gain from the use of large models pre-trained on large datasets. We hypothesize that the most common pre-training strategy of relying on general purpose, object-centric image datasets such as ImageNet, is limited by an important domain shift. On the other hand, collecting domain specific ground truth such as 2D or 3D labels does not scale well. Therefore, we propose a pre-training approach based on self-supervised learning that works on human-centric data using only images. Our method uses pairs of images of humans: the first is partially masked and the model is trained to reconstruct the masked parts given the visible ones and a second image. It relies on both stereoscopic (cross-view) pairs, and temporal (cross-pose) pairs taken from videos, in order to learn priors about 3D as well as human motion. We pre-train a model for body-centric tasks and one for hand-centric tasks. With a generic transformer architecture, these models outperform existing self-supervised pre-training methods on a wide set of human-centric downstream tasks, and obtain state-of-the-art performance for instance when fine-tuning for model-based and model-free human mesh recovery