516 research outputs found
Danish Aid Policy: Theory and Empirical Evidence
This paper is a study of Danish aid policy from the early 1960s to 1995. It includes (i) a review of officially stated aims and criteria, (ii) a descriptive analysis of actual behaviour in international comparative perspective, (iii) a review of the theoretical and empirical aid allocation literature, and (iv) a series of panel data regressions to further explore how Danish bilateral aid was, in actual fact, distributed country-by-country. A theoretical model explaining how the allocation process took place is also formulated. It underpins the empirical analysis from which it transpires that a two step model is a useful way of analysing Danish aid allocations. The first step is whether to select a country or not, and the second involves the decision of how much aid to commit. The empirical analysis demonstrates that Danish aid has been guided in both steps by officially stated aims and criteria in an expected and statistically significant manner although a clear Eastern and Southern Africa bias was found. Another general result is that the relative weights of the explanatory variables have varied both from year-to-year and between sub-periods.Danish foreign aid; modelling aid allocation; panel data analysis
Training for Speech Recognition on Coprocessors
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has increased in popularity in recent
years. The evolution of processor and storage technologies has enabled more
advanced ASR mechanisms, fueling the development of virtual assistants such as
Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Home. The interest in
such assistants, in turn, has amplified the novel developments in ASR research.
However, despite this popularity, there has not been a detailed training
efficiency analysis of modern ASR systems. This mainly stems from: the
proprietary nature of many modern applications that depend on ASR, like the
ones listed above; the relatively expensive co-processor hardware that is used
to accelerate ASR by big vendors to enable such applications; and the absence
of well-established benchmarks. The goal of this paper is to address the latter
two of these challenges. The paper first describes an ASR model, based on a
deep neural network inspired by recent work in this domain, and our experiences
building it. Then we evaluate this model on three CPU-GPU co-processor
platforms that represent different budget categories. Our results demonstrate
that utilizing hardware acceleration yields good results even without high-end
equipment. While the most expensive platform (10X price of the least expensive
one) converges to the initial accuracy target 10-30% and 60-70% faster than the
other two, the differences among the platforms almost disappear at slightly
higher accuracy targets. In addition, our results further highlight both the
difficulty of evaluating ASR systems due to the complex, long, and resource
intensive nature of the model training in this domain, and the importance of
establishing benchmarks for ASR.Comment: under submission to pvldb even though used acm style to submit her
Den dramaturgiske coach: − Om kunstnerisk proces, bevidsthed og coaching
The essay deals with dramaturgical coaching of artistic processes
Greatest HITs: Higher Inductive Types in Coinductive Definitions via Induction under Clocks
Guarded recursion is a powerful modal approach to recursion that can be seen
as an abstract form of step-indexing. It is currently used extensively in
separation logic to model programming languages with advanced features by
solving domain equations also with negative occurrences. In its multi-clocked
version, guarded recursion can also be used to program with and reason about
coinductive types, encoding the productivity condition required for recursive
definitions in types. This paper presents the first type theory combining
multi-clocked guarded recursion with the features of Cubical Type Theory, as
well as a denotational semantics. Using the combination of Higher Inductive
Types (HITs) and guarded recursion allows for simple programming and reasoning
about coinductive types that are traditionally hard to represent in type
theory, such as the type of finitely branching labelled transition systems. For
example, our results imply that bisimilarity for these imply path equality, and
so proofs can be transported along bisimilarity proofs. Among our technical
contributions is a new principle of induction under clocks. This allows
universal quantification over clocks to commute with HITs up to equivalence of
types, and is crucial for the encoding of coinductive types. Such commutativity
requirements have been formulated for inductive types as axioms in previous
type theories with multi-clocked guarded recursion, but our present formulation
as an induction principle allows for the formulation of general computation
rules.Comment: 29 page
Cross Functional Integration in the Process of Product Innovation
Integration across departments, functions, and knowledge areas is important for success in the process of product innovation. Research of organizations, whether private or public, demonstrates, however, that cross functional integration is difficult to achieve in praxis. This problem area: Why is cross functional integration – in SMEs – in the process of product innovation so difficult in praxis? – sets up the foundation for this PhD. By focusing on cross functional integration in small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and by utilizing a qualitative research design in studies of the micro politics of cross functional integration, the PhD makes a novel contribution within an area of research largely overlooked by previous literatures...
Cell wall arabinan is essential for guard cell function
Stomatal guard cells play a key role in the ability of plants to survive on dry land, because their movements regulate the exchange of gases and water vapor between the external environment and the interior of the plant. The walls of these cells are exceptionally strong and must undergo large and reversible deformation during stomatal opening and closing. The molecular basis of the unique strength and flexibility of guard cell walls is unknown. We show that degradation of cell wall arabinan prevents either stomatal opening or closing. This locking of guard cell wall movements can be reversed if homogalacturonan is subsequently removed from the wall. We suggest that arabinans maintain flexibility in the cell wall by preventing homogalacturonan polymers from forming tight associations
Arabidopsis plants perform arithmetic division to prevent starvation at night
Photosynthetic starch reserves that accumulate in Arabidopsis leaves during
the day decrease approximately linearly with time at night to support
metabolism and growth. We find that the rate of decrease is adjusted to
accommodate variation in the time of onset of darkness and starch content, such
that reserves last almost precisely until dawn. Generation of these dynamics
therefore requires an arithmetic division computation between the starch
content and expected time to dawn. We introduce two novel chemical kinetic
models capable of implementing analog arithmetic division. Predictions from the
models are successfully tested in plants perturbed by a night-time light period
or by mutations in starch degradation pathways. Our experiments indicate which
components of the starch degradation apparatus may be important for appropriate
arithmetic division. Our results are potentially relevant for any biological
system dependent on a food reserve for survival over a predictable time period.Comment: To be published in eLIF
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