Impediments to Growth of the Garment and Food Industries in Cambodia: Exploring Potential Benefits of the ASEAN-PRC FTA

This paper attempts to identify structural constraints to growth and exports within Cambodia’s key industries and to consider the policy actions needed to reduce obstacles to trade. The paper places special emphasis on Cambodia’s exports to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), given the major export opportunities arising from the free trade agreement (FTA) between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the PRC, known as the ASEAN–[People’s Republic of] China FTA (ACFTA). A qualitative case study method was applied at the firm-level by conducting face-to-face interviews to identify the impediments to the growth and exports of key industries in Cambodia, and to examine the opportunities and challenges presented by the ACFTA. This study covers the garment and food industries, which are critical to the economic development of Cambodia in the context of regional and global economic integration. The food industry, with its large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, has great potential for contributing to pro-poor growth in Cambodia, while the textile industry is the largest employer in the Cambodian labor force and is critical for poverty reduction efforts through export-led growth. The study also provides policy recommendations at both the industry and government levels.Cambodian economy; garment industry; food industry; ASEAN-[People’s Republic of] China FTA; firm-level analysis; bribery

Economic pragmatism and regional economic integration : the case of Cambodia

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Chheang Vannarith, Visiting Fellow, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, explains that "International economic cooperation and regional integration are key principles of Cambodia’s foreign policy.

Cambodia-North Korea relations

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Chheang Vannarith, President of Asian Vision Institute, Phnom Penh, explains that "before the imposition of the latest round of United Nations sanctions on North Korea, the relationship with Cambodia had helped Pyongyang maintain access to trade.

State and Tourism Planning: A Case Study of Cambodia

State is a catalyst in tourism planning not just because of economic development and poverty reduction but also for national image and cultural identity. The paper examines the role of state in tourism development policies in post conflict Cambodia by discussing the talks/speeches made by Prime Minister Hun Sen in respect of tourism development policies in Cambodia. Twenty eight speeches were identified and analyzed under the framework of textual analysis and the discourse of power. Nine factor were determined in the context of tourism development: security and safety for tourists; infrastructure and tourism facilities development; stakeholders collaboration; cultural heritage preservation; environmental protection; human resources development; tourism products promotion; simplification of travel procedures; and regional cooperation

Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam : Economic Reforms and Sub-regional Integration

This paper reviews the gradual transitions and progress of economic reforms and transformations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (CLV) since the late 1980s and the subregional cooperation and economic integration among the three countries in promoting economic development and poverty reduction especially along the border areas under the development triangle initiative. Liberal market economy in Cambodia, socialist-oriented market economy in Laos and Vietnam, and global and regional economic integration stay the mainstream of the political economy of development of CLV countries. State is the main actor in facilitating economic growth while the market is the driving force. With relatively high economic growth rate driven by trade openness and the inward flow of foreign direct investments, CLV countries are emerging to be an integral part of the regional economic dynamism of ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific region. However, the remaining challenges need to be tackled are institutional capacity, good governance, and labor productivity

Medical Text Simplification: Optimizing for Readability with Unlikelihood Training and Reranked Beam Search Decoding

Text simplification has emerged as an increasingly useful application of AI for bridging the communication gap in specialized fields such as medicine, where the lexicon is often dominated by technical jargon and complex constructs. Despite notable progress, methods in medical simplification sometimes result in the generated text having lower quality and diversity. In this work, we explore ways to further improve the readability of text simplification in the medical domain. We propose (1) a new unlikelihood loss that encourages generation of simpler terms and (2) a reranked beam search decoding method that optimizes for simplicity, which achieve better performance on readability metrics on three datasets. This study's findings offer promising avenues for improving text simplification in the medical field.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Finding

Social Visual Behavior Analytics for Autism Therapy of Children Based on Automated Mutual Gaze Detection

Social visual behavior, as a type of non-verbal communication, plays a central role in studying social cognitive processes in interactive and complex settings of autism therapy interventions. However, for social visual behavior analytics in children with autism, it is challenging to collect gaze data manually and evaluate them because it costs a lot of time and effort for human coders. In this paper, we introduce a social visual behavior analytics approach by quantifying the mutual gaze performance of children receiving play-based autism interventions using an automated mutual gaze detection framework. Our analysis is based on a video dataset that captures and records social interactions between children with autism and their therapy trainers (N=28 observations, 84 video clips, 21 Hrs duration). The effectiveness of our framework was evaluated by comparing the mutual gaze ratio derived from the mutual gaze detection framework with the human-coded ratio values. We analyzed the mutual gaze frequency and duration across different therapy settings, activities, and sessions. We created mutual gaze-related measures for social visual behavior score prediction using multiple machine learning-based regression models. The results show that our method provides mutual gaze measures that reliably represent (or even replace) the human coders' hand-coded social gaze measures and effectively evaluates and predicts ASD children's social visual performance during the intervention. Our findings have implications for social interaction analysis in small-group behavior assessments in numerous co-located settings in (special) education and in the workplace.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE) 202

Immersive Virtual Reality and Robotics for Upper Extremity Rehabilitation

Stroke patients often experience upper limb impairments that restrict their mobility and daily activities. Physical therapy (PT) is the most effective method to improve impairments, but low patient adherence and participation in PT exercises pose significant challenges. To overcome these barriers, a combination of virtual reality (VR) and robotics in PT is promising. However, few systems effectively integrate VR with robotics, especially for upper limb rehabilitation. Additionally, traditional VR rehabilitation primarily focuses on hand movements rather than joint movements of the limb. This work introduces a new virtual rehabilitation solution that combines VR with KinArm robotics and a wearable elbow sensor to measure elbow joint movements. The framework also enhances the capabilities of a traditional robotic device (KinArm) used for motor dysfunction assessment and rehabilitation. A preliminary study with non-clinical participants (n = 16) was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the proposed VR framework. We used a two-way repeated measures experimental design where participants performed two tasks (Circle and Diamond) with two conditions (VR and VR KinArm). We found no main effect of the conditions for task completion time. However, there were significant differences in both the normalized number of mistakes and recorded elbow joint angles (captured as resistance change values from the wearable sensor) between the Circle and Diamond tasks. Additionally, we report the system usability, task load, and presence in the proposed VR framework. This system demonstrates the potential advantages of an immersive, multi-sensory approach and provides future avenues for research in developing more cost-effective, tailored, and personalized upper limb solutions for home therapy applications.Comment: Submitted to International Journal of Human-Computer Interactio

A Mendelian Trait for Olfactory Sensitivity Affects Odor Experience and Food Selection

SummaryHumans vary in acuity to many odors [1–4], with variation within olfactory receptor (OR) genes contributing to these differences [5–9]. How such variation also affects odor experience and food selection remains uncertain [10], given that such effects occur for taste [11–15]. Here we investigate β-ionone, which shows extreme sensitivity differences [4, 16, 17]. β-ionone is a key aroma in foods and beverages [18–21] and is added to products in order to give a pleasant floral note [22, 23]. Genome-wide and in vitro assays demonstrate rs6591536 as the causal variant for β-ionone odor sensitivity. rs6591536 encodes a N183D substitution in the second extracellular loop of OR5A1 and explains >96% of the observed phenotypic variation, resembling a monogenic Mendelian trait. Individuals carrying genotypes for β-ionone sensitivity can more easily differentiate between food and beverage stimuli with and without added β-ionone. Sensitive individuals typically describe β-ionone in foods and beverages as “fragrant” and “floral,” whereas less-sensitive individuals describe these stimuli differently. rs6591536 genotype also influences emotional associations and explains differences in food and product choices. These studies demonstrate that an OR variant that influences olfactory sensitivity can affect how people experience and respond to foods, beverages, and other products