Research on The Optimization Strategy of Cross-border B2B Supply Chain with Service Cost Information Sharing

The development of cross-border e-commerce highlights the importance of service integration and information sharing. This paper considers a cross-border B2B supply chain which consists of a local manufacturer and a foreign trade service integrator. The service integrator holds the service cost structure as private information. The optimal decisions and maximum expected profits of the manufacturer and service integrator are analyzed under two scenarios：no information sharing versus information sharing. The paper finds that information sharing always benefit the manufacturer but not for the service integrator. In the meanwhile, the value of information is increased with the manufacturer’s forecast uncertainty about the service integrator’s service cost. The whole supply chain can get pareto improvement through the Nash bargaining mechanism

PARASOL: Parametric Style Control for Diffusion Image Synthesis

We propose PARASOL, a multi-modal synthesis model that enables disentangled, parametric control of the visual style of the image by jointly conditioning synthesis on both content and a fine-grained visual style embedding. We train a latent diffusion model (LDM) using specific losses for each modality and adapt the classifier-free guidance for encouraging disentangled control over independent content and style modalities at inference time. We leverage auxiliary semantic and style-based search to create training triplets for supervision of the LDM, ensuring complementarity of content and style cues. PARASOL shows promise for enabling nuanced control over visual style in diffusion models for image creation and stylization, as well as generative search where text-based search results may be adapted to more closely match user intent by interpolating both content and style descriptors.Comment: Added Appendi

How Warm is an Igloo?

Homeostasis maintains the human body temperature within a few degrees of 37oC. However, in severe environments, such as a harsh winter blizzard, the body will not be able to maintain a 37oC temperature without the aid of clothes, shelter, and sources of heat. We find the Igloo, a shelter made of ice and snow, a very interesting means of maintaining body temperature. In this project, we have created a mesh of the Igloo system in GAMBIT and ran simulations in FIDAP to examine temperature variation and air flow inside of the igloo, when the human body is the only source of heat. In the steady state temperature profile obtained, areas of highest temperature were located directly around and above the human, and close to the top of the igloo, the temperature was 289K. The areas of lowest temperature were around 266 K, located at the bottom of the igloo farthest from the human. Natural convection caused the velocity of the air in the igloo to range from 0 to 9mm/s. The FIDAP analysis did not take into account radiative heat transfer, so a separate analysis was done, which revealed that there is considerable heat transfer through radiation in an igloo

Bringing Stories Alive: Generating Interactive Fiction Worlds

World building forms the foundation of any task that requires narrative intelligence. In this work, we focus on procedurally generating interactive fiction worlds---text-based worlds that players "see" and "talk to" using natural language. Generating these worlds requires referencing everyday and thematic commonsense priors in addition to being semantically consistent, interesting, and coherent throughout. Using existing story plots as inspiration, we present a method that first extracts a partial knowledge graph encoding basic information regarding world structure such as locations and objects. This knowledge graph is then automatically completed utilizing thematic knowledge and used to guide a neural language generation model that fleshes out the rest of the world. We perform human participant-based evaluations, testing our neural model's ability to extract and fill-in a knowledge graph and to generate language conditioned on it against rule-based and human-made baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/rajammanabrolu/WorldGeneration

Time Series Analysis of the Impact of Rising Prices of Inorganic Fertilizers on Field Crops Production: A Case Study of Pakistan

In this study, we have analyzed the impact of rising prices of inorganic fertilizers on field crops production in Pakistan by using time series 1986 to 2012. Ordinary Least Square method was used to investigate model parameters. The empirical results showed that when price of fertilizer such as Urea, DAP, SSP and SOP increase 1 percent, production of Sugarcane,  Maize and Rice  were decrease at 91.146,1.943 and 4.443 tonnes respectively. The prices of major fertilizer products during the last five years are increasing. Now, as price increasing, the less used of fertilizers. Therefore, the agricultural productivity is low due to low use of inputs. The main increase was in the DAP price due to a high price on the international market. Now prices of major fertilizers, are Urea, 1700 DAP 4000, NP 2600, and SOP 3700, SSP 1200 per 50Kg bag respectively. Therefore, our study suggest that Government of Pakistan should support small farmers through credit schemes on affordable interest rate and subsidize on agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, seeds and pesticide. It will help in raising farm productivity. Keywords: Agriculture, Price of Fertilizers, Crop productio