Evaluation of the Immigrant Citizens Survey (ICS)

This evaluation undertakes a critical appraisal of the "Immigrant Citizens Survey (ICS)". The survey was funded under the European Integration Fund and jointly coordinated by the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF) and the Migration Policy Group (MPG). The survey was implemented in cooperation with research, polling and launch partners in the 7 countries covered by the survey. The survey was implemented in 2011 and 2012 and launched in May 2012

Industrial growth and the quality of institutions : what do (transition) economies have to gain from the Rule of Law?

The authors empirically test the link between industrial growth and indicators of institutional quality. They find significant evidence that institutional quality affects inindustrial growth in 27 Asian and Latin American countries. Their results suggest that the development of the legal and regulatory framework works its way to industrial growth through both investment and total factor productivity. The implications for policymakers in transition economies: Institution building should complement privatization, public and private investment in education, research and development, and measures to promote foreign direct investment. Specifically, policymakers should try to reduce corruption, eliminate bureacratic barriers, and improve the legal environment and contract enforcement. Special attention should also be given to measures to deepen financial intermediation, improve the financial sector infrastructure, and increase the efficiency of financial transactions.Governance Indicators,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration

A comparison of linear and non-linear calibrations for speaker recognition

In recent work on both generative and discriminative score to log-likelihood-ratio calibration, it was shown that linear transforms give good accuracy only for a limited range of operating points. Moreover, these methods required tailoring of the calibration training objective functions in order to target the desired region of best accuracy. Here, we generalize the linear recipes to non-linear ones. We experiment with a non-linear, non-parametric, discriminative PAV solution, as well as parametric, generative, maximum-likelihood solutions that use Gaussian, Student's T and normal-inverse-Gaussian score distributions. Experiments on NIST SRE'12 scores suggest that the non-linear methods provide wider ranges of optimal accuracy and can be trained without having to resort to objective function tailoring.Comment: accepted for Odyssey 2014: The Speaker and Language Recognition Worksho

Heteroclinic optimal control solutions for attitude motion planning

An analytical attitude motion planning method is presented that exploits the heteroclinic connections of an optimal kinematic control problem. This class of motion, of hyperbolic type, supply a special case of analytically defined rotations that can be further optimised to select a suitable reference motion that minimises accumulated torque and the final orientation error amongst these motions. This analytical approach could be used to improve the overall performance of a spacecraft’s attitude dynamics and control system when used alongside current flight tested tracking controllers. The resulting algorithm only involves optimising a small number of parameters of standard functions and is simple to implement

Observing and Verifying the Quantum Trajectory of a Mechanical Resonator

Continuous weak measurement allows localizing open quantum systems in state space, and tracing out their quantum trajectory as they evolve in time. Efficient quantum measurement schemes have previously enabled recording quantum trajectories of microwave photon and qubit states. We apply these concepts to a macroscopic mechanical resonator, and follow the quantum trajectory of its motional state conditioned on a continuous optical measurement record. Starting with a thermal mixture, we eventually obtain coherent states of 78% purity--comparable to a displaced thermal state of occupation 0.14. We introduce a retrodictive measurement protocol to directly verify state purity along the trajectory, and furthermore observe state collapse and decoherence. This opens the door to measurement-based creation of advanced quantum states, and potential tests of gravitational decoherence models.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure