Impact of Credit Default Swaps on Firms’ Operational Efficiency

As one of the most important financial innovations in the last two decades, credit default swap (CDS) contracts have been initiated and actively traded in the market to hedge against credit risks. However, little is known about how these financial innovations affect an underlying firm’s operations. In this empirical study, we find that an underlying firm’s operational efficiency is significantly improved with the inception of CDS trading. Our results are robust to multiple causal identification strategies. Further analysis suggests that the inception of CDS tends to enhance the operational efficiency of a firm through the supply chain financing capability and trade credit. We also postulate that CDS leads to enhanced efficiency through institutional monitoring and improvements in management effectiveness. We then obtain suggestive evidence. Our findings have direct implications concerning the ongoing policy debate surrounding CDS. We contribute to operations management research by exploring how innovations in the financial market would, in turn, affect the operational performance of firms

GeneNarrator: Mining the Literaturome for Relations Among Genes

The rapid development of microarray and other genomic technologies now enables biologists to monitor the expression of hundreds, even thousands of genes in a single experiment. Interpreting the biological meaning of the expression patterns still relies largely on biologist\u27s domain knowledge, as well as on information collected from the literature and various public databases. Yet individual experts’ domain knowledge is insufficient for large data sets, and collecting and analyzing this information manually from the literature and/or public databases is tedious and time-consuming. Computer-aided functional analysis tools are therefore highly desirable. We describe the architecture of GeneNarrator, a text mining system for functional analysis of microarray data. This system’s primary purpose is to test the feasibility of a more general system architecture based on a two-stage clustering strategy that is explained in detail. Given a list of genes, GeneNarrator collects abstracts about them from PubMed, then clusters the abstracts into functional topics in a first clustering stage. In the second clustering stage, the genes are clustered into groups based on similarities in their distributions of occurrence across topics. This novel two-stage architecture, the primary contribution of this project, has benefits not easily provided by onestage clustering

Grounding Classical Task Planners via Vision-Language Models

Classical planning systems have shown great advances in utilizing rule-based human knowledge to compute accurate plans for service robots, but they face challenges due to the strong assumptions of perfect perception and action executions. To tackle these challenges, one solution is to connect the symbolic states and actions generated by classical planners to the robot's sensory observations, thus closing the perception-action loop. This research proposes a visually-grounded planning framework, named TPVQA, which leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect action failures and verify action affordances towards enabling successful plan execution. Results from quantitative experiments show that TPVQA surpasses competitive baselines from previous studies in task completion rate

A snoRNA modulates mRNA 3' end processing and regulates the expression of a subset of mRNAs.

mRNA 3' end processing is an essential step in gene expression. It is well established that canonical eukaryotic pre-mRNA 3' processing is carried out within a macromolecular machinery consisting of dozens of trans-acting proteins. However, it is unknown whether RNAs play any role in this process. Unexpectedly, we found that a subset of small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are associated with the mammalian mRNA 3' processing complex. These snoRNAs primarily interact with Fip1, a component of cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor (CPSF). We have functionally characterized one of these snoRNAs and our results demonstrated that the U/A-rich SNORD50A inhibits mRNA 3' processing by blocking the Fip1-poly(A) site (PAS) interaction. Consistently, SNORD50A depletion altered the Fip1-RNA interaction landscape and changed the alternative polyadenylation (APA) profiles and/or transcript levels of a subset of genes. Taken together, our data revealed a novel function for snoRNAs and provided the first evidence that non-coding RNAs may play an important role in regulating mRNA 3' processing

Integrating Action Knowledge and LLMs for Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worlds

Task planning systems have been developed to help robots use human knowledge (about actions) to complete long-horizon tasks. Most of them have been developed for "closed worlds" while assuming the robot is provided with complete world knowledge. However, the real world is generally open, and the robots frequently encounter unforeseen situations that can potentially break the planner's completeness. Could we leverage the recent advances on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable classical planning systems to deal with novel situations? This paper introduces a novel framework, called COWP, for open-world task planning and situation handling. COWP dynamically augments the robot's action knowledge, including the preconditions and effects of actions, with task-oriented commonsense knowledge. COWP embraces the openness from LLMs, and is grounded to specific domains via action knowledge. For systematic evaluations, we collected a dataset that includes 1,085 execution-time situations. Each situation corresponds to a state instance wherein a robot is potentially unable to complete a task using a solution that normally works. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in the success rate of service tasks. Additionally, we have demonstrated COWP using a mobile manipulator. Supplementary materials are available at: https://cowplanning.github.io/Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2210.0128

Improving Surgical Situational Awareness with Signed Distance Field: A Pilot Study in Virtual Reality

The introduction of image-guided surgical navigation (IGSN) has greatly benefited technically demanding surgical procedures by providing real-time support and guidance to the surgeon during surgery. \hi{To develop effective IGSN, a careful selection of the surgical information and the medium to present this information to the surgeon is needed. However, this is not a trivial task due to the broad array of available options.} To address this problem, we have developed an open-source library that facilitates the development of multimodal navigation systems in a wide range of surgical procedures relying on medical imaging data. To provide guidance, our system calculates the minimum distance between the surgical instrument and the anatomy and then presents this information to the user through different mechanisms. The real-time performance of our approach is achieved by calculating Signed Distance Fields at initialization from segmented anatomical volumes. Using this framework, we developed a multimodal surgical navigation system to help surgeons navigate anatomical variability in a skull base surgery simulation environment. Three different feedback modalities were explored: visual, auditory, and haptic. To evaluate the proposed system, a pilot user study was conducted in which four clinicians performed mastoidectomy procedures with and without guidance. Each condition was assessed using objective performance and subjective workload metrics. This pilot user study showed improvements in procedural safety without additional time or workload. These results demonstrate our pipeline's successful use case in the context of mastoidectomy.Comment: First two authors contributed equally. 6 page

Morphological asymmetries of quasar host galaxies with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam

How does the host galaxy morphology influence a central quasar or vice versa? We address this question by measuring the asymmetries of 2424 SDSS quasar hosts at $0.2<z<0.8$ using broad-band ($grizy$) images from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. Control galaxies (without quasars) are selected by matching the redshifts and stellar masses of the quasar hosts. A two-step pipeline is run to decompose the PSF and \sersic\ components, and then measure asymmetry indices ($A_{\rm CAS}$, $A_{\rm outer}$, and $A_{\rm shape}$) of each quasar host and control galaxy. We find a mild correlation between host asymmetry and AGN bolometric luminosity ($L_{\rm bol}$) for the full sample (spearman correlation of 0.37) while a stronger trend is evident at the highest luminosities ($L_{\rm bol}>45$). This then manifests itself into quasar hosts being more asymmetric, on average, when they harbor a more massive and highly accreting black hole. The merger fraction also positively correlates with $L_{\rm bol}$ and reaches up to 35\% for the most luminous. Compared to control galaxies, quasar hosts are marginally more asymmetric (excess of 0.017 in median at 9.4$\sigma$ level) and the merger fractions are similar ($\sim 16.5\%$). We quantify the dependence of asymmetry on optical band which demonstrates that mergers are more likely to be identified with the bluer bands and the correlation between $L_{\rm bol}$ and asymmetry is also stronger in such bands. We stress that the band dependence, indicative of a changing stellar population, is an important factor in considering the influence of mergers on AGN activity.Comment: 27 pages, 28 figure

Ferroelectric BaTiO3/SrTiO3 multilayered thin films for room-temperature tunable microwave elements

Ferroelectric BaTiO3/SrTiO3 with optimized c-axis-oriented multilayered thin films were epitaxially fabricated on (001) MgO substrates. The microstructural studies indicate that the in-plane interface relationships between the films as well as the substrate are determined to be (001)SrTiO3//(001)BaTiO3//(001)MgO and [100]SrTiO3//[100]BaTiO3//[100]MgO. The microwave (5 to 18 GHz) dielectric measurements reveal that the multilayered thin films have excellent dielectric properties with large dielectric constant, low dielectric loss, and high dielectric tunability, which suggests that the as-grown ferroelectric multilayered thin films can be developed for room-temperature tunable microwave elements and related device applications

In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet, for just a moment,-

CHI can be a multisensory overload. Attendees endure days of workshops, presentations, evening parties, and ephemeral interactions. This paper attempts to disrupt that onslaught of activities [9]. It draws inspiration from theories and methods already in HCI-eg mindfulness [1], reflective design [8], and slow design [4, 7]-to bring eight pages of silence to the conference. This is meant to disrupt CHI's busy schedule and help attendees foster resilience. In pursuit of these aims, the authors will use the time and pages offered by this paper to facilitate a group silence; quiet, for just a moment, in the midst of the hurricane that is CHI