948 research outputs found
Religion, religious fervour, and universalist education
This paper is conceived from a secular perspective, and designed to address three elements identified in the call for papers: “Pluralistic tendencies”, their counterpart of “exclusivist attitudes”, and “creating an ethos of inter-religious harmony”. I choose to tackle these aspects by (a) exploring the meaning of religion, (b) addressing a specific attitude often corresponding to religion, namely religious fervour, and (c) assessing the validity and instrumentality of facilitating a universalist education as a tool to defuse “mistrust and hatred among various faith-communities”. The following paper is intended to serve only as a preliminary discussion guidance paper
The Economic Incentives for Sharing Security Information
Given that Information Technology (IT) security has emerged as an important issue in the last few years, the subject of security information sharing among firms, as a tool to minimize security breaches, has gained the interest of practitioners and academics. To promote the disclosure and sharing of cyber-security information among firms, the US federal government has encouraged the establishment of many industry based Information Sharing & Analysis Centers (ISACs) under Presidential Decision Directive 63. Sharing security vulnerabilities and technological solutions related to methods for preventing, detecting and correcting security breaches, is the fundamental goal of the ISACs. However, there are a number of interesting economic issues that will affect the achievement of this goal. Using game theory, we develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitive implications of sharing security information and investments in security technologies. We find that security technology investments and security information sharing act as ``strategic complements'' in equilibrium. Our results suggest that information sharing is more valuable when product substitutability is higher, implying that such sharing alliances yield greater benefits in more competitive industries. We also highlight that the benefits from such information sharing alliances increase with the size of the firm. We compare the levels of information sharing and technology investments obtained when firms behave independently (Bertrand-Nash) to those selected by an ISAC which maximizes social welfare or joint industry profits. Our results help us predict the consequences of establishing organizations such as ISACs, CERT or InfraGard by the federal government.Technology Investment, Information Sharing, Security Breaches, Externality Benefit, Spillover Effect, Social Welfare
A Proposal for a Borderland Dispute Settlement Continuum Mechanism
The malaise felt by both Canadians and Americans regarding several areas of trade does not exist in a vacuum. It is not difficult to surmise that besides the genuine tension owing to actual implementation of liberal trade principles in the trade practise between the two states, and to their diverging interpretations of these principles, lies also some political opportunism. Not only has the US pursued a unilateralist course in its trade relations with Canada; it did so also in matters security, which have created, at least a perception, of an unfavourable impact on Canadian economic interests. The US current beleaguered international reputation in matters foreign policy regarding both security and economic issues may therefore tilt the pendulum in Canada’s favour. From a power contest point of view, perhaps now is the time and opportunity for Canada to reap also international “moral” (juridical), in addition to economic, gains
The Economic Incentives for Sharing Security Information
Given that information technology (IT) security has emerged as an important issue in the last few years, the
subject of security information sharing among firms, as a tool to minimize security breaches, has gained
the interest of practitioners and academics. To promote the disclosure and sharing of cyber security information
among firms, the U.S. federal government has encouraged the establishment of many industry-based Information
Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) under Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 63. Sharing security
vulnerabilities and technological solutions related to methods for preventing, detecting, and correcting security
breaches is the fundamental goal of the ISACs. However, there are a number of interesting economic issues that
will affect the achievement of this goal. Using game theory, we develop an analytical framework to investigate
the competitive implications of sharing security information and investments in security technologies. We find
that security technology investments and security information sharing act as “strategic complements” in equilibrium.
Our results suggest that information sharing is more valuable when product substitutability is higher,
implying that such sharing alliances yield greater benefits in more competitive industries. We also highlight that
the benefits from such information-sharing alliances increase with the size of the firm. We compare the levels of
information sharing and technology investments obtained when firms behave independently (Bertrand-Nash) to
those selected by an ISAC, which maximizes social welfare or joint industry profits. Our results help us predict
the consequences of establishing organizations such as ISACs, Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT),
or InfraGard by the federal government.NYU, Stern School of Business, IOMS Department, Center for Digital Economy Researc
An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion
Text-to-image models offer unprecedented freedom to guide creation through
natural language. Yet, it is unclear how such freedom can be exercised to
generate images of specific unique concepts, modify their appearance, or
compose them in new roles and novel scenes. In other words, we ask: how can we
use language-guided models to turn our cat into a painting, or imagine a new
product based on our favorite toy? Here we present a simple approach that
allows such creative freedom. Using only 3-5 images of a user-provided concept,
like an object or a style, we learn to represent it through new "words" in the
embedding space of a frozen text-to-image model. These "words" can be composed
into natural language sentences, guiding personalized creation in an intuitive
way. Notably, we find evidence that a single word embedding is sufficient for
capturing unique and varied concepts. We compare our approach to a wide range
of baselines, and demonstrate that it can more faithfully portray the concepts
across a range of applications and tasks.
Our code, data and new words will be available at:
https://textual-inversion.github.ioComment: Project page: https://textual-inversion.github.i
Learning Control by Iterative Inversion
We propose -- an algorithm for learning an
inverse function without input-output pairs, but only with samples from the
desired output distribution and access to the forward function. The key
challenge is a between the desired outputs and
the outputs of an initial random guess, and we prove that iterative inversion
can steer the learning correctly, under rather strict conditions on the
function. We apply iterative inversion to learn control. Our input is a set of
demonstrations of desired behavior, given as video embeddings of trajectories
(without actions), and our method iteratively learns to imitate trajectories
generated by the current policy, perturbed by random exploration noise. Our
approach does not require rewards, and only employs supervised learning, which
can be easily scaled to use state-of-the-art trajectory embedding techniques
and policy representations. Indeed, with a VQ-VAE embedding, and a
transformer-based policy, we demonstrate non-trivial continuous control on
several tasks. Further, we report an improved performance on imitating diverse
behaviors compared to reward based methods.Comment: ICML 2023. Videos available at
https://sites.google.com/view/iter-inve
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