A New Framework for Analyzing and Managing Macrofinancial Risks of an Economy

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the theory and practice of modern contingent claims analysis (CCA). We illustrate how to use the CCA approach to model and measure sectoral and national risk exposures, and analyze policies to offset their potentially harmful effects. This new framework provides economic balance sheets for inter-linked sectors and a risk accounting framework for an economy. CCA provides a natural framework for analysis of mismatches between an entity's assets and liabilities, such as currency and maturity mismatches on balance sheets. Policies or actions that reduce these mismatches will help reduce risk and vulnerability. It also provides a new framework for sovereign capital structure analysis. It is useful for assessing vulnerability, policy analysis, risk management, investment analysis, and design of risk control strategies. Both public and private sector participants can benefit from pursuing ways to facilitate more efficient macro risk accounting, improve price and volatility discovery, and expand international risk intermediation activities.

Adaptive Game Input Using Knowledge of Player Capability: Designing for Individuals with Different Abilities

The application of video games has been shown to be valuable in medical interventions, such as the use of Active Video Games in physical therapy. Because patients requiring physical therapy present with both highly variable physical capabilities and unique therapeutic goals, developers of rehabilitation intervention games face the challenge of creating flexible games that they can individualize to each player’s particular needs. This thesis proposes an approach to this problem by identifying and addressing two issues concerning therapy AVG game design. First, regarding the difficulties of individualizing software, a particular complication in the development of AVGs for therapy is the increased complexity of writing input routines based on human body motion, which provides a much larger and more complex domain than traditional, discrete-input game controllers. Second, the primary difficulty in individualizing a therapy game experience to an individual player is that developers must program software with static routines that cannot be modified once compiled and released. Overcoming this aspect of software development is a prime concern that adaptive games research aims to address. The System for Unified Kinematic Input (SUKI) is a software library that addresses both of these concerns. SUKI enables games to adapt to players’ specific therapeutic goals by mapping arbitrary human body movement input to game mechanics at runtime, allowing user-defined body motions to drive gameplay without requiring any change to the software. Additionally, the SUKI library implements a dynamic profile system that alters the game’s configuration based on known physical capabilities of the player and updates this profile based on the player’s demonstrated ability during play. Within the context of the study of adaptive games, the following research presents the details of this approach and demonstrates the versatility and extensibility that it can provide in adapting AVG games to meet individual player needs.https://doi.org/10.17918/D8R94VM.S., Digital Media -- Drexel University, 201

Genome-wide linkage scan for genes affecting longitudinal trends in systolic blood pressure

Only one genome scan to date has attempted to make use of the longitudinal data available in the Framingham Heart Study, and this attempt yielded evidence of linkage to a gene for mean systolic blood pressure. We show how the additional information available in these longitudinal data can be utilized to examine linkages for not only mean systolic blood pressure (SBP), but also for its trend with age and its variability. Prior to linkage analysis, individuals treated for hypertension were adjusted to account for right-censoring of SBP. Regressions on age were fitted to obtain orthogonal measures of slope, curvature, and residual variance of SBP that were then used as dependent variables in the model-free linkage program SIBPAL. We included mean age, gender, and cohort as covariates in the analysis. To improve power, sibling pairs were weighted for informativity using weights derived from both the marker and trait. The most significant results from our analyses were found on chromosomes 12, 15, and 17 for mean SBP, and chromosome 20 for both SBP slope and curvature

New Framework for Measuring and Managing Macrofinancial Risk and Financial Stability

This paper proposes a new approach to improve the way central banks can analyze and manage the financial risks of a national economy. It is based on the modern theory and practice of contingent claims analysis (CCA), which is successfully used today at the level of individual banks by managers, investors, and regulators. The basic analytical tool is the risk-adjusted balance sheet, which shows the sensitivity of the enterprise’s assets and liabilities to external “shocks.” At the national level, the sectors of an economy are viewed as interconnected portfolios of assets, liabilities, and guarantees—some explicit and others implicit. Traditional approaches have difficulty analyzing how risks can accumulate gradually and then suddenly erupt in a full-blown crisis. The CCA approach is well-suited to capturing such “non-linearities” and to quantifying the effects of asset-liability mismatches within and across institutions. Risk-adjusted CCA balance sheets facilitate simulations and stress testing to evaluate the potential impact of policies to manage systemic risk.

Improvements for Vision-based Navigation of Small, Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Investigating alternative navigation approaches for use when GPS signals are unavailable is an active area of research across the globe. In this paper we focus on the navigation of small, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that employ vision-based approaches combined with other measurements as a replacement for GPS. We demonstrate with flight test data that vehicle attitude information, derived from cheap, MEMS-based IMUs is sufficient to improve two different types of vision processing algorithms. Secondly, we show analytically and with flight test data that range measurements to one other vehicle with global pose is sufficient to constrain the global drift of a visual inertial odometry-based navigation solution. Further, we demonstrate that such ranging information is not needed at a fast rate; that bounding can occur using data as infrequent as 0.01Hz

Statistical Computations with AstroGrid and the Grid

We outline our first steps towards marrying two new and emerging technologies; the Virtual Observatory (e.g, AstroGrid) and the computational grid. We discuss the construction of VOTechBroker, which is a modular software tool designed to abstract the tasks of submission and management of a large number of computational jobs to a distributed computer system. The broker will also interact with the AstroGrid workflow and MySpace environments. We present our planned usage of the VOTechBroker in computing a huge number of n-point correlation functions from the SDSS, as well as fitting over a million CMBfast models to the WMAP data.Comment: Invited talk to appear in "Proceedings of PHYSTAT05: Statistical Problems in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology