Eastern Enlargement of the EU and its Economic Impact: A CGE Approach

The main objective of this study is to conduct a quantitative assessment of the potential economic effects of the 5th enlargement of the EU including Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia which joined the EU on 1 May 2004 as well as of additional accession of Bulgaria and Romania which is to take place on 1 January 2007 using a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. In addition, a full membership of Croatia and Turkey is considered for quantification. Economic effects of eastern enlargements of the EU are expected to be significant for the enlarged Europe, as a bigger and more integrated market boosts economic growth for current and new members alike. On one hand, the wider Europe is to positively affect the economies of third countries such as the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) including Russia and the Republics of the former Soviet Union. On the other hand, it is to negatively influence the economies of most of the third countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA

Bi-PointFlowNet: Bidirectional Learning for Point Cloud Based Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation, which extracts point-wise motion between scenes, is becoming a crucial task in many computer vision tasks. However, all of the existing estimation methods utilize only the unidirectional features, restricting the accuracy and generality. This paper presents a novel scene flow estimation architecture using bidirectional flow embedding layers. The proposed bidirectional layer learns features along both forward and backward directions, enhancing the estimation performance. In addition, hierarchical feature extraction and warping improve the performance and reduce computational overhead. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture achieved a new state-of-the-art record by outperforming other approaches with large margin in both FlyingThings3D and KITTI benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/cwc1260/BiFlow.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 202

NAS-VAD: Neural Architecture Search for Voice Activity Detection

Various neural network-based approaches have been proposed for more robust and accurate voice activity detection (VAD). Manual design of such neural architectures is an error-prone and time-consuming process, which prompted the development of neural architecture search (NAS) that automatically design and optimize network architectures. While NAS has been successfully applied to improve performance in a variety of tasks, it has not yet been exploited in the VAD domain. In this paper, we present the first work that utilizes NAS approaches on the VAD task. To effectively search architectures for the VAD task, we propose a modified macro structure and a new search space with a much broader range of operations that includes attention operations. The results show that the network structures found by the propose NAS framework outperform previous manually designed state-of-the-art VAD models in various noise-added and real-world-recorded datasets. We also show that the architectures searched on a particular dataset achieve improved generalization performance on unseen audio datasets. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/daniel03c1/NAS_VAD.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

Isolation, Characterization, and Symbiotic Effectiveness in Soybeans of Exopolysaccharide Mutants of Rhizobium Fredii USDA191.

Chapter 1. Production of exopolysaccharides by Rhizobium has been linked with efficient invasion and nodulation of leguminous plant roots by the bacteria. Exopolysaccharide-deficient (exo) mutants of Rhizobium fredii USDA191 were isolated by Tn5-insertion mutagenesis. Five phenotypically unique exo mutants were investigated for exopolysaccharide synthesis and their ability to nodulate soybeans. The exopolysaccharides produced by these mutants were analyzed for polysaccharide composition by column chromatography and thin layer chromatography. Two mutants designated exo3 and exo5 were deficient in both the neutral glucan and exopolysaccharide synthesis, but still made effective nodules on Glycine max cv. Peking, although with decreased efficiency. The remaining three mutants (exo1, exo2, and exo4) synthesized neutral glucans at various levels compared with wild type and exhibited partial exopolysaccharide-deficiencies. One of these exo mutants, exo4, induced nodules on soybean, Peking. These data imply that neither exopolysaccharides nor neutral glucans are necessary for the formation of spherical nodules by R. fredii. Chapter 2. Rhizobium fredii USDA191 is a fast-growing symbiont that nodulates soybeans as well as slow-growing Bradyrhizobium species. R. meliloti exo DNA clones (obtained from Graham Walker) were introduced by triparental plasmid matings into five exo mutants of R. fredii USDA191. These exo mutants of R. fredii each exhibited a unique Tn5 insertion pattern and a depressed exopolysaccharide synthesis. In two R. fredii exo mutants, exopolysaccharide expression was restored by introduction of R. meliloti exo DNA. R. fredii YKL288 (exo4) was complemented for exopolysaccharide synthesis when plasmid pD56 (exoF/B) but not plasmid pD2 (exoB) was introduced into it, and R. fredii YKL293 (exo5) was complemented for exopolysaccharide production when it contained plasmid pD15 (exoC). Significantly, plasmid pLYK5293 containing DNA sequences flanking the Tn5 of YKL293 hybridized with DNAs of plasmid clones pD56 (exoF/B), pD2 (exoB), and pD5 (exoD) of R. meliloti. Putative wild type exo5 genes also were cloned into a phage lambda NM1149 using plasmid pLYK5293 as a probe DNA. The data suggest the existence of common pathways for exopolysaccharide synthesis in R. fredii as well as in R. meliloti. The data also suggest a possible linkage in R. fredii USDA191 of exoC and exoD gene homologues of R. meliloti