Investigating dynamic interdependencies between traditional and digital assets during the COVID-19 outbreak: Implications for G7 and Chinese financial investors

This paper discusses the relationship between the volatilities of traditional and digital assets before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using daily data relevant to the period ranging from January 4, 2016, to April 15, 2020, the results of the DCC-MVGARCH model indicate that the stock markets responded to the Coronavirus outbreak as the crypto market with worrying volatility. Before this outbreak, Bitcoin and gold are considered as a hedge for US, English, French, German, and Italian financial investors. The conditional correlation between stock indices and other assets was skyrocketing during this pandemic, except for the couple SSE-Ripple

The Evolution of Competition of the Tunisian Banking Sector: An Empirical Analysis

This paper analyzes the evolution of competition in the Tunisian banking sector in the period 2000 - 2008, which is a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose, we use two indicators of the competition from the theory of the industrial organization (the Lerner index and the Panzar and Rosse’s H-statistic). The empirical evidence does not permit us to reject the existence of monopolistic competition. The evolution of Lerner index over the period of study shows a low tendency to concentration. The movements of the mergers of the banking institutions seem to be slow, as a big effort of cleaning their balance sheets remains to be achieved before banks can merge

Optimal phase shift design for fair allocation in RIS aided uplink network using statistical CSI

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can be crucial in next-generation communication systems. However, designing the RIS phases according to the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) can be challenging in practice due to the short coherent time of the channel. In this regard, we propose a novel algorithm based on the channel statistics of massive multiple input multiple output systems rather than the CSI. The beamforming at the base station (BS), power allocation of the users, and phase shifts at the RIS elements are optimized to maximize the minimum signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR), guaranteeing fair operation among various users. In particular, we design the RIS phases by leveraging the asymptotic deterministic equivalent of the minimum SINR that depends only on the channel statistics. This significantly reduces the computational complexity and the amount of controlling data between the BS and RIS for updating the phases. This setup is also useful for electromagnetic fields (EMF)-aware systems with constraints on the maximum user's exposure to EMF. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithms achieve more than 100% gain in terms of minimum SINR, compared to a system with random RIS phase shifts, with 40 RIS elements, 20 antennas at the BS and 10 users, respectively

A year of genomic surveillance reveals how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unfolded in Africa

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A year of genomic surveillance reveals how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unfolded in Africa.

The progression of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in Africa has so far been heterogeneous, and the full impact is not yet well understood. In this study, we describe the genomic epidemiology using a dataset of 8746 genomes from 33 African countries and two overseas territories. We show that the epidemics in most countries were initiated by importations predominantly from Europe, which diminished after the early introduction of international travel restrictions. As the pandemic progressed, ongoing transmission in many countries and increasing mobility led to the emergence and spread within the continent of many variants of concern and interest, such as B.1.351, B.1.525, A.23.1, and C.1.1. Although distorted by low sampling numbers and blind spots, the findings highlight that Africa must not be left behind in the global pandemic response, otherwise it could become a source for new variants

An efficient hardware architecture for interpolation filter of HEVC decoder

International audienceIn most video coding standard, motion compensation MC is applied to remove temporal redundancy and reduce the size of bit stream significantly. In the decoder, the reconstructed MV (Motion Vector) is generated from the prediction error and neighboring information. However, due to the finite sampling the motion of blocks does not match exactly in the integer positions of samples grid. The High efficiency video coding standard HEVC introduced 7 taps filter and 8 taps filter for the interpolation of ¼ and ½ luminance sub positions respectively which can give a better precision in the inter prediction process. Furthermore, the profiling of the HM reference software proves that the interpolation filter consume more than 50% of the complexity of Motion Compensation block in the HEVC decoder with random access configuration. Therefore, a new flexible hardware architecture for half and quarter fractional pixels used in the interpolation filter is proposed in this paper. This architecture can process the whole fractional positions of 4×4 PU (prediction unit) in only 30 clock cycles and support a maximal throughput of QFHD@30fps at 185 MHZ. The implementation is performed with the technology TSMC 0.18 um

Estimates of the macroeconomic costs of cyber‐attacks

International audienceThis paper estimates the macroeconomic losses related to the cyber-attacks originating from the information and communications technology (ICT) and the financial sectors. The study accounts for the interdependency of various economic sectors and looks to the cascading effect of cyber-attacks on production network in the United States and leading Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries with the help of the input–output methodology and the World Input–Output Database. Our results suggest that cyber-attacks that affect the ICT and finance sectors result in losses which also impact different economic sectors, due to cascading effects

An efficient and unified 2D-inverse integer cosine transform (IICT) FPGA-hardware implementation for HEVC standard

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