The impact of microfinance on entrepreneurial outcomes and the role of intangible resources of women entrepreneurs in Vietnam

Microfinance has been discussed by numerous researchers in the assessment of its benefits towards poverty reduction in many developing countries. It is also considered as a life-changing tool for the poor who have little access to funds from formal lenders. Especially, microfinance is knowingly associated with women empowerment in poor set-ting with an aim to improve their well-beings. The driving forces from microfinance movement have struck women to recognize their potentials and spark up business plans regarding venture creation. In order to clarify about the success of women in entrepreneurial activities, the exposure of intangible resources possessed by women was presented in the light of resource-based theory. Intangible resources in this circumstance were concentrated on the constructs of psychological capital and social capital. The research approach adopted in this study includes the analysis of case studies from third party publications in combination with interview conduction. Through case studies, innovative business models of women entrepreneurs under the assistance of a microfinance provider, TYM Fund, were discovered rigorously. Meanwhile, the latter was carried out through an interviewing process with a gender expert in regard to a women-oriented project in rural area of Vietnam. The findings from this research led to develop new insights about transformational mindset of female entrepreneurs by positive motives and how they utilized their social resources from their extended networks. Also strengthening the role of intangible resources of women by the influence of micro-finance was highlighted. The study, as a result, underlined inspirational motivation and collaborative relations in the setting of community-based activities to support women in business undertaking. Main conclusion drawn from this study confirmed the efficiency of microfinance programs pertaining to intangible resources optimization as stimulus to the growth of women entrepreneurship in the context of Vietnam in medium term. Furthermore, it reinforced the necessity of active participation of women in microfinance institutions and emphasized on continuous efforts related to women empowerment in society

Visual Query Tuning: Towards Effective Usage of Intermediate Representations for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learning

Intermediate features of a pre-trained model have been shown informative for making accurate predictions on downstream tasks, even if the model backbone is kept frozen. The key challenge is how to utilize these intermediate features given their gigantic amount. We propose visual query tuning (VQT), a simple yet effective approach to aggregate intermediate features of Vision Transformers. Through introducing a handful of learnable ``query'' tokens to each layer, VQT leverages the inner workings of Transformers to ``summarize'' rich intermediate features of each layer, which can then be used to train the prediction heads of downstream tasks. As VQT keeps the intermediate features intact and only learns to combine them, it enjoys memory efficiency in training, compared to many other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches that learn to adapt features and need back-propagation through the entire backbone. This also suggests the complementary role between VQT and those approaches in transfer learning. Empirically, VQT consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art approach that utilizes intermediate features for transfer learning and outperforms full fine-tuning in many cases. Compared to parameter-efficient approaches that adapt features, VQT achieves much higher accuracy under memory constraints. Most importantly, VQT is compatible with these approaches to attain even higher accuracy, making it a simple add-on to further boost transfer learning.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023. Cheng-Hao Tu and Zheda Mai contributed equally to this wor

Poverty, Neighbourhood Characteristics and Trajectories of Maternal Depression

Background: Income, education, being an immigrant and residential neighbourhood characteristics are linked to depressive symptoms. To our knowledge, no longitudinal study has examined the joint influence of demographic and neighbourhood characteristics on maternal depressive symptoms. Objective: To examine the influence of demographic and neighbourhood characteristics on trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms from child age 1.5 to 7 years, in Québec, Canada. METHODS: 1611 mothers from the Québec Longitudinal Study on Child Development, seen regularly since child birth (1998). Maternal depressive symptoms (CES-D), income, and residential neighbourhood characteristics (neighbourhood poverty, unemployment and quality of nearest park) were measured for mothers at child ages 1.5, 3.5, 5 and 7 years. Analyses of the influence of income and neighbourhood characteristics on depression scores (overall trajectory and at each time point) were performed with PROCTRAJ in SAS. Results: Over the 6-year period, 42.6% of mothers showed likelihood of a trajectory of low depressive symptoms, while 46.5% and 10.9% showed likelihood of trajectories of minor and elevated depressive symptoms respectively. Prior elevated maternal depressive symptoms at child age 5 months and being an immigrant mother were associated with a greater likelihood of minor (OR= 6.40 CI 3.40-12.37, p=0.001; OR=2.44 CI=1.09-5.48, p=0.01respectively) or elevated (OR=8.18, CI=1.88-22.88, p=0.005; OR=5.66 CI=1.41-22.65, p=0.01 respectively) depressive symptoms. High perception of neighbourhood safety (top quartile) was associated with lesser likelihood of a trajectory of elevated depressive symptoms (OR=0.12, CI=0.03-0.49, p=0.001). Living near a park with greater green space was associated with lesser likelihood of a trajectory of minor depressive symptoms (OR=0.38 CI=0.18-0.80, p=0.02). Implications: These results suggest that demographic and neighbourhood factors are associated with maternal depressive symptoms. Further research will evaluate the link between trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms and cortisol profiles as such relations vary according to individual and neighbourhood factors. During her doctoral studies, Mai Thanh Tu examined the influences of breastfeeding and low income on biological stress pathways in mothers of healthy infants. After studying stress regulation in preterm infants, Mai is now working on maternal mental health and social factors such as characteristics of the residential neighbourhood, living in poverty conditions and caring for a sick child. Mai is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Universite de Montreal, and is funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the NARSAD foundation

Compositional Sketch Search

We present an algorithm for searching image collections using free-hand sketches that describe the appearance and relative positions of multiple objects. Sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) methods predominantly match queries containing a single, dominant object invariant to its position within an image. Our work exploits drawings as a concise and intuitive representation for specifying entire scene compositions. We train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode masked visual features from sketched objects, pooling these into a spatial descriptor encoding the spatial relationships and appearances of objects in the composition. Training the CNN backbone as a Siamese network under triplet loss yields a metric search embedding for measuring compositional similarity which may be efficiently leveraged for visual search by applying product quantization.Comment: ICIP 2021 camera-ready versio

Ultra high Performance Fiber Reinforced Concrete Panel Subjected to Severe Blast Loading

Experimental studies play a crucial role in shedding light on the dynamic behaviour of structures under blast loading. However, high costs and complicated technical requirements, particularly for full-scale structures, are still huge disadvantages to conduct such a series of tests. Hence, the finite element method is much needed to provide supplementary information to previous experiments and to enable further parametric studies without testing. This article presents a numerical investigation carried out to understand the behaviour of ultra high performance fiber reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) panels under severe blast loading. The authors designed a subroutine with eight numbers of solution-dependent state variables, 32 mechanical constants, integrated with the Abaqus program to analyze the dynamic behaviour of UHPFRC against multiple blast impacts, using the Johnson-Holmquist 2 damage model incorporating both the damage and residual strength of the material. The subroutine was validated by comparing the simulation results with test results. For the purpose of estimating the structural response of the UHPFRC panel subjected to blast loading, other studying scenarios were considered by varying input parameters, including the thickness of the panel, stand-off distance, and steel reinforcement bar volume. The variations in deflection, strain, and damage of the UHPFRC panel, as well as the steel reinforcement strain, were also evaluated. Through important obtained results, the UHPFRC panel is strongly recommended for a protective barrier installed in the vicinity of critical infrastructure against severe blast loadin

The Relationship between Budget Revenue - expenditure and Inflation in Vietnam: Viewed from the Results of Quantitative Analysis

The research examines the relationship between budget revenue expenditure and inflation in Vietnam, with time series data on budget revenue expenditure and the consumer price index (CPI) (representing the inflation variable in Vietnam). Data were collected from the International Financial Statistics (IFS-IMF), General Statistics Office (GSO) in the period of 2005-2022. The author used Eview software to build a linear relationship log-log of budget revenue - -expenditure and CPI in the case of the Vietnamese economy. Quantitative analysis results show that when budget revenue increased by 1%, CPI increased by 0.249674%, when budget expenditure increased by 1%, CPI increased by 0.298316%. Raising budget revenue to raise budget expenditure will result in higher inflation during the research period in Vietnam. From the theoretical basis, research overview, and quantitative analysis results, the research team makes some recommendations for fiscal policy in Vietnam in the current context