Asymmetric wealth effect in the U.S and Eeuropean markets: threshold cointegration approach

Este estudo visa em verificar as relações de ajustamento existentes entre mercados acionistas e mercado imobiliário e segue o estudo realizado por Chiang, Lee, & Tsai (2012). São estudados quer o mercado acionista norte americano – este representado pelo Standard and Poors’ 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average e Freddie Mac House Price Index- como também o europeu – representado pelo Financial TSE 100 e Euro STOXX 50. A metodologia aplicada quebra face à maior parte dos estudos previamente feitos, onde eram aplicados modelos lineares. A utilização desses modelos pode retornar resultados falaciosos pois os ajustamentos dos mercados são diferentes quando ocorrem choques negativos e positivos. Como tal foi utilizado o modelo TAR e MTAR de modo a testar as duas hipóteses formuladas sendo elas: (1) o equilíbrio a longo prazo dos mercados; (2) a verificação de existência de ajustamentos assimétricos. Os resultados recolhidos apontam para a existência de cointegração entre eles, na maior parte dos casos.This study aims to verify the equilibrium relationships among various markets – housing market and stock market – in a long-run and follows the study of Chiang, Lee, & Tsai (2012). The markets that are studied are the North American stock market and Housing market and European stock market. The North American stock market is represented by Santadard & Poors’ 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the housing market is represented by Freddie Mac House Price Index. The European stock market is represented by Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 and Euro STOXX 50. The methodology applied does not follow most of the studies due to the fact that those studies used a linear framework. The results obtained from that models can lead to misinformation of the reality since the adjustments made from the series differ if the shock is either negative or positive. For that reason, the study applies the TAR and MTAR models to test both hypotheses. The first is the long-run equilibrium in the markets and the second is to verify if the adjustments are asymmetric. The results point out to the existence of cointegration for the majority of the indexes

Multimodal emotion recognition

Reading emotions from facial expression and speech is a milestone in Human-Computer Interaction. Recent sensing technologies, namely the Microsoft Kinect Sensor, provide basic input modalities data, such as RGB imaging, depth imaging and speech, that can be used in Emotion Recognition. Moreover Kinect can track a face in real time and present the face fiducial points, as well as 6 basic Action Units (AUs). In this work we explore this information by gathering a new and exclusive dataset. This is a new opportunity for the academic community as well to the progress of the emotion recognition problem. The database includes RGB, depth, audio, fiducial points and AUs for 18 volunteers for 7 emotions. We then present automatic emotion classification results on this dataset by employing k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks classifiers, with unimodal and multimodal approaches. Our conclusions show that multimodal approaches can attain better results.Ler e reconhecer emoções de expressões faciais e verbais é um marco na Interacção Humana com um Computador. As recentes tecnologias de deteção, nomeadamente o sensor Microsoft Kinect, recolhem dados de modalidades básicas como imagens RGB, de informaçãode profundidade e defala que podem ser usados em reconhecimento de emoções. Mais ainda, o sensor Kinect consegue reconhecer e seguir uma cara em tempo real e apresentar os pontos fiduciais, assim como as 6 AUs – Action Units básicas. Neste trabalho exploramos esta informação através da compilação de um dataset único e exclusivo que representa uma oportunidade para a comunidade académica e para o progresso do problema do reconhecimento de emoções. Este dataset inclui dados RGB, de profundidade, de fala, pontos fiduciais e AUs, para 18 voluntários e 7 emoções. Apresentamos resultados com a classificação automática de emoções com este dataset, usando classificadores k-vizinhos próximos, máquinas de suporte de vetoreseredes neuronais, em abordagens multimodais e unimodais. As nossas conclusões indicam que abordagens multimodais permitem obter melhores resultados

Radiation statistics in homogeneous isotropic turbulence

An analysis of the interaction between turbulence and radiation in statistically stationary (forced) homogeneous and isotropic turbulence has been carried out. A direct numerical simulation (DNS) code was used to generate instantaneous turbulent scalar fields, and the radiative transfer equation (RTE) was solved to provide statistical data of the radiation intensity and absorption coefficient, as well as correlations related to radiative emission and absorption. In addition, the time-averaged RTE was solved and the mean radiation intensity, mean absorption coefficient, and mean radiative emission were computed and compared with those derived from the statistical data. An analysis of the number of samples required to achieve statistically meaningful results is presented, and the influence of the optical thickness of the medium, mean and variance of the temperature and variance of the mean molar fraction of the absorbing species are studied. The moments of the radiation intensity, Planck-mean and incident-mean absorption coefficients, and emission and absorption correlations relevant to the turbulence – radiation interaction (TRI) are calculated. It was found while turbulence yields an increase of the mean blackbody radiation intensity, it causes a decrease of the time-averaged Planck-mean absorption coefficient. The absorption coefficient self-correlation is small in comparison with the temperature self-correlation, and the role of TRI in radiative emission is more important than in radiative absorption. The correlation between fluctuations of the absorption coefficient and fluctuations of the radiation intensity is small, which supports the optically thin fluctuation approximation (OTFA), and justifies the good predictions often achieved using the time-averaged RTE

Efficient hardware design and implementation of the voting scheme-based convolution

Due to a point cloud’s sparse nature, a sparse convolution block design is necessary to deal with its particularities. Mechanisms adopted in computer vision have recently explored the advantages of data processing in more energy-efficient hardware, such as the FPGA, as a response to the need to run these algorithms on resource-constrained edge devices. However, implementing it in hardware has not been properly explored, resulting in a small number of studies aimed at analyzing the potential of sparse convolutions and their efficiency on resource-constrained hardware platforms. This article presents the design of a customizable hardware block for the voting convolution. We carried out an in-depth analysis to determine under which conditions the use of the voting scheme is justified instead of dense convolutions. The proposed hardware design achieves an energy consumption about 8.7 times lower than similar works in the literature by ignoring unnecessary arithmetic operations with null weights and leveraging data dependency. Access to data memory was also reduced to the minimum necessary, leading to improvements of around 55% in processing time. To evaluate both the performance and applicability of the proposed solution, the voting convolution was integrated into the well-known PointPillars model, where it achieves improvements between 23.05% and 80.44% without a significant effect on detection performance.European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) (Project no. 037902; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-037902)

Treinador individual para a gestão da informação

O problema abordado neste trabalho está relacionado com a realidade que existe na vida de muitos profissionais, principalmente da área do conhecimento, que consiste numa crescente sobrecarga de informação. Os profissionais da área do conhecimento, segundo Peter Drucker (CFI Education Inc., 2017), são trabalhadores de alto nível que aplicam conhecimentos teóricos e analíticos, adquiridos por meio de formação, para desenvolver produtos e serviços. Apesar de existir no quotidiano dos profissionais há já muitos anos, nos últimos tempos a quantidade de informação com que um profissional tem de lidar tem vindo a aumentar consideravelmente. Como consequência dessa sobrecarga de informação, a respetiva produtividade diminuiu, causando impactos negativos na atividade das empresas. Para além do impacto financeiro negativo para as empresas, a sobrecarga de informação e consequente diminuição de produtividade tem vindo também a causar um aumento da infelicidade dos trabalhadores. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe a implementação de um treinador individual para a gestão da informação, com recurso a uma aplicação móvel que, através de dados de, por exemplo, compras e vendas, de imóveis ou veículos, introduzidos pelo profissional, lhes permita extrair conclusões, isto é, proporcionar métricas que ajudem o profissional a otimizar o seu trabalho, aumentando assim a sua produtividade e a sua relação com a informação.The problem addressed in this dissertation refers to the reality that exists in the lives of many professionals, especially those in the area of knowledge, which consists of information overload issues. Knowledge professionals, according to Peter Drucker (CFI Education Inc., 2017), are high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through training, to develop products and services. Despite existing in the daily lives of professionals for many years, in recent times the amount of information that a professional has to deal with has increased considerably. As a result of this information overload, the respective productivity has decreased, causing negative impacts on companies' activities. In addition to the negative financial impact on companies, the information overload and consequent decrease in productivity has also been causing an increase in workers' unhappiness. In this context, this work proposes the implementation of an individual trainer for information management, using a mobile application that, through data from, for example, purchases and sales, of properties or vehicles, introduced by the professional, allows them to extract conclusions, that is, to provide metrics that help the professional to optimize his work, thus increasing his productivity

Treinador individual para a gestão da informação

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Blockchain implications for auditing: a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis

Blockchain technology, smart contracts, and asset tokenization have relevant implications for the auditing environment. This paper evaluates the current stage of blockchain application in auditing, analyzing scientific publications and identifying the impact of what is already a reality and the potential effects of its improvements in audit professionals’ activities performance. The article considers the proposals and suggestions on the leading research indexed by the Scopus and Web of Science databases. We analyzed 374 papers on the topic of blockchain and provide a summary and analysis of the current state of auditing research. The bibliometric analysis was performed using the Bibliometrix R Package and the VOSviewer software. After a systematic study of abstracts and a general review of the papers to only include those directly related to our work’s objectives, we found 78 papers. The work results in a framework of potential and effective implications of blockchain technology for auditing, pointing out several new challenges in terms of skills and knowledge needed in this new reality of audit professionals

Proposta de estação meteorológica inteligente baseada em ambientes IoT

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica, 2018.Este documento apresenta os resultados do projeto final de graduação do curso de Engenharia de Redes da Universidade de Brasília, projeto este cujo principal objetivo é elaborar um protótipo de estação meteorológica inteligente e autônoma, de forma a utilizar os conceitos de Internet das Coisas para aplicar uma possível solução para os problemas de conectividade e mobilidade na transmissão de dados meteorológicos. O presente documento contém a fundamentação teórica do trabalho, a realização e implementação do projeto, bem como os dados experimentais obtidos com o protótipo construído. São abordados os principais conceitos que envolvem Internet das Coisas (IoT), as dificuldades e problemas encontrados na definição e aplicação desses conceitos, especificamente na implementação e aplicabilidade na prototipação do dispositivo, bem como na captura e comunicação de dados da estação meteorológica proposta. O projeto, cuja metodologia reúne aspectos de análise, de prototipação e de validação, mostra a viabilidade da utilização de IoT em aplicação de meteorologia inteligente e apresenta indicadores de interesse no que se refere à autonomia e informações coletadas, tratadas e disponibilizadas

Nuclear Medicine and Drug Delivery

Nuclear Medicine is a molecular‐imaging modality that diagnoses and treats diseases with very small amounts of radioactive materials, known as radiopharmaceuticals. Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, technologies, and systems for transporting a pharmaceutical compound in the body as needed to safely achieve its desired therapeutic effect. The use of nuclear medicine and radiopharmaceuticals allows studying the in vivo behavior of developed drug‐delivery systems, and pharmacoscintigraphy is, from the beginning, one of the most promising aspects of this medical specialty. In this chapter, we review the technologies, fundaments, rationales, and strategies more frequently used and present examples of their application in the development and evaluation of drug‐delivery systems