1,895 research outputs found
Shares in the EMCA : the time is ripe for true no par value shares in the EU, and the 2nd directive is not an obstacle
The most interesting proposal in the draft European Model Companies Act ( EMCA) concerning shares and the focus of this Article is the recommendation to introduce true no par value shares, as they have been in use in the US for many years and were introduced in Australia, New Zealand but also Finland more recently. Contrary to what has often been assumed, the 2nd EU Company Law Directive does not preclude no par value shares. There is nothing in the wording of the Directive to suggest otherwise, and the reference in the Directive to shares without a nominal value is a reference to Belgian law, which has allowed true no par value shares in all but name since at least 1913. EU member states could therefore introduce such shares even for public companies. True no par value shares offer a far more flexible framework in case of capital increases or mergers, but since under a no par value system there is no link between par value and shareholder rights, additional disclosure about these rights might be warranted under a no par value system. Traditional par value shares offer no protection to creditors, shareholders or other stakeholders, so that their abolition should not be mourned. The threat of new share issues at an unacceptably high discount is more efficiently countered by disclosure and shareholder decision rights
FSS-1000: A 1000-Class Dataset for Few-Shot Segmentation
Over the past few years, we have witnessed the success of deep learning in
image recognition thanks to the availability of large-scale human-annotated
datasets such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, and COCO. Although these datasets have
covered a wide range of object categories, there are still a significant number
of objects that are not included. Can we perform the same task without a lot of
human annotations? In this paper, we are interested in few-shot object
segmentation where the number of annotated training examples are limited to 5
only. To evaluate and validate the performance of our approach, we have built a
few-shot segmentation dataset, FSS-1000, which consists of 1000 object classes
with pixelwise annotation of ground-truth segmentation. Unique in FSS-1000, our
dataset contains significant number of objects that have never been seen or
annotated in previous datasets, such as tiny daily objects, merchandise,
cartoon characters, logos, etc. We build our baseline model using standard
backbone networks such as VGG-16, ResNet-101, and Inception. To our surprise,
we found that training our model from scratch using FSS-1000 achieves
comparable and even better results than training with weights pre-trained by
ImageNet which is more than 100 times larger than FSS-1000. Both our approach
and dataset are simple, effective, and easily extensible to learn segmentation
of new object classes given very few annotated training examples. Dataset is
available at https://github.com/HKUSTCV/FSS-1000
Semiconductor Electronic Label-Free Assay for Predictive Toxicology.
While animal experimentations have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they also have spawned many logistical concerns in providing toxicity screening for copious new materials. Their prioritization is premised on performing cellular-level screening in vitro. Among the screening assays, secretomic assay with high sensitivity, analytical throughput, and simplicity is of prime importance. Here, we build on the over 3-decade-long progress on transistor biosensing and develop the holistic assay platform and procedure called semiconductor electronic label-free assay (SELFA). We demonstrate that SELFA, which incorporates an amplifying nanowire field-effect transistor biosensor, is able to offer superior sensitivity, similar selectivity, and shorter turnaround time compared to standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We deploy SELFA secretomics to predict the inflammatory potential of eleven engineered nanomaterials in vitro, and validate the results with confocal microscopy in vitro and confirmatory animal experiment in vivo. This work provides a foundation for high-sensitivity label-free assay utility in predictive toxicology
SE-shapelets: Semi-supervised Clustering of Time Series Using Representative Shapelets
Shapelets that discriminate time series using local features (subsequences)
are promising for time series clustering. Existing time series clustering
methods may fail to capture representative shapelets because they discover
shapelets from a large pool of uninformative subsequences, and thus result in
low clustering accuracy. This paper proposes a Semi-supervised Clustering of
Time Series Using Representative Shapelets (SE-Shapelets) method, which
utilizes a small number of labeled and propagated pseudo-labeled time series to
help discover representative shapelets, thereby improving the clustering
accuracy. In SE-Shapelets, we propose two techniques to discover representative
shapelets for the effective clustering of time series. 1) A \textit{salient
subsequence chain} () that can extract salient subsequences (as candidate
shapelets) of a labeled/pseudo-labeled time series, which helps remove massive
uninformative subsequences from the pool. 2) A \textit{linear discriminant
selection} () algorithm to identify shapelets that can capture
representative local features of time series in different classes, for
convenient clustering. Experiments on UCR time series datasets demonstrate that
SE-shapelets discovers representative shapelets and achieves higher clustering
accuracy than counterpart semi-supervised time series clustering methods
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