Economic Integrations and their Role in Intra-Africa Trade

Open access articleThis paper investigates the roles of economic integrations (EIs) in the development of trade within Africa region vis-à-vis Africa’s trade with the rest of the world. Specifically, we examine how the removal of trade barriers could eventually lead to harmonization of trade policies in Africa and in turn the growth of trade between the member countries. Our study focuses on a 20-year period in which we observe that as the domestic markets for the developing economies continue to expand, the expected trend is that their export competitiveness will also expand. However, data shows that while African Nations put EIs at the core of their development, only 10 percent of total value of African trade is intra-African in nature, and 90 percent is with countries outside the region. Using a gravity model adapted for African context, our analysis indicates that streamlining and employing similar policies encouraged and promoted trade. As trade entails the interaction of many other sectors, our results imply that policy reforms to deepen their economic integrations should proceed at a faster rate to stimulate investment flows from both intra-regional and extra-regional sources in addition to the diversification of products for export

Phase transitions in the Shastry-Sutherland lattice

Two recently developed theoretical approaches are applied to the Shastry-Sutherland lattice, varying the ratio $J'/J$ between the couplings on the square lattice and on the oblique bonds. A self-consistent perturbation, starting from either Ising or plaquette bond singlets, supports the existence of an intermediate phase between the dimer phase and the Ising phase. This existence is confirmed by the results of a renormalized excitonic method. This method, which satisfactorily reproduces the singlet triplet gap in the dimer phase, confirms the existence of a gapped phase in the interval $0.66<J'/J<0.86$Comment: Submited for publication in Phys. Rev.

Effective Capacity and Randomness of Closed Sets

We investigate the connection between measure and capacity for the space of nonempty closed subsets of {0,1}*. For any computable measure, a computable capacity T may be defined by letting T(Q) be the measure of the family of closed sets which have nonempty intersection with Q. We prove an effective version of Choquet's capacity theorem by showing that every computable capacity may be obtained from a computable measure in this way. We establish conditions that characterize when the capacity of a random closed set equals zero or is >0. We construct for certain measures an effectively closed set with positive capacity and with Lebesgue measure zero

Stochastic Tools for Network Intrusion Detection

With the rapid development of Internet and the sharp increase of network crime, network security has become very important and received a lot of attention. We model security issues as stochastic systems. This allows us to find weaknesses in existing security systems and propose new solutions. Exploring the vulnerabilities of existing security tools can prevent cyber-attacks from taking advantages of the system weaknesses. We propose a hybrid network security scheme including intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and honeypots scattered throughout the network. This combines the advantages of two security technologies. A honeypot is an activity-based network security system, which could be the logical supplement of the passive detection policies used by IDSs. This integration forces us to balance security performance versus cost by scheduling device activities for the proposed system. By formulating the scheduling problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (DEC-POMDP), decisions are made in a distributed manner at each device without requiring centralized control. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a useful choice for controlling stochastic systems. As a combination of two Markov models, POMDPs combine the strength of hidden Markov Model (HMM) (capturing dynamics that depend on unobserved states) and that of Markov decision process (MDP) (taking the decision aspect into account). Decision making under uncertainty is used in many parts of business and science.We use here for security tools.We adopt a high-quality approximation solution for finite-space POMDPs with the average cost criterion, and their extension to DEC-POMDPs. We show how this tool could be used to design a network security framework.Comment: Accepted by International Symposium on Sensor Networks, Systems and Security (2017

Equilibrium problems for Raney densities

The Raney numbers are a class of combinatorial numbers generalising the Fuss--Catalan numbers. They are indexed by a pair of positive real numbers $(p,r)$ with $p>1$ and $0 < r \le p$, and form the moments of a probability density function. For certain $(p,r)$ the latter has the interpretation as the density of squared singular values for certain random matrix ensembles, and in this context equilibrium problems characterising the Raney densities for $(p,r) = (\theta +1,1)$ and $(\theta/2+1,1/2)$ have recently been proposed. Using two different techniques --- one based on the Wiener--Hopf method for the solution of integral equations and the other on an analysis of the algebraic equation satisfied by the Green's function --- we establish the validity of the equilibrium problems for general $\theta > 0$ and similarly use both methods to identify the equilibrium problem for $(p,r) = (\theta/q+1,1/q)$, $\theta > 0$ and $q \in \mathbb Z^+$. The Wiener--Hopf method is used to extend the latter to parameters $(p,r) = (\theta/q + 1, m+ 1/q)$ for $m$ a non-negative integer, and also to identify the equilibrium problem for a family of densities with moments given by certain binomial coefficients.Comment: 13 page