156 research outputs found
Essays on managerial foreign experience and corporate behaviours in China : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Finance at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Managerial foreign experience is a type of resource which allows managers to think globally and act locally. This thesis contributes to the literature on how foreign experienced managers impact corporate behaviour in China, the worldâs largest emerging market. The first essay examines how managers with foreign experience influence corporate risk-taking. I find that foreign experienced managers are positively associated with corporate risk-taking. This relationship only robustly exists among private firms rather than state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The excess risk-taking through foreign experienced managers is positively related to Tobinâs Q, indicating that foreign experienced managers increase firm value through value-enhancing projects, which benefits shareholders. The second essay concentrates on the relationship between managerial foreign experience and earnings quality. I find that foreign experienced managers improve corporate earnings quality, and this improvement is more
pronounced in private firms. Moreover, I document that the improved earnings quality is an important mechanism for which foreign experienced managers increase stock returns and decrease agency costs. The third essay in the thesis investigates the relationship between foreign experienced managers and corporate labour investment. I find foreign experienced managers are more likely to recruit and retain high skilled employees, which in turn increases labour cost for firms in total. The positive relationship between managerial foreign experience and labour cost is significant in both SOEs and private firms. Foreign experienced managers may focus on employeesâ well-being to complete political goals in SOEs while they are more likely to retain and attract high skilled employees to benefit shareholdersâ value in private firms. I further document that the increased labour costs through managerial foreign experience can influence firm value positively. However, it also increases the labour stickiness cost. Overall, this thesis documents the benefits and costs of hiring foreign experienced managers in firms
LipLearner: Customizable Silent Speech Interactions on Mobile Devices
Silent speech interface is a promising technology that enables private
communications in natural language. However, previous approaches only support a
small and inflexible vocabulary, which leads to limited expressiveness. We
leverage contrastive learning to learn efficient lipreading representations,
enabling few-shot command customization with minimal user effort. Our model
exhibits high robustness to different lighting, posture, and gesture conditions
on an in-the-wild dataset. For 25-command classification, an F1-score of 0.8947
is achievable only using one shot, and its performance can be further boosted
by adaptively learning from more data. This generalizability allowed us to
develop a mobile silent speech interface empowered with on-device fine-tuning
and visual keyword spotting. A user study demonstrated that with LipLearner,
users could define their own commands with high reliability guaranteed by an
online incremental learning scheme. Subjective feedback indicated that our
system provides essential functionalities for customizable silent speech
interactions with high usability and learnability.Comment: Conditionally accepted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems 2023 (CHI '23
Retailing in College Towns During the Pandemic: Spatial Location and Public Transit
A âcollege townâ is a unique urban landscape in America and displays different features from other urban areas. As a result, retailers located in college towns have faced different situations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In our thesis, we investigated the daily footprint data of 157 retailers in 38 identified college towns from 2018 to 2020. Our study contributes to the research on the economic consequences of college town retailers in the situation of a global pandemic. To be specific, we explore two core research questions: (1) how does the university footprint interact with spatial location and public transit in affecting the retailer footprint? And (2) what moderating effects did government containment and health index exert upon the customer footprints? Our study indicates that the university footprints, distance to university, and public transit percentage had a positive, negligible, and negative impact on store visits, respectively. Furthermore, the positive effect of university visits on store visits decreases as store-university distance increases but has little correlation with percent of public transit. Moreover, we find that the intensity of containment and health index strengthens the negative effect exerted by store-university distance upon the positive correlation between university visits and store visits. In contrast, the effects of the university visits and percent of public transit on store visits do not vary with containment and health index. This research provides essential information that can be utilized by government officials and retail managers to better respond to a global pandemic and prepare for the recovery after pandemic
Generalization Ability of Wide Residual Networks
In this paper, we study the generalization ability of the wide residual
network on with the ReLU activation function. We first show
that as the width , the residual network kernel (RNK)
uniformly converges to the residual neural tangent kernel (RNTK). This uniform
convergence further guarantees that the generalization error of the residual
network converges to that of the kernel regression with respect to the RNTK. As
direct corollaries, we then show the wide residual network with the early
stopping strategy can achieve the minimax rate provided that the target
regression function falls in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)
associated with the RNTK; the wide residual network can not generalize
well if it is trained till overfitting the data. We finally illustrate some
experiments to reconcile the contradiction between our theoretical result and
the widely observed ``benign overfitting phenomenon''Comment: 28 pages, 3 figure
Statistical Optimality of Deep Wide Neural Networks
In this paper, we consider the generalization ability of deep wide
feedforward ReLU neural networks defined on a bounded domain . We first demonstrate that the generalization ability of
the neural network can be fully characterized by that of the corresponding deep
neural tangent kernel (NTK) regression. We then investigate on the spectral
properties of the deep NTK and show that the deep NTK is positive definite on
and its eigenvalue decay rate is . Thanks to the well
established theories in kernel regression, we then conclude that multilayer
wide neural networks trained by gradient descent with proper early stopping
achieve the minimax rate, provided that the regression function lies in the
reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) associated with the corresponding NTK.
Finally, we illustrate that the overfitted multilayer wide neural networks can
not generalize well on . We believe our technical contributions
in determining the eigenvalue decay rate of NTK on might be of
independent interests
Functional Slicing-free Inverse Regression via Martingale Difference Divergence Operator
Functional sliced inverse regression (FSIR) is one of the most popular
algorithms for functional sufficient dimension reduction (FSDR). However, the
choice of slice scheme in FSIR is critical but challenging. In this paper, we
propose a new method called functional slicing-free inverse regression (FSFIR)
to estimate the central subspace in FSDR. FSFIR is based on the martingale
difference divergence operator, which is a novel metric introduced to
characterize the conditional mean independence of a functional predictor on a
multivariate response. We also provide a specific convergence rate for the
FSFIR estimator. Compared with existing functional sliced inverse regression
methods, FSFIR does not require the selection of a slice number. Simulations
demonstrate the efficiency and convenience of FSFIR
Huge myxoid chondrosarcoma expanded into the thoracic cavity with spinal involvement
En bloc resection is the treatment of choice of myxoid chondrosarcoma. These tumors can produce huge masses. Anatomical constraints limit the possibility to perform en bloc resection in the spine. A very huge myxoid chondrosarcoma (14.2âĂâ10.8âĂâ11.4 cm) arising from T2 to T5 and invading the whole higher left pleural cavity was observed. Surgical planning according to WBB staging system was performed. The tumor was successfully submitted to en bloc resection achieving a tumor-free margin as demonstrated by the pathologist's report. A careful planning and a multidisciplinary collaboration make possible to perform en bloc resection even in apparently impossible cases
Temperature Homogenization of Co-Integrated Shape MemoryâSilicon Bimorph Actuators
The high work density and beneficial downscaling of shape memory alloy (SMA) actuation performance provide a basis for the development of actuators and systems at microscales. Here, we report a novel monolithic fabrication approach for the co-integration of SMA and Si microstructures to enable SMA-Si bimorph microactuation. Double-beam cantilevers are chosen for the actuator layout to enable electrothermal actuation by Joule heating. The SMA materials under investigation are NiMnGa and NiTi(Hf) films with tunable phase transformation temperatures. We show that Joule heating of the cantilevers generates increasing temperature gradients for decreasing cantilever size, which hampers actuation performance. In order to cope with this problem, a new method for design optimization is presented based on finite element modeling (FEM) simulations. We demonstrate that temperature homogenization can be achieved by the design of additional folded beams in the perpendicular direction to the active beam cantilevers. Thereby, power consumption can be reduced by more than 35 % and maximum deflection can be increased up to a factor of 2 depending on the cantilever geometry
Cross-Ray Neural Radiance Fields for Novel-view Synthesis from Unconstrained Image Collections
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a revolutionary approach for rendering
scenes by sampling a single ray per pixel and it has demonstrated impressive
capabilities in novel-view synthesis from static scene images. However, in
practice, we usually need to recover NeRF from unconstrained image collections,
which poses two challenges: 1) the images often have dynamic changes in
appearance because of different capturing time and camera settings; 2) the
images may contain transient objects such as humans and cars, leading to
occlusion and ghosting artifacts. Conventional approaches seek to address these
challenges by locally utilizing a single ray to synthesize a color of a pixel.
In contrast, humans typically perceive appearance and objects by globally
utilizing information across multiple pixels. To mimic the perception process
of humans, in this paper, we propose Cross-Ray NeRF (CR-NeRF) that leverages
interactive information across multiple rays to synthesize occlusion-free novel
views with the same appearances as the images. Specifically, to model varying
appearances, we first propose to represent multiple rays with a novel cross-ray
feature and then recover the appearance by fusing global statistics, i.e.,
feature covariance of the rays and the image appearance. Moreover, to avoid
occlusion introduced by transient objects, we propose a transient objects
handler and introduce a grid sampling strategy for masking out the transient
objects. We theoretically find that leveraging correlation across multiple rays
promotes capturing more global information. Moreover, extensive experimental
results on large real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of CR-NeRF.Comment: ICCV 2023 Ora
Mesh-MLP: An all-MLP Architecture for Mesh Classification and Semantic Segmentation
With the rapid development of geometric deep learning techniques, many
mesh-based convolutional operators have been proposed to bridge irregular mesh
structures and popular backbone networks. In this paper, we show that while
convolutions are helpful, a simple architecture based exclusively on
multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) is competent enough to deal with mesh
classification and semantic segmentation. Our new network architecture, named
Mesh-MLP, takes mesh vertices equipped with the heat kernel signature (HKS) and
dihedral angles as the input, replaces the convolution module of a ResNet with
Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), and utilizes layer normalization (LN) to perform
the normalization of the layers. The all-MLP architecture operates in an
end-to-end fashion and does not include a pooling module. Extensive
experimental results on the mesh classification/segmentation tasks validate the
effectiveness of the all-MLP architecture.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
- âŠ