ESSAYS ON INTERNATIONAL RISK SHARING

International risk sharing is an intertemporal utility maximizing process in which countries of different economic prospects engage in cross-border trade and financial asset transactions to mitigate impacts of idiosyncratic income shocks on consumption. Measuring the extent of international risk sharing (IRS) remains an open empirical question. This dissertation provides a new approach to measuring the extent of IRS for countries and conditions for the measure of consumption correlation to hold and a possible cause to the consumption correlation puzzle

Rice seed image classification based on HOG descriptor with missing values imputation

Rice is a primary source of food consumed by almost half of world population. Rice quality mainly depends on the purity of the rice seed. In order to ensure the purity of rice variety, the recognition process is an essential stage. In this paper, we firstly propose to use histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptor to characterize rice seed images. Since the size of image is totally random and the features extracted by HOG can not be used directly by classifier due to the different dimensions. We apply several imputation methods to fill the missing data for HOG descriptor. The experiment is applied on the VNRICE benchmark dataset to evaluate the proposed approach

A multi-criteria decision-making in relieving grinding process of surface of gear milling tooth based on the archimedean spiral using taguchi-ahp-topsis method

In this study, in order to optimize the quality criteria of the machined surface based on the Archimedean spiral, the relieving grinding process (RGP) was performed to machine the material of HSS P18 in a 1Б811 machine with four input parameters including graininess of grinding wheel (G), grinding wheel hardness (Hd), velocity of grinding wheel (V), and feed rate (s) and with three quality criteria including surface roughness (Ra), hardening of surface layer (∆HRC), and hardened layer thickness (∆L). Taguchi-AHP-Topsis method was successfully applied to solve the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem in this case. The optimized results of the output parameters are surface roughness of 0.21 µm, surface hardening of 1.45 HRC, and hardened layer thickness of 34.18 µm. These results were determined at the set of the input parameters includes G, V, s with their values of 120, 24 m/s, 2.08 m/min, respectively, and Hd at level 1. The optimal results were verified through the comparison between the calculated and the experimental results using this set of optimal parameters. The differences between the calculated results and the experimental results were quite small (maximum different value was 4.8 %) Thus, the results of this study can be applied to solve the multi-objective optimization problems in RGP of the GMT surface based on the Archimedean spira

Inductive and Transductive Few-Shot Video Classification via Appearance and Temporal Alignments

We present a novel method for few-shot video classification, which performs appearance and temporal alignments. In particular, given a pair of query and support videos, we conduct appearance alignment via frame-level feature matching to achieve the appearance similarity score between the videos, while utilizing temporal order-preserving priors for obtaining the temporal similarity score between the videos. Moreover, we introduce a few-shot video classification framework that leverages the above appearance and temporal similarity scores across multiple steps, namely prototype-based training and testing as well as inductive and transductive prototype refinement. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to explore transductive few-shot video classification. Extensive experiments on both Kinetics and Something-Something V2 datasets show that both appearance and temporal alignments are crucial for datasets with temporal order sensitivity such as Something-Something V2. Our approach achieves similar or better results than previous methods on both datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/fsvc-ata.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 202

Investigation of the estrogenic activity of Pueraria candollei variety mirifica extract on rats

Background: Pueraria candollei variety mirifica (PM) has been widely used as ingredient in many rejuvenating products. In this study, we aimed to assess the estrogenic activity of PM extract grown in Vietnam.Methods: Estrogenic activity of PM extract was estimated on immature female rats by using uterotrophic method to measure the weight of the reproductive organs. Estrogenic activity of PM extract also was investigated in mature female ovariectomized rats by evaluating the vaginal cells growth, reproductive organs weight, serum estradiol concentration.Results: Our results showed that PM extract at doses of 100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg had increased the reproductive organs weight in immature rats and female ovariectomized rats. In addition, PM extract had increased the serum estradiol concentration and the vaginal cells growth by increasing the percentage of keratinocytes in female ovariectomized rats.Conclusions: Our results showed that PM extract has strong estrogenic activity in rats

The Satisfaction of Corporate Customer at Agribank in Ho Chi Minh City

In this paper, the authors use analytical method of explore factor analysis to determining factors that are components of the corporate customer satisfaction in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). This paper conducted during the period from March 2012 to December 2014. The exploratory factor analysis result showed that there were five factors, which included of factors following the service behavior, the tangible and the competitive price, the reliance, the convenience and the Agribank Image that are components of the corporate customer satisfaction with significance level 5 %. In addition, the research result processed from SPSS 20.0 software. The research result showed that there were nearly 550 corporates of Agribank in HCMC interviewed but 503 corporates (47 samples mistaken) to be processed and answered about 30 questions. The researcher had analyzed KMO test. The corporate responses measured through an adapted questionnaire on a 5-point Likert scale. Hard copy and interview the corporate by questionnaire distributed among corporate of Agribank in HCMC. At the same time, the result was also a scientific evidence and important for researchers, and policy makers who apply them for improving the corporate customer satisfaction in HCMC. The researchers had obtained the main objectives of this study were to: 1. The first objective, the authors had to conduct a survey to find factors that are components of the corporate customer satisfaction of Agribank in HCMC. 2. The second objective, the authors had to identify some factors that are components in the corporate customer satisfaction in HCMC