Face Prediction Model for an Automatic Age-invariant Face Recognition System

Automated face recognition and identification softwares are becoming part of our daily life; it finds its abode not only with Facebook's auto photo tagging, Apple's iPhoto, Google's Picasa, Microsoft's Kinect, but also in Homeland Security Department's dedicated biometric face detection systems. Most of these automatic face identification systems fail where the effects of aging come into the picture. Little work exists in the literature on the subject of face prediction that accounts for aging, which is a vital part of the computer face recognition systems. In recent years, individual face components' (e.g. eyes, nose, mouth) features based matching algorithms have emerged, but these approaches are still not efficient. Therefore, in this work we describe a Face Prediction Model (FPM), which predicts human face aging or growth related image variation using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) learning techniques. The FPM captures the facial changes, which occur with human aging and predicts the facial image with a few years of gap with an acceptable accuracy of face matching from 76 to 86%.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure

Gamma Ray Bursts -- A radio perspective

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic events at cosmological distances. They provide unique laboratory to investigate fundamental physical processes under extreme conditions. Due to extreme luminosities, GRBs are detectable at very high redshifts and potential tracers of cosmic star formation rate at early epoch. While the launch of {\it Swift} and {\it Fermi} has increased our understanding of GRBs tremendously, many new questions have opened up. Radio observations of GRBs uniquely probe the energetics and environments of the explosion. However, currently only 30\% of the bursts are detected in radio bands. Radio observations with upcoming sensitive telescopes will potentially increase the sample size significantly, and allow one to follow the individual bursts for a much longer duration and be able to answer some of the important issues related to true calorimetry, reverse shock emission and environments around the massive stars exploding as GRBs in the early Universe.Comment: To appear in Advances in Astronomy, special issue "Gamma-Ray Burst in Swift/Fermi Era and Beyond

Relationship based Entity Recommendation System

With the increase in usage of the internet as a place to search for information, the importance of the level of relevance of the results returned by search engines have increased by many folds in recent years. In this paper, we propose techniques to improve the relevance of results shown by a search engine, by using the kinds of relationships between entities a user is interested in. We propose a technique that uses relationships between entities to recommend related entities from a knowledge base which is a collection of entities and the relationships with which they are connected to other entities. These relationships depict more real world relationships between entities, rather than just simple “is-a” or “has-a” relationships. The system keeps track of relationships on which user is clicking and uses this click count as a preference indicator to recommend future entities. This approach is very useful in modern day semantic web searches for recommending entities of user’s interests

Conflict in Cross Border Mergers Effect of Firm and Market Size

This paper tries to analyze the interrelationship between possibilities of conflict in cross border mergers and acquisitions and firm and market characteristics in a two country three firm model. We show that in general an increase in asymmetry across firms reduces the possibility of conflict between jurisdictions over merger review decisions. We also show that possibility of conflict increase with the increase in market asymmetries across countries. We also discuss interaction of asymmetry in firm and market size with the distribution of firms across countries and its effect on the possibilities of conflict.conflict, Cross border mergers, firm size, Market Size

A Matter of Voice: The Case for Abolishing the 30 percent Rule for Pension Fund Investments

Pension fund managers have devised ways to effectively skirt the rule that limits them to acquiring no more than 30 percent of the shares eligible to vote for the directors of a corporation. It’s time for regulators to enforce the rule or eliminate it entirely, thereby giving pension funds a voice commensurate with their equity stake.Canadian pension security, Canadian pension funds