We explore in this paper the design of optimal share contracts when there is a double moral hazard, one on inputs exclusively provided by the agent (such as effort) and the other in reporting the level of output to be shared with the principal, and when there is a social efficiency cost to under-reporting. The optimal contract is second best in that it allows for residual moral hazard in both e...

This paper discusses different aspects of the notion of systemic risk. It contains a selective survey of the research on related topics, a review of some case studies of financial crises and failures, and a discussion pointing towards the importance of moral hazard as a key element of systemic risk. The main ideas studied are the links between: capital structure theory and bank capital regulati...

This paper presents a framework of using Chinese speech to access images via English captions. The formulation and the structure mapping rules of Chinese and English named entities are extracted from an NICT foreign location name corpus. For a named location, name part and keyword part are usually transliterated and translated, respectively. Keyword spotting identifies the keyword from speech q...

A technique for high-accuracy tracking of formants or vocal tract resonances is presented in this paper using a novel nonlinear predictor and using a target-directed temporal constraint. The nonlinear predictor is constructed from a parameter-free, discrete mapping function from the formant (frequencies and bandwidths) space to the LPC-cepstral space, with trainable residuals. We examine in thi...

Current Automatic Speech Recognition systems convert the speech signal into a sequence of discrete units, such as phonemes, and then apply statistical methods on the units to produce the linguistic message. Similar methodology has also been applied to recognize speaker and language, except that the output of the system can be the speaker or language information. Therefore, we propose the use of...

In this paper, we investigate achievable rates for data transmission from sources to sinks through multiple relay networks. We consider myopic coding, a constrained communication strategy in which each node has only a local view of the network, meaning that nodes can only transmit to and decode from neighboring nodes. We compare this with omniscient coding, in which every node has a global view...

Speaker verification systems require some kind of background model to reliably perform the verification task. Several algorithms have been proposed for the selection of cohort models to form a background model. This paper proposes a new cohort selection method called the Close Impostor Clustering (CIC). The new method is shown to outperform several other methods in a text-dependent verification...

Over the past few decades, obesity has become a global epidemic that affects diverse societies across developed and developing countries. Obe­ sity rates correlate well with recent developments such as incessant enticements to sit and an un­ precedented availability, at low or no cost, of foods and beverages rich in poorly satiating calo­ ries. These rapid environmental changes interact with pr...