The aim of this paper is to point out some problems of index estimation for the purposes of weather derivative valuation considering the particularities of agriculture. The assessment of the sensitivity of barley to weather over 40 years has been the basis for the design and valuation of weather derivative in the Czech Republic (The Southern Moravia Region). The analysis is based on regression ...

This document discusses the characteristics of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and different front-end approaches for ECG signal acquisition. The tradeoffs between different approaches and the effects on overall system design are discussed. The report also includes descriptions of potential implementations of the front-end architecture using the ADS1258 and ADS1278 and respective noise measurem...

We describe a single framework in which to view the end-to-endindependently-verifiable (E2E) polling-place voting systems with a mixnet back-end. We use the framework to invent new systems that combine front and back-ends from existing systems.

Most compensation methods to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems in noisy environments such as spectral subtraction, CMN, and MVN, rely on the fact that noise and speech spectra are independent. However, the use of limited window in signal processing may introduce a cross-term between them, which deteriorates the speech recognition accuracy. To tackle this problem, we introduce...

This paper explores the organizational structure and coordination mechanisms used by large ITOvendor organizations. Five global ITO-vendor organizations were studied. The results show that all five use a “front-back hybrid” structure. All five vendors divide their front-end labor pool according to the types of customers that they serve. On the back-end, their labor pools are organized around th...

Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist events produced nearly 3000 fatalities, nearly six times more than the next largest event. But, was this enormous loss of life statistically unlikely given mo...

The Australian National Corpus has been established in an effort to make currently scattered and relatively inaccessible data available to researchers through an online portal. In contrast to other national corpora, it is conceptualised as a linked collection of many existing and future language resources representing language use in Australia, unified through common technical standards. This a...

Previous work has shown that spectro-temporal features reduce WER for automatic speech recognition under noisy conditions. The spectro-temporal framework, however, is not the only way to process features in order to reduce errors due to noise in the signal. The two-stage mel-warped Wiener filtering method used in the “Advanced Front End” (AFE), now a standard front end for robust recognition, i...

We examine the social prerequisites for symbolic communication by studying a language game embedded within a signaling game, in which cooperation is possible but unenforced, and agents have incentive to deceive. Despite this incentive, and even with persistent cheating, naming conventions can still arise from strictly local interactions, as long as agents employ sufficient mechanisms to detect ...