The negotiations for a global climate agreement recognize that substantial and additional funds need to be generated for assisting adaptation in developing countries. Currently, the 2% adaptation levy (AL) on the clean development mechanism (CDM) is intended to serve this purpose under the Kyoto Protocol. This paper analyses whether such an arrangement can achieve its objectives, and thereby di...

Speaker adaptation is an important step in optimization and personalization of the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for individual users. While many applications target in rapid adaptation by various global transformations, slower adaptation to obtain a higher level of personalization would be useful for many active ASR users, especially for those whose speech is not recognized...

Gardens is an integrated programming language and system supporting parallel computation across networks of workstations. It addresses a combination of goals: it (i) maximises performance and (ii) is still safe, it supports (iii) the programming of abstractions (parallel libraries) and (iv) adaptive parallel computation, ie, computation that adapts at run-time to a changing set of available wor...

Motivated by the findings in social science that people’s opinions are diverse and variable while together they are shaped by evolving social norms, we perform personalized sentiment classification via shared model adaptation over time. In our proposed solution, a global sentiment model is constantly updated to capture the homogeneity in which users express opinions, while personalized models a...

Placed in the context of China’s transitional economy, this paper studies the role of different economic, institutional and managerial factors in accelerating or hindering hightechnology firms’ pace of strategic adaptation toward a higher level of technology orientation. Drawing on a unique longitudinal data of firms in the Zhongguancun Science Park (China’s Silicon Valley) from 2000 to 2003, w...

International policy is placing increasing emphasis on adaptation to climate change, including the allocation of new funds to assist adaptation efforts. Climate change adaptation funding may be most effective where it meets integrated goals, but global geographic priorities based on multiple development and ecological criteria are not well characterized. Here we show that human and natural adap...

We tested between three levels of visuospatial adaptation (global map, parallel feature modules, and parallel sensorimotor transformations) by training subjects to reach and grasp virtual objects viewed through a left-right reversing prism, with either visual location or orientation feedback. Even though spatial information about the global left-right reversal was present in every training sess...

Traditional adaptive hypermedia systems have focused on providing adaptation functionality on a closed corpus, while Web search interfaces have delivered non-personalized information to users. In this paper, we show how we integrate closed corpus adaptation and global context provision in a Personal Reader environment. The local context consists of individually optimized recommendations to lear...