 Commodity markets: overview, description and structure  Commodity spot price models, their performance and calibration  Forward curve modeling for commodities  Modeling commodity price volatility  Correlations/dependencies in commodity portfolios  Modeling risk of a commodity portfolio  Typical commodity derivatives (quanto, Asian, spread and basket options, volumetric and swing options...

The entry price of supercomputing has traditionally been very high. As processing elements, operating systems, and switch technology become cheap commodity parts, building a powerful supercomputer at a fraction of the price of a proprietary system becomes realistic. We have recently purchased, in support of both our local and national collaborations, a dedicated computational cluster of eight D...

The’ Market for Higher Education: Does It Really Exist? Higher education, like any other commodity or service, has been viewed in a variety of economic frameworks. Little of this work, however, appears to have made any effort to define carefully the boundaries of the relevant market for higher education, which is the subject of this particular inquiry. Market definition is an essential prelimin...

This paper investigates the propensity of exporters in certain primary commodity sectors to innovate and then attempts to measure the associated gains. The high degree of differentiation in metal products is giving rise to the potential for vertical upgrading for a substantial portion of Latin American export sales. Estimation of a demand system for U.S. imports shows that relatively high-price...

We introduce a novel RGB-D patch descriptor designed for detecting coplanar surfaces in SLAM reconstruction. The core of our method is a deep convolutional neural net that takes in RGB, depth, and normal information of a planar patch in an image and outputs a descriptor that can be used to find coplanar patches from other images. We train the network on 10 million triplets of coplanar and non-c...

We propose a novel external memory based algorithm for constructing minimal perfect hash functions h for huge sets of keys. For a set of n keys, our algorithm outputs h in time O(n). The algorithm needs a small vector of one byte entries in main memory to construct h. The evaluation of h(x) requires three memory accesses for any key x. The description of h takes a constant number of up to 9 bit...

Within the framework of an n-commodity, n-factor, K-country loglinear model with identical Cobb–Douglas production coefficients and identical consumer-expenditure shares across countries, balanced trade, and a pattern of world endowments permitting positive outputs of all commodities in each country, it is shown that, given any mode of aggregating the n commodities into at most n − 1 industrial...