A real-time facial expression recognition system for affective computing

A thesis submitted to the University of London in partial fulfillment to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Judging Japan's FDI: The verdict from a dartboard model

We evaluate Japan's inward and outward FDI performance using theoretical benchmarks based on the premise that management teams headquartered around the world bid for the production facilities located in each country. Our model incorporates the assumption that bids are inversely proportionate to distance. It accurately predicts the multilateral shares of FDI stocks for most important countries. The theory predicts lower shares of FDI for Japan than its share of the world economy. Japan's actual share of outward FDI exceeds its inward share -as the model predicts- but both currently lie below the benchmark predictions.Foreign direct investment, gravity, mergers and acquisitions, openness

Model Reduction of Multi-Dimensional and Uncertain Systems

We present model reduction methods with guaranteed error bounds for systems represented by a Linear Fractional Transformation (LFT) on a repeated scalar uncertainty structure. These reduction methods can be interpreted either as doing state order reduction for multi-dimensionalsystems, or as uncertainty simplification in the case of uncertain systems, and are based on finding solutions to a pair of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). A related necessary and sufficient condition for the exact reducibility of stable uncertain systems is also presented

Selecting Economic Immigrants: An Actuarial Approach

There is growing international interest in a Canadian-style points system for selecting economic immigrants. Although existing points systems have been influenced by the human capital literature, the findings have traditionally been incorporated in an ad hoc way. This paper explores a formal method for designing a points system based on a human capital earnings regression for predicting immigrant economic success. The method is implemented for Canada using the IMDB, a remarkable longitudinal database that combines information on immigrants’ characteristics at landing with their subsequent income performance as reported on tax returns. We demonstrate the feasibility of the method by developing an illustrative points system. We also explore how the selection system can be improved by incorporating additional information such as country-of origin characteristics and intended occupations. We discuss what our findings imply for the debate about the relative merits of points- and employment-based systems for selecting economic immigrants.Immigrant selection, Points system, Human capital, Earnings prediction

Implications of the r-mode instability of rotating relativistic stars

Several recent surprises appear dramatically to have improved the likelihood that the spin of rapidly rotating, newly formed neutron stars (and, possibly, of old stars spun up by accretion) is limited by a nonaxisymmetric instability driven by gravitational waves. Except for the earliest part of the spin-down, the axial l=m=2 mode (an r-mode) dominates the instability, and the emitted waves may be observable by detectors with the sensitivity of LIGO II. A review of these hopeful results is followed by a discussion of constraints on the instability set by dissipative mechanisms, including viscosity, nonlinear saturation, and energy loss to a magnetic field driven by differential rotation.Comment: 20 pages LaTeX2e (stylefile included), 6 eps figures. Review to appear in the proceedings of the 9th Marcel Grossman Meeting, World Scientific, ed. V. Gurzadyan, R. Jantzen, R. Ruffin

An Automated Framework for Structural Test-data Generation

Structural testing criteria are mandated in many software development standards and guidelines. The process of generating test data to achieve 100% coverage of a given structural coverage metric is labour-intensive and expensive. This paper presents an approach to automate the generation of such test data. The test-data generation is based on the application of a dynamic optimisation-based search for the required test data. The same approach can be generalised to solve other test-data generation problems. Three such applications are discussed-boundary value analysis, assertion/run-time exception testing, and component re-use testing. A prototype tool-set has been developed to facilitate the automatic generation of test data for these structural testing problems. The results of preliminary experiments using this technique and the prototype tool-set are presented and show the efficiency and effectiveness of this approac

2-(3,5-Dimethylbenzene)-1-ferrocenylmethyl-1H-1,3-benzimidazole

In the title molecule, [Fe(C5H5)(C21H19N2)], the five-membered imidazole ring forms dihedral angles of 88.61 (8) and 42.15 (6)° with the substituted cyclopentadienyl and dimethyl-substituted benzene rings, respectively. In the crystal structure, there is an Nsp2...H contact and a modest C-H...[pi](arene) interaction involving the benzene ring of the benzimidizole system

Gluino Coannihilation Revisited

Some variants of the MSSM feature a strip in parameter space where the lightest neutralino is identified as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), the gluino is the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle (NLSP) and is nearly degenerate with the LSP, and the relic cold dark matter density is brought into the range allowed by astrophysics and cosmology by coannihilation with the gluino NLSP. We calculate the relic density along this gluino coannihilation strip in the MSSM, including the effects of gluino-gluino bound states and initial-state Sommerfeld enhancement, and taking into account the decoupling of the gluino and LSP densities that occurs for large values of the squark mass. We find that bound-state effects can increase the maximum LSP mass for which the relic cold dark matter density lies within the range favoured by astrophysics and cosmology by as much as ~ 50% if the squark to gluino mass ratio is 1.1, and that the LSP may weigh up to ~ 8 TeV for a wide range of the squark to gluino mass ratio \lesssim 100.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures, matches version to appear in JHE