Since 1994, the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) has offered the Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) program to increase gender diversity in the computing research community. DREU gives undergraduate women the experience of conducting summer research with a professor of computer science or computer engineering (CSE). In 2006, CRA-W joined with...

Modified Reconstructibility Analysis (MRA), a novel decomposition within the framework of set-theoretic (crisp possibilistic) reconstructibility analysis, is presented. It is shown that in some cases, while three-variable NPNclassified Boolean functions are not decomposable using Conventional Reconstructibility Analysis (CRA), they are decomposable using MRA. Also, it is shown that whenever a d...

This paper is mainly concerned with the relation-algebraical aspects of the well-known Region Connection Calculus (RCC). We show that the contact relation algebra (CRA) of certain RCC model is not atomic complete and hence infinite. So in general an extensional composition table for the RCC cannot be obtained by simply refining the RCC8 relations. After having shown that each RCC model is a con...

The need for modularity in the behaviour analysis of concurrent systems has been answered successfully by making reachability analysis compositional. Compositional reachability analysis (CRA) on the other hand, often exacerbates the state explosion problem; subsystem analysis leaves out information from the subsystem environment (context), which could considerably reduce the number of states al...

We study the effect of risk aversion on the valuation of credit derivatives. Using the technology of utility-indifference valuation in intensity-based models of default risk, we analyze resulting yield spreads for single-name defaultable bonds, and a simple representative two-name credit derivative. The impact of risk averse valuation on prices and yield spreads is expressed in terms of effecti...

WHAT IS HINDSIGHT BIAS? In 1972, President Richard Nixon made a historic trip to China, which had become virtually a closed country following the 1949 revolution. There was intense speculation on what Nixon might achieve. In a now-famous study, Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth (1975) asked their students to estimate probabilities for events relating to his visit. An example: “The USA will establ...

We construct a new credit spread index, employing an extensive micro-level data set of secondary market prices of outstanding senior unsecured bonds over the 1973– 2009 period. Compared with the standard default-risk indicators such as the Baa-Aaa corporate bond spread and the paper-bill spread, our credit spread index is a robust predictor of future economic activity across a variety of econom...

Given a set P of n points in R ̄ , an ε-kernel K ⊆ P approximates the directional width of P in every direction within a relative (1 − ε) factor. In this paper we study the stability of ε-kernels under dynamic insertion and deletion of points to P and by changing the approximation factor ε. In the first case, we say an algorithm for dynamically maintaining a ε-kernel is stable if at most O(1) po...

The need for modularity in the behaviour analysis of concurrent systems has been answered successfully by making reachability analysis compositional. Compositional reachability analysis (CRA) on the other hand, often exacerbates the state explosion problem; subsystem analysis leaves out information from the subsystem environment (context), which could considerably reduce the number of states al...

The Taylor rule establishes a simple linear relation between the interest rate, inflation and output gap. However, this relation may not be so simple. To get a deeper understanding of central banks’ behaviour, this paper asks whether central banks are indeed following a linear Taylor rule or, instead, a nonlinear rule. At the same time, it also analyses whether that rule can be augmented with a...