University of Texas at Arlington

About: University of Texas at Arlington is a education organization based out in Arlington, Texas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 11758 authors who have published 28598 publications receiving 801626 citations. The organization is also known as: UT Arlington & University of Texas-Arlington.

Heterogeneous image feature integration via multi-modal spectral clustering

Abstract: In recent years, more and more visual descriptors have been proposed to describe objects and scenes appearing in images. Different features describe different aspects of the visual characteristics. How to combine these heterogeneous features has become an increasing critical problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to unsupervised integrate such heterogeneous features by performing multi-modal spectral clustering on unlabeled images and unsegmented images. Considering each type of feature as one modal, our new multi-modal spectral clustering (MMSC) algorithm is to learn a commonly shared graph Laplacian matrix by unifying different modals (image features). A non-negative relaxation is also added in our method to improve the robustness and efficiency of image clustering. We applied our MMSC method to integrate five types of popularly used image features, including SIFT, HOG, GIST, LBP, CENTRIST and evaluated the performance by two benchmark data sets: Caltech-101 and MSRC-v1. Compared with existing unsupervised scene and object categorization methods, our approach always achieves superior performances measured by three standard clustering evaluation metrices.

Causes and Consequences of Goodwill Impairment Losses

Abstract: The paper examines the reaction of market participants to the announcement of a goodwill impairment loss, the nature of the information conveyed by the loss, and whether a cause of goodwill impairment can be traced back to overpayment for targets at the time of prior acquisitions. We use a comprehensive sample of goodwill impairment announcements made under the regulatory regimes of SFAS 121 and SFAS 142 and explore how the information content changes over different reporting regimes. Our evidence suggests that investors as well as financial analysts revise their expectations downward on the announcement of a goodwill impairment loss and the downward revision is related to the magnitude of the loss. We find that the negative impact of the loss is significant under all three reporting regimes, i.e., pre-SFAS-142, transition period and post-SFAS-142, though it is lower in the post period. We further show that the impairment loss serves as a leading indicator of a decline in future profitability due to a slow-down in sales and/or higher operating costs. Our tests also reveal that proxies for overpayment for targets at the time of prior acquisitions can predict the subsequent goodwill impairment. From our analysis of firms with potentially impaired goodwill that do not report impairment, we find no evidence that market participants revise their expectations at the time of revelation of a zero impairment loss, especially in the post-SFAS-142 period. Indirect evidence suggests that some of these firms may have used their managerial discretion to avoid taking an impairment loss, consistent with the argument in Ramanna (2008) and Ramanna and Watts (2010) that the use of unverifiable fair values under SFAS 142 may lead to the opportunistic avoidance of impairment charges.

Search for an additional, heavy Higgs boson in the H → ZZ decay channel at √s = 8 TeV in pp collision data with the ATLAS detector

Abstract: A search is presented for a high-mass Higgs boson in the , , , and decay modes using the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The search uses proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb. The results of the search are interpreted in the scenario of a heavy Higgs boson with a width that is small compared with the experimental mass resolution. The Higgs boson mass range considered extends up to for all four decay modes and down to as low as 140 , depending on the decay mode. No significant excess of events over the Standard Model prediction is found. A simultaneous fit to the four decay modes yields upper limits on the production cross-section of a heavy Higgs boson times the branching ratio to boson pairs. 95 % confidence level upper limits range from 0.53 pb at GeV to 0.008 pb at GeV for the gluon-fusion production mode and from 0.31 pb at GeV to 0.009 pb at GeV for the vector-boson-fusion production mode. The results are also interpreted in the context of Type-I and Type-II two-Higgs-doublet models.

Resilient Moduli Response of Moderately Cement-Treated Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement Aggregates

Abstract: The use of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) aggregate materials in road construction reduces natural resource depletion and promotes the recycling of RAP materials for other applications. However, product variability and low resilient moduli characteristics often limit RAP applications in road bases. Stabilization of RAP materials with cement was hence attempted in a research study to evaluate the effectiveness of cement treatments in enhancing resilient characteristics of RAP aggregates. The present paper describes the results from a series of resilient modulus tests that were conducted in a laboratory environment using a repeated load triaxial test setup. The effects of three different cement dosages and various confining and deviatoric stress levels on the resilient modulus (MR) response of treated RAP materials were studied. MR values of untreated and cement-treated RAP aggregates ranged from 180 to 340 MPa and 200 to 515 MPa, respectively, which reveal the enhancements with cement treatment. Regressi...