The geography of corporate fake news.

Although a rich academic literature examines the use of fake news by foreign actors for political manipulation, there is limited research on potential foreign intervention in capital markets. To address this gap, we construct a comprehensive database of (negative) fake news regarding U.S. firms by scraping prominent fact-checking sites. We identify the accounts that spread the news on Twitter (now X) and use machine-learning techniques to infer the geographic locations of these fake news spreaders. Our analysis reveals that corporate fake news is more likely than corporate non-fake news to be spread by foreign accounts. At the country level, corporate fake news is more likely to originate from African and Middle Eastern countries and tends to increase during periods of high geopolitical tension. At the firm level, firms operating in uncertain information environments and strategic industries are more likely to be targeted by foreign accounts. Overall, our findings provide initial evidence of foreign-originating misinformation in capital markets and thus have important policy implications.

RobustMat: Neural Diffusion for Street Landmark Patch Matching Under Challenging Environments.

For autonomous vehicles (AVs), visual perception techniques based on sensors like cameras play crucial roles in information acquisition and processing. In various computer perception tasks for AVs, it may be helpful to match landmark patches taken by an onboard camera with other landmark patches captured at a different time or saved in a street scene image database. To perform matching under challenging driving environments caused by changing seasons, weather, and illumination, we utilize the spatial neighborhood information of each patch. We propose an approach, named RobustMat, which derives its robustness to perturbations from neural differential equations. A convolutional neural ODE diffusion module is used to learn the feature representation for the landmark patches. A graph neural PDE diffusion module then aggregates information from neighboring landmark patches in the street scene. Finally, feature similarity learning outputs the final matching score. Our approach is evaluated on several street scene datasets and demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art matching results under environmental perturbations.

Image Patch-Matching With Graph-Based Learning in Street Scenes.

Matching landmark patches from a real-time image captured by an on-vehicle camera with landmark patches in an image database plays an important role in various computer perception tasks for autonomous driving. Current methods focus on local matching for regions of interest and do not take into account spatial neighborhood relationships among the image patches, which typically correspond to objects in the environment. In this paper, we construct a spatial graph with the graph vertices corresponding to patches and edges capturing the spatial neighborhood information. We propose a joint feature and metric learning model with graph-based learning. We provide a theoretical basis for the graph-based loss by showing that the information distance between the distributions conditioned on matched and unmatched pairs is maximized under our framework. We evaluate our model using several street-scene datasets and demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art matching results.

Quasi-Synchronization of Heterogeneous Networks With a Generalized Markovian Topology and Event-Triggered Communication.

We consider the quasi-synchronization problem of a continuous time generalized Markovian switching heterogeneous network with time-varying connectivity, using pinned nodes that are event-triggered to reduce the frequency of controller updates and internode communications. We propose a pinning strategy algorithm to determine how many and which nodes should be pinned in the network. Based on the assumption that a network has limited control efficiency, we derive a criterion for stability, which relates the pinning feedback gains, the coupling strength, and the inner coupling matrix. By utilizing the stochastic Lyapunov stability analysis, we obtain sufficient conditions for exponential quasi-synchronization under our stochastic event-triggering mechanism, and a bound for the quasi-synchronization error. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

An impulse radio ultrawideband system for contactless noninvasive respiratory monitoring.

We design a impulse radio ultrawideband radar monitoring system to track the chest wall movement of a human subject during respiration. Multiple sensors are placed at different locations to ensure that the backscattered signal could be detected by at least one sensor no matter which direction the human subject faces. We design a hidden Markov model to infer the subject facing direction and his or her chest movement. We compare the performance of our proposed scheme on 15 human volunteers with the medical gold standard using respiratory inductive plethysmography (RIP) belts, and show that on average, our estimation is over 81% correlated with the measurements of a RIP belt system. Furthermore, in order to automatically differentiate between periods of normal and abnormal breathing patterns, we develop a change point detection algorithm based on perfect simulation techniques to detect changes in the subject's breathing. The feasibility of our proposed system is verified by both the simulation and experiment results.