Deformable avatars are virtual humans that deform themselves during motion. This implies facial deformations, body deformations at joints, and global deformations. Simulating deformable avatars ensures a more realistic simulation of virtual humans. The research requires models for capturing of geometrie and kinematic data, the synthesis of the realistic human shape and motion, the parametrisation and motion retargeting, and several appropriate deformation models. Once a deformable avatar has been created and animated, the researcher must model high-level behavior and introduce agent...

Econometric theory, as presented in textbooks and the econometric literature generally, is a somewhat disparate collection of findings. Its essential nature is to be a set of demonstrated results that increase over time, each logically based on a specific set of axioms or assumptions, yet at every moment, rather than a finished work, these inevitably form an incomplete body of knowledge. The practice of econometric theory consists of selecting from, applying, and evaluating this literature, so as to test its applicability and range. The creation, development, and use of computer software has...

Over the past 25 years, applied econometrics has undergone tremen- dous changes, with active developments in fields of research such as time series, labor econometrics, financial econometrics and simulation based methods. Time series analysis has been an active field of research since the seminal work by Box and Jenkins (1976), who introduced a gen- eral framework in which time series can be analyzed. In the world of financial econometrics and the application of time series techniques, the ARCH model of Engle (1982) has shifted the focus from the modelling of the process in itself to the...

Are foreign exchange markets efficient? Are fundamentals important for predicting exchange rate movements? What is the signal-to-ratio of high frequency exchange rate changes? Is it possible to define a measure of the equilibrium exchange rate that is useful from an assessment perspective?
The book is a selective survey of current thinking on key topics in exchange rate economics, supplemented throughout by new empirical evidence. The focus is on the use of advanced econometric tools to find answers to these and other questions which are important to practitioners, policy-makers and...

Astranger in academia cannot but be impressed by the apparent uniformity and precision of the methodology currently applied to the measurement of economic relationships. In scores of journal articles and other studies, a theoretical argument is typically presented to justify the position that a certain variable is related to certain other, possibly causal, variables. Regression or a related method is applied to a set of observations on these variables, and the conclusion often emerges that the causa, l variables are indeed "significant" at a certain "level," thereby lending support to the...

One cannot exaggerate the importance of estimating how international trade responds to changes in income and prices. But there is a tension between whether one should use models that fit the data but that contradict certain aspects of the underlying theory or models that fit the theory but contradict certain aspects of the data. The essays in Estimating Trade Elasticities book offer one practical approach to deal with this tension. The analysis starts with the practical implications of optimising behaviour for estimation and it follows with a re-examination of the puzzling...

Markov chains have increasingly become useful way of capturing stochastic nature of many economic and financial variables. Although the hidden Markov processes have been widely employed for some time in many engineering applications e.g. speech recognition, its effectiveness has now been recognized in areas of social science research as well. The main aim of Hidden Markov Models: Applications to Financial Economics is to make such techniques available to more researchers in financial economics. As such we only cover the necessary theoretical aspects in each chapter while...

During 1985-86, the acquisition editor for the humanities and social sciences division of Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands visited the University of Horida (where I was also visiting while on sabbatical leave from Wilfrid Laurier University as the McKethan-Matherly Senior Research Fellow) to discuss publishing plans of the faculty. He expressed a keen interest in publishing the proceedings of the conference of the Canadian Econometric Study Group (CESG) that was to be held the following year at WLU. This volume is the end product of his interest, endurance, and persistence. But...

Patrick Artus and Yves Barroux The Applied Econometric Association organised an international conference on "Monetary and Financial Models" in Geneva in January 1987. The purpose of this book is to make available to the public a choice of the papers that were presented at the conference. The selected papers all deal with the setting of monetary targets and the effects of monetary policy on the economy as well as with the analysis of the financial behaviours of economic agents. Other papers presented at the same conference but dealing with the external aspects of monetary policy (exchange rate...