The estimation of large covariance and precision matrices is fundamental in modern multivariate analysis. However, problems arise from the statistical analysis of large panel economic and financial data. The covariance matrix reveals marginal correlations between variables, while the precision matrix encodes conditional correlations between pairs of variables given the remaining variables. In this paper, we provide a selective review of several recent developments on the estimation of large covariance and precision matrices. We focus on two general approaches: a rankbased method and a factormodelbased method. Theories and applications of both approaches are presented. These methods are expected to be widely applicable to the analysis of economic and financial data.

Short integer solution (SIS) and learning with errors (LWE) are two hard lattice problems. These two problems are believed having huge potential in application of cryptography. In 2012, Ding et al. [5] introduced the first provably secure key exchange based on LWE problem. On the other hand, we believe that it is very difficult to do key exchange on SIS problem only. In 2014, Wang et al. [6] did an attempt, but it was not successful. Mao et al. [7] broke the protocol by an attack based on CBi-SIS problem in 2016. However, their attack is not efficient. In this paper, we present a extremely straightforward and simple attack to Wang’s key exchange and then we will construct a key exchange based on SIS and LWE problems.

We introduce an interactive tool which enables a user to quickly assemble an architectural model directly over a 3D point cloud acquired from large-scale scanning of an urban scene. The user loosely defines and manipulates simple building blocks, which we call SmartBoxes, over the point samples. These boxes quickly snap to their proper locations to conform to common architectural structures. The key idea is that the building blocks are smart in the sense that their locations and sizes are automatically adjusted on-the-fly to fit well to the point data, while at the same time respecting contextual relations with nearby similar blocks. SmartBoxes are assembled through a discrete optimization to balance between two snapping forces defined respectively by a data-fitting term and a contextual term, which together assist the user in reconstructing the architectural model from a sparse and noisy point cloud. We show that a combination of the user’s interactive guidance and high-level knowledge about the semantics of the underlying model, together with the snapping forces, allows the reconstruction of structures which are partially or even completely missing from the input.

In this paper, we consider a bilevel polynomial optimization problem where the objective and the constraint functions of both the upper-and the lower-level problems are polynomials. We present methods for finding its global minimizers and global minimum using a sequence of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations and provide convergence results for the methods. Our scheme for problems with a convex lower-level problem involves solving a transformed equivalent single-level problem by a sequence of SDP relaxations, whereas our approach for general problems involving a nonconvex polynomial lower-level problem solves a sequence of approximation problems via another sequence of SDP relaxations.

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