Contributions in Merlin

The Semantic Web is distributed yet interoperable: Distributed since resources are created and published by a variety of producers, tailored to their specific needs and knowledge; Interoperable as entities are linked across resources, allowing to use resources from different providers in concord. Complementary to the explicit usage of Semantic Web resources, embedding methods made them applicable to machine learning tasks. Subsequently, embedding models for numerous tasks and structures have been developed, and embedding spaces for various resources have been published. The ecosystem of embedding spaces is distributed but not interoperable: Entity embeddings are not readily comparable across different spaces. To parallel the Web of Data with a Web of Embeddings, we must thus integrate available embedding spaces into a uniform space. Current integration approaches are limited to two spaces and presume that both of them were embedded with the same method — both assumptions are unlikely to hold in the context of a Web of Embeddings. In this paper, we present FedCoder— an approach that integrates multiple embedding spaces via a latent space. We assert that linked entities have a similar representation in the latent space so that entities become comparable across embedding spaces. FedCoder employs an autoencoder to learn this latent space from linked as well as non-linked entities. Our experiments show that FedCoder substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches when faced with different embedding models, that it scales better than previous methods in the number of embedding spaces, and that it improves with more graphs being integrated whilst performing comparably with current approaches that assumed joint learning of the embeddings and were, usually, limited to two sources. Our results demonstrate that FedCoder is well adapted to integrate the distributed, diverse, and large ecosystem of embeddings spaces into an interoperable Web of Embeddings.

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Millions of employees across the globe, including a large proportion of knowledge workers, transitioned to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. As remote work continues to characterize work post-crisis, it is imperative to understand how employees adjust to remote work. The current research explores the extent to which knowledge workers hold a fixed mindset about remote work (e.g., that a person either is or is not suited to remote work and this cannot be changed) and tested how this mindset shaped well-being during coronavirus-related lockdown. In a longitudinal five-week study of 113 knowledge workers transitioning to remote work, we find that knowledge workers who endorsed a more fixed mindset about remote work experienced more negative and less positive emotion during remote work. The increased negative emotion prompted by fixed mindsets was associated with lesser perceived productivity among these knowledge workers in subsequent weeks. We conclude that understanding how fundamental beliefs (e.g., beliefs about the learnability of remote work) affect employee experiences can help create a brighter future as technology further enables remote work. Encouraging employees to view remote work as a skill that can be learned and developed could help people thrive in the new world of work.

Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and it poses negative externalities to health services. To shed light on the role of parents, we elicit parental beliefs about the returns and the persistence of a healthy diet and exercise routine in childhood. Parents believe both types of investments to improve child and adult health outcomes. Consistent with a model of taste formation, parents believe that childhood health behaviors persist into adulthood. We show that perceived returns are predictive of health investments and outcomes, and that less educated parents view the returns to health investments to be lower. Our descriptive evidence suggests that beliefs contribute to the socioeconomic inequality in health outcomes and the intergenerational transmission of obesity.

Evaluation campaigns for interactive multimedia retrieval, such as the Video Browser Shodown (VBS) or the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC), so far imposed constraints on both simultaneity and locality of all participants, requiring them to solve the same tasks in the same place, at the same time and under the same conditions. These constraints are in contrast to other evaluation campaigns that do not focus on interactivity, where participants can process the tasks in any place at any time. The recent travel restrictions necessitated the relaxation of the locality constraint of interactive campaigns, enabling participants to take place from an arbitrary location. Born out of necessity, this relaxation turned out to be a boon since it greatly simplified the evaluation process and enabled organisation of ad-hoc evaluations outside of the large campaigns. However, it also introduced an additional complication in cases where participants were spread over several time zones. In this paper, we introduce an evaluation scheme for interactive retrieval evaluation that relaxes both the simultaneity and locality constraints, enabling participation from any place at any time within a predefined time frame. This scheme, as implemented in the Distributed Retrieval Evaluation Server (DRES), enables novel ways of conducting interactive retrieval evaluation and bridged the gap between interactive campaigns and non-interactive ones.

Die Existenz der Trade-off Theorie (TOT) und der Pecking Order Theorie (POT) wird meist in gesamten Märkten untersucht. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, Unternehmen nach buchhalterischen Merkmalen zu sortieren und anschliessend auf die beiden Theorien zu testen. So kann gezeigt werden, dass u.a. grosse Unternehmen der POT folgen, wobei kleine Unternehmen eher der TOT folgen. Bei der Betrachtung aller Unternehmen konnte anhand mehrerer Indikatoren eher auf die Existenz der POT geschlossen werden, wobei die TOT vermutlich von weniger Unternehmen benutzt wird.

We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default—that is nonpersonalized—conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing methodology that uses virtual agents to conduct large-scale analysis of algorithmic information curation in a controlled environment. Specifically, we look at the text search results for “us elections,” “donald trump,” “joe biden,” “bernie sanders” queries on Google, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex, during the 2020 primaries. Our findings indicate substantial differences in the search results between search engines and multiple discrepancies within the results generated for different agents using the same search engine. It highlights that whether users see certain information is decided by chance due to the inherent randomization of search results. We also find that some search engines prioritize different categories of information sources with respect to specific candidates. These observations demonstrate that algorithmic curation of political information can create information inequalities between the search engine users even under nonpersonalized conditions. Such inequalities are particularly troubling considering that search results are highly trusted by the public and can shift the opinions of undecided voters as demonstrated by previous research.

We investigate the impact of the Bank of England's asset purchase program (APP) on the composition of assets of UK banks with unique data on the received reserves injections. Compared to the control group, receiving banks reallocated their assets towards lower risk-weighted investments, such as government securities, but did not supply more credit to the real economy. Overall, our findings suggest that risk-based capital constraints can limit the effectiveness of expansionary unconventional monetary policies and provide incentives for carry trade activities when banks are not adequately capitalised.

Weltweit erhöhen die Zentralbanken die Leitzinsen: Die Konsequenzen für Aktionäre, Hypothekarnehmer und Sparer reichen weit.

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