Contributions in Merlin

Die digitale Transformation lebt nicht von Daten und Algorithmen allein: Sie benötigt auch Rohstoffe und Energie. Green IT verfolgt das Ziel, die damit verbundenen Belastungen für Mensch und Umwelt zu verringern. Das ist sinnvoll, genügt aber nicht als Grundlage für eine nachhaltige Digitalisierung.

The subject of this work is the study of the determinants of the Italian NPL stock and the analysis of the resolutions. When determining the driver of the distressed credit stock a panel data analysis on 11 listed banks for the period 2001-2017 has been applied. The fixed effect estimation highlighted that both macroeconomic and bank-specific variables concur in determining the NPL ratio level. The NPL market is characterised by informational asymmetries that result in a pricing gap between banks net book value and market evaluation of NPL. The lack of a well functioning secondary market for distressed credit coupled with economy downturn contributed to the build up of a EUR 350 billion stock of non performing loans in the Italian banking system. In order to reduce the amount of NPL both public measures and private initiatives have been undertaken. From the government side the set up of an asset protection scheme for senior securitised tranches of NPL (GACS) and law reforms regarding judicial proceedings and collateral enforcement have been adopted. When it comes to the first, an estimation of the potential costs for the State has been carried out based on a modelling of the portfolio losses and it turned out that the resources funded by the government are indeed adequate to cover the average loss on securitised tranches. From the private side the inception of Atlante funds was undertaken in the attempt to reduce the bid-ask spread and foster the NPL transactions. Both public and private measures contributed to the development of the Italian NPL market that was characterised by a frency activity and jumbo deals starting from 2017. Consequently, after years of constant increase, the Italian NPL stock started to reduce in size, with such a trend expected to continue for 2018. Pricing gap on the Italian market still persist and will force credit institutions to face losses when disposing of their distressed credit thus putting preassure on banks’ capitalization. At the same time, the entering into force of the new IFRS standards with respect to asset classification and provisioning will further reduce the CET ratio of Italian credit institutions. As highlighted by an analysis of the Italian banking sector, the massive NPL stock is considered to be the main cause of the low profitability and of the credit crunch affecting the economy in the last years, with the Italian GDP growth that, since the outburst of the great financial crisis, has been below the EU average. NPL resolution will take some time and will require strong efforts from the both the private and the public sector, but it is expected to positively contributed to economy recovery.

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Das gestiegene Bewusstsein der Allgemeinheit über die Schädlichkeit der Korruption hat zu zahlreichen nationalen, regionalen wie auch internationalen Massnahmen zur Eindämmung korrupter Praktiken geführt. Die Verschärfung der Gesetzgebungen und die grössere Intoleranz der Gesellschaft gegenüber korrupten Praktiken zwingen sowohl grosse Firmen als auch kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMUs) zur aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit Korruption und der Einführung von Präventionsmassnahmen. Aufgrund ihrer teilweise globalen Vernetzung und der damit einhergehenden Möglichkeit, Gesellschaften, Organisationen und vielleicht sogar Regierungen aus verschiedenen Regionen zu mobilisieren, stellen internationale Organisationen und NGOs (Drittparteien) wichtige Akteure im globalen Kampf gegen Korruption dar. Diese Arbeit bietet erste Einblicke über die Rolle der Drittparteien in Bezug auf die Antikorruption in KMUs. Diesbezüglich werden die Bemühungen und die eingenommene Rolle von unterschiedlichen Drittparteien, sowie ihre Wahrnehmungen und Sichtweisen hinsichtlich Antikorruption in KMUs untersucht. Mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse von Interviewdaten und der Erstellung einer dreistufigen Datenstruktur konnten drei verschiedene Rollen identifiziert werden: aktiv, passiv und indirekt.

Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes instead of standard intensity frames. They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, because the output is composed of a sequence of asynchronous events rather than actual intensity images, traditional vision algorithms cannot be applied, so that a paradigm shift is needed. We introduce the problem of event-based multi-view stereo (EMVS) for event cameras and propose a solution to it. Unlike traditional MVS methods, which address the problem of estimating dense 3D structure from a set of known viewpoints, EMVS estimates semi-dense 3D structure from an event camera with known trajectory. Our EMVS solution elegantly exploits two inherent properties of an event camera: (1) its ability to respond to scene edges—which naturally provide semi-dense geometric information without any pre-processing operation—and (2) the fact that it provides continuous measurements as the sensor moves. Despite its simplicity (it can be implemented in a few lines of code), our algorithm is able to produce accurate, semi-dense depth maps, without requiring any explicit data association or intensity estimation. We successfully validate our method on both synthetic and real data. Our method is computationally very efficient and runs in real-time on a CPU.

Social decision-making is increasingly studied with neurocomputational modeling. Here we discuss how this approach allows researchers to better understand and predict behavior in social settings. Using examples from the study of resource distributions and social learning, we illustrate how this methodology provides a flexible way to quantify social values and beliefs, identify specific motives and cognitive processes underlying social choice and learning, and arbitrate between competing theories of social behavior. We also critically discuss open questions and potential problems associated with this methodology.

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