 Joscha Eirich, Dominik Jäckle, Michael Sedlmair, Christoph Wehner, Ute Schmid, Jürgen Bernard, Tobias Schreck, ManuKnowVis: How to Support Different User Groups in Contextualizing and Leveraging Knowledge Repositories, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 29 (8), 2023. (Journal Article)
 
We present ManuKnowVis, the result of a design study, in which we contextualize data from multiple knowledge repositories of a manufacturing process for battery modules used in electric vehicles. In data-driven analyses of manufacturing data, we observed a discrepancy between two stakeholder groups involved in serial manufacturing processes: Knowledge providers (e.g., engineers) have domain knowledge about the manufacturing process but have difficulties in implementing data-driven analyses. Knowledge consumers (e.g., data scientists) have no first-hand domain knowledge but are highly skilled in performing data-driven analyses. ManuKnowVis bridges the gap between providers and consumers and enables the creation and completion of manufacturing knowledge. We contribute a multi-stakeholder design study, where we developed ManuKnowVis in three main iterations with consumers and providers from an automotive company. The iterative development led us to a multiple linked view tool, in which, on the one hand, providers can describe and connect individual entities (e.g., stations or produced parts) of the manufacturing process based on their domain knowledge. On the other hand, consumers can leverage this enhanced data to better understand complex domain problems, thus, performing data analyses more efficiently. As such, our approach directly impacts the success of data-driven analyses from manufacturing data. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we carried out a case study with seven domain experts, which demonstrates how providers can externalize their knowledge and consumers can implement data-driven analyses more efficiently. |
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Caroline Zheng, Marc Chesney, ESG funds ride the tech rally, In: The Standard, 31 July 2023. (Media Coverage)
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Jan Von der Assen, Alberto Huertas Celdran, Nicolas Huber, Gérôme Bovet, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Burkhard Stiller, Moving Target Defense Strategy Selection against Malware in Resource-Constrained Devices, In: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2023-07-31. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have become critical assets to be protected due to increased adoption for emerging use cases. As such, these devices are confronted with a myriad of malware-based threats. To combat malware in IoT, Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a viable defense layer, since MTD does not rely on a low breach probability - aiming to increase security in a dynamic way. Although evidence supports the usefulness of MTD for IoT, the current state of the art suffers from unrealistic deployments, including the problem of operating multiple MTD techniques. Especially, there is a commonly observed gap in determining and deploying one of a set of locally available MTD techniques. This paper addresses this gap by relying on a rule-based selection mechanism. For that, a risk-driven methodology to establish this selection agent with a well-defined architecture is followed. As an input, the device's behavior, as expressed through its resource consumption, serves as a selection criterion. This architecture was implemented for a Raspberry Pi and evaluated against seven malware, given four existing MTD techniques. The resulting prototype highlights that a rule-based system can efficiently mitigate the malware samples. |
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Stefania Gavrila-Ionescu, Aniko Hannak, Nicolo Pagan, The role of luck in the success of social media influencers, Applied Network Science, Vol. 8 (1), 2023. (Journal Article)
Motivation
Social media platforms centered around content creators (CCs) faced rapid growth in the past decade. Currently, millions of CCs make livable incomes through platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. As such, similarly to the job market, it is important to ensure the success and income (usually related to the follower counts) of CCs reflect the quality of their work. Since quality cannot be observed directly, two other factors govern the network-formation process: (a) the visibility of CCs (resulted from, e.g., recommender systems and moderation processes) and (b) the decision-making process of seekers (i.e., of users focused on finding CCs). Prior virtual experiments and empirical work seem contradictory regarding fairness: While the first suggests the expected number of followers of CCs reflects their quality, the second says that quality does not perfectly predict success.
Results
Our paper extends prior models in order to bridge this gap between theoretical and empirical work. We (a) define a parameterized recommendation process which allocates visibility based on popularity biases, (b) define two metrics of individual fairness (ex-ante and ex-post), and (c) define a metric for seeker satisfaction. Through an analytical approach we show our process is an absorbing Markov Chain where exploring only the most popular CCs leads to lower expected times to absorption but higher chances of unfairness for CCs. While increasing the exploration helps, doing so only guarantees fair outcomes for the highest (and lowest) quality CC. Simulations revealed that CCs and seekers prefer different algorithmic designs: CCs generally have higher chances of fairness with anti-popularity biased recommendation processes, while seekers are more satisfied with popularity-biased recommendations. Altogether, our results suggest that while the exploration of low-popularity CCs is needed to improve fairness, platforms might not have the incentive to do so and such interventions do not entirely prevent unfair outcomes. |
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Ann‐Kathrin Reinl, Daniel Seddig, James Dennison, Eldad Davidov, Basic Human Values and Preferences for an EU‐Wide Social Benefit Scheme, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 2023, 2023. (Journal Article)
Previous explanations regarding transnational solidarity in the European Union (EU) have mainly focussed on factors including left–right self‐placement, support for European integration and European identity. We expand this model by considering deeper psychological determinants of transnational solidarity: values, operationalised as Schwartz's basic human values of universalism and security. We expect them to exert (1) direct effects on transnational solidarity – measured as support for pan‐European social benefits – and (2) indirect effects via the three aforementioned factors. We test and find evidence to support our theoretical framework using multigroup structural equation modelling and data from the European Social Survey. We further show that the effect size of the value of universalism on preferences for an EU social benefit scheme in each country is positively moderated by that country's net contribution to the EU budget, highlighting the interaction between material interests and psychological value motivations. |
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Mahnaz Parian-Scherb, Peter Uhrig, Luca Rossetto, Stephane Dupont, Heiko Schuldt, Gesture retrieval and its application to the study of multimodal communication, International journal on digital libraries, 2023. (Journal Article)
Comprehending communication is dependent on analyzing the different modalities of conversation, including audio, visual, and others. This is a natural process for humans, but in digital libraries, where preservation and dissemination of digital information are crucial, it is a complex task. A rich conversational model, encompassing all modalities and their co-occurrences, is required to effectively analyze and interact with digital information. Currently, the analysis of co-speech gestures in videos is done through manual annotation by linguistic experts based on textual searches. However, this approach is limited and does not fully utilize the visual modality of gestures. This paper proposes a visual gesture retrieval method using a deep learning architecture to extend current research in this area. The method is based on body keypoints and uses an attention mechanism to focus on specific groups. Experiments were conducted on a subset of the NewsScape dataset, which presents challenges such as multiple people, camera perspective changes, and occlusions. A user study was conducted to assess the usability of the results, establishing a baseline for future gesture retrieval methods in real-world video collections. The results of the experiment demonstrate the high potential of the proposed method in multimodal communication research and highlight the significance of visual gesture retrieval in enhancing interaction with video content. The integration of visual similarity search for gestures in the open-source multimedia retrieval stack, vitrivr, can greatly contribute to the field of computational linguistics. This research advances the understanding of the role of the visual modality in co-speech gestures and highlights the need for further development in this area. |
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Dina Pomeranz, Welchen Einfluss hat der Klimawandel auf die Armut?, In: SonntagsZeitung, p. online, 22 July 2023. (Newspaper Article)
Armut, Kindersterblichkeit und andere Übel haben in den letzten 30 Jahren enorm abgenommen. Aber wie lange noch? |
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Patrick Lehnert, Sarah McNamara, Guido Neidhöfer, Intergenerational mobility and economic performance of European regions, In: SASE Annual Conference. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Eric Bettinger, Madison Dell, Patrick Lehnert, Uschi Backes-Gellner, The effect of postsecondary institutions on local economies: a bird's-eye view, In: SASE Annual Conference. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Andreas Bühler, Patrick Lehnert, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Curriculum Updates in Vocational Education and Changes in Skills and Wages, In: SASE Annual Conference 2023. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Patricia Pálffy, Luc Sandfort, Martin Schneider, Uschi Backes-Gellner, How to avoid losing young talents in early career stages? Resource configurations that enable a smooth labor market entry, In: SASE Annual Conference 2023. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Patricia Pálffy, Patrick Lehnert, Uschi Backes-Gellner, One size does not fit all: A large-scale field experiment on countering gender-typicality in occupational choices of women and men, In: SASE Annual Conference 2023. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Chiara Zisler, Damiano Pregaldini, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Opening doors for immigrants: The role of occupational skills and workplace-based cultural skills for a successful labor market entry, In: SASE Annual Conference. 2023. (Conference Presentation)
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Thadeu Gasparetto, Helmut Max Dietl, Cornel Nesseler, Cristina Muñiz, When a woman replaces a man: evaluating coach dismissal in professional tennis, Managing Sport and Leisure, 2023. (Journal Article)
Purpose: Previous research indicates gender discrimination in leadership positions. However, performance and not gender should be the key indicator when evaluating a leader. We examine the performance effect of changing from a female to a male coach and vice versa.
Methodology: We analyze 1,093 Billie Jean King Cup singles matches from 2006 to 2016, with the match result as the dependent variable. First, we examine the very short-term effects arising from the change of a coach with a regression discontinuity design. Second, we evaluate the short-, medium-, and long-term performances.
Findings: The results show that the gender of the new coach has no significant effect on performance. However, when a female coach succeeds another female coach, performance improves. This provides an argument in favor of female leadership.
Practical Implications: Team managers should primarily focus on the quality of the coach instead of gender. The results also suggest that a continuum of female leadership is likely advantageous.
Research Contribution: This paper contributes to the debate regarding the misrepresentation of women as head coaches and offers an avenue for further research. |
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Redaktion, Steven Ongena, Domestic Climate Policy and Cross-Border Lending, In: Easy Branches Network, 17 July 2023. (Media Coverage)
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Sascha Zuber, Laura Bechtiger, Julien Stéphane Bodelet, Marta Golin, Jens Heumann, Jung Hyun Kim, Matthias Klee, Jure Mur, Jennie Noll, Stacey Voll, Patrick O’Keefe, Annekatrin Steinhoff, Ulf Zölitz, Graciela Muniz-Terrera, Lilly Shanahan, Michael J Shanahan, Scott M Hofer, An integrative approach for the analysis of risk and health across the life course: challenges, innovations, and opportunities for life course research, Discover Social Science and Health, Vol. 3 (1), 2023. (Journal Article)
Life course epidemiology seeks to understand the intricate relationships between risk factors and health outcomes across different stages of life to inform prevention and intervention strategies to optimize health throughout the lifespan. However, extant evidence has predominantly been based on separate analyses of data from individual birth cohorts or panel studies, which may not be sufficient to unravel the complex interplay of risk and health across different contexts. We highlight the importance of a multi-study perspective that enables researchers to: (a) Compare and contrast findings from different contexts and populations, which can help identify generalizable patterns and context-specific factors; (b) Examine the robustness of associations and the potential for effect modification by factors such as age, sex, and socioeconomic status; and (c) Improve statistical power and precision by pooling data from multiple studies, thereby allowing for the investigation of rare exposures and outcomes. This integrative framework combines the advantages of multi-study data with a life course perspective to guide research in understanding life course risk and resilience on adult health outcomes by: (a) Encouraging the use of harmonized measures across studies to facilitate comparisons and synthesis of findings; (b) Promoting the adoption of advanced analytical techniques that can accommodate the complexities of multi-study, longitudinal data; and (c) Fostering collaboration between researchers, data repositories, and funding agencies to support the integration of longitudinal data from diverse sources. An integrative approach can help inform the development of individualized risk scores and personalized interventions to promote health and well-being at various life stages. |
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Pietro Calice, Dimitrios G Demekas, Stefano Battiston, Irene Monasterolo, Victor Fitzpatrick Duggan, Mobilizing Finance for the Just Energy Transition in the European Union, World Bank Group, Washington, DC, https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099071523034041011/p179493027acfc0960858d0cb3597661c6b, 2023-07-17. (Published Research Report)
Minimizing the adverse social and economic consequences of the energy transition is an important social aspiration. It is the essence of the “just transition,” the connective tissue that binds together climate goals with social outcomes centered around jobs. This policy note proposes the first iteration of a just transition policy framework built around three interrelated and mutually reinforcing pillars. These include: (i) a system for determining a hierarchy of priorities for activities, sectors, or groups that are to be compensated for the negative impacts they suffer from the transition to a low-carbon economy or supported because they contribute directly to a more equitable sharing of the costs and opportunities from the transition; (ii) a fiscal transfer mechanism to allocate public funds consistent with these priorities; and (iii) financial flows enablers, a set of instruments or policy interventions to facilitate private financial flows to activities or projects that are deemed to contribute to a more just transition. The assessment provides seven key takeaways for consideration by competent authorities to strengthen further the EU just transition policy framework going forward. These are: (i) narrowing the scope of the framework by focusing on social support and/or land restoration, while encouraging private sector funding for economic revitalization projects; (ii) enhancing data collection on social impact assessment to better understand the negative effects of climate transition initiatives and prevent "social washing"; (iii) embedding just transition considerations in sustainability regulations by including relevant indicators and metrics; (iv) providing guidance on assessing just transition-related risks for financial firms in prioritized regions and sectors; (v) clarifying supervisory expectations for financial firms regarding just transition-related litigation and liability risk; (vi) encouraging the development of financial instruments for the just transition; and (vii) maximizing the role of multilateral development banks in de-risking just transition projects, especially in member countries with limited resources and capacity. |
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Dany Kamuhanda, Mengtian Cui, Claudio Tessone, Illegal Community Detection in Bitcoin Transaction Networks, Entropy, Vol. 25 (7), 2023. (Journal Article)
Community detection is widely used in social networks to uncover groups of related vertices (nodes). In cryptocurrency transaction networks, community detection can help identify users that are most related to known illegal users. However, there are challenges in applying community detection in cryptocurrency transaction networks: (1) the use of pseudonymous addresses that are not directly linked to personal information make it difficult to interpret the detected communities; (2) on Bitcoin, a user usually owns multiple Bitcoin addresses, and nodes in transaction networks do not always represent users. Existing works on cluster analysis on Bitcoin transaction networks focus on addressing the later using different heuristics to cluster addresses that are controlled by the same user. This research focuses on illegal community detection containing one or more illegal Bitcoin addresses. We first investigate the structure of Bitcoin transaction networks and suitable community detection methods, then collect a set of illegal addresses and use them to label the detected communities. The results show that 0.06% of communities from daily transaction networks contain one or more illegal addresses when 2,313,344 illegal addresses are used to label the communities. The results also show that distance-based clustering methods and other methods depending on them, such as network representation learning, are not suitable for Bitcoin transaction networks while community quality optimization and label-propagation-based methods are the most suitable. |
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Martin Sterchi, Lorenz Hilfiker, Rolf Grütter, Abraham Bernstein, Active querying approach to epidemic source detection on contact networks, Scientific Reports, Vol. 13 (1), 2023. (Journal Article)
The problem of identifying the source of an epidemic (also called patient zero) given a network of contacts and a set of infected individuals has attracted interest from a broad range of research communities. The successful and timely identification of the source can prevent a lot of harm as the number of possible infection routes can be narrowed down and potentially infected individuals can be isolated. Previous research on this topic often assumes that it is possible to observe the state of a substantial fraction of individuals in the network before attempting to identify the source. We, on the contrary, assume that observing the state of individuals in the network is costly or difficult and, hence, only the state of one or few individuals is initially observed. Moreover, we presume that not only the source is unknown, but also the duration for which the epidemic has evolved. From this more general problem setting a need to query the state of other (so far unobserved) individuals arises. In analogy with active learning, this leads us to formulate the active querying problem. In the active querying problem, we alternate between a source inference step and a querying step. For the source inference step, we rely on existing work but take a Bayesian perspective by putting a prior on the duration of the epidemic. In the querying step, we aim to query the states of individuals that provide the most information about the source of the epidemic, and to this end, we propose strategies inspired by the active learning literature. Our results are strongly in favor of a querying strategy that selects individuals for whom the disagreement between individual predictions, made by all possible sources separately, and a consensus prediction is maximal. Our approach is flexible and, in particular, can be applied to static as well as temporal networks. To demonstrate our approach’s practical importance, we experiment with three empirical (temporal) contact networks: a network of pig movements, a network of sexual contacts, and a network of face-to-face contacts between residents of a village in Malawi. The results show that active querying strategies can lead to substantially improved source inference results as compared to baseline heuristics. In fact, querying only a small fraction of nodes in a network is often enough to achieve a source inference performance comparable to a situation where the infection states of all nodes are known. |
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Anna Siczek, Jan Cieciuch, Pathological personality traits from ICD-11 and attachment – Comparison of 10 models of attachment dimensions, Psychiatria Polska (319), 2023. (Journal Article)
Aim. The aim of the study was to analyze the relationship between personality disorders according to the new ICD-11 dimensional approach and attachment. To do so, we examined ten models of attachment and employed seven questionnaires. Method. The study was conducted online and involved a non-clinical group of N = 391 (68% women, 30% men, and 2% – people who marked the “gender – other” category, aged 16–65 yeas; M = 24.91; SD = 7.8). Attachment was measured using seven questionnaires, and the Polish adaptation of the PiCD Questionnaire was used to measure personality disorders according to ICD-11. Results. The regression analysis revealed a consistent picture of the relationship between insecure attachment (regardless of model) and personality disorders. “Negative Affectivity” and “Disinhibition” are associated with Anxious attachment, while “Detachment” and “Dissociality” with Avoidant attachment. “Anankastia” showed only a sporadic association with attachment. Conclusions. Attachment (according to theoretical models formed in childhood) is significantly related to personality disorders in adults. In the conducted study, a coherent picture of this relationship was obtained thanks to the use of many conceptualizations and operationalizations of attachment. |
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