Income-related health inequality in urban China (1991-2015): The role of homeownership and housing conditions

in Health and Place (in press)

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn’t accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health ... [more ▼]

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn’t accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities between the rich and poor. This study examines the role of housing in income-related health inequalities (income-health gradient) in urban China. We here analyze 1991-2015 China Health and Nutrition Survey data to ask how housing affects income-related health inequalities in urban China. We find pro-poor inequalities in self-reported bad health but pro-rich inequalities in objective bad health (general overweight/obesity, central obesity and high blood pressure). Housing conditions serve to reduce the health gradient, especially for objective health. On the contrary, homeownership exacerbates the health gradient. Improving housing conditions thus appears to be an effective way of reducing the income-health gradient in urban China. [less ▲]

Urbanicity, behavior problems and HPA axis regulation in preschoolers

in Psychoneuroendocrinology (in press)

Institutionalism and Comparative Administrative Law Beyond the Liberal State: Extrapolations from Santi Romano as seen by D’Alberti

in VV., AA. (Ed.) Liber Amicorum Marco D’Alberti (in press)

Unpacking Tourism in the Cold War: International Tourism and Commercialism in Socialist Romania, 1960s-1980s

in Contemporary European History (in press)

The role of market oriented tourist policies in the planned economies of socialist Eastern Europe has been long overlooked. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ... [more ▼]

The role of market oriented tourist policies in the planned economies of socialist Eastern Europe has been long overlooked. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ideological rhetoric to commercialism and market-driven strategies when promoting Romania as a tourist destination in the ‘West’ between the 1960s and the 1980s. It argues that there was a continual shifting between using tourism as an ideological tool and a certain pragmatism that was needed to turn Romania into a desirable tourist destination. [less ▲]

The DLT Sandbox under the Pilot-Regulation

in Capital Markets Law Journal (in press)

Guidelines for Assessing the Accuracy of Log Message Template Identification Techniques

in Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’22) (in press)

Log message template identification aims to convert raw logs containing free-formed log messages into structured logs to be processed by automated log-based analysis, such as anomaly detection and model ... [more ▼]

Log message template identification aims to convert raw logs containing free-formed log messages into structured logs to be processed by automated log-based analysis, such as anomaly detection and model inference. While many techniques have been proposed in the literature, only two recent studies provide a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of the techniques using an established benchmark composed of real-world logs. Nevertheless, we argue that both studies have the following issues: (1) they used different accuracy metrics without comparison between them, (2) some ground-truth (oracle) templates are incorrect, and (3) the accuracy evaluation results do not provide any information regarding incorrectly identified templates. In this paper, we address the above issues by providing three guidelines for assessing the accuracy of log template identification techniques: (1) use appropriate accuracy metrics, (2) perform oracle template correction, and (3) perform analysis of incorrect templates. We then assess the application of such guidelines through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 existing template identification techniques on the established benchmark logs. Results show very different insights than existing studies and in particular a much less optimistic outlook on existing techniques. [less ▲]

Efficient Online Testing for DNN-Enabled Systems using Surrogate-Assisted and Many-Objective Optimization

in Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’22) (in press)

With the recent advances of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in real-world applications, such as Automated Driving Systems (ADS) for self-driving cars, ensuring the reliability and safety of such DNN- enabled ... [more ▼]

With the recent advances of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in real-world applications, such as Automated Driving Systems (ADS) for self-driving cars, ensuring the reliability and safety of such DNN- enabled Systems emerges as a fundamental topic in software testing. One of the essential testing phases of such DNN-enabled systems is online testing, where the system under test is embedded into a specific and often simulated application environment (e.g., a driving environment) and tested in a closed-loop mode in interaction with the environment. However, despite the importance of online testing for detecting safety violations, automatically generating new and diverse test data that lead to safety violations present the following challenges: (1) there can be many safety requirements to be considered at the same time, (2) running a high-fidelity simulator is often very computationally-intensive, and (3) the space of all possible test data that may trigger safety violations is too large to be exhaustively explored. In this paper, we address the challenges by proposing a novel approach, called SAMOTA (Surrogate-Assisted Many-Objective Testing Approach), extending existing many-objective search algorithms for test suite generation to efficiently utilize surrogate models that mimic the simulator, but are much less expensive to run. Empirical evaluation results on Pylot, an advanced ADS composed of multiple DNNs, using CARLA, a high-fidelity driving simulator, show that SAMOTA is significantly more effective and efficient at detecting unknown safety requirement violations than state-of-the-art many-objective test suite generation algorithms and random search. In other words, SAMOTA appears to be a key enabler technology for online testing in practice. [less ▲]

The CEO beauty premium: Founder CEO attractiveness and firm valuation in initial coin offerings

in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (in press)

We apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economics to the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers' (founder CEOs') facial ... [more ▼]

We apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economics to the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers' (founder CEOs') facial attractiveness influences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context of initial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronounced founder CEO beauty premium, with a positive relationship between founder CEO attractiveness and firm valuation. We find only very limited evidence of stereotype-based evaluations, through the association of founder CEO attractiveness with latent traits such as competence, intelligence, likeability, or trustworthiness. Rather, attractiveness seems to bear economic value per se, especially in a context in which investors base their decisions on a limited information set. Indeed, attractiveness has a sustainable effect on post-ICO performance. [less ▲]

Automated Handling of Anaphoric Ambiguity in Requirements: A Multi-solution Study

in In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'22), Pittsburgh, PA, USA 22-27 May 2022 (in press)

Ambiguity is a pervasive issue in natural-language requirements. A common source of ambiguity in requirements is when a pronoun is anaphoric. In requirements engineering, anaphoric ambiguity occurs when a ... [more ▼]

Ambiguity is a pervasive issue in natural-language requirements. A common source of ambiguity in requirements is when a pronoun is anaphoric. In requirements engineering, anaphoric ambiguity occurs when a pronoun can plausibly refer to different entities and thus be interpreted differently by different readers. In this paper, we develop an accurate and practical automated approach for handling anaphoric ambiguity in requirements, addressing both ambiguity detection and anaphora interpretation. In view of the multiple competing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies that one can utilize, we simultaneously pursue six alternative solutions, empirically assessing each using a collection of ~1,350 industrial requirements. The alternative solution strategies that we consider are natural choices induced by the existing technologies; these choices frequently arise in other automation tasks involving natural-language requirements. A side-by-side empirical examination of these choices helps develop insights about the usefulness of different state-of-the-art NLP and ML technologies for addressing requirements engineering problems. For the ambiguity detection task, we observe that supervised ML outperforms both a large-scale language model, SpanBERT (a variant of BERT), as well as a solution assembled from off-the-shelf NLP coreference resolvers. In contrast, for anaphora interpretation, SpanBERT yields the most accurate solution. In our evaluation, (1) the best solution for anaphoric ambiguity detection has an average precision of ~60% and a recall of 100%, and (2) the best solution for anaphora interpretation (resolution) has an average success rate of ~98%. [less ▲]

Bibliothéconomie et pratiques de l’écrit à Saint-Maximin de Trèves du XIIIe au XVIe siècles : Premiers regards sur la base du « grand légendier » et d’autres manuscrits hagiographiques

in Questes: Revue pluridisciplinaire d'études médiévales (in press)