Social networks have intruded into the every day’s life. Users contribute with uploading content and sharing it with friends and public. From this information knowledge on who know whom, who communicates with whom, who meets whom and who shares the shame interests with whom can be extracted. These four aspects of human behavior can provide valuable insights while designing networking algorithms...

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators’ votes, keeping an eye on incumbents’ interests and incentives in different systems seems a natural thing to do if we want to understand different prospects for reforms in differen...

In this paper we address the issue of the steady and significant increase in the scope of the codecision procedure and the motivation of the member states for increasing the power of the European Parliament. Using a rational choice framework we argue that the important variable in the assessment of the changes in the decision making procedures is the expected benefit from the various legislativ...

Should we treat other people according to what they want (their own values), or according to what we take their best interests to be? If they have given us no mandate to decide for them, their values should prevail. This applies not only to allowing but also to assisting them to get what they want. Taking this seriously in medical practice involves a lot of communication between doctor and pati...

My research interests are in developing rigorous numerical techniques to study problems in Dynamical Systems. More specifically, I am interested in the stability spectra (Lyapunov exponents & Sacker-Sell spectra) of finite and infinite dimensional dynamical systems, as well as the development of quantitative perturbation theory to obtain error bounds for the stability spectra. Perturbation anal...

We address the problem of inferring users’ interests from microblogging sites such as Twitter, based on their utterances and interactions in the social network. Inferring user interests is important for systems such as search and recommendation engines to provide information that is more attuned to the likes of its users. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model of user uttera...

The latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) addressed important issues related to the definition and diagnostic criteria of paraphilic disorders. Among them is the distinctionbetweenparaphilic interestsandparaphilicdisorders, which clearly acknowledge that paraphilias are not necessarily pathological. However, ...

Does the United States shape the content of International Monetary Fund conditionality agreements? If so, in pursuit of what goals does the United States use its influence? We present evidence that American interests do shape the content of IMF conditionality agreements. We find that American policymakers use their influence in the IMF to pursue American financial and foreign policy objectives....

This paper proposes a probabilistic method for classifying folksonomy users to specific domains and for identifying their specific interests to these domains. The proposed method uses a hierarchical probabilistic topic modeling approach that exploits tags to induce hierarchies of latent topics. These hierarchies represent domain conceptualizations of specific domains that are either collective ...

Alarge number of randomized clinical trials with important health outcomes are completed each year. Those with favorable findings are typically reported and published rapidly, while the publication of those with unfavorable results is often delayed or given a positive "spin." This observation applies primarily to industry-sponsored trials. Our objectives are to discuss the responsibility of pha...