Scanning recent news sources, anyone preparing for the upcoming celebration of Christmas might wonder how exactly we can manage to celebrate wholeheartedly in a global climate of terrorist attacks, massive migrations of traumatized war victims and economic refugees, and generalized fear for the future. Commentators, syndicated columnists and political cartoonists in recent times have highlighte...

Spatial data mining fulfills real needs of many geomatic applications. It allows taking advantage of the growing availability of geographically referenced data and their potential richness. This includes the risk analysis linked to a territory such as epidemic risk or traffic accident risk in the road network. This work deals with the method of decision tree for spatial data classification. Thi...

The purpose of this White Paper of the EU Support Action “Visioneer”(see www.visioneer.ethz.ch) is to address the following goals: 1. Develop strategies to quickly increase the objective knowledge about social and economic systems 2. Describe requirements for efficient large-scale scientific data mining of anonymized social and economic data 3. Formulate strategies how to collect stylized facts...

The game of lottery is both popular and simple. Focusing on the essentials, and leaving aside additional features of secondary importance, which vary across different lottery implementations, the rules of the game are as follows: each player submits to the lottery organizers a ticket consisting of M integers selected by the player, without repetitions, selection order being unimportant from the...

Structure in music is traditionally analyzed hierarchically: large-scale sections can be sub-divided and refined down to the short melodic ideas at the motivic level. However, typical algorithmic approaches to structural annotation produce flat temporal partitions of a track, which are commonly evaluated against a similarly flat, human-produced annotation. Evaluating structure analysis as repre...

This paper presents an approach based on network theory to deal with risk interactions in large engineering projects. Indeed, such projects are exposed to numerous and interdependent risks of various nature, which makes their management more difficult. In this paper, a topological analysis based on network theory is presented, which aims at identifying key elements in the structure of interrela...

It is essential for corporate social responsibility that staff can trust its leaders. This paper argues that trust in leaders depends on the relationship between the leader’s values, words and actions. If they are in line, employees can trust the leader. If they are not, distrust prevails. Five alternative relationships between values, words and actions can be identified: (1) values = words = a...

In this century, information, along with other factors of production, is a valuable and vital component of the organizations. With increasing technology advances, organizations have realized the undeniable benefits of Information Technology (IT) to increase the quality, accuracy and speed of affairs and most managers have become aware of the importance of its use in increasing efficiency and ef...

Security risk analysis should be conducted regularly to maintain an acceptable level of security. In principle, all risks that are unacceptable according to the predefined criteria should be mitigated. However, risk mitigation comes at a cost, and only the countermeasures that cost-efficiently mitigate risks should be implemented. This paper presents an approach to integrate the countermeasure ...