From the 19th to the 21st Century: Paradigmatic Shifts in the Luxembourgs Economy

peer reviewedBeginning in the 20th century, Luxembourg experienced several periods of transition. The largely agriculture-based economy became industrialized, driven by a powerful steel industry which remained the dominant sector from the immediate post-Second World War years to the mid-1970s. In 1974 the steel industry began to decline, marking the end of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’. Luxembourg was forced to implement considerable structural changes and embarked on its second major transition, from an industrial economy to a service economy based on the financial sector. The third is the transition to the knowledge economy, which is currently in full swing in LuxembourgCompetition, convergence, harmonisation – a comparative analysis of taxation in the Benelux states” (FISCOLUX: 2019-2023

Le rapport Werner en suspens. Les débats autour de l'Union économique et monétaire en 1973

peer reviewe

Bridging the Gap: How Process Mining Practitioners and Researchers Address Data Quality Issues

Process mining integrates process science and data science to analyze workflows using event logs. As an academic discipline, it has seen rapid adoption in industry, often combined with machine learning and automation. Here, we explore how researchers and practitioners approach data quality issues found in event logs and how they apply preprocessing techniques to solve such issues. Results show that practitioners often undervalue data quality challenges and rely on basic methods, likely due to limited experience and dependence on commercial tools. On the other hand, researchers prioritize diverse and advanced preprocessing techniques and view data quality issues as critical in process mining projects. Respondents with dual roles demonstrate specific expertise, addressing diverse challenges with data quality issues and applying more complex preprocessing techniques. The study emphasizes the need for collaboration between academia and industry, integrating process mining into education, and enhancing tool capabilities. These steps can bridge knowledge gaps, promote best practices, and advance research and practical application in process mining.9. Industry, innovation and infrastructurev

Challenges in completing EMU: asymmetric competition vs fiscal harmonisation. A case study of the Benelux countries

peer reviewedThis paper aims to investigate the concept, context and socio-economic consequences of fiscal competition in the integrated economic space of EMU in completion, to pinpoint the positive and negative factors at work via a case study of the Benelux countries – both founder members of the EU and pioneers of EMU – and to examine the impact on European and international regulations in the field. In particular, it will endeavour to provide a comprehensive interpretation of fiscal policy in the Benelux countries via a comparative approach and from a historical perspective. It will look at the development of respective domestic fiscal policies, driven by national interests and by membership of a Community that is subject to requirements in terms of harmonisation and taxation, but also by constant contact (and frequent clashes) with the multilateral international environment

Massively multiplayer online games and social capital: A systematic literature review

peer reviewedVideo gaming has historically been regarded as a pastime with addictive potential and has subsequently been the subject of public scrutiny, in media and academia. In the early 2000s, massively multiplayer online games (MMO) in particular were the locus of addiction-centred debates. However, over time different avenues of research into the outcomes of MMOs have opened up, honing in on social and psychological consequences. The present systematic literature review organises and examines research on the social impact of playing MMOs on their players, analysing a sample of 22 studies leaning on the PRISMA framework. The results indicate that a number of facets adhering to MMO gameplay, such as collective play, game involvement and being part of a community are beneficial to an individual's social capital and related concepts, while gaming time was a significant negative predictor. Offline social capital and leadership research were scarcely present in the collected studies, however the results imply a positive relation between MMO gameplay and these variables. Overall, the results suggest a high potential for transferability of social capital, even so there seems to be diminishing returns. Beyond a certain threshold of gaming time, the relation becomes negative, indicating the importance of balanced engagement

Robust shortcut and disordered robustness: Improving adversarial training through adaptive smoothing

peer reviewedDeep neural networks are highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations: artificial noise that corrupts input data in ways imperceptible to humans but causes incorrect predictions. Among the various defenses against these attacks, adversarial training has emerged as the most effective. In this work, we aim to enhance adversarial training to improve robustness against adversarial attacks. We begin by analyzing how adversarial vulnerability evolves during training from an instance-wise perspective. This analysis reveals two previously unrecognized phenomena: robust shortcut and disordered robustness. We then demonstrate that these phenomena are related to robust overfitting, a well-known issue in adversarial training. Building on these insights, we propose a novel adversarial training method: Instance-adaptive Smoothness Enhanced Adversarial Training (ISEAT). This method jointly smooths the input and weight loss landscapes in an instance-adaptive manner, preventing the exploitation of robust shortcut and thereby mitigating robust overfitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of ISEAT and its superiority over existing adversarial training methods. Code is available at https://github.com/TreeLLi/ISEAT

Fostering interdisciplinary exchanges through peer feedback to improve academic writing skills

peer reviewedThe University of Luxembourg is quadrilingual, with mono-, bi-, tri- and quadrilingual programmes in French, German, English and Luxembourgish. PhD students can choose to write their thesis in any one of these languages. Two teaching approaches are practised for thesis writing: critiquing groups, in which doctoral students read and comment on the writing of other students, and productivity groups, in which students write alongside each other (Guerin & Aitchison, 2023). Agreeing to submit a piece of writing to peers can help students apply information obtained from theoretical reading to their research results. But in the course of this feedback on written work, which is a stage-by-stage, multilayered process (Becker, 1986), general inconsistencies in reasoning and local misconceptions remain. The peer proofreading process takes place among students at the same hierarchical level, which facilitates discussions on the meaning of passages in the text (Lejot, 2017). But some students point to the fact that peers are not sufficiently qualified to give comments comparable to those provided by higher education professors (Rollinson, 2005). The interdisciplinary nature of texts written by different PhD students also contributes to the lack of qualification of proofreaders. This article will address the following research question: What impact do interdisciplinarity and multilingualism have on peer proofreading? To answer the question, we will analyse questionnaires completed by 50 doctoral students who participated in an academic writing course including peer proofreading. We will analyse the responses to the questionnaire and the feedback given on the course. First results suggest that the interdisciplinary nature of peer proofreading, in other words doctoral students in medicine, physics, political science, education and literature reading each other’s texts, initially gives rise to scepticism among participants before ultimately leading to discussions and explanations of respective discipline-specific conventions, and therefore a better awareness and understanding of one’s own ways of working. We will suggest applicable recommendations to promote favourable conditions for our PhD students to write in a multilingual environment, thereby improving the sense of belonging to an academic community (Vincent et al, 2022)

Competition in and through artificial intelligence

editorial reviewedThis chapter maps the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on competition. It argues that the technical capabilities and complexities associated with AI systems are directly relevant for understanding markets in a digital age, both in the emerging markets for AI technologies and in the myriad downstream markets in which AI is used to supply products, services, or even to carry out regulatory tasks. To make this point, it first shows how the dependence of AI systems on resources such as high-level expertise, big data, and vast computational resources promotes the formation of technological ecosystems centred around platforms, and structures competition within, between, and across said ecosystems. Then, it maps how market actors and regulators incorporate AI systems into their practices, with an emphasis on how AI can be used to sustain and detect anti-competitive practices. Finally, it discusses the effects of AI regulation on competition.16. Peace, justice and strong institutions9. Industry, innovation and infrastructur

"Double vaccinated, 5G boosted!": Learning Attitudes towards COVID-19 Vaccination from Social Media

peer reviewedThe sudden onset of the recently concluded COVID-19 pandemic has driven substantial progress in various scientific fields. One notable example is the comprehension of public vaccination attitudes and the timely monitoring of their fluctuations through social media platforms. This approach can serve as a cost-effective means to supplement surveys in gathering public vaccine hesitancy levels. In this article, we propose a deep learning framework leveraging textual posts on social media to extract and track users' vaccination stances in near real time. Compared to previous works, we integrate into the framework the recent posts of a user's social network friends to collaboratively detect the user's genuine attitude towards vaccination. Based on our annotated dataset from X (formerly known as Twitter), the models instantiated from our framework can increase the performance of attitude extraction by up to 23% compared to the state-of-the-art text-only models. Using this framework, we successfully confirm the feasibility of using social media to track the evolution of vaccination attitudes in real life. In addition, we illustrate the generality of our framework in extracting other public opinions such as political ideology. We further show one practical use of our framework by validating the possibility of forecasting a user's vaccine hesitancy changes with information perceived from social media

Effect of the European Union Emission Trading System on promoting industrial electrification

peer reviewedThe European Union designed the Emission Trading System (EU-ETS) aiming to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Theoretically, this mechanism should incentivize consumers to emit less CO2 and invest in green technologies. While there is evidence that it helped reduce CO2 emissions, it is unclear whether it helped promote green investments. This paper answers such a question based on a large European industry. We demonstrate that historical EU-ETS prices have not been incentive enough for this industry to transition from gas to electricity to produce steam. Our calculations show that companies would have to pay at least 30,57% more for operational costs when using only electricity for heat generation compared to natural gas, even with the addition of EU-ETS prices. We argue that using both conventional and green technologies might be the way to proceed since such a hybrid solution can reduce energy costs by up to 1,68% and CO2 emissions by 16,23%. These savings could pay back the electric boiler's investment until the gas boiler's lifetime is terminated. Nevertheless, even with the addition of the EU-ETS cost, the operational cost of the electric boiler in 2030 is expected to be higher than gas unless electricity spot prices are controlled