Awards as Signals

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards serve as signals. Awards are more prevalent the more difficult the position and status of an individual is to observe due to an anonymous and globalized setting.awards, signals, status, anonymity, globalization

AI-enabled exploration of Instagram profiles predicts soft skills and personality traits to empower hiring decisions

It does not matter whether it is a job interview with Tech Giants, Wall Street firms, or a small startup; all candidates want to demonstrate their best selves or even present themselves better than they really are. Meanwhile, recruiters want to know the candidates' authentic selves and detect soft skills that prove an expert candidate would be a great fit in any company. Recruiters worldwide usually struggle to find employees with the highest level of these skills. Digital footprints can assist recruiters in this process by providing candidates' unique set of online activities, while social media delivers one of the largest digital footprints to track people. In this study, for the first time, we show that a wide range of behavioral competencies consisting of 16 in-demand soft skills can be automatically predicted from Instagram profiles based on the following lists and other quantitative features using machine learning algorithms. We also provide predictions on Big Five personality traits. Models were built based on a sample of 400 Iranian volunteer users who answered an online questionnaire and provided their Instagram usernames which allowed us to crawl the public profiles. We applied several machine learning algorithms to the uniformed data. Deep learning models mostly outperformed by demonstrating 70% and 69% average Accuracy in two-level and three-level classifications respectively. Creating a large pool of people with the highest level of soft skills, and making more accurate evaluations of job candidates is possible with the application of AI on social media user-generated data

Web knowledge bases

Knowledge is key to natural language understanding. References to specific people, places and things in text are crucial to resolving ambiguity and extracting meaning. Knowledge Bases (KBs) codify this information for automated systems — enabling applications such as entity-based search and question answering. This thesis explores the idea that sites on the web may act as a KB, even if that is not their primary intent. Dedicated kbs like Wikipedia are a rich source of entity information, but are built and maintained at an ongoing cost in human effort. As a result, they are generally limited in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge they index about entities. Web knowledge bases offer a distributed solution to the problem of aggregating entity knowledge. Social networks aggregate content about people, news sites describe events with tags for organizations and locations, and a diverse assortment of web directories aggregate statistics and summaries for long-tail entities notable within niche movie, musical and sporting domains. We aim to develop the potential of these resources for both web-centric entity Information Extraction (IE) and structured KB population. We first investigate the problem of Named Entity Linking (NEL), where systems must resolve ambiguous mentions of entities in text to their corresponding node in a structured KB. We demonstrate that entity disambiguation models derived from inbound web links to Wikipedia are able to complement and in some cases completely replace the role of resources typically derived from the KB. Building on this work, we observe that any page on the web which reliably disambiguates inbound web links may act as an aggregation point for entity knowledge. To uncover these resources, we formalize the task of Web Knowledge Base Discovery (KBD) and develop a system to automatically infer the existence of KB-like endpoints on the web. While extending our framework to multiple KBs increases the breadth of available entity knowledge, we must still consolidate references to the same entity across different web KBs. We investigate this task of Cross-KB Coreference Resolution (KB-Coref) and develop models for efficiently clustering coreferent endpoints across web-scale document collections. Finally, assessing the gap between unstructured web knowledge resources and those of a typical KB, we develop a neural machine translation approach which transforms entity knowledge between unstructured textual mentions and traditional KB structures. The web has great potential as a source of entity knowledge. In this thesis we aim to first discover, distill and finally transform this knowledge into forms which will ultimately be useful in downstream language understanding tasks

Running records and the automated reconstruction of historical narrative

Die sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung befaßt sich mit dem Studium der Veränderung, obwohl die meisten Wissenschaftler, die quantitative Methoden benutzen - Historiker, Soziologen und auch Wirtschaftswissenschaftler -, bis jetzt nicht in der Lage sind, die Datenquellen voll auszuschöpfen, die erläutern, wie soziale Veränderungen tatsächlich eintreten. Es wird eine Methodologie entwickelt - bekannt als 'laufende Aufzeichungen', die es Forschern erlaubt, nicht nur Datenquellen wie Steuer- und Zensuslisten auszunutzen, die im wesentlichen statisch sind, sondern auch durch Gebrauch des Computers die ungeheure Menge von Material zu nutzen, das die Geschehnisse und Transaktionen des Alltagslebens von weiten Teilen der Bevölkerung festhält - Quellen, die den Prozeß der Veränderung selbst dokumentieren, sowie er sich auf bestehende Strukturen und Institutionen bezieht. (KWübers.)'All social science research is concerned with the study of change, yet most scholars who use quantitative methods - historians, sociologists, and economists alike - have been unable to exploit fully data sources which illuminate how social change actually occurs. We have developed a methodology, known as 'running records' (1), which allows researchers not only to use data sources, such as census schedules and tax lists which are essentially static, but also by exploiting the power of the computer, to utilize the vast of materials which record the events and transactions of everyday life for large populations - sources which document the process of change itself, as it relates to existing structures and institutions.' (author's abstract

Sustainable digital marketing under big data: an AI random forest model approach

Digital marketing refers to the process of promoting, selling, and delivering products or services through online platforms and channels using the internet and electronic devices in a digital environment. Its aim is to attract and engage target audiences through various strategies and methods, driving brand promotion and sales growth. The primary objective of this scholarly study is to seamlessly integrate advanced big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology into the realm of digital marketing, thereby fostering the progression and optimization of sustainable digital marketing practices. First, the characteristics and applications of big data involving vast, diverse, and complex datasets are analyzed. Understanding their attributes and scope of application is essential. Subsequently, a comprehensive investigation into AI-driven learning mechanisms is conducted, culminating in the development of an AI random forest model (RFM) tailored for sustainable digital marketing. Subsequent to this, leveraging a real-world case study involving enterprise X, fundamental customer data is collected and subjected to meticulous analysis. The RFM model, ingeniously crafted in this study, is then deployed to prognosticate the anticipated count of prospective customers for said enterprise. The empirical findings spotlight a pronounced prevalence of university-affiliated individuals across diverse age cohorts. In terms of occupational distribution within the customer base, the categories of workers and educators emerge as dominant, constituting 41% and 31% of the demographic, respectively. Furthermore, the price distribution of patrons exhibits a skewed pattern, whereby the price bracket of 0–150 encompasses 17% of the population, whereas the range of 150–300 captures a notable 52%. These delineated price bands collectively constitute a substantial proportion, whereas the range exceeding 450 embodies a minority, accounting for less than 20%. Notably, the RFM model devised in this scholarly endeavor demonstrates a remarkable proficiency in accurately projecting forthcoming passenger volumes over a seven-day horizon, significantly surpassing the predictive capability of logistic regression. Evidently, the AI-driven RFM model proffered herein excels in the precise anticipation of target customer counts, thereby furnishing a pragmatic foundation for the intelligent evolution of sustainable digital marketing strategies

A data-driven approach to predict first-year students’ academic success in higher education institutions

This study presents a data mining approach to predict academic success of the first-year students. A dataset of 10 academic years for first-year bachelor’s degrees from a Portuguese Higher Institution (N = 9652) has been analysed. Features’ selection resulted in a characterising set of 68 features, encompassing socio-demographic, social origin, previous education, special statutes and educational path dimensions. We proposed and tested three distinct course stage data models based on entrance date, end of the first and second curricular semesters. A support vector machines (SVM) model achieved the best overall performance and was selected to conduct a data-based sensitivity analysis. The previous evaluation performance, study gaps and age-related features play a major role in explaining failures at entrance stage. For subsequent stages, current evaluation performance features unveil their predictive power. Suggested guidelines include to provide study support groups to risk profiles and to create monitoring frameworks. From a practical standpoint, a data-driven decision-making framework based on these models can be used to promote academic success.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio