3,383 research outputs found

    SoK: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Finance

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    Recent years have seen the emergence of practical advanced cryptographic tools that not only protect data privacy and authenticity, but also allow for jointly processing data from different institutions without sacrificing privacy. The ability to do so has enabled implementations a number of traditional and decentralized financial applications that would have required sacrificing privacy or trusting a third party. The main catalyst of this revolution was the advent of decentralized cryptocurrencies that use public ledgers to register financial transactions, which must be verifiable by any third party, while keeping sensitive data private. Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs rose to prominence as a solution to this challenge, allowing for the owner of sensitive data (e.g. the identities of users involved in an operation) to convince a third party verifier that a certain operation has been correctly executed without revealing said data. It quickly became clear that performing arbitrary computation on private data from multiple sources by means of secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and related techniques allows for more powerful financial applications, also in traditional finance. In this SoK, we categorize the main traditional and decentralized financial applications that can benefit from state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and identify design patterns commonly used when applying PETs in the context of these applications. In particular, we consider the following classes of applications: 1. Identity Management, KYC & AML; and 2. Markets & Settlement; 3. Legal; and 4. Digital Asset Custody. We examine how ZK proofs, MPC and related PETs have been used to tackle the main security challenges in each of these applications. Moreover, we provide an assessment of the technological readiness of each PET in the context of different financial applications according to the availability of: theoretical feasibility results, preliminary benchmarks (in scientific papers) or benchmarks achieving real-world performance (in commercially deployed solutions). Finally, we propose future applications of PETs as Fintech solutions to currently unsolved issues. While we systematize financial applications of PETs at large, we focus mainly on those applications that require privacy preserving computation on data from multiple parties

    Alexander Dallas Bache: Building the American Nation through Science and Education in the Nineteenth Century

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    Alexander Dallas Bache was the key leader of antebellum American scientists. Presuming his profession to be a herald of an integrated U.S. nation-state, Bache guided organizations such as the United States Coast Survey, then the country's largest scientific enterprise. In this analytical biography, Axel Jansen explains Bache's efforts to build and shape public institutions as a national foundation for a universalistic culture - efforts that culminated during the Civil War when Bache helped found the National Academy of Sciences as a symbol for the continued viability of an American nation

    Expectations and expertise in artificial intelligence: specialist views and historical perspectives on conceptualisation, promise, and funding

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    Artificial intelligence’s (AI) distinctiveness as a technoscientific field that imitates the ability to think went through a resurgence of interest post-2010, attracting a flood of scientific and popular expectations as to its utopian or dystopian transformative consequences. This thesis offers observations about the formation and dynamics of expectations based on documentary material from the previous periods of perceived AI hype (1960-1975 and 1980-1990, including in-between periods of perceived dormancy), and 25 interviews with UK-based AI specialists, directly involved with its development, who commented on the issues during the crucial period of uncertainty (2017-2019) and intense negotiation through which AI gained momentum prior to its regulation and relatively stabilised new rounds of long-term investment (2020-2021). This examination applies and contributes to longitudinal studies in the sociology of expectations (SoE) and studies of experience and expertise (SEE) frameworks, proposing a historical sociology of expertise and expectations framework. The research questions, focusing on the interplay between hype mobilisation and governance, are: (1) What is the relationship between AI practical development and the broader expectational environment, in terms of funding and conceptualisation of AI? (2) To what extent does informal and non-developer assessment of expectations influence formal articulations of foresight? (3) What can historical examinations of AI’s conceptual and promissory settings tell about the current rebranding of AI? The following contributions are made: (1) I extend SEE by paying greater attention to the interplay between technoscientific experts and wider collective arenas of discourse amongst non-specialists and showing how AI’s contemporary research cultures are overwhelmingly influenced by the hype environment but also contribute to it. This further highlights the interaction between competing rationales focusing on exploratory, curiosity-driven scientific research against exploitation-oriented strategies at formal and informal levels. (2) I suggest benefits of examining promissory environments in AI and related technoscientific fields longitudinally, treating contemporary expectations as historical products of sociotechnical trajectories through an authoritative historical reading of AI’s shifting conceptualisation and attached expectations as a response to availability of funding and broader national imaginaries. This comes with the benefit of better perceiving technological hype as migrating from social group to social group instead of fading through reductionist cycles of disillusionment; either by rebranding of technical operations, or by the investigation of a given field by non-technical practitioners. It also sensitises to critically examine broader social expectations as factors for shifts in perception about theoretical/basic science research transforming into applied technological fields. Finally, (3) I offer a model for understanding the significance of interplay between conceptualisations, promising, and motivations across groups within competing dynamics of collective and individual expectations and diverse sources of expertise

    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum

    AN INTEGRATED ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR TRANSFORMING GENDERED UNPAID CARE WORK: COMPARISON OF TURKEY AND ITALY

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    This thesis, using four pathways approach (Cantillon & Teasdale, 2021) as an analytical model and combining this model with 5Rs approach (Addati et al., 2018; Elson, 2017; Rost et al., 2020) under integrated analytical framework, investigates the structural determinants of gendered unpaid care work through case studies in Turkey and Italy. The thesis focuses mainly on the past two decades, representing significant improvements as well as backlashes regarding gender equality. It utilises the existing feminist tools and approaches, namely four pathways and 5Rs, with a novel perspective to explore different contexts and integrates them to produce unique gendered unpaid care work index for transformative policy proposals. The novelty of this thesis is to analyse a social phenomenon embedded in our daily lives with modern feminist theoretical tools and expand them by changing their practical use. In this context, after introducing the problem and the overview of the thesis in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical literature, focusing on the household production and social reproduction, to theoretically capture the structural constraints of gendered unpaid care work. This thesis categorises these constraints under five categories as patriarchy and social reproduction; agency-oriented arguments and neoliberal approach; employment and economic gender inequality; social care inequality; and intersectional gender inequalities. Using four pathways model (Cantillon & Teasdale, 2021), case studies conduct comparative analysis to capture these structural constraints under (i) employment opportunities and labour market regulations, (ii) neoliberal and patriarchal socio-normative structure, (iii) legal and institutional normative structure, and (iv) social care systems and dynamics. The original contribution of the study is to expand the feminist perspective with an integrated analytical framework and to produce the gendered unpaid care work index by going beyond the existing literature that tends to focus on only one pathway, mostly labour force participation. Chapter 3 explains the rationale of the framework and the research problems of the thesis and aims to justify the reasonings behind feminist research and the case study approach. It also identifies the boundaries of the study arising from various reasons. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 investigate two case studies under four pathways (Cantillon & Teasdale, 2021) in Turkey and Italy that form the core of the thesis. Chapter 6 presents the key findings according to the final integrated analytical framework and fifteen policy dimensions of gender transformative policy actions in the gendered unpaid care work index developed based on the case study results. The principal aim of this index is to support the transition from four pathways (Cantillon & Teasdale, 2021) of gendered unpaid care work to the 5Rs - recognition, reduction and redistribution of care work, representation, and reward of the care workers (Addati et al., 2018; Elson, 2017; Rost et al., 2020). This index ranks Turkey and Italy based on the fifteen dimensions and according to their gender equality performance in unpaid care work. Key findings indicate that although Italy outperforms Turkey, paid and unpaid labour division remains significantly gendered in both countries. Therefore, there is an evident need for political, legal, and institutional improvements in most dimensions to equalise and transform gendered unpaid care work

    Authority and Trust in US Culture and Society

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    In the past two decades, a discourse of crisis has emerged about the democratic institutions and political culture of the US: many structures of authority which people had more or less taken for granted are facing a massive public loss of trust. This volume takes an interdisciplinary and historical look at the transformations of authority and trust in the United States. The contributors examine government institutions, political parties, urban neighborhoods, scientific experts, international leadership, religious communities, and literary production. Exploring the nexus between authority and trust is crucial to understand the loss of legitimacy experienced by political, social, and cultural institutions not only in the United States but in Western democracies at large

    Efficiency, Fairness and Sustainability in Social Housing Policy and Projects

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    The provision of affordable housing for low-income households is a very complex issue that has long been debated in many countries around the world. Social housing (SH) is one of the tools for achieving fairness, social sustainability, and economic feasibility, and it is interrelated with politics, ethics, and economics, as well as the environment, architecture, and technology. In other words, national and local policies, as well as public and private financial resources, are all needed to provide SH.SH also involves social and urban transformations and is, consequently, linked to urban planning and redevelopment projects, real estate market dynamics, and cooperation between public and private stakeholders. Furthermore, decision-making on SH policies and projects has to be supported by assessments of economic feasibility and social and environmental sustainability.This volume presents studies on various topics to recompose the multi-faceted subjects of social housing within a unified framework

    Full Issue: Volume 4, Issue 1

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    The first issue in the fourth volume of the Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal
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