Case-Based Comparison of Career Trajectories

Abstract. Data generated across time may not be easily comparable in its original form thus potentially leading to results that may be perceived as unfair to some. We investigate quality assessment of scholarly researchers from their curricula vitae (CVs) for processes such as hiring, promotion, and grant funding. In previous work, we demonstrated that case-based reasoning (CBR) offers advantages as a transparent methodology to assess researcher quality. Its benefits include consistency, transparency, ability to adapt to specific purposes, and ability to provide explanation. The problem we now face is how to preprocess the data from the CVs to compare researchers whose scholarly production is achieved under different conditions, different points in time, and span different career trajectory lengths. We propose strategies to deal with these aspects of time during preprocessing of the data for case representation. We use 1,000 CVs from the Brazilian Lattes database to illustrate

Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Hitting Performance in Baseball

We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as player age and position. We share information across time and across players by using mixture distributions to control shrinkage for improved accuracy. We compare the performance of our model to current sabermetric methods on a held-out season (2006), and discuss both successes and limitations

Everything comes down to money? Migration and working life trajectories in a (post-)socialist context

Using 25 life histories of Poles, this paper addresses the way in which migration has had an impact upon the trajectories of individuals’ working lives both under socialism and after 1989. In our discussion, we explore some of the connections between different waves of migration, bringing together historical and contemporary research on migration as well as engaging with current debates on post-socialism that problematize the disjuncture between socialist and post-socialist experience. Our contention here is that one way in which socialism and post-socialism might be integrated is through focusing on the experiences of individuals whose lives span these eras. We suggest that while there are continuities across the periods, there are also disjunctures created not only by the changed politico-legal context, but also through changed attitudes towards the role of migration as part of individual life trajectories

Driving forces in researchers mobility

Starting from the dataset of the publication corpus of the APS during the period 1955-2009, we reconstruct the individual researchers trajectories, namely the list of the consecutive affiliations for each scholar. Crossing this information with different geographic datasets we embed these trajectories in a spatial framework. Using methods from network theory and complex systems analysis we characterise these patterns in terms of topological network properties and we analyse the dependence of an academic path across different dimensions: the distance between two subsequent positions, the relative importance of the institutions (in terms of number of publications) and some socio-cultural traits. We show that distance is not always a good predictor for the next affiliation while other factors like "the previous steps" of the career of the researchers (in particular the first position) or the linguistic and historical similarity between two countries can have an important impact. Finally we show that the dataset exhibit a memory effect, hence the fate of a career strongly depends from the first two affiliations

WP7 Regional/local Case Studies

This report provides an in depth and transversal analysis of the policy Developing the Young Workforce (DYW) in Glasgow City Region and Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshrie Region. It analyses the correspondence of meanings attributed to the policy by national policymakers, regional managers, practitioners and young adults’ beneficiaries of the DYW policy, as well as identifying governance issues and (un)intended consequences on young peoples’ lives

Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career

Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the academic profession, both the employment relationship and the procedures for assigning recognition and allocating funding should be designed to account for these factors. We study the annual production n_{i}(t) of a given scientist i by analyzing longitudinal career data for 200 leading scientists and 100 assistant professors from the physics community. We compare our results with 21,156 sports careers. Our empirical analysis of individual productivity dynamics shows that (i) there are increasing returns for the top individuals within the competitive cohort, and that (ii) the distribution of production growth is a leptokurtic "tent-shaped" distribution that is remarkably symmetric. Our methodology is general, and we speculate that similar features appear in other disciplines where academic publication is essential and collaboration is a key feature. We introduce a model of proportional growth which reproduces these two observations, and additionally accounts for the significantly right-skewed distributions of career longevity and achievement in science. Using this theoretical model, we show that short-term contracts can amplify the effects of competition and uncertainty making careers more vulnerable to early termination, not necessarily due to lack of individual talent and persistence, but because of random negative production shocks. We show that fluctuations in scientific production are quantitatively related to a scientist's collaboration radius and team efficiency.Comment: 29 pages total: 8 main manuscript + 4 figs, 21 SI text + fig

Career Transitions and Trajectories: A Case Study in Computing

From artificial intelligence to network security to hardware design, it is well-known that computing research drives many important technological and societal advancements. However, less is known about the long-term career paths of the people behind these innovations. What do their careers reveal about the evolution of computing research? Which institutions were and are the most important in this field, and for what reasons? Can insights into computing career trajectories help predict employer retention? In this paper we analyze several decades of post-PhD computing careers using a large new dataset rich with professional information, and propose a versatile career network model, R^3, that captures temporal career dynamics. With R^3 we track important organizations in computing research history, analyze career movement between industry, academia, and government, and build a powerful predictive model for individual career transitions. Our study, the first of its kind, is a starting point for understanding computing research careers, and may inform employer recruitment and retention mechanisms at a time when the demand for specialized computational expertise far exceeds supply.Comment: To appear in KDD 201

Explaining consequences of employment insecurity: The dynamics of scarring in the United Kingdom, Poland and Norway

This deliverable presents three country studies on scarring effects of early employment insecurity in the United Kingdom, Poland and Norway. Traditional analysis of scarring effects has favoured the analysis of the impact of the experience of unemployment on the experience of subsequent unemployment (state dependence) and the monetary costs of previous unemployment in terms of lower subsequent wages (see e.g. Arulampalam, Booth and Taylor 2000; Arulampalam, Gregg and Gregory 2001). The three present country studies go beyond the traditional analysis of scarring effects in order to better understand the trade-offs experienced by young female and male workers when faced with an insecure labour market integration. With national longitudinal data, original methodological designs and research focus, each study contributes in an original way to the research literature. All three studies pay special attention to gender and education as potential moderating variables of scarring effects