Business Ontology for Evaluating Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper presents a software solution that is developed to automatically classify companies by taking into account their level of social responsibility. The application is based on ontologies and on intelligent agents. In order to obtain the data needed to evaluate companies, we developed a web crawling module that analyzes the company’s website and the documents that are available online such as social responsibility report, mission statement, employment structure, etc. Based on a predefined CSR ontology, the web crawling module extracts the terms that are linked to corporate social responsibility. By taking into account the extracted qualitative data, an intelligent agent, previously trained on a set of companies, computes the qualitative values, which are then included in the classification model based on neural networks. The proposed ontology takes into consideration the guidelines proposed by the “ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility”. Having this model, and being aware of the positive relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, an overall perspective on each company’s activity can be configured, this being useful not only to the company’s creditors, auditors, stockholders, but also to its consumers.corporate social responsibility, ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility, ontology, web crawling, intelligent agent, corporate performance, POS tagging, opinion mining, sentiment analysis

Parallel Evidence-Based Indexing of Complex Three-Dimensional Models Using Prototypical Parts and Relations (Dissertation Proposal)

This proposal is concerned with three-dimensional object recognition from range data using superquadric primitives. Superquadrics are a family of parametric shape models which represent objects at the part level and can account for a wide variety of natural and man-made forms. An integrated framework for segmenting dense range data of complex 3-D objects into their constituent parts in terms of bi-quadric surface patches and superquadric shape primitives is described in [29]. We propose a vision architecture that scales well as the size of its model database grows. Following the recovery of superquadric primitives from the input depth map, we split the computation into two concurrent processing streams. One is concerned with the classification of individual parts using viewpoint-invariant shape information while the other classifies pairwise part relationships using their relative size, orientation and type of joint. The major contribution of this proposal lies in a principled solution to the very difficult problems of superquadric part classification and model indexing. The problem is how to retrieve the best matched models without exploring all possible object matches. Our approach is to cluster together similar model parts to create a reasonable number of prototypical part classes (protoparts). Each superquadric part recovered from the input is paired with the best matching protopart using precomputed class statistics. A parallel, theoretically-well grounded evidential recognition algorithm quickly selects models consistent with the classified parts. Classified part relations (protorelations) are used to further reduce the number of consistent models and remaining ambiguities are resolved using sequential top-down search

“Driving While Black”: A Theory for Interethnic Integration and Evolution of Prejudice

This paper studies the evolution of interethnic attitudes, the integration or segregation dynamics of ethnic minorities and the conditions for the rising of ethnic-based social hierarchies. By means of a cultural evolution framework, a dynamics of interethnic attitudes is provided and conditions for their convergence derived. Steady states implying a constant role of racism and no role for racism are identified. Deriving sufficient conditions for convergence, we find that the way in which Oblique Socialization Schemes (the way children react to out-of-family stimuli when forming their cultural values) are defined and modelled becomes crucial for the structure of the derived long run equilibria. In particular, we find that Steady States implying an Ethnic-based social ranking or full integration of ethnicities may be reached depending on whether or not agents use Reciprocity and/or Ethnocentrism in their interethnic attitudes formation schemes. Allowing different groups for asymmetric use of reciprocity and Ethnocentrism, we explain why different ethnic minorities may show different integration patterns, and what are the different roles (Cultural bridge, cultural hub) an ethnic group may play in the integration process. Moreover, in this way, we explain why attitudes of some groups towards others converge to the same values, while other groups seems to be excluded from this process. At last, we provide the first steps for the endogeneization of socialization structures.Cultural transmission, Minority integration, Evolution of preferences

When Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantines in New York and Danzig, 1898-1921

[Excerpt] Recent careful examinations of American quarantines placed on incoming migrants have found that health officials were potent carries of bigotries rooted in the larger society; but usually historians have not paid sufficient attention to the complex challenges facing quarantine units in action. By examining the work of quarantine health officials dealing with migrating Jews from East Central Europe this analytical narrative seeks to show in detail important structural circumstances within which acts of bigotry manifested themselves between the 1890s and 1920s. The narrative also has a larger agenda. Connections between public health quarantines and bio-cultural determinisms have long participated in the construction of public enemies. For instance in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS panic in the United States, public health officials could take for granted a citizenry that had long trusted in abstract empirical scientific knowledge and, for half a century, in the disease curing power of pharmacology\u27s sulfa drugs and other antibiotics. Even so, in the first moments of panic all sorts of calls for screens and quarantine impacted on public policy discussions in ways reminiscent of the years between the 1890s and 1920s. During those years biological determinisms from the past had remained in the saddle. Even as modern public health programmes were becoming dramatically successful in fighting disease, they remained affected by hierarchies of bio-cultural notions, especially in apprehensions about immigrants as agents of dangerous contagious diseases. That is one reason why this article focuses on Jews. The other reason derives from the evidence about Jews and disease in the places and times covered by this study. To be sure, there were other quarantines, involving, for example, resident Chinese and Italians; and in the months after the First World War potential incomers from Italy were at least as much an object of concern among American advocates of immigration restriction as were the Jews in Poland. But, in part, because of a typhus epidemic in that war-torn country, the association between disease and bio-cultural assumptions about Jews retained its traditional particularity in Western Europe and in the United States

What are the levels and mechanisms/processes of language evolution?

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio