Evaluating concepts for short-term control in financial service processes

Financial services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is being delivered. This integration leads to interruptions and thus delays in the processing of a customer order until for example the customer provides the missing input. Because customer behaviour can only be planned to a certain extent this is a major problem for an efficient control of financial service processes. It would be helpful to know which concept leads to the best solution for a certain situation in controlling the process. A concept contains explicit practical knowledge e.g. using a stand-by-employee or a prioritisation of customer orders with first-infirst-out. As financial services differ from manufacturing processes application knowledge of concepts cannot be transferred one to one. To test concepts regarding their ability to deal efficiently with interruptions by customers short-term simulations should be conducted. Shortterm simulation uses the actual state of a process and is not focussing on steady-state results. The research presented focuses on comparing several concepts for short-term control using case-study data of a typical financial service process. For this process a simulation model is built based on process mining. This approach is used to gather information out of documented timestamps of underlying process-aware information systems. Such timestamps allow a historical analysis to build typical scenarios and to gather the actual state of a financial service process as a starting point for a simulation analysis. The depicted concepts are simulated for different typical scenarios points to determine respectively which concept suits best. The results show which concepts suit best in certain situations for the case study conducted. --short-term control,financial services,business process simulation

Exploring the expansion of credit on the demand and the supply side: What are the Macroeconomic Implications of high Household Debt and Equity Ownership, and are Asset Based Credit (ABC) Institutions different from Banks?

During the last two decades, the way credit is handled has profoundly changed on both the demand and supply sides, mostly due to the new role of collateral assets. On the demand side, household debt that is collateralized with real estate, cars, and other tangible assets has reached record levels. On the supply side, the use of collateralized credit has become widespread. Banks now use collateralized credit for a number of purposes such as risk management, issuing fees, etc..., and a new type of lender has entered into competition with banks through the use of assets instead of deposits for credit generation. These modifications, coupled with a stable financial environment and low interest rates, have led to the issuance of considerable amounts of collateralized credit. All these changes have macroeconomic implications, either creating new risk or magnifying existing financial systemic risk. To study the increased demand for household credit, I develop a theoretical model of the macro dynamics of households, with financial stability moderated by asset prices. I show that household real estate debt has quantifiable drawbacks in terms of financial stability. To study the supply of credit, I examine the link between collateral assets and financial stability in two ways. First, I develop a theoretical model of the dynamics between financial stability and assets used as collateral for bank debt. I show that a simple link exists between the price dynamics of bank loan collateral assets and optimal leverage of the financial system. Second, I empirically investigate the characteristics of lenders that do not hold deposits, also called asset-based credit institutions, since they substitute deposit liquidity with short loans securitized by assets. I show that in liquidity generation, risk, and market discipline, asset-based credit institutions mostly behave like banks

Lifestyle as Therapy for Liver Disease

Ph. D. Thesis.Liver disease is the most rapidly growing chronic disease in the UK. ‘Liver disease’ comprises a vast range of aetiologies. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is an individual aetiology that encompasses a range of disease severities, from simple fatty liver through to advanced fibrosis and cirrhosis of the liver. It is estimated that up to 33% of adults within the Western population have NAFLD, with up to 11% of those developing advanced liver disease. It is predicted that by 2030, NAFLD will be the leading indication for liver transplantation. The aim of this thesis was to assess the potential role of lifestyle intervention as a therapy for advanced liver disease including patients awaiting liver transplantation. NAFLD is strongly associated with excessive caloric consumption, sedentary behaviour, and being overweight/obese. In the absence of approved pharmacological treatments, weight loss through lifestyle modification is the primary recommended therapy. It has been shown that a weight loss of >10% body weight is strongly associated with resolution of fibrosis, however, in practise, only a minority of patients manage to achieve and sustain this magnitude of weight loss. Following a statistical analysis whereby all thirty participants were considered, irrespective of whether they completed the intervention, Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate that a very low calorie diet (~800kcals/day) is a safe, feasible and acceptable intervention to achieve a >10% weight loss in 34% of patients with advanced NAFLD to nine months. Chapter 5 describes differences in levels of physical activity and inactivity between patients with advanced NAFLD and age- and gender-matched healthy controls, further corroborating the need for targeted physical activity interventions for patients with NAFLD. Specifically, patients with NAFLD spent more time inactive, and less time engaging in physical activity of light, moderate, vigorous and moderate-vigorous intensities than age and gender matched healthy controls. Chapter 6 describes the development of a tailored exercise programme and an embedded retrospective cohort analysis, targeting the fitness of patients on the liver transplantation waiting list, would be acceptable to patients. The retrospective cohort analysis described clinical measures which are obtained as part of the decision making process to determine suitability for receiving a liver transplant. Data obtained from the retrospective cohort analysis demonstrated that poor cardiorespiratory fitness and other “unhealthy” lifestyle behaviours were major determinants of patients not being wait-listed for liver transplant. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that lifestyle interventions could be employed as acceptable and feasible strategies to achieve weight loss and reduce disease progression in patients with advanced NAFLD. Furthermore, this thesis proposes that clear, structured recommendations for lifestyle behaviours be implemented into clinical care pathways for patients with lifestyle related liver disease across the disease spectru

DNA binding specificity and transcriptional regulation of Six4: a myotonic dystrophy associated transcription factor

Attaining an understanding of the mechanisms underpinning development has been amongst the cardinal scientific challenges of our age. The transition from a single cell organism to the level of complexity evidenced in higher eukaryotes has been facilitated by the advent of intricate developmental networks involving a plethora of factors that synergise to allow for precise spatio-temporal expression of the proteins present in higher organisms. Development is often portrayed as a domino like cascade of events stemming from relatively uncomplicated origins that go on to branch out and form associations and interactions amongst multitudinous actors that will inexorably lead towards a higher state of order. Transcription factors occupy a central position within this tapestry of interactions. They regulate expression of the various required proteins and they provide the cues for the developmental events that will eventually shape an organism. These factors frequently remain unknown until some occurrence causes developmental processes to fail and inadvertently focus attention on the factors that facilitate development. Myotonic dystrophy is a useful paradigm of such a developmental dysfunction that has led to the discovery of a transcription factor integral to both muscle development and gonadogenesis in both Drosophila and higher eukaryotes

Higgs-mass predictions in the MSSM and beyond

Predictions for the Higgs masses are a distinctive feature of supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, where they play a crucial role in constraining the parameter space. The discovery of a Higgs boson and the remarkably precise measurement of its mass at the LHC have spurred new efforts aimed at improving the accuracy of the theoretical predictions for the Higgs masses in supersymmetric models. The "Precision SUSY Higgs Mass Calculation Initiative" (KUTS) was launched in 2014 to provide a forum for discussions between the different groups involved in these efforts. This report aims to present a comprehensive overview of the current status of Higgs-mass calculations in supersymmetric models, to document the many advances that were achieved in recent years and were discussed during the KUTS meetings, and to outline the prospects for future improvements in these calculations

The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC

High energy collisions at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce a large number of particles along the beam collision axis, outside of the acceptance of existing LHC experiments. The proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), to be located several hundred meters from the ATLAS interaction point and shielded by concrete and rock, will host a suite of experiments to probe standard model (SM) processes and search for physics beyond the standard model (BSM). In this report, we review the status of the civil engineering plans and the experiments to explore the diverse physics signals that can be uniquely probed in the forward region. FPF experiments will be sensitive to a broad range of BSM physics through searches for new particle scattering or decay signatures and deviations from SM expectations in high statistics analyses with TeV neutrinos in this low-background environment. High statistics neutrino detection will also provide valuable data for fundamental topics in perturbative and non-perturbative QCD and in weak interactions. Experiments at the FPF will enable synergies between forward particle production at the LHC and astroparticle physics to be exploited. We report here on these physics topics, on infrastructure, detector, and simulation studies, and on future directions to realize the FPF's physics potential