Law applicable to merits of the arbitration dispute (an overview of the English, Swiss and French arbitration laws)

Due to the plethora of international elements of a contract to arbitrate, i.e. nationalities of the parties, nature of the transaction and the legal background of the arbitrator, questions of law applicable to the substance of the dispute are always at stake. In the course of arbitral proceedings, issues of law applicable to the arbitral dispute are raised after a concise examination of the law applicable to the arbitration agreement, namely whether the parties have consented to arbitrate the subject-matter in issue and the law applicable to the arbitral procedure. The present study draws upon the principle of party autonomy, in both theoretical and practical aspects in the context of the freedom of contract principle. It further considers the restrictive role of mandatory rules upon the above principle. Light shall also be shed on the current trends of international mandatory rules and public policy as discussed in ICC awards by experienced arbitrators and solely developed within the ambit of international commercial arbitration. Furthermore, a consistent examination of possible choices of law and rules of law such as a-national rules i.e. lex mercatoria and general trade usages will sketch the existing variety of possibilities in choice of law both on the parties and lawyers leading arbitrations. The last Section will independently examine an absence of choice of law, and several doctrines which envisaged the stance of the three distinguished European arbitral systems: English, Swiss and French.

GAMESMANSHIP, third parties and arbitration: reflecting on the paradigm of PPP disputes

Disputes occurring in PPP projects pervade three interfacing levels of agreements: internal, downstream, and peripheral. PPP disputes have been free from arbitral dispute resolution and their legal environment is uncertain and deregulated. While project partners appear to have a natural monopoly of joining parties in the supply chain to their pending disputes, their decision is often driven by diversified expectations and conflict agendas. Analysis will investigate parameters of risk exposure as a business imperative of the parties’ choice of multiparty arbitration. Emphasis throughout is put on the game-playing capabilities of original and third project parties and the concomitant formulation of pairs, prior to their participation in a single arbitral setting. The impact of their synergistic interplay on the outcome of multiparty arbitration is also explored. The aim is to test the responsiveness of English law and institutionalised practice to the idiosyncrasies of PPP disputes. The results of this study seek to conceptualise multiparty arbitration as part of the parties’ informed business plans and alert legal researchers and industry practitioners to workable institutional arrangements

Estimating a cost-effectiveness threshold for healthcare decision-making in the Greek NHS

Background: The introduction of new health technologies improves quality of life and longevity, but also imposes additional strains in the scarce resources of the health system. Consequently, decisions on the adoption of new technologies are typically based, among other criteria, on the difference between costs and outcomes among competing alternatives. This paper aims to estimate a cost-effectiveness threshold that can be used as an input in the decision-making process for the funding (or reimbursement) of health technologies in Greece. Methods: For a 30-year period, we calculate the Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE) of the Greek population and regress it against per capita public health expenditure, using an instrumental variable approach and controlling for a set of covariates. The estimated coefficients of expenditure on QALE are used to inform a cost-effectiveness threshold, estimatead as the cost per QALY gained through a permanent increase in per capita spending. Results: Based on the estimated coefficient of health expenditure, we estimate a base case cost-effectiveness threshold of €27,117 per QALY gained for the Greek healthcare system, from a third-party payer perspective. Conclusions: In the Greek healthcare system, which is currently in the stage of establishing a comprehensive health technology assessment process, decision rules which are not based on heuristics or “rules of thumb”, are essential

Feature Selection in Computational Biology

This thesis concerns feature selection, with a particular emphasis on the computational biology domain and the possibility of non-linear interaction between features. Towards this it establishes a two-step approach, where the first step is feature selection, followed by the learning of a kernel machine in this reduced representation. Optimization of kernel target alignment is proposed as a model selection criterion and its properties are established for a number of feature selection algorithms, including some novel variants of stability selection. The thesis further studies greedy and stochastic approaches for optimizing alignment, propos- ing a fast stochastic method with substantial probabilistic guarantees. The proposed stochastic method compares favorably to its deterministic counterparts in terms of computational complexity and resulting accuracy. The characteristics of this stochastic proposal in terms of computational complexity and applicabil- ity to multi-class problems make it invaluable to a deep learning architecture which we propose. Very encouraging results of this architecture in a recent challenge dataset further justify this approach, with good further results on a signal peptide cleavage prediction task. These proposals are evaluated in terms of generalization accuracy, interpretability and numerical stability of the models, and speed on a number of real datasets arising from infectious disease bioinfor- matics, with encouraging results

Law applicable to merits of the arbitration dispute (an overview of the English, Swiss and French arbitration laws)

Due to the plethora of international elements of a contract to arbitrate, i.e. nationalities of the parties, nature of the transaction and the legal background of the arbitrator, questions of law applicable to the substance of the dispute are always at stake. In the course of arbitral proceedings, issues of law applicable to the arbitral dispute are raised after a concise examination of the law applicable to the arbitration agreement, namely whether the parties have consented to arbitrate the subject-matter in issue and the law applicable to the arbitral procedure. The present study draws upon the principle of party autonomy, in both theoretical and practical aspects in the context of the freedom of contract principle. It further considers the restrictive role of mandatory rules upon the above principle. Light shall also be shed on the current trends of international mandatory rules and public policy as discussed in ICC awards by experienced arbitrators and solely developed within the ambit of international commercial arbitration. Furthermore, a consistent examination of possible choices of law and rules of law such as a-national rules i.e. lex mercatoria and general trade usages will sketch the existing variety of possibilities in choice of law both on the parties and lawyers leading arbitrations. The last Section will independently examine an absence of choice of law, and several doctrines which envisaged the stance of the three distinguished European arbitral systems: English, Swiss and French

Valutazione del background genetico di una coorte di individui dislessici mediante l'utilizzo di tecnologie ad alta processivit\ue0

Il progresso tecnologico e la riduzione dei costi ha significativamente contribuito all'identificazioni delle cause genetiche di diverse malattie genetiche multifattoriali. In questo lavoro di dottorato riporto i risultati di un analisi genetica di una coorte di ragazzi dislessici utilizzando delle tecnologie ad alta processivit\ue0 come Next Generation Sequencing e SNP-array ad alta densit\ue0. La coorte in studio consiste di 49 soggetti con dislessia e 52 soggetti con dislessia e altre Disabilit\ue0 Specifiche di Apprendimento (disortografia, disgrafia, discalculia). Tutti i campioni sono stati sequenziati utilizzando la piattaforma Ion Torrent, focalizzandosi sulle regioni codificanti e sulle giunzioni esone-introne, in 12 geni candidati (CMIP, CNTNAP2, CYP19A1, DCDC2, DIP2A, DYX1C1, GCFC2, KIAA0319, KIAA0319L, MRPL19, ROBO1, S100B), focalizzandosi sulle varianti non descritte in letteratura e in quelle rare (MAF G). Inoltre, diverse CNV sono state identificate che sovrappongono dei geni associati a problemi con il linguaggio, ma nessuna delle CNV con i geni riportati sopra. Infine, una copia di fratelli sono portatori di diverse duplicazioni localizzate nella regione 16p13.11, una regione di suscettibilit\ue0 ai disordini di neurosviluppo. Il presente lavoro arrichisse la nostra conoscenza sul background genetico della coorte in studio. Nello stesso momento i risultati ottenuti devono essere ulteriormente analizzati per poter attribuire un ruolo a quanto possibile certo sul loro contributo all'insorgenza della dislessia.Technological improvements and continued cost reduction have significantly contributed to the progress of identifying the genetic causes of complex traits. Here we report the results of a genetic screening on a dyslexia cohort combining targeted next generation sequencing and high density SNP array. The study cohort consists of 49 subjects with dyslexia and 52 subjects with dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities (dysorthographia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia). All samples were sequenced on Ion Torrent platform, targeting the coding regions and their exone-intron boundaries of 12 candidate dyslexia genes (CMIP, CNTNAP2, CYP19A1, DCDC2, DIP2A, DYX1C1, GCFC2, KIAA0319, KIAA0319L, MRPL19, ROBO1, S100B), with focus on novel and rare variants. A subset of 54 samples was further analyzed, genotyping over 1.7 M markers (Multi Ethnic Global Array design, Ilumina), for copy number variation (CNV) discovery and characterization according to the literature. For this purpose, high confidence CNVs were obtained using the cnvPartition and the PennCNV calling algorithms. We report a total of 12 pathogenic predicted variants, among which two novel deleterious events (DIP2A:p.G1387* and KIAA0319:p.V774Afs*37) and a known rare splicing variant (GCFC2:c.266-2A>G). Moreover, several copy number variants were identified, overlapping some language related genes, but not any of the above sequenced genes. Finally, a sibling pair was found to harbor duplications in the chromosome band 16p13.11, a susceptibility region for several neurodevelopmental disorders. The present study enriches our knowledge about the genetic background in a dyslexia cohort. At the same time our findings emphasize the need for further research to attribute causative roles of these events for cohort phenotypes

Law applicable to merits of the arbitration dispute (an overview of the English, Swiss and French arbitration laws)

Due to the plethora of international elements of a contract to arbitrate, i.e. nationalities of the parties, nature of the transaction and the legal background of the arbitrator, questions of law applicable to the substance of the dispute are always at stake. In the course of arbitral proceedings, issues of law applicable to the arbitral dispute are raised after a concise examination of the law applicable to the arbitration agreement, namely whether the parties have consented to arbitrate the subject-matter in issue and the law applicable to the arbitral procedure. The present study draws upon the principle of party autonomy, in both theoretical and practical aspects in the context of the freedom of contract principle. It further considers the restrictive role of mandatory rules upon the above principle. Light shall also be shed on the current trends of international mandatory rules and public policy as discussed in ICC awards by experienced arbitrators and solely developed within the ambit of international commercial arbitration. Furthermore, a consistent examination of possible choices of law and rules of law such as a-national rules i.e. lex mercatoria and general trade usages will sketch the existing variety of possibilities in choice of law both on the parties and lawyers leading arbitrations. The last Section will independently examine an absence of choice of law, and several doctrines which envisaged the stance of the three distinguished European arbitral systems: English, Swiss and French