A Bayesian Model for Investment Decisions in Early Ventures

In this research, we present a Bayesian model to aid the investment decision in early stage start-ups and ventures. This model addresses both the venture and the angel investing markets. The model is informed both by previous academic literature on entrepreneurship and by venture capital investment practices. The model is validated through an anonymized experiment where reviewers with previous experience in entrepreneurship or investment or both scored a list of 20 anonymous real companies for which we knew the outcome a priori. The experiment revealed that the model and online scoring platform that we built provide an accuracy of 83% in identifying companies that would later on fail and where the investments would be lost. The model also performs fairly well in identifying companies where the investors would not lose their money but they would either have to wait for a very long time on their returns or they would not receive large return on investment (ROI), and we also show that the model performs modestly in identifying “big exit” companies or companies where the investors would receive high ROI and in a fairly short amount of time

The Social Sciences Interdisciplinarity for Astronomy and Astrophysics -- Lessons from the History of NASA and Related Fields

In this paper we showcase the importance of understanding and measuring interdisciplinarity and other -disciplinarity concepts for all scientists, the role social sciences have historically played in NASA research and missions, the sparsity of social science interdisciplinarity in space and planetary sciences, including astronomy and astrophysics, while there is an imperative necessity for it, and the example of interdisciplinarity between social sciences and astrobiology. Ultimately we give voice to the scientists across all fields with respect to their needs, aspirations and experiences in their interdisciplinary work with social sciences through an ad-hoc survey we conducted within the Astro2020 Decadal Survey scientific community

PyATMOS: A Scalable Grid of Hypothetical Planetary Atmospheres

Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the statistical distributions and properties of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres we implemented a parallelised climate modelling tool to scan a range of hypothetical atmospheres.Starting with a modern day Earth atmosphere, we iteratively and incrementally simulated a range of atmospheres to infer the landscape of the multi-parameter space, such as the abundances of biological mediated gases (\ce{O2}, \ce{CO2}, \ce{H2O}, \ce{CH4}, \ce{H2}, and \ce{N2}) that would yield `steady state' planetary atmospheres on Earth-like planets around solar-type stars. Our current datasets comprises of \numatmospheres simulated models of exoplanet atmospheres and is available publicly on the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Our scalable approach of analysing atmospheres could also help interpret future observations of planetary atmospheres by providing estimates of atmospheric gas fluxes and temperatures as a function of altitude. Such data could enable high-throughput first-order assessment of the potential habitability of exoplanetary surfaces and sepcan be a learning dataset for machine learning applications in the atmospheric and exoplanet science domain.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Message in a Bottle -- An Update to the Golden Record

Communication is an essential asset enabling humankind to forge an advanced civilization. Using approximately 31,000 languages from the Stone Age to our present digital information society, humans have connected and collaborated to accomplish remarkable feats. As the newly dawned Space Age progresses, we are attempting to communicate with intelligent species beyond our world, on distant planets and in Earth's far future. Absent mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic conventions, this study, the "Message in a Bottle", uses scientific methods to assess and design a means of communication encapsulating the story of humanity, conveying our thoughts, emotions, ingenuity, and aspirations. The message will be structured to provide a universal yet contextual understanding of modern human society, evolution of life on Earth, and challenges for the future. In assembling this space and time capsule, we aim to energize and unite current generations to celebrate and preserve humanity

A Complex Systems Perspective of Communication from Cells to Societies

This book is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the evolution of communication from cells to societies, both in living organisms and in non-living ones, such as designed or emergent systems from socio-technological innovations (i.e., digital communication, institutional communication). It aims to provide better understanding of the universal versus contextual patterns of communication that we can potentially classify and identify if we look deeper into the history and evolution of this phenomenon at large. Novel research from a variety of disciplines, such as information theory, biology, linguistics, culture and social science that take a complex perspective is being explored, for an integrated understanding of what communication is at a fundamental level

Emergence of communication in socio-biological networks

This book integrates current advances in biology, economics of information and linguistics research through applications using agent-based modeling and social network analysis to develop scenarios of communication and language emergence in the social aspects of biological communications. The book presents a model of communication emergence that can be applied both to human and non-human living organism networks. The model is based on economic concepts and individual behavior fundamental for the study of trust and reputation networks in social science, particularly in economics; it is also based on the theory of the emergence of norms and historical path dependence that has been influential in institutional economics. Also included are mathematical models and code for agent-based models to explore various scenarios of language evolution, as well as a computer application that explores language and communication in biological versus social organisms, and the emergence of various meanings and grammars in human networks. Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks offers both a completely novel approach to communication emergence and language evolution and provides a path for the reader to explore various scenarios of language and communication that are not constrained to the human networks alone. By illustrating how computational social science and the complex systems approach can incorporate multiple disciplines and offer an integrated theory-model approach to the evolution of language, the book will be of interest to researchers working with computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and complex systems

Aderarea la Uniunea Europeană a primelor zece – consideraţii privind impactul la nivelul Uniunii Europene şi al României

Cea de-a cincea extindere a Uniunii Europene sporeşte numărul de membri ai acesteia de la 15 la 25, fiind cea mai amplă din întreaga istorie a UE. Populaţia Uniunii va fi, în urma acestui proces, de 450 milioane de locuitori, cât populaţiile Rusiei şi Statelor Unite însumate.