Do Graph Neural Networks Build Fair User Models? Assessing Disparate Impact and Mistreatment in Behavioural User Profiling

Recent approaches to behavioural user profiling employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to turn users' interactions with a platform into actionable knowledge. The effectiveness of an approach is usually assessed with accuracy-based perspectives, where the capability to predict user features (such as gender or age) is evaluated. In this work, we perform a beyond-accuracy analysis of the state-of-the-art approaches to assess the presence of disparate impact and disparate mistreatment, meaning that users characterised by a given sensitive feature are unintentionally, but systematically, classified worse than their counterparts. Our analysis on two real-world datasets shows that different user profiling paradigms can impact fairness results. The source code and the preprocessed datasets are available at: https://github.com/erasmopurif/do_gnns_build_fair_models

Monetary policy and financial stability in the Economic and Monetary Union

Following the financial crisis, a new theoretical framework has emerged, in which monetary policy aims at price stability and macro-prudential policy aims at financial stability. In 2014, the European in-stitutions established the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) to pursue the objective of financial sta-bility. The new institutional arrangement provides for micro-prudential policy under the direct control of the ECB and macro-prudential policy under the responsibility of NCAs and the supervision of the ECB. The essay presents a literature review and a simple analytical model to assess this new institu-tional design. Despite a still incomplete reform process, as the decision-making process lacks total transparency and the regulatory field is not levelled, the literature review supports the view that the SSM promotes financial stability in the Euro area. According to our model, we positively assess the new institutional framework: an increase in the efficiency of prudential policies to face financial risks allows the ECB to pursue the objective of financial stability without compromising the goal of output stability

Financial Development and Agglomeration. MPRA WORKING PAPER

Munich Personal RePEc Archiv

Determinazione degli ormoni sessuali naturali nel sangue bovino mediante tecniche radioimmunologiche. Nota I. Dosaggio del 17beta-estradiolo

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). Biblioteca Centrale / CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle RichercheSIGLEITItal

Sharing knowledge in digital ecosystems using semantic multimedia big data

The use of formal representations has a basic importance in the era of big data. This need is more evident in the context of multimedia big data due to the intrinsic complexity of this type of data. Furthermore, the relationships between objects should be clearly expressed and formalized to give the right meaning to the correlation of data. For this reason the design of formal models to represent and manage information is a necessary task to implement intelligent information systems. Approaches based on the semantic web need to improve the data models that are the basis for implementing big data applications. Using these models, data and information visualization becomes an intrinsic and strategic task for the analysis and exploration of multimedia Big Data. In this article we propose the use of a semantic approach to formalize the structure of a multimedia Big Data model. Moreover, the identification of multimodal features to represent concepts and linguistic-semantic properties to relate them is an effective way to bridge the gap between target semantic classes and low-level multimedia descriptors. The proposed model has been implemented in a NoSQL graph database populated by different knowledge sources. We explore a visualization strategy of this large knowledge base and we present and discuss a case study for sharing information represented by our model according to a peer-to-peer(P2P) architecture. In this digital ecosystem, agents (e.g. machines, intelligent systems, robots,..) act like interconnected peers exchanging and delivering knowledge with each other

Treatment of chronic hepatitis B: Recommendations from an Italian workshop

The changing scenario of hepatitis B virus therapy has encouraged the organisation of a workshop, endorsed by three Italian scientific societies, aimed at defining the current recommendations for hepatitis B virus treatment. Liver histology and stage of disease remain fundamental for treatment decisions; interferon and nucleoside/nucleotide analogues-based therapy represent different strategies for different phases of the hepatitis B virus disease. The recommendations defined: new and lower cut-off of hepatitis B virus-DNA for eligibility to therapy according to disease stage, how to optimise the use of nucleoside/nucleotide analogues and to individualise the monitoring of response and what to do with treatment failures. Specific recommendations have also been given for cirrhosis patients, those immune suppressed and co-infected with HIV and other hepatitis viruses. © 2008 Editrice Gastroenterologica Italiana S.r.l

Simit epidemiological multicentric study on hospitalized immigrants in Italy during 2002

The aim of this article is to retrospectively evaluate the patient characteristics and the most common infectious diseases in immigrant patients hospitalized in 46 Italian infectious disease clinics during 2002. The main Italian infectious disease clinics were invited to fill in a questionnaire that regarded the number and type of hospital admissions, the country of origin, and demographic features (age, sex, and resident state) of immigrants. A total of 46 clinics including 2255 patients participated in the study. Most patients were men (63%) with an age between 16 and 40 years (63.4%) covered by the National Health Service (71%) and coming from Africa (44.3%). The main infectious diseases observed were: 378 (16.76%) cases of HIV infection, 303 (13.43%) cases of tuberculosis diseases, 282 (12.5%) cases of various forms of viral hepatitis, 177 (7.84%) cases of respiratory diseases, and 196 (8.69%) gastrointestinal diseases. Tropical diseases found were 134 (5.94%) including 95 cases of malaria (70.9%). In conclusion, a broad range of diseases was noted in immigrants which were directly correlated with conditions of poverty. Only a few tropical diseases were diagnosed and therefore the immigrant should not be considered as an infectious disease carrier. \ua9 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005