An analysis of the Graduate Labour Market in Finland: the impact of Spatial Agglomeration and Skill-Job Mismatches

The recent history of Finland has been shaped by the rollercoaster of the 1990s when the economy went from deep recession to becoming among the most innovative and competitive within merely a decade. Economic recovery driven by the surge of ICT-related industries with the active support of the higher education system gave way also to growing inequalities among regions, especially within graduate workers. The paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the returns to education of a cohort entering the labour force between 1995 and 2005; our objective is to capture the extent of spatial and occupational determinants on income distribution as Finland slid from its most troubled to most prosperous times.Regional Development; Earning Distribution; Education and Skills; Spatial Inequalities

Argumentative Reward Learning: Reasoning About Human Preferences

We define a novel neuro-symbolic framework, argumentative reward learning, which combines preference-based argumentation with existing approaches to reinforcement learning from human feedback. Our method improves prior work by generalising human preferences, reducing the burden on the user and increasing the robustness of the reward model. We demonstrate this with a number of experiments.Comment: 4 pages, ICML HMCaT worksho

Urgent carotid endarterectomy to prevent recurrence and improve neurologic outcome in mild-to-moderate acute neurologic events

Objectives: This study evaluated the safety and benefit of urgent carotid endarterectomy (CEA) in patients with carotid disease and an acute stable neurologic event. Methods: The study involved patients with acute neurologic impairment, defined as >= 4 points on the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) evaluation related to a carotid stenosis >= 50% who underwent urgent CEA. Preoperative workup included neurologic assessment with the NIHSS on admission or immediately before surgery and at discharge, carotid duplex scanning, transcranial Doppler ultrasound imaging, and head computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. End points were perioperative (30-day) neurologic mortality, significant NIHSS score improvement or worsening (defined as a variation >= 4), and hemorrhagic or ischemic neurologic recurrence. Patients were evaluated according to their NIHSS score on admission (4-7 or >= 8), clinical and demographic characteristics, timing of surgery (before or after 6 hours), and presence of brain infarction on neuroimaging. Results: Between January 2005 and December 2009, 62 CEAs were performed at a mean of 34.2 +/- 50.2 hours (range, 2-280 hours) after the onset of symptoms. No neurologic mortality nor significant NIHSS score worsening was detected. The NIHSS score decreased in all but four patients, with no new ischemic lesions detected. The mean NIHSS score was 7.05 +/- 3.41 on admission and 3.11 +/- 3.62 at discharge in the entire group (P = 8 on admission had a bigger score reduction than those with a lower NIHSS score (NIHSS 4-7; mean 4.95 +/- 1.03 preoperatively vs 1.31 +/- 1.7 postoperatively, NIHSS >= 8 10.32 +/- 1.94 vs 4.03 +/- 3.67; P < .001). Conclusions: In patients with acute neurologic event, a high NIHSS score does not contraindicate early surgery. To date, guidelines recommend treatment of symptomatic carotid stenosis <= 2 weeks from onset of symptoms to minimize the neurologic recurrence. Our results suggest that minimizing the time for intervention not only reduces the risk of recurrence but can also improve neurologic outcome. (J Vasc Surg 2011;53:622-8.

Provably Robust and Plausible Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Networks via Robust Optimisation

Counterfactual Explanations (CEs) have received increasing interest as a major methodology for explaining neural network classifiers. Usually, CEs for an input-output pair are defined as data points with minimum distance to the input that are classified with a different label than the output. To tackle the established problem that CEs are easily invalidated when model parameters are updated (e.g. retrained), studies have proposed ways to certify the robustness of CEs under model parameter changes bounded by a norm ball. However, existing methods targeting this form of robustness are not sound or complete, and they may generate implausible CEs, i.e., outliers wrt the training dataset. In fact, no existing method simultaneously optimises for proximity and plausibility while preserving robustness guarantees. In this work, we propose Provably RObust and PLAusible Counterfactual Explanations (PROPLACE), a method leveraging on robust optimisation techniques to address the aforementioned limitations in the literature. We formulate an iterative algorithm to compute provably robust CEs and prove its convergence, soundness and completeness. Through a comparative experiment involving six baselines, five of which target robustness, we show that PROPLACE achieves state-of-the-art performances against metrics on three evaluation aspects.Comment: Accepted at ACML 2023, camera-ready versio

Multilayer stochastic block models reveal the multilayer structure of complex networks

In complex systems, the network of interactions we observe between system's components is the aggregate of the interactions that occur through different mechanisms or layers. Recent studies reveal that the existence of multiple interaction layers can have a dramatic impact in the dynamical processes occurring on these systems. However, these studies assume that the interactions between systems components in each one of the layers are known, while typically for real-world systems we do not have that information. Here, we address the issue of uncovering the different interaction layers from aggregate data by introducing multilayer stochastic block models (SBMs), a generalization of single-layer SBMs that considers different mechanisms of layer aggregation. First, we find the complete probabilistic solution to the problem of finding the optimal multilayer SBM for a given aggregate observed network. Because this solution is computationally intractable, we propose an approximation that enables us to verify that multilayer SBMs are more predictive of network structure in real-world complex systems

An analysis of the Graduate Labour Market in Finland: the impact of Spatial Agglomeration and Skill-Job Mismatches

The recent history of Finland has been shaped by the rollercoaster of the 1990s when the economy went from deep recession to becoming among the most innovative and competitive within merely a decade. Economic recovery driven by the surge of ICT-related industries with the active support of the higher education system gave way also to growing inequalities among regions, especially within graduate workers. The paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the returns to education of a cohort entering the labour force between 1995 and 2005; our objective is to capture the extent of spatial and occupational determinants on income distribution as Finland slid from its most troubled to most prosperous times

Bone health management in the continuum of prostate cancer disease: a review of the evidence with an expert panel opinion

Bone health impairment is a frequent detrimental consequence of the high bone tropism of prostate cancer (PCa) cells. It is further worsened by administration of androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), the current standard of care in the management of advanced PCa, through a rapid and dramatic increase in bone turnover and body mass changes. As a result, patients may experience substantial pain and poor quality of life (QoL) and have an increased risk of death. Notwithstanding the importance of this issue, however, bone health preservation is not yet a widespread clinical goal in daily practice.To address this urgent unmet need, following a thorough discussion of available data and sharing of their clinical practice experience, a panel of Italian experts in the field of bone health and metabolism formulated a number of practical advices for optimising the monitoring and treatment of bone health in men undergoing ADT during all phases of the disease. The rationale behind the venture was to raise awareness on the importance of bone preservation in this complex setting, while providing an instrument to support physicians and facilitate the management of bone health.Current evidence regarding the effects on bone health of ADT, of novel hormone therapies (which improve progression delay, pain control and QoL while consistently carrying the risk of non-pathological fractures in both non-metastatic and metastatic PCa) and of bone turnover inhibitors (whose use is frequently suboptimal) is reviewed. Finally, the expert opinion to optimise bone health preservation is given