Venture Capitalists, Asymmetric Information, and Ownership in the Innovation Process

In this paper we construct a model in which entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incumbents are present. We show that as exacerbated development by better-informed venture-backed rms is used as a signal to enhance the sale price of developed innovations, venture capitalists must be sufciently more ecient in selecting innovative projects than incumbents in order to exist in equilibrium. Otherwise, incumbents undertake early preemptive, acquisitions to prevent the venture-backed rms' signaling-driven investment, despite the risk of buying a bad innovation. We nally show at what point the presence of active venture capitalists increases the incentives for entrepreneurial innovations.Venture Capitalists; Innovation; Entrepreneurs; Signaling; Development;

Compression domain volume rendering for distributed environments

This paper describes a method for volume data compression and rendering which bases on wavelet splats. The underlying concept is especially designed for distributed and networked applications, where we assume a remote server to maintain large scale volume data sets, being inspected, browsed through and rendered interactively by a local client. Therefore, we encode the server‘s volume data using a newly designed wavelet based volume compression method. A local client can render the volumes immediately from the compression domain by using wavelet footprints, a method proposed earlier. In addition, our setup features full progression, where the rendered image is refined progressively as data comes in. Furthermore, framerate constraints are considered by controlling the quality of the image both locally and globally depending on the current network bandwidth or computational capabilities of the client. As a very important aspect of our setup, the client does not need to provide storage for the volume data and can be implemented in terms of a network application. The underlying framework enables to exploit all advantageous properties of the wavelet transform and forms a basis for both sophisticated lossy compression and rendering. Although coming along with simple illumination and constant exponential decay, the rendering method is especially suited for fast interactive inspection of large data sets and can be supported easily by graphics hardware

Introduction: European Crises

This introduction addresses the increased levels of social, political and ideological polarization and the socio-political conflicts in contemporary Europe that are often subsumed under notions of ‘crisis’. We argue that the humanities and social sciences must react to these scenarios in at least two ways: by critically reflecting on the European project, and by analysing key elements of current ‘crisis’ discourses, such as post-factual narratives of ‘decline’, ‘survival’ and ‘emergency’, and populist fictions of homogeneous, ‘tribal’ cultural domains

FastZIP: Faster and More Secure Zero-Interaction Pairing

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), establishing a secure channel between smart devices becomes crucial. Recent research proposes zero-interaction pairing (ZIP), which enables pairing without user assistance by utilizing devices' physical context (e.g., ambient audio) to obtain a shared secret key. The state-of-the-art ZIP schemes suffer from three limitations: (1) prolonged pairing time (i.e., minutes or hours), (2) vulnerability to brute-force offline attacks on a shared key, and (3) susceptibility to attacks caused by predictable context (e.g., replay attack) because they rely on limited entropy of physical context to protect a shared key. We address these limitations, proposing FastZIP, a novel ZIP scheme that significantly reduces pairing time while preventing offline and predictable context attacks. In particular, we adapt a recently introduced Fuzzy Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (fPAKE) protocol and utilize sensor fusion, maximizing their advantages. We instantiate FastZIP for intra-car device pairing to demonstrate its feasibility and show how the design of FastZIP can be adapted to other ZIP use cases. We implement FastZIP and evaluate it by driving four cars for a total of 800 km. We achieve up to three times shorter pairing time compared to the state-of-the-art ZIP schemes while assuring robust security with adversarial error rates below 0.5%.Comment: ACM MobiSys '21 - Code and data at: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/fastzi

Abnormal vital signs are strong predictors for intensive care unit admission and in-hospital mortality in adults triaged in the emergency department - a prospective cohort study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Assessment and treatment of the acutely ill patient have improved by introducing systematic assessment and accelerated protocols for specific patient groups. Triage systems are widely used, but few studies have investigated the ability of the triage systems in predicting outcome in the unselected acute population. The aim of this study was to quantify the association between the main component of the Hillerød Acute Process Triage (HAPT) system and the outcome measures; Admission to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and in-hospital mortality, and to identify the vital signs, scored and categorized at admission, that are most strongly associated with the outcome measures.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The HAPT system is a minor modification of the Swedish Adaptive Process Triage (ADAPT) and ranks patients into five level colour-coded triage categories. Each patient is assigned a triage category for the two main descriptors; vital signs, T_vitals, and presenting complaint, T_complaint. The more urgent of the two determines the final triage category, T_final. We retrieved 6279 unique adult patients admitted through the Emergency Department (ED) from the Acute Admission Database. We performed regression analysis to evaluate the association between the covariates and the outcome measures.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The covariates, T_vitals, T_complaintand T_finalwere all significantly associated with ICU admission and in-hospital mortality, the odds increasing with the urgency of the triage category. The vital signs best predicting in-hospital mortality were saturation of peripheral oxygen (SpO₂), respiratory rate (RR), systolic blood pressure (BP) and Glasgow Coma Score (GCS). Not only the type, but also the number of abnormal vital signs, were predictive for adverse outcome. The presenting complaints associated with the highest in-hospital mortality were 'dyspnoea' (11.5%) and 'altered level of consciousness' (10.6%). More than half of the patients had a T_complaintmore urgent than T_vitals, the opposite was true in just 6% of the patients.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The HAPT system is valid in terms of predicting in-hospital mortality and ICU admission in the adult acute population. Abnormal vital signs are strongly associated with adverse outcome, while including the presenting complaint in the triage model may result in over-triage.</p

Venture Capitalists, Asymmetric Information and Ownership in the Innovation Process

This paper constructs a model where entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incumbents are present. We first show that aggressive development of a basic innovation by better informed venture-backed firms is used as a signaling device to enhance the sale price of the innovation. We then show that incumbents can undertake early, preemptive, acquisitions to prevent such signaling driven overinvestment, despite the risk of buying a non-productive innovation. Therefore, to exist in equilibrium, venture capitalists must be sufficiently more efficient in selecting innovation projects, otherwise preemptive acquisitions will take place