University of Luxembourg

About: University of Luxembourg is a education organization based out in Luxembourg, Luxembourg. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Computer science. The organization has 4744 authors who have published 22175 publications receiving 381824 citations.

Climatic factors as determinants of international migration

Abstract: We examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration. We distinguish between unexpected short-run factors, captured by natural disasters, as well as long-run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long-run averages. Starting from a simple neo-classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960-2000 that allows us to control for numerous time-varying and time invariant factors. We find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable. In contrast, there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages. We further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs.

A review of methods for capacity identification in Choquet integral based multi-attribute utility theory: Applications of the Kappalab R package

Abstract: The application of multi-attribute utility theory whose aggregation process is based on the Choquet integral requires the prior identification of a capacity. The main approaches to capacity identification proposed in the literature are reviewed and their advantages and inconveniences are discussed. All the reviewed methods have been implemented within the Kappalab R package. Their application is illustrated on a detailed example.

EnrichNet: network-based gene set enrichment analysis

Abstract: Motivation: Assessing functional associations between an experimentally derived gene or protein set of interest and a database of known gene/protein sets is a common task in the analysis of large-scale functional genomics data. For this purpose, a frequently used approach is to apply an over-representation-based enrichment analysis. However, this approach has four drawbacks: (i) it can only score functional associations of overlapping gene/proteins sets; (ii) it disregards genes with missing annotations; (iii) it does not take into account the network structure of physical interactions between the gene/protein sets of interest and (iv) tissue-specific gene/protein set associations cannot be recognized. Results: To address these limitations, we introduce an integrative analysis approach and web-application called EnrichNet. It combines a novel graph-based statistic with an interactive sub-network visualization to accomplish two complementary goals: improving the prioritization of putative functional gene/protein set associations by exploiting information from molecular interaction networks and tissue-specific gene expression data and enabling a direct biological interpretation of the results. By using the approach to analyse sets of genes with known involvement in human diseases, new pathway associations are identified, reflecting a dense sub-network of interactions between their corresponding proteins. Availability: EnrichNet is freely available at http://www.enrichnet.org. Contact: ku.ca.mahgnitton@rogonsarK.oilataN, ul.inu@redienhcs.drahnier or se.oinc@aicnelava Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Online.

PAT: Towards Flexible Verification under Fairness

Abstract: Recent development on distributed systems has shown that a variety of fairness constraints (some of which are only recently defined) play vital roles in designing self-stabilizing population protocols. Current practice of system analysis is, however, deficient under fairness. In this work, we present PAT, a toolkit for flexible and efficient system analysis under fairness. A unified algorithm is proposed to model check systems with a variety of fairness effectively in two different settings. Empirical evaluation shows that PAT complements existing model checkers in terms of fairness. We report that previously unknown bugs have been revealed using PAT against systems functioning under strong global fairness.