University of the Aegean

About: University of the Aegean is a education organization based out in Mytilene, Greece. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2818 authors who have published 8100 publications receiving 179275 citations. The organization is also known as: UAEG.

QCSP-solve: a solver for quantified constraint satisfaction problems

Abstract: The Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problem (QCSP) is a generalization of the CSP in which some variables are universally quantified. It has been shown that a solver based on an encoding of QCSP into QBF can outperform the existing direct QCSP approaches by several orders of magnitude. In this paper we introduce an efficient QCSP solver. We show how knowledge learned from the successful encoding of QCSP into QBF can be utilized to enhance the existing QCSP techniques and speed up search by orders of magnitude. We also show how the performance of the solver can be further enhanced by incorporating advanced look-back techniques such as CBJ and solution-directed pruning. Experiments demonstrate that our solver is several orders of magnitude faster than existing direct approaches to QCSP solving, and significantly outperforms approaches based on encoding QCSPs as QBFs.

Disentangling the role of floral sensory stimuli in pollination networks

Abstract: Despite progress in understanding pollination network structure, the functional roles of floral sensory stimuli (visual, olfactory) have never been addressed comprehensively in a community context, even though such traits are known to mediate plant-pollinator interactions. Here, we use a comprehensive dataset of floral traits and a novel dynamic data-pooling methodology to explore the impacts of floral sensory diversity on the structure of a pollination network in a Mediterranean scrubland. Our approach tracks transitions in the network behaviour of each plant species throughout its flowering period and, despite dynamism in visitor composition, reveals significant links to floral scent, and/or colour as perceived by pollinators. Having accounted for floral phenology, abundance and phylogeny, the persistent association between floral sensory traits and visitor guilds supports a deeper role for sensory bias and diffuse coevolution in structuring plant-pollinator networks. This knowledge of floral sensory diversity, by identifying the most influential phenotypes, could help prioritize efforts for plant-pollinator community restoration.

Overview of PAN 2019: Bots and Gender Profiling, Celebrity Profiling, Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution and Style Change Detection

Abstract: We briefly report on the four shared tasks organized as part of the PAN 2019 evaluation lab on digital text forensics and authorship analysis. Each task is introduced, motivated, and the results obtained are presented. Altogether, the four tasks attracted 373 registrations, yielding 72 successful submissions. This, and the fact that we continue to invite the submission of software rather than its run output using the TIRA experimentation platform, demarcates a good start into the second decade of PAN evaluations labs.

Auditor’s Perceptions of Financial Reporting Quality: The Case of Greece

Abstract: According to IASB a key prerequisite for quality in financial reporting is the adherence to the objective and the qualitative characteristics of financial reporting information. Qualitative characteristics are the attributes that make financial information useful and consist of relevance, faithful representation, comparability, verifiability, timeliness and understandability. This paper aims to investigate auditor’s perceptions of the quality of financial reports based on the qualitative characteristics of financial reporting information defined by IASB in its conceptual framework. In addition, it aims to identify the key factors that influence and improve the quality of financial reports, as well as the factors that lead to poor quality. Finally, an effort is made to assess the quality of financial reporting of Greek companies according to each qualitative characteristic of financial reporting information. Results indicate that auditors perceive the qualitative characteristics of financial reporting information as important quality elements of financial reports. As far as the quality of financial reports of Greek companies is concerned auditors perceive it to be of moderate quality attributed mainly to earnings management, poor corporate governance, family ownership and deviation from accounting principles.