Exposure characterization in regional risk assessment aims to assign physical properties to the assets of interest so they can be associated with damage and loss functions. While this process has benefited from the growing availability of public infrastructure inventories, these datasets often lack the detailed attributes required for high-resolution risk assessment. Missing attributes are commonly inferred using predictive models or engineering-based rulesets. However, these imputations are inherently imperfect and can introduce bias and additional uncertainty in regional risk estimates. This study proposes a methodology to quantify the bias and uncertainty in regional risk assessment that arises from probabilistic exposure characterization. By integrating analytical and simulation-based approaches, the methodology decomposes the total uncertainty into contributions from incomplete exposure information as well as other sources, including hazard and damage characterization. This decomposition clarifies how bias and uncertainty associated with missing exposure information are generated and propagated through the risk assessment pipeline. The methodology is applied to both bridge-spe
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols now intermediate over USD 100 billion in value, including regulated stablecoins and tokenized assets deployed as collateral, yet no widely adopted framework operationalizes risk assessment at the rigor institutional adoption demands. Existing approaches emphasize protocol-specific parameter optimization or conceptual taxonomies without providing explainable, composability-aware, and structurally independent assessment methodologies. We propose a nine-dimension DeFi risk assessment framework extending the six-dimension taxonomy introduced by Moody's Analytics and Gauntlet with three novel dimensions: composability risk, comprehension debt, and temporal risk dynamics. We additionally introduce a transparency confidence modifier separating assessment reliability from risk severity. The framework is grounded in structural analysis of protocol dependencies conducted through an ontology-based protocol intelligence infrastructure covering more than 8,000 DeFi protocols. We retrospectively analyze 12 major DeFi-related incidents from 2024-2026 representing approximately USD 2.5 billion in direct losses. Five of the 12 incidents require at least one no
Organizations investing in artificial intelligence face a fundamental challenge: traditional return on investment calculations fail to capture the dual nature of AI implementations, which simultaneously reduce certain operational risks while introducing novel exposures related to algorithmic malfunction, adversarial attacks, and regulatory liability. This research presents a comprehensive financial framework for quantifying AI project returns that explicitly integrates changes in organizational risk profiles. The methodology addresses a critical gap in current practice where investment decisions rely on optimistic benefit projections without accounting for the probabilistic costs of AI-specific threats including model drift, bias-related litigation, and compliance failures under emerging regulations such as the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and ISO/IEC 42001. Drawing on established risk quantification methods, including annual loss expectancy calculations and Monte Carlo simulation techniques, this framework enables practitioners to compute net benefits that incorporate both productivity gains and the delta between pre-implementation and post-implementation risk exposu
This paper develops a geospatial framework for climate risk stress testing in California with applications to banking and climate-exposed sectors such as agriculture, real estate, and tourism. The study integrates physical hazard mapping, sector-specific exposure analysis, and scenario-based financial risk assessment to evaluate how wildfires, drought, flooding, extreme heat, and transition risks may affect regional economic activity and financial stability. The framework is intended to support portfolio monitoring, climate scenario analysis, and institutional readiness under emerging disclosure and risk-management standards. In addition, the paper provides a survey-based implementation guide for benchmarking current climate-risk practices and data needs across industry and academic stakeholders.
In this article, we address the problem of risk assessment of stealthy attacks on uncertain control systems. Considering data injection attacks that aim at maximizing impact while remaining undetected, we use the recently proposed output-to-output gain to characterize the risk associated with the impact of attacks under a limited system knowledge attacker. The risk is formulated using a well-established risk metric, namely the maximum expected loss. Under this setups, the risk assessment problem corresponds to an untractable infinite non-convex optimization problem. To address this limitation, we adopt the framework of scenario-based optimization to approximate the infinite non-convex optimization problem by a sampled non-convex optimization problem. Then, based on the framework of dissipative system theory and S-procedure, the sampled non-convex risk assessment problem is formulated as an equivalent convex semi-definite program. Additionally, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for the risk to be bounded. Finally, we illustrate the results through numerical simulation of a hydro-turbine power system.
In 2004, the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs commissioned research with the aim of developing a scheme for assessing the risks posed to species, habitats and ecosystems in the UK by non-native organisms. The outcome was the UK Non-Native Organism Risk Assessment Scheme. Unfortunately, the mathematical basis of the procedure for summarising risks deployed in the Risk Assessment Scheme, as outlined in Baker et al. (2008) and described in more detail in the Risk Assessment Scheme's User Manual, contains several analytical errors. These errors are outlined in the notes that follow.
This paper presents fast non-sampling based methods to assess the risk for trajectories of autonomous vehicles when probabilistic predictions of other agents' futures are generated by deep neural networks (DNNs). The presented methods address a wide range of representations for uncertain predictions including both Gaussian and non-Gaussian mixture models to predict both agent positions and control inputs conditioned on the scene contexts. We show that the problem of risk assessment when Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) of agent positions are learned can be solved rapidly to arbitrary levels of accuracy with existing numerical methods. To address the problem of risk assessment for non-Gaussian mixture models of agent position, we propose finding upper bounds on risk using nonlinear Chebyshev's Inequality and sums-of-squares (SOS) programming; they are both of interest as the former is much faster while the latter can be arbitrarily tight. These approaches only require higher order statistical moments of agent positions to determine upper bounds on risk. To perform risk assessment when models are learned for agent control inputs as opposed to positions, we propagate the moments of unce
Foods naturally contain a number of contaminants that may have different and long term toxic effects. This paper introduces a novel approach for the assessment of such chronic food risk that integrates the pharmacokinetic properties of a given contaminant. The estimation of such a Kinetic Dietary Exposure Model (KDEM) should be based on long term consumption data which, for the moment, can only be provided by Household Budget Surveys such as the SECODIP panel in France. A semi parametric model is proposed to decompose a series of household quantities into individual quantities which are then used as inputs of the KDEM. As an illustration, the risk assessment related to the presence of methyl mercury in seafood is revisited using this novel approach.
This study estimates the risk contributions of individual European countries regarding the indemnity payments in agricultural insurance. We model the total risk exposure as an insurance portfolio where each country is unique in terms of its risk characteristics. The data has been collected from the recent surveys conducted by the European Commission and the World Bank. Farm Accountancy Data Network is used as well. 22 out of 26 member states are included in the study. The results suggest that the EuroMediterranean countries are the major risk contributors. These countries not only have the highest expected loss but also high volatility of indemnity payments. Nordic countries have the lowest indemnity payments and risk exposure.
In the European Union, official food safety monitoring data collected by member states are submitted to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and published on Zenodo. This data includes 392 million analytical results derived from over 15.2 million samples covering more than 4,000 different types of food products, offering great opportunities for artificial intelligence to analyze trends, predict hazards, and support early warning systems. However, the current format with data distributed across approximately 1000 files totaling several hundred gigabytes hinders accessibility and analysis. To address this, we introduce the CompreHensive European Food Safety (CHEFS) database, which consolidates EFSA monitoring data on pesticide residues, veterinary medicinal product residues, and chemical contaminants into a unified and structured dataset. We describe the creation and structure of the CHEFS database and demonstrate its potential by analyzing trends in European food safety monitoring data from 2000 to 2024. Our analyses explore changes in monitoring activities, the most frequently tested products, which products were most often non-compliant and which contaminants were most often
Geo-localization is the task of identifying the location of an image using visual cues alone. It has beneficial applications, such as improving disaster response, enhancing navigation, and geography education. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly demonstrating capabilities as accurate image geo-locators. This brings significant privacy risks, including those related to stalking and surveillance, considering the widespread uses of AI models and sharing of photos on social media. The precision of these models is likely to improve in the future. Despite these risks, there is little work on systematically evaluating the geolocation precision of Generative VLMs, their limits and potential for unintended inferences. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the geolocation capabilities of 25 state-of-the-art VLMs on four benchmark image datasets captured in diverse environments. Our results offer insight into the internal reasoning of VLMs and highlight their strengths, limitations, and potential societal risks. Our findings indicate that current VLMs perform poorly on generic street-level images yet achieve notably high accuracy (61\%) on images re
How may exposure risks to SARS-CoV-2 be assessed quantitatively? The material metabolism approach of Industrial Ecology can be applied to the mass flows of these virions by their numbers, as a key step in the analysis of the current pandemic. Several transmission routes of SARS-2 from emission by a person to exposure of another person have been modelled and quantified. Start is a COVID-19 illness progression model specifying rising emissions by an infected person: the human virion factory. The first route covers closed spaces, with an emission, concentration, and decay model quantifying exposure. A next set of routes covers person-to-person contacts mostly in open spaces, modelling the spatial distribution of exhales towards inhalation. These models also cover incidental exposures, like coughs and sneezes, and exposure through objects. Routes through animal contacts, excrements, and food, have not been quantified. Potential exposures differ by six orders of magnitude. Closed rooms, even with reasonably (VR 2) to good (VR 5) ventilation, constitute the major exposure risks. Close person-to-person contacts of longer duration create two orders of magnitude lower exposure risks. Open s
In risk management, tail risks are of crucial importance. The assessment of risks should be carried out in accordance with the regulatory authority's requirement at high quantiles. In general, the underlying distribution function is unknown, the database is sparse, and therefore special tail models are used. Very often, the generalized Pareto distribution is employed as a basic model, and its parameters are determined with data from the tail area. With the determined tail model, statisticians then calculate the required high quantiles. In this context, we consider the possible accuracy of the calculation of the quantiles and determine the finite sample distribution function of the quantile estimator, depending on the confidence level and the parameters of the tail model, and then calculate the finite sample bias and the finite sample variance of the quantile estimator. Finally, we present an impact analysis on the quantiles of an unknown distribution function.
Food supply chain plays a vital role in human health and food prices. Food supply chain inefficiencies in terms of unfair competition and lack of regulations directly affect the quality of human life and increase food safety risks. This work merges Hyperledger Fabric, an enterprise-ready blockchain platform with existing conventional infrastructure, to trace a food package from farm to fork using an identity unique for each food package while keeping it uncomplicated. It keeps the records of business transactions that are secured and accessible to stakeholders according to the agreed set of policies and rules without involving any centralized authority. This paper focuses on exploring and building an uncomplicated, low-cost solution to quickly link the existing food industry at different geographical locations in a chain to track and trace the food in the market.
The Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI) aims to advance the state of the art for computational prediction of genetic variant impact, particularly those relevant to disease. The five complete editions of the CAGI community experiment comprised 50 challenges, in which participants made blind predictions of phenotypes from genetic data, and these were evaluated by independent assessors. Overall, results show that while current methods are imperfect, they have major utility for research and clinical applications. Missense variant interpretation methods are able to estimate biochemical effects with increasing accuracy. Performance is particularly strong for clinical pathogenic variants, including some difficult-to-diagnose cases, and extends to interpretation of cancer-related variants. Assessment of methods for regulatory variants and complex trait disease risk is less definitive, and indicates performance potentially suitable for auxiliary use in the clinic. Emerging methods and increasingly large, robust datasets for training and assessment promise further progress ahead.
In this paper we consider a class of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) modeling the quantity of a given food contaminant in the body. On the one hand, the amount of contaminant increases with random food intakes and, on the other hand, decreases thanks to the release rate of the body. Our aim is to provide quantitative speeds of convergence to equilibrium for the total variation and Wasserstein distances via coupling methods.
As a new type of cyber attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs) pose a severe threat to modern society. This paper focuses on the assessment of the risk of APTs. Based on a dynamic model characterizing the time evolution of the state of an organization, the organization's risk is defined as its maximum possible expected loss, and the risk assessment problem is modeled as a constrained optimization problem. The influence of different factors on an organization's risk is uncovered through theoretical analysis. Based on extensive experiments, we speculate that the attack strategy obtained by applying the hill-climbing method to the proposed optimization problem, which we call the HC strategy, always leads to the maximum possible expected loss. We then present a set of five heuristic attack strategies and, through comparative experiments, show that the HC strategy causes a higher risk than all these heuristic strategies do, which supports our conjecture. Finally, the impact of two factors on the attacker's HC cost profit is determined through computer simulations. These findings help understand the risk of APTs in a quantitative manner.
Food recognition and nutritional apps are trending technologies that may revolutionise the way people with diabetes manage their diet. Such apps can monitor food intake as a digital diary and even employ artificial intelligence to assess the diet automatically. Although these apps offer a promising solution for managing diabetes, they are rarely used by patients. This chapter aims to provide an in-depth assessment of the current status of apps for food recognition and nutrition, to identify factors that may inhibit or facilitate their use, while it is accompanied by an outline of relevant research and development.
Flexibility of energy consumption can be harnessed for the purposes of ancillary services in a large power grid. In prior work by the authors a randomized control architecture is introduced for individual loads for this purpose. In examples it is shown that the control architecture can be designed so that control of the loads is easy at the grid level: Tracking of a balancing authority reference signal is possible, while ensuring that the quality of service (QoS) for each load is acceptable on average. The analysis was based on a mean field limit (as the number of loads approaches infinity), combined with an LTI-system approximation of the aggregate nonlinear model. This paper examines in depth the issue of individual risk in these systems. The main contributions of the paper are of two kinds: Risk is modeled and quantified: (i) The average performance is not an adequate measure of success. It is found empirically that a histogram of QoS is approximately Gaussian, and consequently each load will eventually receive poor service. (ii) The variance can be estimated from a refinement of the LTI model that includes a white-noise disturbance; variance is a function of the randomized poli
In our previous paper, "A Unified Approach to Systemic Risk Measures via Acceptance Set" (\textit{Mathematical Finance, 2018}), we have introduced a general class of systemic risk measures that allow for random allocations to individual banks before aggregation of their risks. In the present paper, we prove the dual representation of a particular subclass of such systemic risk measures and the existence and uniqueness of the optimal allocation related to them. We also introduce an associated utility maximization problem which has the same optimal solution as the systemic risk measure. In addition, the optimizer in the dual formulation provides a \textit{risk allocation} which is fair from the point of view of the individual financial institutions. The case with exponential utilities which allows for explicit computation is treated in details.