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L. Bellomarini, M. Benedetti, S. Ceri, R. Laurendi, D. Magnanimi, M. Nissl, E. Sallinger:
"Reasoning on Company Takeovers during the COVID-19 Crisis with Knowledge Graphs";
Talk: RuleML+RR 2020 - 4th International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning, Oslo, Norway; 2020-06-29 - 2020-07-01; in: "roceedings of the 14th International Rule Challenge, 4th Doctoral Consortium, and 6th Industry Track @ RuleML+RR 2020 co-located with 16th Reasoning Web Summer School {(RW} 2020) 12th DecisionCAMP 2020 as part of Declarative {AI} 2020, Oslo, Norway (virtual due to Covid-19 pandemic), 29 June - 1 July, 2020", (2020), 145 - 156.

When some country takes a disproportionate hit by a large-scale turmoil-just like Italy did during the COVID-19 pandemics-theshare prices of its companies plunge. Suddenly, it becomes feasible toattempt foreign takeovers of national assets, including those of strate-gic interest. To avert this risk, the Government can veto transactions bysummoning the so-called "Golden Powers". Or, it can work to proactivelyidentify structural weaknesses in the control or shareholding chains of keycompanies, in order to reinforce them without resorting to special pow-ers. Sometimes, vulnerabilities and attacks hide in plain sight due to howcomplex and intertwined the network of mutual company shareholdingis. In this work, we show how to leverageKnowledge Graphs(KGs) asa representation and reasoning framework to analyze both reactive andproactive measures against takeover attempts, however intricate the set-ting where they take place. We formally characterize a set of reasoningtasks that define when and if to employ Golden Powers, plus others thataim at pinpointing companies prone to attacks. These criteria are exer-cised on the real network of all Italian companies, built for the occasion.A rich set of experiments is provided, including on several large syntheticinstances, to prove the robustness of our method.

Knowledge Graphs·Reasoning·Company Takeovers.

Project Head Reinhard Pichler:
KnowledgeGraph