Extensible Technology-Agnostic Runtime Verification

With numerous specialised technologies available to industry, it has become increasingly frequent for computer systems to be composed of heterogeneous components built over, and using, different technologies and languages. While this enables developers to use the appropriate technologies for specific contexts, it becomes more challenging to ensure the correctness of the overall system. In this paper we propose a framework to enable extensible technology agnostic runtime verification and we present an extension of polyLarva, a runtime-verification tool able to handle the monitoring of heterogeneous-component systems. The approach is then applied to a case study of a component-based artefact using different technologies, namely C and Java.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2013, arXiv:1302.478

Mining Bad Credit Card Accounts from OLAP and OLTP

Credit card companies classify accounts as a good or bad based on historical data where a bad account may default on payments in the near future. If an account is classified as a bad account, then further action can be taken to investigate the actual nature of the account and take preventive actions. In addition, marking an account as "good" when it is actually bad, could lead to loss of revenue - and marking an account as "bad" when it is actually good, could lead to loss of business. However, detecting bad credit card accounts in real time from Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) data is challenging due to the volume of data needed to be processed to compute the risk factor. We propose an approach which precomputes and maintains the risk probability of an account based on historical transactions data from offline data or data from a data warehouse. Furthermore, using the most recent OLTP transactional data, risk probability is calculated for the latest transaction and combined with the previously computed risk probability from the data warehouse. If accumulated risk probability crosses a predefined threshold, then the account is treated as a bad account and is flagged for manual verification.Comment: Conference proceedings of ICCDA, 201

Potential Errors and Test Assessment in Software Product Line Engineering

Software product lines (SPL) are a method for the development of variant-rich software systems. Compared to non-variable systems, testing SPLs is extensive due to an increasingly amount of possible products. Different approaches exist for testing SPLs, but there is less research for assessing the quality of these tests by means of error detection capability. Such test assessment is based on error injection into correct version of the system under test. However to our knowledge, potential errors in SPL engineering have never been systematically identified before. This article presents an overview over existing paradigms for specifying software product lines and the errors that can occur during the respective specification processes. For assessment of test quality, we leverage mutation testing techniques to SPL engineering and implement the identified errors as mutation operators. This allows us to run existing tests against defective products for the purpose of test assessment. From the results, we draw conclusions about the error-proneness of the surveyed SPL design paradigms and how quality of SPL tests can be improved.Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2015, arXiv:1504.0192

Trends in Banking 2017 and onwards

The changing nature of the relationship between a retail bank and its customers is examined, particularly with respect to new financial concepts, debt and regulation. The traditional image of a bank is portrayed as a physical building a classical Doric portico. This image conveys concepts of service, soundness, strength, stability and security ("five-S"). That "five-S" concept is changing, and the evidence for changes that affect customers directly is considered. A fundamental legal problem associated with those changes is highlighted: a bank is no longer solely responsible for the safeguard of customer monies. A solution to this problem is proposed: banks should be jointly liable with perpetrators of criminal activity in the event of frauds as an encouragement to recognise and mitigate fraud.Comment: Proceedings 29th SASE Conference, Lyon France, June-July 201

Spending time with money: from shared values to social connectivity

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions