The Failures of Litigation as a Tool for the Development of Social Welfare Policy

This article argues that litigation is largely counterproductive to the development of a coherent and feasible social welfare policy and interferes with the constitutionally-derived separation of powers. It describes the proper role of the courts when evaluating government actions and the proper procedures for doing so. It then discusses several cases brought against the New York State Department of Social Services and local governments, arguing that the courts have abandoned their appropriate role, and using these decisions to illustrate its thesis

The Failures of Litigation as a Tool for the Development of Social Welfare Policy

This article argues that litigation is largely counterproductive to the development of a coherent and feasible social welfare policy and interferes with the constitutionally-derived separation of powers. It describes the proper role of the courts when evaluating government actions and the proper procedures for doing so. It then discusses several cases brought against the New York State Department of Social Services and local governments, arguing that the courts have abandoned their appropriate role, and using these decisions to illustrate its thesis

Targeted Greybox Fuzzing with Static Lookahead Analysis

Automatic test generation typically aims to generate inputs that explore new paths in the program under test in order to find bugs. Existing work has, therefore, focused on guiding the exploration toward program parts that are more likely to contain bugs by using an offline static analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique for targeted greybox fuzzing using an online static analysis that guides the fuzzer toward a set of target locations, for instance, located in recently modified parts of the program. This is achieved by first semantically analyzing each program path that is explored by an input in the fuzzer's test suite. The results of this analysis are then used to control the fuzzer's specialized power schedule, which determines how often to fuzz inputs from the test suite. We implemented our technique by extending a state-of-the-art, industrial fuzzer for Ethereum smart contracts and evaluate its effectiveness on 27 real-world benchmarks. Using an online analysis is particularly suitable for the domain of smart contracts since it does not require any code instrumentation---instrumentation to contracts changes their semantics. Our experiments show that targeted fuzzing significantly outperforms standard greybox fuzzing for reaching 83% of the challenging target locations (up to 14x of median speed-up)

Do interest rates matter? credit demand in the Dhaka Slums

If the demand for credit by the poor changes little when interest rates increase, lenders can raise fees to cost-covering levels without losing customers. This claim is at the core of sustainable microfinance strategies that aim to provide banking services to the poor while eschewing long-term subsidies, but, so far, there is little direct evidence of this. This paper uses data from SafeSave, a credit cooperative in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, to examine how sensitive borrowers are to increases in the interest rate on loans. Using unanticipated between-branch variation in the interest rate we estimate interest elasticities of loan demand ranging from -0.73 to -1.04. Less wealthy accountholders are more sensitive to the interest rate than (relatively) wealthier borrowers (an elasticity of -0.86 compared to -0.26), and consequently the bank’s portfolio shifts away from its poorest borrowers when it increases the interest rate.microfinance; credit; demand

Pilot, Rollout and Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods for Job Shop Scheduling

Greedy heuristics may be attuned by looking ahead for each possible choice, in an approach called the rollout or Pilot method. These methods may be seen as meta-heuristics that can enhance (any) heuristic solution, by repetitively modifying a master solution: similarly to what is done in game tree search, better choices are identified using lookahead, based on solutions obtained by repeatedly using a greedy heuristic. This paper first illustrates how the Pilot method improves upon some simple well known dispatch heuristics for the job-shop scheduling problem. The Pilot method is then shown to be a special case of the more recent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods: Unlike the Pilot method, MCTS methods use random completion of partial solutions to identify promising branches of the tree. The Pilot method and a simple version of MCTS, using the $\varepsilon$-greedy exploration paradigms, are then compared within the same framework, consisting of 300 scheduling problems of varying sizes with fixed-budget of rollouts. Results demonstrate that MCTS reaches better or same results as the Pilot methods in this context.Comment: Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN (LION'6) 7219 (2012

Analyzing Conflict Freedom For Multi-threaded Programs With Time Annotations

Avoiding access conflicts is a major challenge in the design of multi-threaded programs. In the context of real-time systems, the absence of conflicts can be guaranteed by ensuring that no two potentially conflicting accesses are ever scheduled concurrently.In this paper, we analyze programs that carry time annotations specifying the time for executing each statement. We propose a technique for verifying that a multi-threaded program with time annotations is free of access conflicts. In particular, we generate constraints that reflect the possible schedules for executing the program and the required properties. We then invoke an SMT solver in order to verify that no execution gives rise to concurrent conflicting accesses. Otherwise, we obtain a trace that exhibits the access conflict.Comment: http://journal.ub.tu-berlin.de/eceasst/article/view/97

SysMART Indoor Services: A System of Smart and Connected Supermarkets

Smart gadgets are being embedded almost in every aspect of our lives. From smart cities to smart watches, modern industries are increasingly supporting the Internet of Things (IoT). SysMART aims at making supermarkets smart, productive, and with a touch of modern lifestyle. While similar implementations to improve the shopping experience exists, they tend mainly to replace the shopping activity at the store with online shopping. Although online shopping reduces time and effort, it deprives customers from enjoying the experience. SysMART relies on cutting-edge devices and technology to simplify and reduce the time required during grocery shopping inside the supermarket. In addition, the system monitors and maintains perishable products in good condition suitable for human consumption. SysMART is built using state-of-the-art technologies that support rapid prototyping and precision data acquisition. The selected development environment is LabVIEW with its world-class interfacing libraries. The paper comprises a detailed system description, development strategy, interface design, software engineering, and a thorough analysis and evaluation.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figur

Constraint Expressions and Workflow Satisfiability

A workflow specification defines a set of steps and the order in which those steps must be executed. Security requirements and business rules may impose constraints on which users are permitted to perform those steps. A workflow specification is said to be satisfiable if there exists an assignment of authorized users to workflow steps that satisfies all the constraints. An algorithm for determining whether such an assignment exists is important, both as a static analysis tool for workflow specifications, and for the construction of run-time reference monitors for workflow management systems. We develop new methods for determining workflow satisfiability based on the concept of constraint expressions, which were introduced recently by Khan and Fong. These methods are surprising versatile, enabling us to develop algorithms for, and determine the complexity of, a number of different problems related to workflow satisfiability.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1205.0852; to appear in Proceedings of SACMAT 201