Enabling Preserving Bisimulation Equivalence

Most fairness assumptions used for verifying liveness properties are criticised for being too strong or unrealistic. On the other hand, justness, arguably the minimal fairness assumption required for the verification of liveness properties, is not preserved by classical semantic equivalences, such as strong bisimilarity. To overcome this deficiency, we introduce a finer alternative to strong bisimilarity, called enabling preserving bisimilarity. We prove that this equivalence is justness-preserving and a congruence for all standard operators, including parallel composition

Regulating Competition in the Interexchange Telecommunications Market: The Dominant/Nondominant Carrier Approach and the Evolution of Forbearance

Although significant competition began to develop in the interexchange market during the mid-twentieth century, the Federal Communications Commission did not undertake a meaningful effort to regulate competitive forces until it commenced its Competitive Carrier rulemaking in 1979. This proceeding, which adopted a market power approach to rate, tariff, and facilities regulation in order to enhance competition, service diversity, and consumer welfare, constituted a fundamental change in the Commission\u27s monopoly-based regulatory approach to telecommunications. The author examines the market power approach to the regulation of competition in the interexchange telecommunications market recently adopted by the FCC, with an emphasis on the arduous administrative, judicial, and legislative course taken to develop and implement forbearance as the primary regulatory policy

TAPESTRY:A Blockchain based Service for Trusted Interaction Online

We present a novel blockchain based service for proving the provenance of online digital identity, exposed as an assistive tool to help non-expert users make better decisions about whom to trust online. Our service harnesses the digital personhood (DP); the longitudinal and multi-modal signals created through users' lifelong digital interactions, as a basis for evidencing the provenance of identity. We describe how users may exchange trust evidence derived from their DP, in a granular and privacy-preserving manner, with other users in order to demonstrate coherence and longevity in their behaviour online. This is enabled through a novel secure infrastructure combining hybrid on- and off-chain storage combined with deep learning for DP analytics and visualization. We show how our tools enable users to make more effective decisions on whether to trust unknown third parties online, and also to spot behavioural deviations in their own social media footprints indicative of account hijacking.Comment: Submitted to IEEE TSC Special Issue on Blockchain Services, May 201

Towards Big Biology: high-performance verification of large concurrent systems

Bal, H.E. [Promotor]Fokkink, W.J. [Promotor]Kielmann, T. [Copromotor

Resigned robots and aspiring artisans: a conceptualisation of the IT service support worker

In the last two decades the IT service support worker has emerged to be a worker-type of considerable socio-economic importance. Such workers are symbolic of the trends towards the importance of information/knowledge and information technology within modern economic/political systems. Such systems, heavily influenced by governmental bodies and business organisations, have aggrandised the use of rationalising customer-centric management techniques. And yet such symbolic workers are largely hidden and unacknowledged as a specific type of worker in the business literature. This thesis represents an attempt to conceptualise the IT service support worker as a worker-type, inducing a conceptual model that identifies three aspects to the worker: information systems worker; knowledge worker and service worker and considers them from each of these perspectives. This qualitative research draws on a rich mix of observational and interview data collected across five UK organisations to produce a narrative that suggests that, for different IT service support workers, those different aspects tend to be variably emphasised within their team roles. The study additionally offers a theoretical conclusion that IT service support workers might reasonably be divided into different classes depending upon not only the design of their team role but also their individual career orientations and the nature of the knowledge they actually use in their work. Four such classes are identified as being of particular significance and these are evocatively named: Resigned Robots ; Constrained Careerists ; Establishment Experts and Aspiring Artisans . Whilst being outside of the scope of this study, it is suggested that this novel typology might also be useful for classifying other worker groupings. The study is intended to be useful for the enhancement of IT service management practice and makes several contributions in this regard. These include the need for managers to recognise the importance of experientially-acquired knowledge for efficiency in IT service support work and a suggestion that managers might tailor HRM practices for different classes of worker

Charting Regulatory Frameworks for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship Testing, Pilots, and Commercial Deployments

The report discusses how Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASSs), ships capable of autono-mous and remote operations, should be regulated. It consists of an introduction and three main chapters. Chapter 2 introduces MASS technologies, focusing on the sensors, software components, and algo-rithms needed in autonomous navigation systems. The report provides an overview of the role of machine learning models in autonomous navigation systems. These are necessary especially in automating watchkeeping duties and require testing in multiple phases of the system development cycle. Chapter 3 discusses the existing IMO, EU, and national regulatory frameworks, in the context of MASS trials and pilot deployments in test areas in the Baltic Sea. It also considers how the rules should be changed to facilitate the trials and pilot deployment. It concludes that the current rules will allow MASS trials, provided that they are approved by the authorities. Permanent MASS deploy-ments, however, still require amendments of national and international rules. Chapter 4 discusses theme 4, outlining the building blocks and challenges of building a future regu-latory framework for MASS commercial deployments. The Chapter focuses on MASS ethics, auton-omous navigation system regulation, and liability and accountability for MASSs. Chapter 5 provides an executive summary of the main findings