Coloured Petri Nets - a Pragmatic Formal Method for Designing and Analysing Distributed Systems

The thesis consists of six individual papers, where the present paper contains the mandatory overview, while the remaining five papers are found separately from the overview. The five papers can roughly be divided into three areas of research, namely case studies, education, and extensions to the CPN method.The primary purpose of the PhD thesis is to study the pragmatics, practical aspects, and intuition of CP-nets viewed as a formal method for describing and reasoning about concurrent systems. The perspective of pragmatics is our leitmotif, but at the same time in the context of CP-nets it is a kind of hypothesis of this thesis. This overview paper summarises the research conducted as an investigation of the hypothesis in the three areas of case studies, education, and extensions.The provoking claim of pragmatics should not be underestimated. In the present overview of the thesis, the CPN method is compared with a representative selection of formal methods. The graphics and simplicity of semantics, yet generality and expressiveness of the language constructs, essentially makes CP-nets a viable and attractive alternative to other formal methods. Similar graphical formal methods, such as SDL and Statecharts, typically have significantly more complicated semantics, or are domain-specific languages.research conducted in this thesis, opens a new complex of problems. Firstly, to get wider acceptance of CP-nets in industry, it is important to identify fruitful areas for the effective introduction of the CPN method. Secondly, it would be useful to identify a few extensions to the CPN method inspired by specific domains for easier adaption in industry. Thirdly, which analysis methods do future systems make use of

Joint perceptual decision-making: a case study in explanatory pluralism.

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches

An Analytical Approach to Programs as Data Objects

This essay accompanies a selection of 32 articles (referred to in bold face in the text and marginally marked in the bibliographic references) submitted to Aarhus University towards a Doctor Scientiarum degree in Computer Science.The author's previous academic degree, beyond a doctoral degree in June 1986, is an "Habilitation à diriger les recherches" from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in France; the corresponding material was submitted in September 1992 and the degree was obtained in January 1993.The present 32 articles have all been written since 1993 and while at DAIMI.Except for one other PhD student, all co-authors are or have been the author's students here in Aarhus

Overhearing: An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals

Denmark is building new and improved super hospitals, based on a vision of improving overall quality by switching the focus from hospitals for treatment to hospitals for healing, guided by research in the field of evidence-based design and healing architecture. Users mention noise as one of the main stressors and research has discovered that noise levels in hospitals continue to rise. Noise has therefore become a central point of concern, recommending strategies to reduce measurable and perceived noise levels.However, these strategies do not support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is also a key element in creating healing environments linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field. This framework regards broad concepts such as noise and silence as objects with quantifiable properties, and assumes that these properties can be understood independently of the perceiver as a bodily and situated subject. The aim of this dissertation is accordingly to develop an alternative framework capable of accommodating the multi-sensory, affective and atmospheric conditions that influence the experience of noise, with a view to complementing the existing approaches in the field.  Consequently, the dissertation develops an ecological framework capable of accommodating these issues, established by viewing sound and listening through the lens of atmospheres. The attuning approach highlights the reciprocal relationship between the way in which atmospheres condition shared rhythms that shape us, but also the way in which we can tune them in different ways. In the context of sound and listening, this creates the potential of ecological overhearing as an atmospheric mode of listening capable of reconfiguring habitual background and foregrounding relationships. Attuning strategies should thus provide opportunities for diverse acoustic situations and possibilities for active choice-making to meet different and shifting needs through an enactive approach in order to enhance empowerment and ecological overhearing. Embedding diverse enactive sound installations and interactive sound technology in hospitals can facilitate such zones of overhearing. These zones become places for ruptures that strengthen the possibilities for engaging in counter-attunements of existing negative atmospheres. In this way, zones of overhearing not only provide continual sense of presence without demanding full attention, but also create ample opportunities for the restoration of  attention.The dissertation takes an experimental practice-based approach through artistic- and constructive design-research and comprises six peer-reviewed papers (Part IV), framed by a general overview article (Parts I-III) that develops the theoretical and methodological foundation for the papers, and provides a synthesis and discussion of their main findings. The practice-based work is founded on a range of experiments, but focuses on two main experiments: Light, Landscape & Voices and KidKit, and the way in which they elicit sensitivities within the topic of investigation. This contribution also concerns the concrete development of installations through the experiments. These installations are in themselves manifestations of and challenges to hypotheses about the topic I aim to address.