Modelling information flow for organisations delivering microsystems technology

Motivated by recent growth and applications of microsystems technology (MST), companies within the MST domain are beginning to explore avenues for understanding, maintaining and improving information flow, within their organisations and to/from customers, with a view to enhancing delivery performance. Delivery for organisations is the flow of goods from sellers to buyers and a classic approach to understanding information flow is via the use of modelling techniques. Cont/d

Mass Litigation Governance in the Post-Class Action Era: The Problems and Promise of Non-removable State Actions in Multi-district Litigation

Given a string of decisions restricting the use and availability of the class action device, the world of mass litigation may well be moving into a post-class action era. In this era, newer devices of aggregation—perhaps principally among them multi-district litigation (“MDL”)—increasingly will be called upon to meet the age-old mass litigation goal of achieving global peace of numerous claims arising out of a related, widespread harm. Indeed, coordination of pretrial proceedings in the MDL frequently facilitates the achievement of this peace, given the reality that cases, once consolidated in the MDL, often settle en masse. However, one clear obstacle to the achievement of aggregate peace in the MDL, one that also plagues the achievement of that peace in the class action world, is our federal system of substantive and procedural law. In the MDL context, the problem arises because litigation involving state-law claims and non-diverse parties, which are not removable from state court, cannot be transferred to the MDL court. Despite their prevalence, little scholarly attention has been devoted to non-removable state-court actions in MDL. The few responses to this issue have largely focused upon the efficiencies that could be gained through increased, and perhaps total, consolidation of all related cases or, short of consolidation, through heightened coordination of pre-trial proceedings between state and federal judges. This article questions whether these responses have led reform proposals in the wrong direction, and instead takes a different view. Rather than argue for increased consolidation, I offer for further consideration the possible ways in which the happenstantial existence of parallel tracks of related state and federal cases actually hold promise, if properly harnessed, as mechanisms for achieving the goals of aggregate litigation and for disciplining the contours of global settlements of mass disputes. In particular, I explore the possibility that the existence of parallel state and federal cases—frequently viewed as an obstacle to global resolution of claims unable to be consolidated in a single forum—may well fortuitously provide an opportunity to achieve the sorts of mass litigation resolution envisioned but unsuccessfully attempted in the class action context. In so doing, this article adds new thoughts and theories to the specific debate regarding parallel state and federal claims in MDL, as well as to the larger debate about mass litigation governance in a post-class action world

Web information systems: A study of maintenance, change and flexibility

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Information Systems (IS’s) have provided organisations with huge efficiency gains and benefits over the years; however an outstanding problem that is yet to be successfully tackled is that of the troublesome maintenance phase. Consuming vast resources and thwarting business progression in a competitive global market place, system maintenance has been recognised as one of the key areas where IS is failing organisations. Organisations are too often faced with the dilemma of either replacement or the continual upkeep of an unwieldy system. The ability for IS’s to be able to adapt to exogenous influences is even more acute today than at any time in the past. This is due to IS’s namely, Web Information Systems (WIS’s) increasingly and continually having to accommodate the needs of organisations to interconnect with a plethora of additional systems as well as supporting evolving business models. The richness of the interconnectivity, functionalities and services WIS’s now offer are shaping social, cultural and economic behaviour on a truly global scale, making the maintenance of such systems and evermore pertinent issue. The growth and proliferation of WIS’s shows no sign of abating which leads to the conclusion that what some have termed as the ‘maintenance iceberg’ should not be ignored. The quandary that commercial organisations face is typically driven by two key aspects; firstly, systems are built on the cultural premise of using fixed requirements, with not enough thought or attention being paid to systems abilities to deviate from these requirements. Secondly, systems do not generally cope well with adapting to unpredictable change arising from outside of the organisations environment. Over the recent past, different paradigms, approaches and methods have attempted to make software development more predictable, controllable and adaptable, however, the benefits of such measures in relation to the maintenance dilemma have been limited. The concept of flexible systems that are able to cope with such change in an efficient manner is currently an objective that few can claim to have realised successfully. The primary focus of the thesis was to examine WIS post-development change in order to empirically substantiate and understand the nature of the maintenance phase. This was done with the intention to determine exactly ‘where’ and ‘how’ flexibility could be targeted to address these changes. This study uses an emergent analytical approach to identify and catalogue the nature of change occurring within WIS maintenance. However, the research framework design underwent a significant revision as the initial results indicated that a greater emphasis and refocus was required to achieve the research objective. To study WIS’s in an appropriate and detailed context, a single case study was conducted in a web development software house. In total the case study approach was used to collect empirical evidence from four projects that investigated post-development change requests in order to identify areas of the system susceptible to change. The maintenance phases of three WIS projects were considered in-depth, resulting in the collection of over four hundred change requests. The fourth project served as a validation case. The results are presented and the findings are used to identify key trends and characteristics that depict WIS maintenance change. The analytical information derived from the change requests is consolidated and shown diagrammatically for the key areas of change using profile models developed in this thesis. Based on the results, the thesis concludes and contributes to the ongoing debate that there is a discernable difference when considering WIS maintenance change compared to that of traditional IS maintenance. The detailed characteristics displayed in the profile models are then used to map specific flexibility criteria that ultimately are required to facilitate change. This is achieved using the Flexibility Matrix of Change (FMoC) tool which was developed within the remit of this research. This tool is a qualitative measurement scheme that aligns WIS maintenance changes to a reciprocal flexibility attribute. Thus, the wider aim of this thesis is to also expand the awareness of flexibility and its importance as a key component of the WIS lifecycle

Humancentric Applications of Precise Location Based Services

Mobile technologies, which allow users to move around while maintaining the ability to access a network and its services, now claim a significant degree of attention in both industry and academia. In this vision, one particular attribute gains critical importance: location. The ability to pinpoint a mobile user’s location creates a new class of applications and services. These location based services (LBS) exploit the known location of a user to provide services dependent on their geographic context and personalised needs. However, as newer positioning technologies are introduced into the market with a greater level of location accuracy, and existing technologies are integrated to overcome limitations, issues pertaining to the use and potential misuse of location information rise to the fore. In addition to this, perhaps because LBS are so new, there has been limited investigation into exactly what effects the widespread use of these technologies may have. This thesis aims to rectify a gap in current knowledge by presenting a plausible scenario that describes how humancentric applications of LBS could change the world of tomorrow, based on the current state of development. It also makes several original contributions in an analysis of legal, ethical, social and technological issues that arise from the scenario

Epistemic Harvest

The following discussion of computational capital takes the electronic database, an infrastructure for storing information, as vantage point. Following a brief look into how database systems serve information desires, the notion of ‘database as discourse’ by Mark Poster is explored and further developed. Database as discourse establishes a machinic agency, directed towards the individual in a specific mode of hailing. This mode of hailing in turn leads to a scatteredform of subjectivity, that is identified with Manuela Ott and Gerald Raunig as dividual. How does dividualization emerge from database infrastructure? What is the specificquality of data, that is produced by and being harvested from in/dividuals into databases, and what are the consequences of such ashifted view

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 11561 and 11562 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2019, held in New York City, USA, in July 2019. The 52 full papers presented together with 13 tool papers and 2 case studies, were carefully reviewed and selected from 258 submissions. The papers were organized in the following topical sections: Part I: automata and timed systems; security and hyperproperties; synthesis; model checking; cyber-physical systems and machine learning; probabilistic systems, runtime techniques; dynamical, hybrid, and reactive systems; Part II: logics, decision procedures; and solvers; numerical programs; verification; distributed systems and networks; verification and invariants; and concurrency