A framework for assessing systemic risk

When faced with financial crises, authorities worldwide tend to respond aggressively with public support measures. Given the adverse impact on moral hazard and market discipline, support measures involving public money are ideally limited to crisis situations involving systemic risk: a disturbance in the financial system that is serious enough to affect the real economy. This note sets out the main characteristics of a systemic risk assessment framework: a simple analytical framework that can be used by authorities with financial crisis management responsibilities in times of financial crisis to assess the extent to which that particular crisis situation poses systemic risk.Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,Emerging Markets,Financial Intermediation,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress

Capacity development for agricultural biotechnology in developing countries: Concepts, contexts, case studies and operational challenges of a systems perspective.

There are divergent views on what capacity development might mean in relation to agricultural biotechnology. The core of this debate is whether this should involve the development of human capital and research infrastructure, or whether it should encompass a wider range of activities which also include developing the capacity to use knowledge productively. This paper uses the innovation systems concept to shed light on this discussion, arguing that it is innovation capacity rather than science and technology capacity that has to be developed. The context of deploying biotechnology in developing countries is illustrated with an over view of Uganda and Ethiopia. The then presents 6 examples of different capacity development approaches. It concludes by suggesting that policy needs to take a multidimensional approach to capacity development in line with an innovation systems perspective. But it also argues that policy needs to recognise the need to develop the capacity of diversity of innovation systems and that a key part of the capacity development task is to bring about the integration of these different systems at strategic points in time. The paper concludes with a tentative typology of the main types of agricultural innovation systems that are likely to be important in developing countries.agriculture, Ethiopia, Uganda, innovation systems, biotechnology, capacity building, innovation policy.

Process model comparison based on cophenetic distance

The automated comparison of process models has received increasing attention in the last decade, due to the growing existence of process models and repositories, and the consequent need to assess similarities between the underlying processes. Current techniques for process model comparison are either structural (based on graph edit distances), or behavioural (through activity profiles or the analysis of the execution semantics). Accordingly, there is a gap between the quality of the information provided by these two families, i.e., structural techniques may be fast but inaccurate, whilst behavioural are accurate but complex. In this paper we present a novel technique, that is based on a well-known technique to compare labeled trees through the notion of Cophenetic distance. The technique lays between the two families of methods for comparing a process model: it has an structural nature, but can provide accurate information on the differences/similarities of two process models. The experimental evaluation on various benchmarks sets are reported, that position the proposed technique as a valuable tool for process model comparison.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Local Birds in and around the Offhore wind Farm Egmond aan Zee (OWEZ)

This report presents the final results of a four-year study of seabird distribution patterns in and around the first offshore wind farm in Dutch North Sea waters. This wind farm, known as OWEZ (Offshore Wind farm Egmond aan Zee) is situated 10 - 18 km off the Dutch mainland coast, northwest of the port of IJmuide

Deriving use case diagrams from business process models

In this paper we introduce a technique to simplify requirements capture. The technique can be used to derive functional requirements, specified in the form of UML use case diagrams, from existing business process models. Because use case diagrams have to be constructed by performing interviews, and business process models usually are available in a company, use case diagrams can be produced more quickly when derived from business proces models. The use case diagrams that result from applying the technique, specify a software system that provides automated support for the original business processes. We also show how the technique was successfully evaluated in practice

Consistency in multi-viewpoint architectural design

This thesis presents a framework that aids in preserving consistency in multi-viewpoint designs. In a multi-viewpoint design each stakeholder constructs his own design part. We call each stakeholder’s design part the view of that stakeholder. To construct his view, a stakeholder has a viewpoint. This viewpoint defines the design concepts, the notation and the tool support that the stakeholder uses. The framework presented in this thesis focuses on architectural multiviewpoint design of distributed systems. A distributed system is a system of which the parts execute on different physical system nodes. Interaction between the system parts plays an important role in such systems. An example of a distributed system is a mobile communication network. In such a network, the parts of the system execute on e.g. the mobile telephones of the clients, the desktops of the employees of the network operator and the mobile access points. Architectural design is the area of design that focuses on higher levels of abstraction in the design process. The lowest level of abstraction that we consider is the level at which the system parts correspond to parts that can be deployed on communication middleware. Using our framework, consistency is preserved through inter-viewpoint relations and consistency rules that must be specified by the stakeholders. The stakeholders use inter-viewpoint relations to specify how one view relates to another and they use consistency rules to specify what rules must at least be satisfied in a consistent design. To aid in preserving consistency, our framework defines: – a common set of basic design concepts; – pre-defined inter-viewpoint relations; – pre-defined consistency rules; – a language to represent inter-viewpoint relations and consistency rules. The basic design concepts that the framework defines have been adopted from earlier work. These concepts were developed by carefully examining the area of distributed systems design. Using our framework, viewpoint-specific design concepts must be defined as compositions or specializations of these basic concepts. Hence, the basic concepts form a common vocabulary that the different stakeholders can use to understand each other’s designs. The framework pre-defines inter-viewpoint relations that can be reused to specify how one view relates to another. The two main types of inter-viewpoint relations that it pre-defines are: refinement relations and overlap relations. Refinement relations exist between views that (partly) consider the same design concerns at different levels of abstraction. Overlap relations exist between views that (partly) consider the same design concerns at the same level of abstraction. We derived the pre-defined relations by examining existing frameworks for multi-viewpoint design and extracting frequently occurring relations between viewpoints in these frameworks. If a pre-defined inter-viewpoint relation exists between two views, this implies that certain consistency rules must be satisfied. Specifically, if two views have a refinement relation, this implies that one must preserve the system properties specified by the other. If two views have an overlap relation, this implies that the two views must be equivalent with respect to the overlap that they have. Our framework pre-defines consistency rules that can be re-used to verify these properties. We define an architecture for tool-support to aid in specifying view relations and consistency rules and to check whether the specified consistency rules hold. The architecture contains the pre-defined relations and consistency rules, such that they can be re-used. As a case study for the framework we define adapted versions of the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints, using our framework. We define the concepts from these viewpoints as compositions of the basic concepts. Also, we define the relations between views from these viewpoints, as well as the corresponding consistency rules, using the relations and consistency rules that are pre-defined by the framework. The results of the case study support the claim that our framework aids in preserving consistency in multi-viewpoint designs

An approach to relate business and application services using ISDL

This paper presents a service-oriented design approach that allows one to relate services modelled at different levels of granularity during a design process, such as business and application services. To relate these service models we claim that a 'concept gap' and an 'abstraction gap' need to be bridged. The concept gap represents the difference between the conceptual models used to construct service models by different stakeholders involved in the design process. The abstraction gap represents the difference in abstraction level at which service models are defined. Two techniques are presented that bridge these gaps. Both techniques are based on the Interaction System Design Language (ISDL). The paper illustrates the use of both techniques through an example

Relational Algebra for In-Database Process Mining

The execution logs that are used for process mining in practice are often obtained by querying an operational database and storing the result in a flat file. Consequently, the data processing power of the database system cannot be used anymore for this information, leading to constrained flexibility in the definition of mining patterns and limited execution performance in mining large logs. Enabling process mining directly on a database - instead of via intermediate storage in a flat file - therefore provides additional flexibility and efficiency. To help facilitate this ideal of in-database process mining, this paper formally defines a database operator that extracts the 'directly follows' relation from an operational database. This operator can both be used to do in-database process mining and to flexibly evaluate process mining related queries, such as: "which employee most frequently changes the 'amount' attribute of a case from one task to the next". We define the operator using the well-known relational algebra that forms the formal underpinning of relational databases. We formally prove equivalence properties of the operator that are useful for query optimization and present time-complexity properties of the operator. By doing so this paper formally defines the necessary relational algebraic elements of a 'directly follows' operator, which are required for implementation of such an operator in a DBMS

Of Charlie and Karl:notes on persuasive legal writing

How can we distinguish good from mediocre in doctrinal legal research? There may be as many answers to this question as there are lawyers. This essay nevertheless attempts to stake out three elements that are indispensable to quality legal scholarship: law, empirics, and normativity. It draws inspiration from Karl Llewellyn’s approach to legal realism and explains how his insights can be applied today. It then turns to Charles Mingus for an approximation of virtuosity in legal writing.</p