Learning to learn: A case for developing Small Firm Owner/Managers

Purpose: The paper seeks to contribute to the management development debate by providing insight on the dynamics of organisational learning and human interaction in the SME firm. The paper sets out to consider how a practice based perspective of knowledge is useful in this regard. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is theoretical in its intent and adopts a social constructionist view of knowledge and learning. Using qualitative analysis the paper establishes a review of the current literature by highlighting the centrality of knowledge and learning. Findings: Literature has suggested that critical aspects of learning within the SME firm are based around contextualised action, critical reflection and social interaction. A limited number of studies account for how practice is configured and influenced, in terms of value, uniqueness and scope of what is known, and how these influences can vary depending upon the contexts in which knowledge is being used, and potentially used. Practical Implications: There is a strong recognition in many of the empirical studies of learning and its use in the SME firm, that knowledge is gained through practice as opposed to formal instruction. What current research does not reflect is the changing nature of knowledge research in the wider organisational community, which has focused its attention towards the situated nature of knowledgeable activity or knowing in practice. Originality/Value: The paper argues that learning through practice, with its focus on real world issues and lived experiences, which are contextually embedded in the owner-manager's environment, may provide a better means of successfully developing practitioner focused owner/managers

Symbolic and analytic techniques for resource analysis of Java bytecode

Recent work in resource analysis has translated the idea of amortised resource analysis to imperative languages using a program logic that allows mixing of assertions about heap shapes, in the tradition of separation logic, and assertions about consumable resources. Separately, polyhedral methods have been used to calculate bounds on numbers of iterations in loop-based programs. We are attempting to combine these ideas to deal with Java programs involving both data structures and loops, focusing on the bytecode level rather than on source code

Formalising oblivious transfer in the semi-honest and malicious model in CryptHOL

Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows multiple parties to compute a function together while keeping their inputs private. Large scale implementations of MPC protocols are becoming practical thus it is important to have strong guarantees for the whole development process, from the underlying cryptography to the implementation. Computer aided proofs are a way to provide such guarantees. We use CryptHOL to formalise a framework for reasoning about two party protocols using the security definitions for MPC. In particular we consider protocols for 1-out-of-2 Oblivious Transfer ($OT^1_2$) --- a fundamental MPC protocol --- in both the semi-honest and malicious models. We then extend our semi-honest formalisation to $OT^1_4$ which is a building block for our proof of security for the two party GMW protocol --- a protocol that can securely compute any Boolean circuit. The semi-honest $OT^1_2$ protocol we formalise is constructed from Extended Trapdoor Permutations (ETP), we first prove the general construction secure and then instantiate for the RSA collection of functions --- a known ETP. Our general proof assumes only the existence of ETPs, meaning any instantiated results come without needing to prove any security properties, only that the requirements of an ETP are met

Querying Proofs (Work in Progress)

We motivate and introduce the basis for a query language designed for inspecting electronic representations of proofs. We argue that there is much to learn from large proofs beyond their validity, and that a dedicated query language can provide a principled way of implementing a family of useful operations