The disempowered supervisors

Getting critical with children: empowering approaches with a disempowered group.

The study of children and childhood has historically been accorded a marginal place in the health, human, and social sciences. In part, this is due to prevailing Western ideology that constructs children as passive, presocial, innocent, and vulnerable. The dominant discourse is further characterized by the treatment of children as a homogeneous group, devoid of race, class, or gender. While man...

Design of asynchronous supervisors

One of the main drawbacks while implementing the interaction between a plant and a supervisor, synthesised by the supervisory control theory of Ramadge and Wonham, is the inexact synchronisation. Balemi was the first to consider this problem, and the solutions given in his PhD thesis were in the domain of automata theory. Our goal is to address the issue of inexact synchronisation in a process ...

Learning for Supervisors

supervisors: Olli Simula

In the history of human communication, the concept and need for secrecy between the parties has always been present. One way of achieving it is to modify the message so that it is readable only by the receiver, as in cryptography for example. Hiding the message in an innocuous medium is another, called steganography. And the counterpart to steganography, that is, discovering whether a message i...

Optimal Contracts for Lenient Supervisors

We consider a situation where an agent’s effort is monitored by a supervisor who cares for the agent’s well–being. This is modeled by incorporating the agent’s utility into the utility function of the supervisor. The first–best solution can be implemented even if the supervisor’s preferences are unknown. The corresponding optimal contract is similar to what we observe in practice: The superviso...