Universal circuits (UCs) can be programmed to evaluate any circuit of a given size k. They provide elegant solutions in various application scenarios, e.g. for private function evaluation (PFE) and for improving the flexibility of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes. The optimal size of a universal circuit is proven to be Ω(k log k). Valiant (STOC’76) proposed a size-optimized UC construct...

The delight design platform (DDP) is a vision of a new integrated design environment that would enable design engineers to consistently design delightful products. Such delightful products satisfy an attractive quality as well as the performance and must-have qualities of the Kano model. The attractive quality depends on a customer’s subjective evaluation involving emotion. To implement DDP, we...

We present an agent-based model of a minimal economy containing households, retail banks, and producers of consumer and capital goods. Household behavior is based on the buffer-stock savings model by Deaton (1961), while the profit-maximizing firms employ reinforcement learning to determine pricing and production. Competitive retail banks facilitate the flow of funds between households and prod...

The growing complexities of software and the demand for shorter time to market are two important challenges that face today’s IT industry. These challenges demand the increase of both productivity and quality of software. Model-based testing is a promising technique for meeting these challenges. Traceability modeling is a key issue and challenge in model-based testing. Relationships between the...

“Problem-solving environments” recently became a widely accepted approach to providing computational resources to solve complex eScience problems. This approach represents a problem as a workflow, orchestrating a set of various computational services. The existing cloud computing resources planning methods do not take into account a relation between such services, problem domain specifics, pred...

Many large scale companies use knowledge-based systems (KBS) to support their decision making processes. The quality of the decisions made depend on the quality of the underlying knowledge. It has been stated many times that verification techniques can be used to improve decision making and the quality of the knowledge rules in a knowledge based system. Furthermore, verification is seen as one ...

One of the consequences of the failure of mainstream theory in convincingly taking into account the heterogeneity of agents and their interaction is the misrepresentation of markets with asymmetric information. This paper presents a credit network model with heterogeneous firms and banks which is solved analytically. The solution is articulated in two steps which involve two different master eq...

Component-based software development places an emphasis on identifying and managing interdependencies among preexisting pieces of software in order to integrate them into new systems. Traditional software development methodologies, on the other hand, place an emphasis on representing components, leaving the description and management of component interdependencies implicit, or distributed among...

The successful development, deployment and utilization of CaseBased Reasoning Systems in commercial environments require the development team to focus on aspects that go beyond the core CBR engine itself. Characteristics of the Users, the Organization and the Domain have considerable impact on the design decisions during implementation and on the success of the project after deployment. If the ...

The ever-increasing complexity and diversity of consumer products drives the creation of product families (products with many commonalties and few differences) and product populations (products with many commonalties but also with many differences). For the latter, we use an approach based on composition of software components, organized in packages. This influences our configuration management...