We formalise the data race free (DRF) guarantee provided by Java, as captured by the semi-formal Java Memory Model (JMM) [1] and published in the Java Language Specification [2]. The DRF guarantee says that all programs which are correctly synchronised (i.e., free of data races) can only have sequentially consistent behaviours. Such programs can be understood intuitively by programmers. Formali...

Interface automata provide a formalism capturing the high level interactions between software components. Checking compatibility, and other safety properties, in an automata-based system suffers from the scalability issues inherent in exhaustive techniques such as model checking. This work develops a theoretical framework and automated algorithms for modular verification of interface automata. ...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the effect of various properties of the CSR on automatic transcription. To this end, we used various versions of a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) to make automatic transcriptions. Our results show that changing certain properties of the CSR affects the resulting automatic transcriptions. The best results were obtained when ‘short’ hidden Markov model...

High level design decisions are never captured formally in programs and are often violated as programs evolve. In this paper, we focus on design decisions in which an object o works correctly only if another object p is in some specific states. Such decisions can be specified as the object invariant of o. The invariant of o must hold when control is not inside any of o’s methods (i.e. when o is...

The NHS does bad things. A youngman with learning disability drowned in a bath while in its care. Subcultures have existed that have ignored cries of pain. The NHS has covered up events leading to deaths rather than being open. The chief inspector of general practice in England, Steve Field, has said that he’s ashamed of his profession and that we haven’t dealt with our failings. There are two ...

Uptime-guarantee maintenance contracts reflect the obligation of service providers to maintain full functionality of equipment in certain fractions of working time in a period. In this paper, we study the optimal design of uptime-guarantee contracts for a service provider who does not know the customer’s exact valuation for having the equipment up and running per unit of working time. We first ...

Accuracy is one of the most important performance metrics in clock synchronization. While state-of-the-art synchronization protocols achieve μsec-order average accuracy, they usually do not focus on the worst case accuracy and do not have any deterministic guarantees. This lack of accuracy guarantee makes it hard for sensor networks to be incorporated into larger systems that require more relia...

Contract services let service providers and consumers manage service level agreements (SLAs) and other contractual documents. These services let users negotiate SLAs, select tariffs, submit selected service offerings to auctions, view and manage running contracts and finally submit feedback about the satisfaction with the usage of contract-bound services. We define a number of contract services...

In this paper we show economic analysis of Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), which guarantees a constant income for each individual regardless of ages, gender, or any geographic characteristics. We address moral hazard and adverse selection problems that may arise in BIG scheme. As for moral hazard problem, we compare Negative Income Tax (NIT) with BIG. in the laboratory experiment. In a setting wh...