This meta-analysis reviews 208 laboratory studies of acute psychological stressors and tests a theoretical model delineating conditions capable of eliciting cortisol responses. Psychological stressors increased cortisol levels; however, effects varied widely across tasks. Consistent with the theoretical model, motivated performance tasks elicited cortisol responses if they were uncontrollable o...

This paper deals with the problem of enforcing generalized mutual exclusion constraints (GMEC) on place/transition nets with uncontrollable transitions. An efficient control synthesis technique, that has been proposed in the literature, is to enforce GMEC constraints by introducing monitor places to create suitable place invariants. The method has been shown to be maximally permissive and to gi...

Expect: Curing Those Uncontrollable Fits of Interaction [1] was the seminal paper on Expect, a software tool for automation of other software. The Expect software itself was a solution to a long-standing problem: how to automate software designed to be operated by a human. There are very good reasons for automating software. An obvious one is testing— if a piece of software only works when a hu...

This paper deals with dissipativity of uncontrollable linear time-invariant systems with quadratic supply rates and storage functions. A definition of dissipativity appropriate for this class of systems is given. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for dissipativeness in the single input / single output case.

Preferences and uncertainty are common in many real-life problems. In this paper we consider preferences modelled via soft constraints, that allow for the representation of quantitative preferences. Moreover, we consider uncertainty modelled via uncontrollable variables, that is, variables whose value cannot be decided by us. We also assume that some information is provided for such variables, ...