Real options literature commonly assumes that, either the investment opportunity is directly managed by the owners, or the managers are perfectly aligned with them. However, agency conflicts occur and managers reveal interests not totally in line with those of the shareholders. This may have a major impact on the value maximizing decisions, namely, on the optimal timing to invest. This paper co...

This work aims to show the applicability, and how, of privacy by design approach to biometric systems and the benefit of using formal methods to this end. Starting from a general framework that has been introduced at STM in 2014, that enables to define privacy architectures and to formally reason about their properties, we explain how it can be adapted to biometrics. The choice of particular te...

Research has shown that forward contracts for electricity can reduce market power and increase producer output. This is frequently used as justification for policy interventions requiring that consumers purchase forward capacity, but it is not a sufficient justification because rational consumers can account for market power impacts when making forward contracting decisions. Advocates for capac...

In this paper we present a multi-part formal design and evaluation of the style-by-demonstration (SBD) approach to creating interactive robot behaviors: enabling people to design the style of interactive robot behaviors by providing an exemplar. We first introduce our Puppet Master SBD algorithm that enables the creation of interactive robot behaviors with a focus on style: users provide an exa...

For decades now, modular design methodologies have helped software engineers cope with the size and complexity of modern-day industrial applications. To be truly effective though, it is essential that module interfaces be rigorously specified. Design by Contract (DBC) is an increasingly popular method of interface specification for object-oriented systems. Many researchers are actively adding s...

A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli et al. (eds.), Embedded Systems Development, Embedded Systems 20, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-3879-3 8, c © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract In this paper we propose a rule unifying circular and non-circular assumeguarantee reasoning and show its interest for contract-based design and verification. Our work was motivated by the need to combine, in th...

Following the economic rationale of [7] and [8] we present a new class of Asian options where the holder enjoys the early exercise feature of American options whereupon his payoff (deliverable immediately) is the ‘best prediction’ of the European payoff under the hypothesis that the true drift of the stock price equals a contract drift. Inherent in this is a protection feature which is key to t...

One popular approach to object design proposes to identify responsibilities from software contracts, apply a number of principles to assign them to objects, and finally construct an object interaction that realizes the contract. This three-step activity is currently a manual process that is time-consuming and error-prone, and is among the most challenging activities in object-oriented developme...

Electromigration due to insufficient wire width can cause the premature failure of a circuit. The ongoing reduction of circuit feature sizes has aggravated the problem over the last couple of years, especially with analog circuits. It is therefore an important reliability issue to consider current densities already in the physical design stage. We present a new methodology capable of routing an...

There is ongoing interest in utilising user experiences associated with security and privacy to better inform system design and development. However, there are few studies demonstrating how, together, security and usability design techniques can help in the design of secure systems; such studies provide practical examples and lessons learned that practitioners and researchers can use to inform ...