The purpose of this paper is to report on the research involved in the development of a software agent—the Giant — that collaborates with students in their construction and sharing of knowledge. The Giant’s working environment is an educational software tool used by students in and between classrooms to collaborate on a subject of study. Its task is to reason about the student’s beliefs and ide...

the scholarly character of khālid b. yazīd and his attempts in acquiring and spreading of knowledge has always been of doubt to researchers and, with the expansion in the field of research on roots of science, has taken a mythical form. in earlier centuries, ibn khaldūn, and in the modern age, such researchers as ruska, kraus, ulman, sarton, and mieli have totally denied khālid’s attempts in th...

Negotiations are a formalism for describing multiparty distributed cooperation. Alternatively, they can be seen as a model of concurrency with synchronized choice as communication primitive. Well-designed negotiations must be sound, meaning that, whatever its current state, the negotiation can still be completed. In earlier work, Esparza and Desel have shown that deciding soundness of a negotia...

This technical report describes a machine checked proof of the type soundness of a subset of the Java language called JavaS . A formal semantics for this subset has been developed by Drossopoulou and Eisenbach, and they have sketched an outline of the type soundness proof. The formulation developed here complements their written semantics and proof by correcting and clarifying signi cant detail...

We present a generic computational soundness result for interactive cryptographic primitives. Our abstraction of interactive primitives leverages the Universal Composability (UC) framework, and thereby offers strong composability properties for our computational soundness result: given a computationally sound Dolev-Yao model for non-interactive primitives, and given UC-secure interactive primit...

Classical workflow nets (WF-nets) are an important class of Petri nets that are widely used to model and analyze workflow systems. Soundness is a crucial property that guarantees these systems are deadlock-free and bounded. Aalst et al. proved that the soundness problem is decidable, and proposed (but not proved) that the soundness problem is EXPSPACE-hard. In this paper, we show that the satis...

The cornerstone of bank supervision is a regular schedule of thorough, on-site examinations. Under rules set forth in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA), most U.S. banks must submit to a full-scope federal or state examination every 12 months; small, well-capitalized banks must be examined every 18 months. These examinations focus on six components of ban...

Analysis of workflow processes with quantitative aspects like timing is of interest in numerous time-critical applications. We suggest a workflow model based on timed-arc Petri nets and study the foundational problems of soundness and strong (time-bounded) soundness. We first consider the discrete-time semantics (integer delays) and explore the decidability of the soundness problems and show, a...