Privacy means something different to everyone. Against a vast and rich canvas of diverse types of privacy rights and violations, we argue technology’s dual role in privacy: new technologies raise new threats to privacy rights and new technologies can help preserve privacy. Formal methods, as just one class of technology, can be applied to privacy, but privacy raises new challenges, and thus new...

The difficulty of a user query can affect the performance of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This work presents a formal model for quantifying and reasoning about query difficulty as follows: Query difficulty is considered to be a subjective belief, which is formulated on the basis of various types of evidence. This allows us to define a belief model and a set of operators for combining evi...

Paradoxically, one of the most important { and at the same time, probably one of the least understood { functions performed by information integrity protocols is to transfer trust from where it exists to where it is needed. Initially in any protocol, there are at least two types of trust: trust that designated participants, or groups of participants, will faithfully execute their assigned funct...

Engineering projects often undergo several design iterations before being completed. Information received from other groups working on a project (analysis, manufacturing, marketing, sales) will often necessitate changes in a design. The interaction between diierent groups associated with a design project often takes the form of informal \negotiation." This form of interaction commonly arises wh...

This paper shows an example of developing a fusion system in a formal framework, i.e., through the use of formal operators in the development process. Two main concepts of formal methods are theories and models. In our approach, the development of a fusion system consists of operations on theories and models. We show, on a simple example, how theories and models are combined in the process of d...

How do individual preferences over welfare spending respond to economic hard times? In this paper we reconcile two prominent, opposing expectations: that recessions lead to a ‘hunkering down’ such that individuals become less favorable to taxation and expenditure; and that downturns, being associated with increases in risk, should lead to increased demand for government expenditure. We present ...

By describing several industrial-scale applications of formal methods, this paper intends to demonstrate that formal methods for software development and safety analysis are increasingly adopted in the safety critical systems sector. The bene ts and limitations of using formal methods are described, and the problems of developing software for safety critical systems are analysed.

Why are we polite when we talk to one another? One hypothesis is that people expect others to choose what to say based on their goals both to transfer information efficiently (an epistemic goal) and to make the listener feel good (a social goal). In our previous work, we found that when these two goals conflict, they sometimes produce white lies. In the current work, we expand on this theory to...

Research dealing with control behavior determination often needs plant modelling to use formal methods. However, plant models are difficult to obtain because a manufacturing application is composed of a huge set of components with numerous interactions each other. The goal of this paper is to propose and demonstrate a property to improve the designer’s confidence in his plant model. The propert...