Related papers: Retractability, games and orchestrators for sessio…

Compositional methods are central to the development and verification of software systems. They allow to break down large systems into smaller components, while enabling reasoning about the behaviour of the composed system. For concurrent…

Ensuring robust decision-making in multi-agent systems is challenging when agents have distinct, possibly conflicting objectives and lack full knowledge of each other's strategies. This is apparent in safety-critical applications such as…

The binary relation framework has been shown to be applicable to many real-life preference handling scenarios. Here we study preference contraction: the problem of discarding selected preferences. We argue that the property of minimality…

We survey our results about verification of adaptable processes. We present adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic process evolution. Such patterns rely on…

Matching Dependencies (MDs) are a relatively recent proposal for declarative entity resolution. They are rules that specify, on the basis of similarities satisfied by values in a database, what values should be considered duplicates, and…

We develop a theory of contracting systems, where behavioural contracts may be violated by dishonest participants after they have been agreed upon - unlike in traditional approaches based on behavioural types. We consider the contracts of…

We study a communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with repeated interactions and voluntary transfers. Transfers motivate the receiver's decision-making and signal the sender's information. Although full…

Cloud developers have to build applications that are resilient to failures and interruptions. We advocate for a fault-tolerant programming model for the cloud based on actors, retry orchestration, and tail calls. This model builds upon…

Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…

Smart contracts are computer programs that are executed by a network of mutually distrusting agents, without the need of an external trusted authority. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value (in the form of…

We investigate the evaluation of conjunctive queries over static and dynamic relations. While static relations are given as input and do not change, dynamic relations are subject to inserts and deletes. We characterise syntactically three…

The act of explaining across two parties is a feedback loop, where one provides information on what needs to be explained and the other provides an explanation relevant to this information. We apply a reinforcement learning framework which…

Reachability analysis, in general, is a fundamental method that supports formally-correct synthesis, robust model predictive control, set-based observers, fault detection, invariant computation, and conformance checking, to name but a few.…

Web Service orchestrations are compositions of different Web Services to form a new service. The services called during the orchestration guarantee a given performance to the orchestrater, usually in the form of contracts. These contracts…

Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…

Programs are more distributed and concurrent today than ever before, and structural communications are at the core. Constructing and debugging such programs are hard due to the lack of formal specification/verification of concurrency. This…

Actor coordination armoured with a suitable protocol description language has been a pressing problem in the actors community. We study the applicability of multiparty session type (MPST) protocols for verification of actor programs. We…

We consider an operatorial model of alliances between three political parties which interact with their electors, with the undecided voters, and with the electors of the other parties. This extends what was done in a previous paper, where…

Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving mutually untrusted parties. Existing platforms allow such processes to be modeled using high-level notations and compiled into smart contracts that…

Key to any research involving session search is the understanding of how a user's queries evolve throughout the session. When a user creates a query reformulation, he or she is consciously retaining terms from their original query, removing…