is given, and contemporary research directions are presented. Finally, a range of open issues and future challenges are highlighted.

exploration of the possibilities of future work in the area. Summary 1. Overview This thesis presents an overview of trust as a social phenomenon and discusses it formally. It argues that trust is: • A means for understanding and adapting to the complexity of the environment. • A means of providing added

Performance modelling is concerned with the capture and analysis of the dynamic behaviour of computer and communication systems. The size and complexity of many modern systems result in large, complex models. A compositional approach decomposes the system into subsystems that are smaller and more

The study of computational agents capable of rational behaviour has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Theoretical formalizations of such agents and their implementations have proceeded in parallel with little or no connection between them. This paper explores a particular

predicting current and future behaviour

Social movements and human rights rhetoric in tobacco

Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building complex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date, there have been few serious attempts to cast agent systems as a software engineering paradigm. This paper seeks to rectify this omission. Specifically, it will be argued that: (i) the conceptual apparatus of agent-oriented systems is well-suited to building software solutions for complex systems and (ii) agent-oriented approaches represent a genuine advance over the current state of the art for engineering complex systems. Following on from this view, the major issues raised by adopting an agent-oriented approach to software engineering are highlighted and discussed.

eing analysed. On the negative side, the semantic correctness of the analysis is seldom established and therefore there is often no formal justification for the program transformations for which the information is used. The semantics based approach [1; 5] is often based on domain theory in the form of abstract domains modelling sets of values, projections, or partial equivalence relations. The approach tends to focus more directly on discovering the extensional properties of interest: for constant propagation it might operate on sets of values with constancy corresponding to singletons, and for neededness analysis it might perform a strictness analysis and use the strictness information for neededness (or make use of the "absence" notion from projection analysis and attempt to discover the di#erence). On the positive side, this usually gives rise to provably correct analyses, although there are sometimes complications (due to deciding what information to stick onto the

Theoretical analysis of the connection between taxation and risk-taking has mainly been concerned with the effect of taxes on portfolio decisions of consumers, Mossin (1968b) and Stiglitz (1969). However, there are some problems which are not naturally classified under this

This is a visionary book written by a man on a mission. It articulates one possible answer to the question of what might come after the proprietary-based knowledge-based economy that currently exists in advanced countries. Benkler is professor of law at Yale Law School and one of the most ardent proponents of the open source movement and the information commons approach. He argues that a new form of economy might be emerging, i.e. the “networked information economy”, in which nonmarket and nonproprietary commons-based peer production (i.e. “social production”) and exchange of information, knowledge and culture play a central role. This has become feasible because the capital required for social production and exchange in the networked information economy is relatively cheap and widely distributed. Much of the book argues the perceived advantages of the networked information economy from a multi-disciplinary and liberal political perspective, and the numerous threats endangering the realisation of its potential. The incumbents of the existing proprietary-based “industrial information economy”, in particular Hollywood and the