Business and Human Rights: Where now?

Presentation (2017, April)

Business Models and Profitability of Energy Storage

in iScience (2020), 23(10),

Rapid growth of intermittent renewable power generation makes the identification of investment opportunities in energy storage and the establishment of their profitability indispensable. Here we first ... [more ▼]

Rapid growth of intermittent renewable power generation makes the identification of investment opportunities in energy storage and the establishment of their profitability indispensable. Here we first present a conceptual framework to characterize business models of energy storage and systematically differentiate investment opportunities. We then use the framework to examine which storage technologies can perform the identified business models and review the recent literature regarding the profitability of individual combinations of business models and technologies. Our analysis shows that a set of commercially available technologies can serve all identified business models. We also find that certain combinations appear to have approached a tipping point toward profitability. Yet, this conclusion only holds for combinations examined most recently or stacking several business models. Many technologically feasible combinations have been neglected, indicating a need for further research to provide a detailed and conclusive understanding about the profitability of energy storage. [less ▲]

Business Process Regulatory Compliance is Hard

in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (2015), 8(6), 958-970

Verifying whether a business process is compliant with a regulatory framework is a difficult task. In the present paper we prove the hardness of the business process regulatory compliance problem by ... [more ▼]

Verifying whether a business process is compliant with a regulatory framework is a difficult task. In the present paper we prove the hardness of the business process regulatory compliance problem by taking into account a sub-problem of the general problem. This limited problem allows to verify only the compliance of structured processes with respect to a regulatory framework composed of a set of conditional obligations including a deadline. Experimental evidence from existing studies shows that compliance is a difficult task. In this paper, despite considering a sub-problem of the general problem, we provide some theoretical evidence of the difficulty of the task. In particular we show that the source of the complexity lies in the core language of verifying conditional obligations with a deadline. We prove that for this simplified case verifying partial compliance belongs to the class of NP-complete problems, and verifying full compliance belongs to the class of coNP-complete problems. Thus by proving the difficulty of a simplified compliance problem we prove that the general problem of verifying business process regulatory compliance is hard. [less ▲]

But what does it mean?": Emerging ideas about Hebrew and language in a Talmud Torah class in Luxembourg

Presentation (2020, January 09)

"But you know you won't be back"

Article for general public (2022)

Buybacks around the world

E-print/Working paper (2013)

The By-Product Effect on Metal Markets : New Insights to the Price Behavior of Minor Metals

in Resources Policy (2014), 42(1), 35--44

Bypassing (a lack of) archives: a prosopography approach of the history of the European Court of Justice, 1950s-1970s

Presentation (2018)

Ever since its landmark decisions Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has played a key role in the so-called ‘constitutionalization’ of the European legal order. The ... [more ▼]

Ever since its landmark decisions Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has played a key role in the so-called ‘constitutionalization’ of the European legal order. The fact that its jurisprudence has given EU law a proto-federal framework has been demonstrated, analyzed and commented in countless publications by legal scholars and social scientists, who have tried to grasp how the ECJ could consistently pursue its active prointegration path without provoking a rebellion by the Member States. In the historiography of the EU, however, the ECJ was for many decades largely absent. The main reason for this absence is the Court’s long-standing lack of willingness to give researchers access to its archives. It was only in 2016, that the first archival documents from the ECJ were made available to the public at the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. Long awaited, they reveal little about the functioning of the Court. This paper presents how I have in my research used a prosopographical approach to raise the following challenge: if the ECJ does not (really) let us inside via its archives, can we get inside by studying those who worked at the Court, and above all, the main protagonists behind its case law, the judges? Could an investigation of their social and professional backgrounds, a study of their networks and convictions towards European integration, the analysis of their academic writings and personal papers, give us an unprecedented peak behind the curtains of European judicial decision-making? This presentation shows that (and how) knowing more about the judges reveals a lot about the functioning of the ECJ in the period in which it laid the foundations of the constitutionalization (1950s to 1970s). By providing key insights on the visions that the first generations of judges had on Europe and their role in the European constructions process, it reveals the dynamics that prevailed inside the Court and explains why the bench of judges became outright provocative in the 1970s. The prosopographical approach also brings to the surface new knowledge on the Court’s relationship with the Member States of the European communities. By laying bare why the first and highly decisive European judicial decision-makers were chosen by the governments, the collective biographies give new insights into the Member States’ expectations with regard to the institution and their reaction towards its provocative case law. Finally, the prosopographical approach reveals that the ECJ had a very active political network, which it used to pursue its strategic legal and political interests, and make sure that it would in its jurisprudence not go to a point where it risked being overthrown by the governments. [less ▲]

Bypassing the Combinatorial Explosion: Using Similarity to Generate and Prioritize T-wise Test Configurations for Software Product Lines

in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2014), 40(7), 650-670

Byzantine Resilient Protocol for the IoT

in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2018)

Wireless sensor networks, often adhering to a single gateway architecture, constitute the communication backbone for many modern cyber-physical systems. Consequently, faulttolerance in CPS becomes a ... [more ▼]

Wireless sensor networks, often adhering to a single gateway architecture, constitute the communication backbone for many modern cyber-physical systems. Consequently, faulttolerance in CPS becomes a challenging task, especially when accounting for failures (potentially malicious) that incapacitate the gateway or disrupt the nodes-gateway communication, not to mention the energy, timeliness, and security constraints demanded by CPS domains. This paper aims at ameliorating the fault-tolerance of WSN based CPS to increase system and data availability. To this end, we propose a replicated gateway architecture augmented with energy-efficient real-time Byzantineresilient data communication protocols. At the sensors level, we introduce FT-TSTP, a geographic routing protocol capable of delivering messages in an energy-efficient and timely manner to multiple gateways, even in the presence of voids caused by faulty and malicious sensor nodes. At the gateway level, we propose a multi-gateway synchronization protocol, which we call ByzCast, that delivers timely correct data to CPS applications, despite the failure or maliciousness of a number of gateways. We show, through extensive simulations, that our protocols provide better system robustness yielding an increased system and data availability while meeting CPS energy, timeliness, and security demands. [less ▲]