IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, Nov 1, 2009
This index covers all technical items—papers, correspondence, reviews, etc.—that appeared in this... more This index covers all technical items—papers, correspondence, reviews, etc.—that appeared in this periodical during 2009, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in 2009. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication ...
This paper discusses the application of QR techniques in support of investment decision-making. I... more This paper discusses the application of QR techniques in support of investment decision-making. It first reviews the investment process and its complexities. Then, it explains the way several QR techniques are used to overcome some of these complexities. Throughout the discussion the paper also points out the value of using QR techniques from an organizational and strategic perspective. The paper concluds with a brief review of recent ongoing research on QR techniques for financial and economics applications in general
We examine the main drivers of software maintenance effort and cost. We use the ‘Distributed Cogn... more We examine the main drivers of software maintenance effort and cost. We use the ‘Distributed Cognition’ framework to hypothesize about how ‘discovery work’ in maintenance is effected by two types of cost drivers: system attributes (size, complexity, age, etc.) and personnel attributes (number of maintainers, location dispersion, etc.). We test our hypotheses using archival data about over 5,000 maintenance projects carried out between 2009 and 2011 on 412 different operational systems in a large financial institution. We find that personnel attributes are significantly more influential than system attributes. In particular, a marginal change in personnel factors is associated with effort growing much faster than cost, indicating an escalating marginal cost of spreading maintenance work across more maintainers and site locations. We also find, counter to expectation, that two system attributes are negatively linked to maintenance effort and cost. Implications of these findings for re...
ABSTRACT Economics has been slow to yield to artificial intelligence techniques, although the pot... more ABSTRACT Economics has been slow to yield to artificial intelligence techniques, although the potential value of these techniques has been recognized repeatedly. This potential is examined in the case of advanced symbolic and visual techniques for qualitatively reasoning about complex dynamic systems. Application of these techniques to the study of dynamic economic systems however requires their adaptation to economics problems so as to take account of the significant contribution that mathematical economics has made to the study of dynamics, especially through exploitation of the idiosyncratic structure of many economic systems. Possible implications of using these techniques in related areas, such econometrics, are outlined as well.
Past information systems research on real options has focused mainly on evaluating information te... more Past information systems research on real options has focused mainly on evaluating information technology (IT)investments that embed a single, a priori known option (such as, deferral option, prototype option). In other words, only once a specific isolated option is identified ...
Past research concerning information systems (IS) risk has mainly focused on development risk. Ho... more Past research concerning information systems (IS) risk has mainly focused on development risk. However, the impact of any risk event that occurs once the system is operational can be far more extensive. Such events are due to what has been termed operational risk. Our research is concerned with operational risk that involves an IS – or IS-related operational risk – which has received little attention in the academic literature. Specifically, we seek to offer a comprehensive exploratory analysis of IS-related operational risk based on a database documenting hundreds of actual IS-related operational risk events. Our findings could help managers and researchers to achieve a better understanding of the risk exposure associated with operational ISs in their current business environment and with new information technology (IT) investments under consideration. This research could also assist organizations in achieving a higher level of strategic and economic alignment, through the use of a...
In design, inferring structure from function is a combinatorial generate-and-test problem.Existin... more In design, inferring structure from function is a combinatorial generate-and-test problem.Existing methods use prestored domain-specific partial configurations to constrainthe generator. We have found that for certain types of economic and physicalsystems consisting of two-terminal components connected in parallel, it is fruitfulto specify function in terms of desired behavior, and to identify sets of componentswhose resultant behavior matches that desired behavior.
Assembling financial instruments such as equities, bonds, options, and other derivatives into a p... more Assembling financial instruments such as equities, bonds, options, and other derivatives into a portfolio requires a thorough understanding of how the portfolio will behave in response to changes of specific economic variables and parameters of the instruments. With more information about a more diverse set of instruments becoming available to traders, it is becoming important to limit the complexity of the analysis involved. We show how this complexity can be limited by using qualitative analysis, where the objective is to construct a few good vehicles which can then be analyzed quantitatively. We illustrate how two qualitative reasoning techniques -- qualitative simulation and qualitative synthesis -- are used to design investment vehicles for risk management purposes. These techniques are currently employed by a prototype expert that aims at assisting traders solving a risk management problem called hedging.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, Nov 1, 2009
This index covers all technical items—papers, correspondence, reviews, etc.—that appeared in this... more This index covers all technical items—papers, correspondence, reviews, etc.—that appeared in this periodical during 2009, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in 2009. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication ...
This paper discusses the application of QR techniques in support of investment decision-making. I... more This paper discusses the application of QR techniques in support of investment decision-making. It first reviews the investment process and its complexities. Then, it explains the way several QR techniques are used to overcome some of these complexities. Throughout the discussion the paper also points out the value of using QR techniques from an organizational and strategic perspective. The paper concluds with a brief review of recent ongoing research on QR techniques for financial and economics applications in general
We examine the main drivers of software maintenance effort and cost. We use the ‘Distributed Cogn... more We examine the main drivers of software maintenance effort and cost. We use the ‘Distributed Cognition’ framework to hypothesize about how ‘discovery work’ in maintenance is effected by two types of cost drivers: system attributes (size, complexity, age, etc.) and personnel attributes (number of maintainers, location dispersion, etc.). We test our hypotheses using archival data about over 5,000 maintenance projects carried out between 2009 and 2011 on 412 different operational systems in a large financial institution. We find that personnel attributes are significantly more influential than system attributes. In particular, a marginal change in personnel factors is associated with effort growing much faster than cost, indicating an escalating marginal cost of spreading maintenance work across more maintainers and site locations. We also find, counter to expectation, that two system attributes are negatively linked to maintenance effort and cost. Implications of these findings for re...
ABSTRACT Economics has been slow to yield to artificial intelligence techniques, although the pot... more ABSTRACT Economics has been slow to yield to artificial intelligence techniques, although the potential value of these techniques has been recognized repeatedly. This potential is examined in the case of advanced symbolic and visual techniques for qualitatively reasoning about complex dynamic systems. Application of these techniques to the study of dynamic economic systems however requires their adaptation to economics problems so as to take account of the significant contribution that mathematical economics has made to the study of dynamics, especially through exploitation of the idiosyncratic structure of many economic systems. Possible implications of using these techniques in related areas, such econometrics, are outlined as well.
Past information systems research on real options has focused mainly on evaluating information te... more Past information systems research on real options has focused mainly on evaluating information technology (IT)investments that embed a single, a priori known option (such as, deferral option, prototype option). In other words, only once a specific isolated option is identified ...
Past research concerning information systems (IS) risk has mainly focused on development risk. Ho... more Past research concerning information systems (IS) risk has mainly focused on development risk. However, the impact of any risk event that occurs once the system is operational can be far more extensive. Such events are due to what has been termed operational risk. Our research is concerned with operational risk that involves an IS – or IS-related operational risk – which has received little attention in the academic literature. Specifically, we seek to offer a comprehensive exploratory analysis of IS-related operational risk based on a database documenting hundreds of actual IS-related operational risk events. Our findings could help managers and researchers to achieve a better understanding of the risk exposure associated with operational ISs in their current business environment and with new information technology (IT) investments under consideration. This research could also assist organizations in achieving a higher level of strategic and economic alignment, through the use of a...
In design, inferring structure from function is a combinatorial generate-and-test problem.Existin... more In design, inferring structure from function is a combinatorial generate-and-test problem.Existing methods use prestored domain-specific partial configurations to constrainthe generator. We have found that for certain types of economic and physicalsystems consisting of two-terminal components connected in parallel, it is fruitfulto specify function in terms of desired behavior, and to identify sets of componentswhose resultant behavior matches that desired behavior.
Assembling financial instruments such as equities, bonds, options, and other derivatives into a p... more Assembling financial instruments such as equities, bonds, options, and other derivatives into a portfolio requires a thorough understanding of how the portfolio will behave in response to changes of specific economic variables and parameters of the instruments. With more information about a more diverse set of instruments becoming available to traders, it is becoming important to limit the complexity of the analysis involved. We show how this complexity can be limited by using qualitative analysis, where the objective is to construct a few good vehicles which can then be analyzed quantitatively. We illustrate how two qualitative reasoning techniques -- qualitative simulation and qualitative synthesis -- are used to design investment vehicles for risk management purposes. These techniques are currently employed by a prototype expert that aims at assisting traders solving a risk management problem called hedging.
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Papers by Michel Benaroch