580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Key research themes
1. How can rational requirements ensure sustainable and trustworthy software systems through effective requirements engineering?
This research area focuses on integrating rationality principles into requirements engineering to address long-term sustainability and trustworthiness in software systems. It considers how the elicitation, modeling, and validation of requirements grounded in rational frameworks contribute to software systems that endure technically, socially, environmentally, and economically while maintaining security and stakeholder trust.
Key finding: This work demonstrates that trustworthy software systems must have security requirements that fully reflect stakeholder needs, including confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability. The paper emphasizes the... Read more
Key finding: The authors propose a novel, rational approach using Common Criteria methodologies combined with use cases and actor profiling to elicit security requirements early in the software development lifecycle. This method... Read more
Key finding: This paper systematically categorizes and evaluates validation techniques in requirements engineering, highlighting that rigorous, iterative, and multidisciplinary validation is crucial to ensure requirements are complete,... Read more
Key finding: By introducing grounded theory analysis into requirements elicitation alongside traditional methods, this paper shows that theories can uncover latent socio-technical requirements that arise from user adoption dynamics and... Read more
2. What logical and formal criteria determine the implementability and verification of rationally specified system requirements in safety-critical and multi-agent systems?
This theme examines formal models and complexity results for assessing whether system requirements can be implemented and verified rationally, particularly focusing on safety-critical environments and multi-agent systems. It explores formal frameworks like the four-variable model, explores demonic acceptability, and examines complexity reductions in rational verification by restricting logical properties to specific temporal logics, thereby informing the theoretical foundation for rational requirements engineering.
Key finding: The paper establishes a necessary and sufficient mathematical implementability condition for system requirements in safety-critical software via the four-variable model. By strengthening the acceptability condition with... Read more
Key finding: This work advances the theory of rational verification by demonstrating that restricting agent goals to GR(1) temporal logic fragments or mean-payoff utilities significantly lowers the complexity of verifying rational... Read more
Key finding: The paper develops a family of rational basing permissions that specify when it is rationally permissible to believe a proposition on the basis of believing other propositions, using the concept of grounding to formalize... Read more
Key finding: This article formulates rational requirements that integrate the relevance of premises and inference complexity using weak relative closure and a scale of inference difficulty. It offers refined logical rationality conditions... Read more
Key finding: Beyond socio-technical insights, the grounded theory method presented contributes formal conceptualizations of adoption constraints, producing theoretical requirements that guide implementability and systemic coherence, thus... Read more
3. How do philosophical theories of rationality contribute to understanding and refining the normativity, judgment, and diachronic coherence of rational requirements in decision-making and teaching?
This area investigates foundational philosophical perspectives on rationality’s normative status, the interplay of rules with judgment in rational justification, and diachronic requirements such as persistence of intentions over time. It also explores practical rationality as a middle-range theory connecting research and practice in domains like mathematics teaching, elucidating how rationality theories inform and constrain rational requirements in agent decision-making and instructional situations.
Key finding: This paper critiques the classical model of rationality, affirming that an adequate account of rationality must encompass both explicit rules and the exercise of judgment. It shows that judgment-only models fail to... Read more
Key finding: The authors conceptualize practical rationality in mathematics teaching as a middle-range theory developed from empirical research that links rational requirements to specific instructional norms and teacher beliefs. This... Read more
Key finding: This work explores internalist evidentialism and confirms rationality supervenes on mental states and evidence, emphasizing that rational requirements align with the agent’s perspective and evidential support rather than... Read more
Key finding: The paper challenges reasons perspectivism’s claim that normative reasons are only potent if epistemically accessible to the agent, arguing that constraining normativity in this way fails to reconcile normative reason and... Read more
Key finding: Broome’s analysis of diachronic rational requirements, particularly persistence of intention, is critically examined, highlighting that forgetting does not violate such persistence. The study differentiates between cancelling... Read more