Daniel Amyot

New @sosym.org paper on "SymboleoAC: an access control model for smart legal contracts", co-authored by Sofana Alfuhaid, Amal Anda, John Mylopoulos, Marco Revi and me!

SymboleoAC adds RBAC-based concepts to Symboleo (a language for specifying legal contracts), with tool support. See rdcu.be/eTCt9

Infographic titled “The Drain of Scientific Publishing,” describing four problems in scholarly publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control. Money: Illustration of flying dollar bills and buildings beside a bank. Text explains that for-profit publishers charge unreasonable reading and publishing fees disconnected from production costs, noting that Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis made $US 12 billion profit from 2019–2024. Time: Illustration of a stressed researcher surrounded by stacks of papers and a clock. Text states researchers spend enormous time as authors, reviewers, and editors, maintaining a system that prioritizes quantity over quality, causing burnout and reduced rigor. Trust: Illustration of a magnifying glass over retracted papers. Text describes commercial pressures to publish quickly, enabling low-quality and fraudulent papers, eroding public confidence. Control: Illustration of a person with medals labeled with journal metrics. Text explains that rankings like journal impact factor and h-index dictate success, with infrastructures biased toward English journals and controlled by for-profit companies. At the bottom, a stop-sign graphic reads “Stop the Drain.” Additional text calls for altering incentives and ownership of publishing, re-communalizing scholarly publishing, building community-led systems, preventing unreasonable profits, and using existing open models and infrastructures (e.g., preprints, diamond journals, OJS, SciELO). A final statement urges aligning research assessment with open, community-led publishing.

📣 Our friends at the #ScholCommLab have published a preprint, "The Drain of #ScientificPublishing", and are calling for #research communities, funders, governments, and #universities to "re-communalise publishing to serve #science not the market"

doi.org/10.48550/arX...

#ScholComm #AcademicSky

The #RequirementsEngineering Journal is now on LinkedIn!

Follow the page below to receive new articles, calls for papers, information for potential submitters, and more.

www.linkedin.com/company/reen...

The Requirements Engineering conference is about to start in Valencia, after two days of great workshops. This is my favorite community and event!

Ah! Tariffs! "Princess Bride" had foreseen that situation...

Context-driven process discovery: enhancing process flow interpretability with contextualized activity hierarchies - Software and Systems Modeling Analyzing business processes is important for organizations aiming to optimize operations and identify inefficiencies. Traditional discovered process models often lack sufficient contextual depth, lim...

#OnlineFirst
Context-driven process discovery: enhancing process flow interpretability with contextualized activity hierarchies
Zahra Ahmadi, Jochen De Weerdt & Estefanía Serral Asensio
doi.org/10.1007/s102...

État palestinien | Assez, c’est assez ! L’ancien chef d’antenne estime que l’engagement de Mark Carney de reconnaître l’existence d’un État palestinien risque de ne jamais être tenu, étant donné les conditions irréalistes que le premier min...

Assez, c’est assez ! : lp.ca/qCiszS?shari...

Interested in legal contract verification and #SmartContract generation? We have two papers on #Symboleo in that special issue of SoSyM!

Yep!

Our paper got published! Nice collaboration with HEC Paris and ATOS. We used our #Symboleo project in that context too!

Baquero, P.M., et al. The compliance gap in data supply chains: contract specification languages and smart contracts as compliance technologies. AI & Law. doi.org/10.1007/s105...

Luigi Logrippo was my MSc/ PhD supervisor in 1992-2001. We had dinner at my place on Friday, with other colleagues. We also have another paper coming out soon in the AI & Law journal!

I feel very lucky to have been collaborating with him for 33 years! Not sure I will offer this to my students :-)

Four weeks ago, I had the privilege to participate to my first Dagstuhl Seminar, in excellent company (yeah, I finally got one of these pictures!). The 22 of us focused on "AUTOBIZ: Pushing the Boundaries of AI-Driven Process Execution and Adaptation" for a week. More on this topic soon... :-)

Image of library book display labeled:

“It's A Warning Not An Instruction Manual.”

Books on display:
• On Tyranny
• Twenty Lessons From
The 21st Century
• 1984
• A Handmaids Tale
• Diary of Anne Frank
• Parable of The Sower
• Fahrenheit 451
• Animal Farm
• Brave New World

~TAiLS of a Bookworm

At the SnT (Univ. Luxemburg) on May 12, I presented our work on the use of the #Symboleo formal language for converting legal contracts to #SmartContracts, and results in using LLMs (of course!) to generate Symboleo specifications from English contracts. Presentation slides: lnkd.in/euUPUk3x

Two more days of ICSE 2025 in Ottawa, and already much preparation done for the next three editions in Rio, Dublin, and Hawaii!

#ICSE 2025 started! @tcltcl.bsky.social

Just add maple syrup on it to compensate...

#OnThisDay - April 12, 1980 - St. John's, NL
"Today is the day it all begins..."
#TerryFox travelled to Outer Cove Beach, collecting two bottles of Atlantic seawater. He planned to keep one as a souvenir and pour the second one in the Pacific Ocean when he arrived home. $900M collected terryfox.org

In 1981, the province of Quebec ruled that women would keep their birth name when getting married. Here is another situation where such law would have been useful elsewhere...

YouTube video by thejuicemedia Honest Government Ad | Canada Election 2025 🍁

A fair description of Canada's upcoming election 😉 youtu.be/wT_n4Khmq0o?...

Good bye Richard Chamberlain. The lead actor in Shōgun and The Thorn Birds just passed earlier today.

Censure dans le milieu universitaire américain | D’abord ils sont venus pour les universitaires S’il y a quelqu’un qui ne manque pas de courage, c’est bien la docteure Joanne Liu. L’ancienne présidente internationale de Médecins sans frontières s’est toujours illustrée autant par son travail hum...

First, they came after the universities...
www.lapresse.ca/actualites/c...

This is the moment when a 30-story skyscraper under construction collapsed in Bangkok, when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar hundreds of miles away on Friday. Myanmar’s military government said that 144 people had been killed and 732 injured. Follow live updates. nyti.ms/3QSKjuw

Hotels - ICSE 2025 ICSE, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, is the premier software engineering conference. It will be held April 27-May 3 2025 in Ottawa. Core conference days will be Wednesd...

Last chance for most #icse2025 hotels 25th March. Many full already. conf.researchr.org/attending/ic... Come to Ottawa to learn about special sessions we have tagged on developing AI systems, quantum SE, SE for security, SE for blockchain and formal methods.

Questionnaire that such Canadian researchers must fill: www.caut.ca/sites/defaul...

There are many scary questions!

Canadian researchers working on projects funded by US agencies have been sent a questionnaire to determine how their work aligns with Trump’s political agenda, e.g., that it does not include a climate or “environmental justice” or DEI component and that it increases American influence globally!

I regret to inform you that software engineering will transition to requirements engineering.

This is ChatGPT's view of #Nowruz celebrated in Ottawa... I think it forgot the snow!

Nowruz Mubarak (and happy spring to all)!

So much for freedom of expression and academic freedom in the "Land of the Free".

Libârté!

Je suis encore dans les nouvelles semble-t-il 🙂

Nouvelle article d'Estelle Côté-Sroka à Radio-Canada: "Prestations de sécurité de la vieillesse : recrutement difficile pour changer le système"
ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/214...