Operational efficiency is a central goal of service firms. The past decade witnessed the replacement of people with IT systems in service industries, yet the spotlight recently shifted to how frontline employees (FLEs) might perform a dual role by achieving sales and service goals...

We study and compare the decoherent histories approach, the environment-induced decoherence and the localization properties of the solutions to the stochastic Schrödinger equation in quantum-jump simulation and quantum-state diffusion approaches, for a quantum two-level system model. We show,...

For the purpose of understanding the quantum behaviour such as quantum decoherence, fluctuations, dissipation, entanglement and teleportation of a mesoscopic or macroscopic object interacting with a general environment, we derive here a set of exact master equations for the reduced density...

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are important components of network security. However, it is well known that current IDSs generate large amount of alerts, including both true and false alerts. Other than proposing new techniques to detect intrusions without such problems, this thesis presents...

Service engagements arise commonly in business and scientific computing. A service engagement is characterized by autonomous parties coming together in a contractual arrangement to share resources or carry out tasks for one another. The autonomy of the participants is key, meaning that there is...

Access control is a mechanism for achieving confidentiality and integrity in software systems. Access control policies (ACPs) define how access is managed and the high-level rules of who can access what information under certain conditions. Traditionally, access control policies have been...