Bank restructuring and financial institution reform in Indonesia

The banking sector underwent drastic reform in post-crisis Indonesia. Bank restructuring, driven by IMF conditionalities, resulted in the exit of insolvent banks and ownership changes of major private banks. Through recapitalization and sales of government-held shares, foreign-owned banks emerged as leading actors in the place of business-group-affiliated banks. As part of the restructuring process, an exit rule was created. The central bank, which up to that time had been given only partial authority under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Finance, now gained a full range of authority over banks. The central bank's supervision system on banks, risk management systems at individual banks, and their efforts to build risk management capacities, began to function. This is totally different from the old financial institution under the Soeharto regime, where banks had no incentive to control risks, as the regime tacitly ensured their survival.

Instalación para el estudio de la propagación de ondas de presión en conductos y su aplicación en túneles para trenes de alta velocidad

Se ha construido una instalación experimental de bajo coste para realizar ensayos a escala de la onda de compresión que se generan en el interior de un túnel al introducirse en él un tren a alta velocidad, con el fin de estudiar posibles configuraciones para reducir la presión de la onda reflejada en la salida. El coeficiente de reflexión de varias terminaciones ha sido medido y la influencia de la porosidad en la salida ha sido evaluada utilizando el método de la pulsoreflectometría acústica A low-cost experimental facility has been built to perform scale measurements of the pressure waves generated by a high speed train entering inside a tunnel, in order to study possible configurations to reduce the pressure reflected back at the tunnel exit. The reflection coefficient of some tunnel terminations has been measured and the influence of the porosity at the exit has been evaluated by using the Acoustic Pulse Reflectometry method (APR).

Integrated program debugging, verification, and optimization using abstract interpretation (and the Ciao system preprocessor)

The technique of Abstract Interpretation has allowed the development of very sophisticated global program analyses which are at the same time provably correct and practical. We present in a tutorial fashion a novel program development framework which uses abstract interpretation as a fundamental tool. The framework uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation to obtain information about the program. This information is used to validate programs, to detect bugs with respect to partial specifications written using assertions (in the program itself and/or in system libraries), to generate and simplify run-time tests, and to perform high-level program transformations such as multiple abstract specialization, parallelization, and resource usage control, all in a provably correct way. In the case of validation and debugging, the assertions can refer to a variety of program points such as procedure entry, procedure exit, points within procedures, or global computations. The system can reason with much richer information than, for example, traditional types. This includes data structure shape (including pointer sharing), bounds on data structure sizes, and other operational variable instantiation properties, as well as procedure-level properties such as determinacy, termination, nonfailure, and bounds on resource consumption (time or space cost). CiaoPP, the preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm programming system, which implements the described functionality, will be used to illustrate the fundamental ideas.