EasyInterface: a toolkit for the rapid development of GUIs for research prototype tools

During the lifetime of a research project, different partners develop several research prototype tools that share many common aspects. This is equally true for researchers as individuals and as groups: during a period of time they often develop several related tools to pursue a specific research line. Making research prototype tools easily accessible to the community is of utmost importance to promote the corresponding research, get feedback, and increase the tools’ lifetime beyond the duration of a specific project. One way to achieve this is to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that facilitate trying tools; in particular, with web-interfaces one avoids the overhead of downloading and installing the tools. Building GUIs from scratch is a tedious task, in particular for web-interfaces, and thus it typically gets low priority when developing a research prototype. Often we opt for copying the GUI of one tool and modifying it to fit the needs of a new related tool. Apart from code duplication, these tools will “live” separately, even though we might benefit from having them all in a common environment since they are related. This work aims at simplifying the process of building GUIs for research prototypes tools. In particular, we present EasyInterface, a toolkit that is based on novel methodology that provides an easy way to make research prototype tools available via common different environments such as a web-interface, within Eclipse, etc. It includes a novel text-based output language that allows to present results graphically without requiring any knowledge in GUI/Web programming. For example, an output of a tool could be (a structured version of) “highlight line number 10 of file ex.c” and “when the user clicks on line 10, open a dialog box with the text ...”. The environment will interpret this output and converts it to corresponding visual e_ects. The advantage of using this approach is that it will be interpreted equally by all environments of EasyInterface, e.g., the web-interface, the Eclipse plugin, etc. EasyInterface has been developed in the context of the Envisage [5] project, and has been evaluated on tools developed in this project, which include static analyzers, test-case generators, compilers, simulators, etc. EasyInterface is open source and available at GitHub2.

Integral field spectroscopy and multi-wavelength imaging of nearby spiral galaxies: NGC 5668 as a pilot case for MEGARA

MEGARA (Multi-Espectrógrafo en GTC de Alta Resolución para Astronomía) is an optical Integral-Field Unit (IFU) and Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOS) designed for the GTC 10.4 m telescope in La Palma. MEGARA will be a 3rd generation instrument for GTC. It is led by the University Complutense of Madrid with the collaboration of INAOE, IAA, UPM and comprises more than 50 researchers from a large number of institutions worldwide.

Measuring the impact of international R&D cooperation: the case of Spanish firms participating in the EU Framework Programme

The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of international R&D cooperation on firms’ economic performance. Our approach, based on a complete data set with information about Spanish participants in research joint ventures supported by the EU Framework Programme during the period 1995-2005, establishes a recursive model structure to capture the relationship between R&D cooperation, knowledge generation and economic results, which are measured by labour productivity. In the analysis we take into account that the participation in this specific type of cooperative projects implies a selection process that includes both the self-selection by participants to join the consortia and the selection of projects by the European Commission to award the public aid. Empirical analysis has confirmed that: (1) R&D co-operation has a positive impact on the technological capacity of firms, captured through intan-gible fixed assets and (2) the technological capacity of firms is positively related to their productivity.