Supporting the Model-Driven Development of Real-time Embedded Systems with Run-Time Monitoring and Animation via Highly Customizable Code Generation

This paper presents a vision that allows the combined use of model-driven engineering, run-time monitoring, and animation for the development and analysis of components in real-time embedded systems. Key building block in the tool environment supporting this vision is a highly-customizable code generation process. Customization is performed via a configuration specification which describes the ways in which input is provided to the component, the ways in which run-time execution information can be observed, and how these observations drive animation tools. The environment is envisioned to be suitable for different activities ranging from quality assurance to supporting certification, teaching, and outreach and will be built exclusively with open source tools to increase impact. A preliminary prototype implementation is described.

This Time is Different: Causes and Consequences of British Banking Instability over the Long Run

This paper addresses three questions: (1) How severe were the episodes of banking instability
experienced by the UK over the past two centuries? (2) What have been the macroeconomic
indicators of UK banking instability? and (3) What have been the consequences of UK banking
instability for the cost of credit? Using a unique dataset of bank share prices from 1830 to 2010
to assess the stability of the UK banking system, we find that banking instability has grown more
severe since the 1970s. We also find that interest rates, inflation, lending growth, and equity
prices are consistent macroeconomic indicators of UK banking instability over the long run.
Furthermore, utilising a unique dataset of corporate-bond yields for the period 1860 to 2010, we
find that there is a significant long-run relationship between banking instability and the creditrisk
premium faced by businesses.

Chicken Run: A Chicken-Centred Design Research Project

Chicken Run, an experimental project still in development, sees designers and scientists working together to explore ideas to improve poultry welfare in commercial facilities, applying user-centred design to all key stakeholders: farmer, consumer and chicken. Exploring various aspects of the chicken’s journey from egg to plate, the process has allowed researchers to better understand their needs and to maximise joined-up positive impact. The paper describes the ongoing process where Initial proposals including perches, bales and an app to enable consumers to make the right chicken purchase choices have been developed and tested. Co-authored by leaders of the design and scientific communities involved in the project, the paper describes the issues, design methods used, as well as some of the learning from the cross-disciplinary process. It also provides an update on progress of selected design ideas that are currently being developed with a commercial poultry farm, drawing out the challenges and successes encountered.

Dry Run Creek Watershed Improvement Project 1248-023: Final Project Report: July 2013-December 2015, October 11, 2016

In 2010 a group of farmers in the Dry Run Creek watershed, an Iowa High Quality Water Resource, formed the Dry Run Creek Watershed Improvement Association to learn more about and implement solutions to remedy a bacteria impairment in their stream. Through a partnership with Luther College, Iowa DNR Watershed Monitoring and Assessment and Iowa State University Extension the farmers were able to conduct an assessment of their stream and watershed. The assessment showed multiple potential sources of bacteria, dependent on whether water samples were collected following rain events or during dry conditions. This project will allow watershed farmers to implement solutions to reduce bacteria delivery during both wet and dry weather. Funding will be targeted to feedlot runoff control improvements, cover crops and vegetative filters, manure management strategies and livestock stream access. The council intends to continue intensive water monitoring to determine whether the strategies are successful. Research shows the bacteria reduction in water bodies can be seen relatively quickly, within 1-2 years, compared to other types of impairments.

Dry Run Creek Watershed Improvement Project 1248-023, Final Project Report: July 2013-December 2015, March 26, 2015

In 2010 a group of farmers in the Dry Run Creek watershed, an Iowa High Quality Water Resource, formed the Dry Run Creek Watershed Improvement Association to learn more about and implement solutions to remedy a bacteria impairment in their stream. Through a partnership with Luther College, Iowa DNR Watershed Monitoring and Assessment and Iowa State University Extension the farmers were able to conduct an assessment of their stream and watershed. The assessment showed multiple potential sources of bacteria, dependent on whether water samples were collected following rain events or during dry conditions. This project will allow watershed farmers to implement solutions to reduce bacteria delivery during both wet and dry weather. Funding will be targeted to feedlot runoff control improvements, cover crops and vegetative filters, manure management strategies and livestock stream access. The council intends to continue intensive water monitoring to determine whether the strategies are successful. Research shows the bacteria reduction in water bodies can be seen relatively quickly, within 1-2 years, compared to other types of impairments.

Do breech presentations in twins and singletons run different risks?

SCOPUS: no.j

Status and management of spring-run chinook salmon

Runs have dwindled in many parts of California and additional protection or management actions are needed to protect the fish from further declines. The following is a report requested by the Fish and Game Commission on the status and current management of spring-run chinook salmon stocks. Fish counts presented in this report were developed by a variety of methods. Some of them are estimates of total run-size or spawning escapement, while others are indices of abundance derived from counts of maturing fish in their holding areas. It is important to note the stock assessment method used. Index area counts will always underestimate the true run size, often by a very large margin.

Run-time profiling of Algol 68-R programs using DIDYMUS and SCAMP

Information concerning the run-time behaviour of programs ("program profiling") can be of the greatest assistance in improving program efficiency. Two software devices have been developed for use on ICL 1900 Series machines to provide such information. DIDYMUS is probabilistic in approach and uses multi- tasking facilities to sample the instruction addresses used by a program at run time. It will work regardless of the source language of the program and matches the detected addresses against a loader map to produce a histogram. SCAMP is restricted to profiling Algol 68-R programs, but provides deterministic information concerning those language constructs that are monitored. Procedure calls to appropriate counting routines are inserted into the source text in a pre-pass prior to compilation. The profile information is printed out at the end of the program run. It has been found that these two approaches complement each other very effectively.

Geomorphological constraining of tsunami (?) run-up in the Alcantarilha coastal lowland (Central Algarve, Portugal)

The Alcantarilha lowland, partly barred by a well developed barrier, including foredunes covering Pleistocene-Holocene beachrock and aeolianite, develops across the Alcantarilha infilled estuary, the beach-dune extending further SE until the Salgados lagoon. A topographic and coring survey revealed a peculiar feature at the leeward toe of the dune ridge close to the inlet area: a sandy fan with location, shape and morphology suggesting emplacement by single or multiple overwash of the barrier tip rather than tidal forcing. Its storm or tsunami origin and age are under investigation, and the only time-constrain available at present is that it should post-date ca. 6600 cal BP, the most recent in situ aeolianite (Moura et al., 2007) dated so far. METHODS, DATA SET AND RESULTS The fan boundaries are distinctive in aerial photos and satellite images: it is roughly ellipsoidal, ~200 m wide and ~300 m elongated paralleling the shoreline, rising ~ 0.9-1.2 m above the surrounding floodplain surface. Detailed topography shows that its short axis aligns with SW-NE elongated (though irregular) depressions in the dune crest, which link the beach with the fan. This could have favoured funnelling of, or erosion by, water overtopping the barrier but, in either case, the fan should correspond to extreme and abrupt event(s) of coastal flooding. 18 trenches and cores were performed in the exposed area of the fan and nearby flood plain to obtain samples and data on its sedimentology, lithostratigraphy and geometry. The fan consists of well sorted and rounded sand (Fig. 2). It thins away and wedges out landwards of the apex (located near Alc29T) where it is partly covered by dune sand. Its lower boundary is undulating and marked by textural contrast between sand (fan) and underlying mud (alluvial/lagoonal); an accumulation of marine-sourced perforated pebbles showing limited lateral continuity may pinpoint this boundary near the foredune (core Alc 25, ca. 80 m westward of profile in Fig.1); mud-balls were also observed immediately above this surface in cores and trenches. As the washover was probably emplaced in a barred lagoonal/estuarine floodplain setting, the fan’s northern outer belt is enclosed by low-energy sediments (not shown in Fig. 2).

Pre-colonial institutions and long-run development in Latin America

The present doctoral thesis studies the association between pre-colonial institutions and long-run development in Latin America. The thesis is organised as follows: Chapter 1 places the motivation of the thesis by underlying relevant contributions in the literature on long-run development. I then set out the main objective of the thesis, followed by a brief outline of it. In Chapter 2, I study the effects of pre-colonial institutions on present-day socioeconomic outcomes for Latin America. The main thesis of this chapter is that more advanced pre-colonial institutions relate to better socioeconomic outcomes today - principally, but not only, through their effects on the Amerindian population. I test such hypothesis with a dataset of 324 sub-national administrative units covering all mainland Latin American countries. The extensive range of controls covers factors such as climate, location, natural resources, colonial activities and pre-colonial characteristics - plus country fixed effects. Results strongly support the main thesis. In Chapter 3, I further analyse the association between pre-colonial institutions and present-day economic development in Latin America by using the historical ethnic homelands as my main unit of analysis. The main hypothesis is that ethnic homelands inhabited by more advanced ethnic groups -as measured by their levels of institutional complexity- relate to better economic development today. To track these long-run effects, I construct a new dataset by digitising historiographical maps allowing me to pinpoint the geospatial location of ethnic homelands as of the XVI century. As a result, 375 ethnic homelands are created. I then capture the levels of economic development at the ethnic homeland level by making use of alternative economic measures --satellite light density data. After controlling for country-specific characteristics and applying a large battery of geographical, locational, and historical factors, I found that the effects of pre-colonial institutions relate to a higher light density --as a proxy for economic activity- in ethnic homelands where more advanced ethnic groups lived. In Chapter 4, I explore a mechanism linking the persistence of pre-colonial institutions in Latin America over the long-run: Colonial and post-colonial strategies along with the ethnic political capacity worked in tandem allowing larger Amerindian groups to "support" the new political systems in ways that would benefit their respective ethnic groups as well as the population at large. This mechanism may have allowed the effects of pre-colonial institutions to influence socioeconomic development outcomes up to today. To shed lights on this mechanism, I combine the index of pre-colonial institutions prepared for the second chapter of the present thesis with individual-level survey data on people's attitudes. By controlling for key observable and unobservable country-specific characteristics, the main empirical results show that areas with a history of more advanced pre-colonial institutions increase the probability of individuals supporting present-day political institutions. Finally, in Chapter 5, I summarise the main findings of the thesis, and emphasise the key weaknesses of the study as well as potential avenues for future research.

Singlet extensions of the standard model at LHC Run 2: benchmarks and comparison with the NMSSM

The Complex singlet extension of the Standard Model (CxSM) is the simplest extension that provides scenarios for Higgs pair production with different masses. The model has two interesting phases: the dark matter phase, with a Standard Model-like Higgs boson, a new scalar and a dark matter candidate; and the broken phase, with all three neutral scalars mixing. In the latter phase Higgs decays into a pair of two different Higgs bosons are possible. In this study we analyse Higgs-to-Higgs decays in the framework of singlet extensions of the Standard Model (SM), with focus on the CxSM. After demonstrating that scenarios with large rates for such chain decays are possible we perform a comparison between the NMSSM and the CxSM. We find that, based on Higgs-to-Higgs decays, the only possibility to distinguish the two models at the LHC run 2 is through final states with two different scalars. This conclusion builds a strong case for searches for final states with two different scalars at the LHC run 2. Finally, we propose a set of benchmark points for the real and complex singlet extensions to be tested at the LHC run 2. They have been chosen such that the discovery prospects of the involved scalars are maximised and they fulfil the dark matter constraints. Furthermore, for some of the points the theory is stable up to high energy scales. For the computation of the decay widths and branching ratios we developed the Fortran code sHDECAY, which is based on the implementation of the real and complex singlet extensions of the SM in HDECAY.

A Hardware Implementation of a Run-Time Scheduler for Reconfigurable Systems

New generation embedded systems demand high performance, efficiency and flexibility. Reconfigurable hardware can provide all these features. However the costly reconfiguration process and the lack of management support have prevented a broader use of these resources. To solve these issues we have developed a scheduler that deals with task-graphs at run-time, steering its execution in the reconfigurable resources while carrying out both prefetch and replacement techniques that cooperate to hide most of the reconfiguration delays. In our scheduling environment task-graphs are analyzed at design-time to extract useful information. This information is used at run-time to obtain near-optimal schedules, escaping from local-optimum decisions, while only carrying out simple computations. Moreover, we have developed a hardware implementation of the scheduler that applies all the optimization techniques while introducing a delay of only a few clock cycles. In the experiments our scheduler clearly outperforms conventional run-time schedulers based on As-Soon-As-Possible techniques. In addition, our replacement policy, specially designed for reconfigurable systems, achieves almost optimal results both regarding reuse and performance.

DOING MORE WITH SHORT PERIOD DATA: DETERMINING MAGNITUDES FROM CLIPPED AND OVER-RUN SEISMIC DATA AT MOUNT ST. HELENS

How can we calculate earthquake magnitudes when the signal is clipped and over-run? When a volcano is very active, the seismic record may saturate (i.e., the full amplitude of the signal is not recorded) or be over-run (i.e., the end of one event is covered by the start of a new event). The duration, and sometimes the amplitude, of an earthquake signal are necessary for determining event magnitudes; thus, it may be impossible to calculate earthquake magnitudes when a volcano is very active. This problem is most likely to occur at volcanoes with limited networks of short period seismometers. This study outlines two methods for calculating earthquake magnitudes when events are clipped and over-run. The first method entails modeling the shape of earthquake codas as a power law function and extrapolating duration from the decay of the function. The second method draws relations between clipped duration (i.e., the length of time a signal is clipped) and the full duration. These methods allow for magnitudes to be determined within 0.2 to 0.4 units of magnitude. This error is within the range of analyst hand-picks and is within the acceptable limits of uncertainty when quickly quantifying volcanic energy release during volcanic crises. Most importantly, these estimates can be made when data are clipped or over-run. These methods were developed with data from the initial stages of the 2004-2008 eruption at Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is a well-studied volcano with many instruments placed at varying distances from the vent. This fact makes the 2004-2008 eruption a good place to calibrate and refine methodologies that can be applied to volcanoes with limited networks.

Preface to Models@run.time 2016

The complexity of adapting software during runtime has spawned interest in how models can be used to validate, monitor and adapt runtime behaviour. The use of models during runtime extends the use of modeling techniques beyond the design and implementation phases. The goal of this workshop is to look at issues related to developing appropriate modeldriven approaches to managing and monitoring the execution of systems and, also, to allow the system to reason about itself. We aim to continue the discussion of research ideas and proposals from researchers who work in relevant areas such as MDE, software architectures, reflection, and autonomic and self-adaptive systems, and provide a 'state-of-the-art' research assessment expressed in terms of challenges and achievements.