Challenges to the Patent System in face of Open Hardware

Dannie Jost gave a presentation outlining some of the challenges to the patent system presented by open source hardware at the "Open Knowledge Festival", under the topic stream treating open design, hardware, manufacturing and making; September 19, 2012; Helsinki, Finland. This topic stream generated considerable discussion, and it serves to educate an audience that is usually very adverse to patents and copyright, and helps the researcher understand the issuing conflicts surrounding emerging technologies, in particular digital technologies, and the maker movement (digitally enabled).

Approaches and Strategy for Cancer Research and Surveillance Data: Integration, Information Pipeline, Data Models, and Informatics Opportunities

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-04

Fifty shades of innovation – from open toward user, and open collaborative forms of innovation – an overview

Starting from the Schumpeterian producer-driven understanding of innovation, followed by user-generated solutions and understanding of collaborative forms of co-creation, scholars investigated the drivers and the nature of interactions underpinning success in various ways. Innovation literature has gone a long way, where open innovation has attracted researchers to investigate problems like compatibilities of external resources, networks of innovation, or open source collaboration. Openness itself has gained various shades in the different strands of literature. In this paper the author provides with an overview and a draft evaluation of the different models of open innovation, illustrated with some empirical findings from various fields drawn from the literature. She points to the relevance of transaction costs affecting viable forms of (open) innovation strategies of firms, and the importance to define the locus of innovation for further analyses of different firm and interaction level formations.

VLSI testing and characterization system for micro electro-mechanical (MEM) sensors

The purpose of this investigation was to develop and implement a general purpose VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) Test Module based on a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) system to verify the mechanical behavior and performance of MEM sensors, with associated corrective capabilities; and to make use of the evolving System-C, a new open-source HDL (Hardware Description Language), for the design of the FPGA functional units. System-C is becoming widely accepted as a platform for modeling, simulating and implementing systems consisting of both hardware and software components. In this investigation, a Dual-Axis Accelerometer (ADXL202E) and a Temperature Sensor (TMP03) were used for the test module verification. Results of the test module measurement were analyzed for repeatability and reliability, and then compared to the sensor datasheet. Further study ideas were identified based on the study and results analysis. ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) design concepts were also being pursued.

Análise de tensões integrada a sistema de engenharia reversa para projeto e confecção de próteses

This work consists of the conception, developing and implementation of a Computational Routine CAE which has algorithms suitable for the tension and deformation analysis. The system was integrated to an academic software named as OrtoCAD. The expansion algorithms for the interface CAE genereated by this work were developed in FORTRAN with the objective of increase the applications of two former works of PPGEM-UFRN: project and fabrication of a Electromechanincal reader and Software OrtoCAD. The software OrtoCAD is an interface that, orinally, includes the visualization of prothetic cartridges from the data obtained from a electromechanical reader (LEM). The LEM is basically a tridimensional scanner based on reverse engineering. First, the geometry of a residual limb (i.e., the remaining part of an amputee leg wherein the prothesis is fixed) is obtained from the data generated by LEM by the use of Reverse Engineering concepts. The proposed core FEA uses the Shell's Theory where a 2D surface is generated from a 3D piece form OrtoCAD. The shell's analysis program uses the well-known Finite Elements Method to describe the geometry and the behavior of the material. The program is based square-based Lagragean elements of nine nodes and displacement field of higher order to a better description of the tension field in the thickness. As a result, the new FEA routine provide excellent advantages by providing new features to OrtoCAD: independency of high cost commercial softwares; new routines were added to the OrtoCAD library for more realistic problems by using criteria of fault engineering of composites materials; enhanced the performance of the FEA analysis by using a specific grid element for a higher number of nodes; and finally, it has the advantage of open-source project and offering customized intrinsic versatility and wide possibilities of editing and/or optimization that may be necessary in the future

Uma interface para o controle de robôs móveis por intermédio de gestos

The main objective of this work was to enable the recognition of human gestures through the development of a computer program. The program created captures the gestures executed by the user through a camera attached to the computer and sends it to the robot command referring to the gesture. They were interpreted in total ve gestures made by human hand. The software (developed in C ++) widely used the computer vision concepts and open source library OpenCV that directly impact the overall e ciency of the control of mobile robots. The computer vision concepts take into account the use of lters to smooth/blur the image noise reduction, color space to better suit the developer's desktop as well as useful information for manipulating digital images. The OpenCV library was essential in creating the project because it was possible to use various functions/procedures for complete control lters, image borders, image area, the geometric center of borders, exchange of color spaces, convex hull and convexity defect, plus all the necessary means for the characterization of imaged features. During the development of the software was the appearance of several problems, as false positives (noise), underperforming the insertion of various lters with sizes oversized masks, as well as problems arising from the choice of color space for processing human skin tones. However, after the development of seven versions of the control software, it was possible to minimize the occurrence of false positives due to a better use of lters combined with a well-dimensioned mask size (tested at run time) all associated with a programming logic that has been perfected over the construction of the seven versions. After all the development is managed software that met the established requirements. After the completion of the control software, it was observed that the overall e ectiveness of the various programs, highlighting in particular the V programs: 84.75 %, with VI: 93.00 % and VII with: 94.67 % showed that the nal program performed well in interpreting gestures, proving that it was possible the mobile robot control through human gestures without the need for external accessories to give it a better mobility and cost savings for maintain such a system. The great merit of the program was to assist capacity in demystifying the man set/machine therefore uses an easy and intuitive interface for control of mobile robots. Another important feature observed is that to control the mobile robot is not necessary to be close to the same, as to control the equipment is necessary to receive only the address that the Robotino passes to the program via network or Wi-Fi.

Architettura cloud per lo sviluppo multi-piattaforma di Sistemi Operativi: Principi generali

Vengono analizzate le strategie di rilascio delle principali Distribuzioni Linux e i metodi per la compilazione automatizzata del software. Si propone quindi una nuova metodologia sia per il rilascio di media installabili e sia per la pacchettizzazione. Sfruttando le tecnologie del campo DevOps, si introduce quindi un alto grado di scalabilità anche in ambienti Cloud, grazie anche alla riproducibilità di ogni componente dell'infrastruttura proposta. Vedremo quindi come questo approccio aumenta l'automatizzazione nei cicli produttivi per la realizzazione della Distribuzione Sabayon Linux e per la definizione di un'infrastruttura automatizzata attualmente in production.

Rilievo fotogrammetrico da drone per la generazione di modelli termici di porzioni di territorio

In questo elaborato viene sperimentato un iter processuale che consenta di utilizzare i sensori termici affiancati a fotocamere digitale in ambito fotogrammetrico al fine di ottenere prodotto dal quale sono estrapolabili informazioni geometriche e termiche dell’oggetto di studio. Il rilievo fotogrammetrico è stato svolto mediante l’utilizzo di un drone con equipaggiamento multisensoriale, termico e digitale, su una porzione di territorio soggetto ad anomalie termiche nei pressi di Medolla (MO). Per l’analisi termica e geometrica sono stati posizionati sul campo 5 target termici di cui ne sono state misurate le coordinate per la georeferenziazione delle nuvole dense di punti e la temperatura. In particolare sono state eseguite due riprese aeree dalle quali sono stati estratti i frame necessari per i processi di restituzione fotogrammetrica. Le immagini sono state sottoposte ad una fase di trattamento che ha prodotto immagini rettificate prive di delle distorsioni impresse dall’obbiettivo. Per la creazione degli elaborati vettoriali e raster a colori e termici sono stati impiegati inizialmente software di fotogrammetria digitale in grado di fornire scene tridimensionali georeferenziate dell’oggetto. Sono state sviluppate sia in un ambiente open-source, sia sfruttando programmi commerciali. Le nuvole dense sono state successivamente trattate su una piattaforma gratuita ad interfaccia grafica. In questo modo è stato possibile effettuare dei confronti tra i diversi prodotti e valutare le potenzialità dei software stessi. Viene mostrato come creare un modello tridimensionale, contenente sia informazioni geometriche che informazioni termiche, partendo dalla nuvola termica e da quella a colori. Entrambe georeferenziate utilizzando gli stessi punti fotogrammetrici d’appoggio. Infine i prodotti ottenuti sono stati analizzati in un ambiente GIS realizzando sovrapposizioni grafiche, confronti numerici, interpolazioni, sezioni e profili.

Alternative per la configurazione dell'infrastruttura di rete in piattaforme Openstack

In questo scritto si analizzeranno alcune alternative nella configurazione di rete della piattaforma di cloud computing open source OpenStack. Verrà mostrata un’ installazione in ambiente di laboratorio di un cluster completo basato sulla release Liberty di Openstack, per poi modificarne la componente dedicata al Networking in modo da sfruttare diversi plugin e diversi protocolli. Si osserverà il traffico generato all’interno e verso l’esterno del sistema Openstack in modo da avere un quadro generale del comportamento dell’infrastruttura.

Supporting Run-time Monitoring of UML-RT through Customizable Monitoring Configurations in PapyrusRT

Model Driven Engineering uses the principle that code can automatically be generated from software models which would potentially save time and cost of development. By this methodology, a systems structure and behaviour can be expressed in more abstract, high level terms without some of the accidental complexity that the use of a general purpose language can bring. Models are the actual implementation of the system unlike in traditional software development where models are often used for documentation purposes only. However once the code is generated from the model, testing and debugging activities tend to happen on the code level and the model is not updated. We believe that monitoring on the model level could potentially facilitate quality assurance activities as the errors are detected in the early phase of development. In this thesis, we create a Monitoring Configuration for an open source model driven engineering tool called PapyrusRT in Eclipse. We support the run-time monitoring of UML-RT elements with a tracing tool called LTTng. We annotate the model with monitoring information to be used by the code generator for adding tracepoint statements for the corresponding elements. We provide the option of a timing specification to discover latency errors on the model. We validate the results by creating and tracing real time models in PapyrusRT.

IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF DATABASE-CENTRIC APPLICATIONS THROUGH PROGRAM ANALYSIS

Modern software applications are becoming more dependent on database management systems (DBMSs). DBMSs are usually used as black boxes by software developers. For example, Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) is one of the most popular database abstraction approaches that developers use nowadays. Using ORM, objects in Object-Oriented languages are mapped to records in the database, and object manipulations are automatically translated to SQL queries. As a result of such conceptual abstraction, developers do not need deep knowledge of databases; however, all too often this abstraction leads to inefficient and incorrect database access code. Thus, this thesis proposes a series of approaches to improve the performance of database-centric software applications that are implemented using ORM. Our approaches focus on troubleshooting and detecting inefficient (i.e., performance problems) database accesses in the source code, and we rank the detected problems based on their severity. We first conduct an empirical study on the maintenance of ORM code in both open source and industrial applications. We find that ORM performance-related configurations are rarely tuned in practice, and there is a need for tools that can help improve/tune the performance of ORM-based applications. Thus, we propose approaches along two dimensions to help developers improve the performance of ORM-based applications: 1) helping developers write more performant ORM code; and 2) helping developers configure ORM configurations. To provide tooling support to developers, we first propose static analysis approaches to detect performance anti-patterns in the source code. We automatically rank the detected anti-pattern instances according to their performance impacts. Our study finds that by resolving the detected anti-patterns, the application performance can be improved by 34% on average. We then discuss our experience and lessons learned when integrating our anti-pattern detection tool into industrial practice. We hope our experience can help improve the industrial adoption of future research tools. However, as static analysis approaches are prone to false positives and lack runtime information, we also propose dynamic analysis approaches to further help developers improve the performance of their database access code. We propose automated approaches to detect redundant data access anti-patterns in the database access code, and our study finds that resolving such redundant data access anti-patterns can improve application performance by an average of 17%. Finally, we propose an automated approach to tune performance-related ORM configurations using both static and dynamic analysis. Our study shows that our approach can help improve application throughput by 27--138%. Through our case studies on real-world applications, we show that all of our proposed approaches can provide valuable support to developers and help improve application performance significantly.

Performatividad y arte computacional. Hacia una “DIY society”

El artículo analiza la figura del prosumidor desde los estudios visuales a partir de la combinación de la teoría de los actos de habla y los nuevos medios. El objetivo es evaluar si la distinción entre productores y consumidores, estrategias y tácticas de Michel de Certeau continúa siendo operativa en las interfaces gráficas de la cultura global de la información de Scott Lash. Para ello distingue dos tipos de performatividad de los actos de habla: la performatividad top-down del software, y la bottom-up de los juegos del lenguaje y las formas de vida. Estos tipos se aplican al análisis del discurso de los eslóganes que aparecen en los sitios web de las iniciativas “open” y de economía colaborativa, ya que las primeras están dedicadas a la producción de bienes inmateriales y las segundas a la producción de bienes materiales. El desarrollo muestra cómo los dos tipos de performatividad transforman el análisis textual de los estudios literarios y cinematográficos en una metodología capaz de investigar acciones materiales, humanas y no humanas. Las conclusiones describen el surgimiento de nuevas convenciones narrativas de poder y control ajenas a la ficción que apuntan a una “DIY society”.

DojoIBL

Available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL3)

Machine learning classification of surgical pathology reports and chunk recognition for information extraction noise reduction

Background and aims: Machine learning techniques for the text mining of cancer-related clinical documents have not been sufficiently explored. Here some techniques are presented for the pre-processing of free-text breast cancer pathology reports, with the aim of facilitating the extraction of information relevant to cancer staging.

Materials and methods: The first technique was implemented using the freely available software RapidMiner to classify the reports according to their general layout: ‘semi-structured’ and ‘unstructured’. The second technique was developed using the open source language engineering framework GATE and aimed at the prediction of chunks of the report text containing information pertaining to the cancer morphology, the tumour size, its hormone receptor status and the number of positive nodes. The classifiers were trained and tested respectively on sets of 635 and 163 manually classified or annotated reports, from the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry.

Results: The best result of 99.4% accuracy – which included only one semi-structured report predicted as unstructured – was produced by the layout classifier with the k nearest algorithm, using the binary term occurrence word vector type with stopword filter and pruning. For chunk recognition, the best results were found using the PAUM algorithm with the same parameters for all cases, except for the prediction of chunks containing cancer morphology. For semi-structured reports the performance ranged from 0.97 to 0.94 and from 0.92 to 0.83 in precision and recall, while for unstructured reports performance ranged from 0.91 to 0.64 and from 0.68 to 0.41 in precision and recall. Poor results were found when the classifier was trained on semi-structured reports but tested on unstructured.

Conclusions: These results show that it is possible and beneficial to predict the layout of reports and that the accuracy of prediction of which segments of a report may contain certain information is sensitive to the report layout and the type of information sought.

Licenshantering inom webbprojekt : Hur medvetna är företag om tredjepartslicenser?

Teknikutvecklingen går snabbt framåt, och idag finns det ett stort behov av att använda andra utvecklares kod för att hänga med i det höga tempot. De kallas samlat för ramverk eller bibliotek, och hjälper utvecklaren att på ett effektivare sätt ta sig från start till mål utan att behöva skriva all programmeringskod själv. Dessa tredjepartslösningar är nästintill alltid bundna till ett licensavtal, vars restriktioner och tillåtelser utvecklaren måste följa vid nyttjandet. I denna studie har vi undersökt hur medvetenheten ser ut kring de licenser som är bundna till dessa tredjepartslösningar. Då det framkom i vår förstudie att vårt fall hade en relativt låg medvetenhet har vi även valt att titta på hur medvetenheten kan ökas. För att genomföra detta har vi valt att intervjua utvecklare och projektledare på ett konsultföretag. Vi undersökte även vilka faktorer som är viktiga för att höja medvetenheten samt vilka konsekvenser som kunde uppkomma vid bristfällande licenshantering. Vi upptäckte att det var en bristfällig kunskap om tredjepartslicenser på det studerade företaget, och hur de följde de licensrestriktioner som fanns för respektive licens. För att höja medvetenheten föreslår vi hjälpmedel i form av en automatiserad centraliserad lösning, lathundar för en enklare överblick av licensavtalen och hur användning av redan färdiga programvaror kan hjälpa till att öka medvetenheten och hanteringen av licenser.