Asynchronous distributed parallelization of mobile network optimization algorithms

It has been years since the introduction of the Dynamic Network Optimization (DNO) concept, yet the DNO development is still at its infant stage, largely due to a lack of breakthrough in minimizing the lengthy optimization runtime. Our previous work, a distributed parallel solution, has achieved a significant speed gain. To cater for the increased optimization complexity pressed by the uptake of smartphones and tablets, however, this paper examines the potential areas for further improvement and presents a novel asynchronous distributed parallel design that minimizes the inter-process communications. The new approach is implemented and applied to real-life projects whose results demonstrate an augmented acceleration of 7.5 times on a 16-core distributed system compared to 6.1 of our previous solution. Moreover, there is no degradation in the optimization outcome. This is a solid sprint towards the realization of DNO.

El surgimiento de HTML5; un nuevo paradigma en los estándares Web

Gracias al crecimiento, expansión y popularización de la World Wide Web, su desarrollo tecnológico tiene una creciente importancia en la sociedad. La simbiosis que protagonizan estos dos entornos ha propiciado una mayor influencia social en las innovaciones de la plataforma y un enfoque mucho más práctico. Nuestro objetivo en este artículo es describir, caracterizar y analizar el surgimiento y difusión del nuevo estándar de hipertexto que rige la Web; HTML5. Al mismo tiempo exploramos este proceso a la luz de varias teorías que aúnan tecnología y sociedad. Dedicamos especial atención a los usuarios de la World Wide Web y al uso genérico que realizan de los Medios Sociales o "Social Media". Sugerimos que el desarrollo de los estándares web está influenciado por el uso cotidiano de este nuevo tipo de tecnologías y aplicaciones. 

Research in practice: Bringing behavioural change from lab to studio

Design influences behaviour, whether it's planned or not. Service Design has a great opportunity to lead the emerging field of design for behavioural change, helping guide and shape experiences to benefit users, service providers and wider society. In this article, presented as an evolving conversation between research and practice, Nick Marsh (EMC Consulting) and Dan Lockton (Brunel University) discuss and explore design patterns for influencing behaviour through Service Design, and how Service Designers and academics can work together for social benefit.

Relating Innovative 2D Ideas into 3D Garments in Terms of Structure, Using ‘Sculptural Form Giving’ as an Intermediate Step in Creation.

This research focuses on finding a fashion design methodology to reliably translate innovative two-dimensional ideas on paper, via a structural design sculpture, into an intermediate model. The author, both as a fashion designer and a researcher, has witnessed the issues which arise, regarding the loss of some of the initial ideas and distortion during the two-dimensional creative sketch to three-dimensional garment transfer process. Therefore, this research is concerned with fashion designers engaged in transferring a two-dimensional sketch through the method ‘sculptural form giving’. This research method applies the ideal model of conceptual sculpture, in the fashion design process, akin to those used in the disciplines of architecture. These parallel design disciplines share similar processes for realizing design ideas. Moreover, this research investigates and formalizes the processes that utilize the measurable space between the garment and the body, to help transfer garment variation and scale. In summation, this research proposition focuses on helping fashion designers to produce a creative method that helps the designer transfer their imaginative concept through intermediate modeling.

FRAMEWORK SYNTHESIS FOR SYMBOLIC EXECUTION OF EVENT-DRIVEN FRAMEWORKS

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique, but it is very challenging to apply to programs built using event-driven frameworks, such as Android. The main reason is that the framework code itself is too complex to symbolically execute. The standard solution is to manually create a framework model that is simpler and more amenable to symbolic execution. However, developing and maintaining such a model by hand is difficult and error-prone. We claim that we can leverage program synthesis to introduce a high-degree of automation to the process of framework modeling. To support this thesis, we present three pieces of work. First, we introduced SymDroid, a symbolic executor for Android. While Android apps are written in Java, they are compiled to Dalvik bytecode format. Instead of analyzing an app’s Java source, which may not be available, or decompiling from Dalvik back to Java, which requires significant engineering effort and introduces yet another source of potential bugs in an analysis, SymDroid works directly on Dalvik bytecode. Second, we introduced Pasket, a new system that takes a first step toward automatically generating Java framework models to support symbolic execution. Pasket takes as input the framework API and tutorial programs that exercise the framework. From these artifacts and Pasket's internal knowledge of design patterns, Pasket synthesizes an executable framework model by instantiating design patterns, such that the behavior of a synthesized model on the tutorial programs matches that of the original framework. Lastly, in order to scale program synthesis to framework models, we devised adaptive concretization, a novel program synthesis algorithm that combines the best of the two major synthesis strategies: symbolic search, i.e., using SAT or SMT solvers, and explicit search, e.g., stochastic enumeration of possible solutions. Adaptive concretization parallelizes multiple sub-synthesis problems by partially concretizing highly influential unknowns in the original synthesis problem. Thanks to adaptive concretization, Pasket can generate a large-scale model, e.g., thousands lines of code. In addition, we have used an Android model synthesized by Pasket and found that the model is sufficient to allow SymDroid to execute a range of apps.

Génération de patrons de conception et restructuration de code vers un patron de conception pour Java

(POO) est l’utilisation de patrons de conception (PC). Un PC est un arrangement caractéristique de classes permettant d’offrir une solution éprouvée, tout en obtenant un code réutilisable et compréhensible. Plusieurs PC sont définis, dont 24 par la GoF [12] et plusieurs autres sont apparus par la suite. Le concept de PC est abstrait ce qui peut amener différentes interprétations. Ces différences peuvent aussi causer une mauvaise implémentation qui peut réduire les avantages d’utiliser ce patron. Ce projet consiste à concevoir un outil facilitant l’utilisation des PC. L’outil Génération et Restructuration de Patrons de Conception(GRPC) permet la génération automatique du squelette d’un patron de conception ainsi que la restructuration d’un code en le transformant structure respectant un PC. La génération et la restructuration automatique permettent d’obtenir un code uniforme et de qualité tout en respectant le patron de conception. La compréhension et la maintenance du code sont ainsi améliorées. GRPC est module d’extension pour l’environnement de développement Eclipse écrit en Java. Le code est conçu pour être facilement compréhensible et extensible. Les deux principaux objectifs de GRPC sont de restructurer (refactoring) une section de code vers l’architecture d’un patron de conception et de générer des squelettes de patrons de conception. Une interface graphique permet de guider l’utilisateur et d’aller chercher toutes les informations importantes pour le fonctionnement du logiciel. Elle permet aussi de configurer les éléments du patron de conception. Pour s’assurer de la possibilité d’effectuer une restructuration, chaque patron est associé avec une ou plusieurs règles qui analysent le code pour détecter la présence d’une structure particulière. Des procédures aident les développeurs à ajouter de nouveaux PC dans GRPC. GRPC fournit des fonctionnalités permettant d’implémenter quelques patrons de conception de la POO définis dans le livre Design Patterns : Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Code pattern analysis of object-oriented programming languages

Code patterns, including programming patterns and design patterns, are good references for programming language feature improvement and software re-engineering. However, to our knowledge, no existing research has attempted to detect code patterns based on code clone detection technology. In this study, we build upon the previous work and propose to detect and analyze code patterns from a collection of open source projects using NiPAT technology. Because design patterns are most closely associated with object-oriented languages, we choose Java and Python projects to conduct our study. The tool we use for detecting patterns is NiPAT, a pattern detecting tool originally developed for the TXL programming language based on the NiCad clone detector. We extend NiPAT for the Java and Python programming languages. Then, we try to identify all the patterns from the pattern report and classify them into several different categories. In the end of the study, we analyze all the patterns and compare the differences between Java and Python patterns.

Identificación de las relaciones reales y posibles entre la administración basada en modelos, la ciencia computacional de la organización y la ingeniería emergente en el contexto de la gestión organizacional

Las teorías administrativas se han basado, casi sin excepción, en los fundamentos y los modelos de la ciencia clásica (particularmente, en los modelos de la física newtoniana). Sin embargo, las organizaciones actualmente se enfrentan a un mundo globalizado, plagado de información (y no necesariamente conocimiento), hiperconectado, dinámico y cargado de incertidumbre, por lo que muchas de las teorías pueden mostrar limitaciones para las organizaciones. Y quizá no por la estructura, la lógica o el alcance de las mismas, sino por la falta de criterios que justifiquen su aplicación. En muchos casos, las organizaciones siguen utilizando la intuición, las suposiciones y las verdades a medias en la toma de decisiones. Este panorama pone de manifiesto dos hechos: de un lado, la necesidad de buscar un método que permita comprender las situaciones de cada organización para apoyar la toma de decisiones. De otro lado, la necesidad de potenciar la intuición con modelos y técnicas no tradicionales (usualmente provenientes o inspiradas por la ingeniería). Este trabajo busca anticipar los pilares de un posible método que permita apoyar la toma de decisiones por medio de la simulación de modelos computacionales, utilizando las posibles interacciones entre: la administración basada en modelos, la ciencia computacional de la organización y la ingeniería emergente.

Ethics in the flesh: formalizing moral values in embodied cognition

Values are beliefs or principles that are deemed significant or desirable within a specific society or culture, serving as the fundamental underpinnings for ethical and socio-behavioral norms. The objective of this research is to explore the domain encompassing moral, cultural, and individual values. To achieve this, we employ an ontological approach to formally represent the semantic relations within the value domain. The theoretical framework employed adopts Fillmore’s frame semantics, treating values as semantic frames. A value situation is thus characterized by the co-occurrence of specific semantic roles fulfilled within a given event or circumstance. Given the intricate semantics of values as abstract entities with high social capital, our investigation extends to two interconnected domains. The first domain is embodied cognition, specifically image schemas, which are cognitive patterns derived from sensorimotor experiences that shape our conceptualization of entities in the world. The second domain pertains to emotions, which are inherently intertwined with the realm of values. Consequently, our approach endeavors to formalize the semantics of values within an embodied cognition framework, recognizing values as emotional-laden semantic frames. The primary ontologies proposed in this work are: (i) ValueNet, an ontology network dedicated to the domain of values; (ii) ISAAC, the Image Schema Abstraction And Cognition ontology; and (iii) EmoNet, an ontology for theories of emotions. The knowledge formalization adheres to established modeling practices, including the reuse of semantic web resources such as WordNet, VerbNet, FrameNet, DBpedia, and alignment to foundational ontologies like DOLCE, as well as the utilization of Ontology Design Patterns. These ontological resources are operationalized through the development of a fully explainable frame-based detector capable of identifying values, emotions, and image schemas generating knowledge graphs from from natural language, leveraging the semantic dependencies of a sentence, and allowing non trivial higher layer knowledge inferences.

Integrating structural and input design of a 2-DOF high-speed parallel manipulator: A flexible model-based approach

This paper discusses the integrated design of parallel manipulators, which exhibit varying dynamics. This characteristic affects the machine stability and performance. The design methodology consists of four main steps: (i) the system modeling using flexible multibody technique, (ii) the synthesis of reduced-order models suitable for control design, (iii) the systematic flexible model-based input signal design, and (iv) the evaluation of some possible machine designs. The novelty in this methodology is to take structural flexibilities into consideration during the input signal design; therefore, enhancing the standard design process which mainly considers rigid bodies dynamics. The potential of the proposed strategy is exploited for the design evaluation of a two degree-of-freedom high-speed parallel manipulator. The results are experimentally validated. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Bifurcation in growth patterns for arrays of parallel Griffith, edge and sliding cracks

This paper presents the recent finding by Muhlhaus et al [1] that bifurcation of crack growth patterns exists for arrays of two-dimensional cracks. This bifurcation is a result of the nonlinear effect due to crack interaction, which is, in the present analysis, approximated by the dipole asymptotic or pseudo-traction method. The nonlinear parameter for the problem is the crack length/ spacing ratio lambda = a/h. For parallel and edge crack arrays under far field tension, uniform crack growth patterns (all cracks having same size) yield to nonuniform crack growth patterns (i.e. bifurcation) if lambda is larger than a critical value lambda(cr) (note that such bifurcation is not found for collinear crack arrays). For parallel and edge crack arrays respectively, the value of lambda(cr) decreases monotonically from (2/9)(1/2) and (2/15.096)(1/2) for arrays of 2 cracks, to (2/3)(1/2)/pi and (2/5.032)(1/2)/pi for infinite arrays of cracks. The critical parameter lambda(cr) is calculated numerically for arrays of up to 100 cracks, whilst discrete Fourier transform is used to obtain the exact solution of lambda(cr) for infinite crack arrays. For geomaterials, bifurcation can also occurs when array of sliding cracks are under compression.

An evolutionary approach to the use of Petri net based models: from parallel controllers to HW/SW co-design

"A workshop within the 19th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets - ICATPN’1998"

Collage, a Collaborative Learning Design Editor Based on Patterns

This paper introduces Collage, a high-level IMS-LD compliant authoring tool that is specialized for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). Nowadays CSCL is a key trend in elearning since it highlights the importance of social interactions as an essential element of learning. CSCL is an interdisciplinary domain, which demands participatory design techniques that allow teachers to get directly involved in design activities. Developing CSCL designs using LD is a difficult task for teachers since LD is a complex technical specification and modelling collaborative characteristics can be tricky. Collage helps teachers in the process of creating their own potentially effective collaborative Learning Designs by reusing and customizing patterns, according to the requirements of a particular learning situation. These patterns, called Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFPs), represent best practices that are repetitively used by practitioners when structuring the flow of (collaborative) learning activities. An example of an LD that can be created using Collage is illustrated in the paper. Preliminary evaluation results show that teachers, with experience in CL but without LD knowledge, can successfully design real collaborative learning experiences using Collage.