Observing the Uptake of a Language Change Making Strings Immutable

To address security concerns, a major change was introduced to the OCaml language and compiler which made strings immutable and introduced array of bytes as replacement for mutable strings. The change is progressively being pushed so that ultimately strings will be immutable. We have investigated the way OCaml package developers undertook the change. In this paper we report on a preliminary observation of software code from the main OCaml package management system. For this purpose we instrumented versions of the OCaml compiler to get precise information into the uptake of safe strings

Software Engineering with Incomplete Information

Information may be the common currency of the universe, the stuff of creation. As the physicist John Wheeler claimed, we get ``it from bit''. Measuring information, however, is a hard problem. Knowing the meaning of information is a hard problem. Directing the movement of information is a hard problem. This hardness comes when our information about information is incomplete. Yet we need to offer decision making guidance, to the computer or developer, when facing this incompleteness. This work addresses this insufficiency within the universe of software engineering. This thesis addresses the first problem by demonstrating that obtaining the relative magnitude of information flow is computationally less expensive than an exact measurement. We propose ranked information flow, or RIF, where different flows are ordered according to their FlowForward, a new measure designed for ease of ordering. To demonstrate the utility of FlowForward, we introduce information contour maps: heatmapped callgraphs of information flow within software. These maps serve multiple engineering uses, such as security and refactoring. By mixing a type system with RIF, we address the problem of meaning. Information security is a common concern in software engineering. We present OaST, the world's first gradual security type system that replaces dynamic monitoring with information theoretic risk assessment. OaST now contextualises FlowForward within a formally verified framework: secure program components communicate over insecure channels ranked by how much information flows through them. This context helps the developer interpret the flows and enables security policy discovery, adaptation and refactoring. Finally, we introduce safestrings, a type-based system for controlling how the information embedded within a string moves through a program. This takes a structural approach, whereby a string subtype is a more precise, information limited, subset of string, ie a string that contains an email address, rather than anything else

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PDF/A formatsAccess: via World Wide Web東京外国語大学大学院総合国際学研究科博士 (学術) 論文 (2016年4月)Author's thesis (Ph.D)--Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2016博甲第214号Bibliography: p. 183-195Summary in English and Japanese東京外国語大学 (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)博士 (学術

Tinkering, Play-Based Learning and Children’s Funds of Knowledge in the Post-Digital : Responding to the Problem of Technology Integration in ECEC

This thesis addresses the well documented and ongoing problem of integrating digital technologies in Early Childhood Education and Care [ECEC] pedagogy, a problem which has been complicated in recent times by young children’s immersion in the digital as mode of social practice, a phenomenon increasingly referred to as the ‘post-digital’. Current understandings of the post-digital are sometimes described as messy, where it is claimed that borders between the digital and non-digital have now become so blurred that it is difficult to distinguish between where children’s digital and non-digital activities begin and end (Apperley et al., 2016; Jandrić et al., 2019; Pettersen, Arnseth, et al., 2022). The aim of this research was to examine the capacity of tinkering with unplugged technologies as a form of play-based learning to support children’s lived experiences in the post-digital in response to the problem of digital technology integration. This aim recognises that play-based learning is a significant pedagogy in ECEC and that tinkering affords opportunities for such play. The term unplugged technologies in this thesis refers to formerly working digital artefacts which no longer function such as decommissioned computer keyboards, computer mice, computer cases, as well as video gaming controllers. Unplugged technologies offer opportunities for children to engage with technologies that educators may view as more appropriate for learning because they can be hands-on rather than relying only on working digital technologies for learning. This thesis employed Actor-Network Theory [ANT] (Latour, 2005) as a model of social constructivism to work within an ontology that considers the material, non-material and humans equal in terms of capacity to exert agency. This theoretical perspective enabled the constitutive actants of the problem of digital integration to be examined through a methodology of participatory co-design where three educators collaborated with myself-as-researcher to design and implement stages of play-based learning in the form of tinkering with unplugged technologies. The findings suggest that educators identified a number of Learning Outcomes as per Australian national and state curricula arising from children’s tinkering with unplugged technologies. Through data analysis informed by ANT (Latour, 2005), children’s Learning Outcomes were traced to a range of actants which jointly co-constituted manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital. Manifestations were represented by children creating their own versions of technologies in the form of ‘iPad’, ‘computer’ and ‘gamer’. Manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital were examined in terms of their composite actants to illustrate how a variety of actants operate within a network of activity to shape a response to the problem of integration of digital learning opportunities into ECEC. Two actants were found to be more influential than others in the three manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital, these being play-based learning and children’s own funds of knowledge. Understanding the various actants in tinkering networks with unplugged technologies can alert educators to entry points for technology integration in ECEC, thereby providing a more helpful and stable starting point for educators than descriptions of children’s post-digital play as entangled and messy

Learning to write in networked public: children and the delivery of writing online

This investigation explored how three children (together with parents) developed networked publics that were diverse, well-connected, and powerful in the world. It was framed in response to calls in the field to better understand the new literacies young writers develop online and outside of school, and to increase literacy educators’ attention to the role of public audiences in writing and how writing is circulated. Performative case study methodology, ethnographic methods, and digital methods were employed to track and describe the online networks of three children (ages 11-13). These focal children were actively involved with their parents in social media, and had developed widespread networks with shared interests in children’s books and book reviews (Case 1), baseball (Case 2), and helping the homeless (Case 3). The children’s online networks were conceptualized as networked publics, drawing on Warner’s (2002) notion of publics as ongoing discursive relations among strangers, and on Actor-Network Theory’s notion of networks as assemblages of diverse interests that mobilize toward a common goal (Callon, 1986) and that develop stability in relation to ongoing circulations of texts (Latour, 1986; Spinuzzi, 2008). Research questions were framed broadly around the rhetorical canon of delivery [now digital delivery (Porter, 2009)], and were concerned with how writers distributed texts online, how those texts circulated, how the networked publics become more stable and powerful, and what instabilities children and parents had to negotiate in order to accomplish all of this. Data sources included interviews with 15 children and 28 adults, and fieldnotes observations of approximately 1,700 screen-captured webpages and other online artifacts. Findings showed that the young writers and their parents initiated and sustained networked publics through distribution practices that were oriented toward building trust; their texts displayed: interest, appreciation, reliability, service, credibility, and responsiveness. Both grassroots and commercial entities circulated texts in these networks, as they were sources of the ongoing renewal these different groups all needed in order to thrive. Sources of instability included conflicts over standards of writing quality, matters of profit, and the constancy of the demand to generate new interest and writing online. Children and their parents responded to these instabilities by welcoming and negotiating heterogeneous perspectives and partnerships. Implications of the study call for further research and teaching about the art of networked public discourse and digital delivery.Curriculum and Instructio

Transforming scientific research and development in precision agriculture : the case of hyperspectral sensing and imaging : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Agriculture at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until 30 September 2023.

Embargoed until 30 September 2023There has been increasing social and academic debate in recent times surrounding the arrival of agricultural big data. Capturing and responding to real world variability is a defining objective of the rapidly evolving field of precision agriculture (PA). While data have been central to knowledge-making in the field since its inception in the 1980s, research has largely operated in a data-scarce environment, constrained by time-consuming and expensive data collection methods. While there is a rich tradition of studying scientific practice within laboratories in other fields, PA researchers have rarely been the explicit focal point of detailed empirical studies, especially in the laboratory setting. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to new knowledge of the influence of big data technologies through an ethnographic exploration of a working PA laboratory. The researcher spent over 30 months embedded as a participant observer of a small PA laboratory, where researchers work with nascent data rich remote sensing technologies. To address the research question: “How do the characteristics of technological assemblages affect PA research and development?” the ethnographic case study systematically identifies and responds to the challenges and opportunities faced by the science team as they adapt their scientific processes and resources to refine value from a new data ecosystem. The study describes the ontological characteristics of airborne hyperspectral sensing and imaging data employed by PA researchers. Observations of the researchers at work lead to a previously undescribed shift in the science process, where effort moves from the planning and performance of the data collection stage to the data processing and analysis stage. The thesis develops an argument that changing data characteristics are central to this shift in the scientific method researchers are employing to refine knowledge and value from research projects. Importantly, the study reveals that while researchers are working in a rapidly changing environment, there is little reflection on the implications of these changes on the practice of science-making. The study also identifies a disjunction to how science is done in the field, and what is reported. We discover that the practices that provide disciplinary ways of doing science are not established in this field and moments to learn are siloed because of commercial constraints the commercial structures imposed in this case study of contemporary PA research

Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving. The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems. From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments. Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data. Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud). Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication