Multimedia Prototyping for Early-Stage Startups Endurance: Stage for New Normal?

Multimedia prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity and interactivity could be a powerful tool for early stage startups to validate their business model assumptions especially product value proposition. This grounds on the prototype"s ability to enhance user experience (UX) thereby making their feedback more accurate and reliable. This article reports practical experiences with consultancy projects involving European early stage startups focusing on the cocreation process of value proposition innovation amid pandemic. This includes the challenges faced in interacting with onsite customers, multimedia prototyping as a tool to foster remote customer involvement, and different challenges involved in prototype-driven cocreation like intellectual property rights, federal laws, motivation rewards, tool selection, and balancing customer expectations. The involvement of remote customers is fostered by the combination of varying degrees of fidelity and interactivity. Higher fidelity and interactivity prototypes are more applicable when a startup has a continuously increasing customer base, better market understanding, and customers having better product understanding. The practical experience indicates that resource-constrained startups could be greatly benefitted from the adoption of multimedia prototyping in their market research. The multimedia prototype development technologies could be easily adopted in startup business practices owing to zero purchase cost, ease of use, and usefulness. Their adoption is expected to become a norm for the 'new normal” as the role of multimedia prototypes is trivial for lean startups enhancing the value of design thinking as well as customer development processes. However, there is an urgent need to define a systematic process for the selection of prototype development tools meeting the business needs and their seamless integration in startup business practices, thereby leveraging across the wider spectrum of prototyping tools marke

Inter-Parameter Dependencies in Real-World Web APIs: The IDEA Dataset

Context: Web services often impose constraints that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service, so-called inter-parameter dependencies. Current API design languages like the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) provide no support for their formal description, making it hardly possible to automatically discover and interact with services without human intervention. Researchers and practitioners are openly requesting support for modelling and validating inter-parameter dependencies in web APIs, but this is not possible unless we share a deep understanding of how these dependencies emerge in practice. Objective: We aim to provide evidence on how inter-parameter dependencies are used in real-world web APIs. This evidence will hopefully serve as a basis for future proposals for modelling and analysing inter-parameter dependencies and will open a new range of research possibilities in areas related to service-oriented computing. Method: The documentation of 2,557 operations from 40 real-world web APIs was reviewed and carefully analysed, and 633 inter-parameter dependencies were found and classified into seven different types. Results: A machine-readable dataset was generated. This dataset helps understand the dimension and recurrence of inter-parameter dependencies in web APIs, as well as their taxonomy.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación HORATIO (RTI2018-101204–B–C21)Junta de Andalucía APOLO (US-1264651)Junta de Andalucía EKIPMENTPLUS (P18–FR–2895)Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional FPU17/0407

An Effective Precision Enhancement Approach to Estimate Software Development Cost: Nature Inspired Way

In recent years, many researchers and practitioners have explored the possibility of estimating effort and cost using nature inspired algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevance of bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA) for optimizing the COCOMO model coefficients to estimate the software development time. The goal of this research is to minimize the fitness function value which is the measure of the deflection of estimated time from the real time taken in the software development. Results of the experimental study conducted shows that the proposed approach produces promising results in comparison to COCOMO model and other existing approaches listed in literature. Results show that COCOMO model and other existing approaches are less accurate in comparison to BFOA with MMRE as 0.16 and PRED(25) as 0.9. Thus BFOA can help software industry in predicting accurate and reliable values for planning and maintenance of software project

Evaluating Testing Techniques in Highly-Configurable Systems: The Drupal Dataset

Context: Software applications exposing a high ability to be extended, changed or configured are usually referred to as Highly-Configurable Systems (HCSs). Testing techniques for HCSs aim at finding effective but manageable test suites that lead to the early detection of faults. Evaluating the effectiveness of these techniques in realistic environments is a must, but also a challenge due to the lack of HCSs with available code, configuration models and fault reports. Aim: In this chapter, we present the Drupal dataset, a collection of real-world data collected from the popular open-source Drupal framework. This dataset allows the assessment of variability testing techniques with real data of an HCS. Method: We collected extensive non-functional data from the Drupal Git repository and the Drupal website, including code changes in different versions of Drupal modules (e.g., 557 commits in Drupal v7.22) and number of tests and assertions in the modules (e.g., 352 and 24,152, respectively). The faults found in different versions of Drupal modules were also gathered from the Drupal bug tracking system (e.g., 3,392 faults in Drupal v7.23). Additionally, we provided the Drupal feature model as a representation of the framework configurability, with more than 2,000 millions of different Drupal configurations; one of the largest attributed feature models published so far. With 150 citations since its publication, the Drupal dataset has become a helpful tool to researchers and practitioners to conduct more realistic experiments and evaluations of HCSs.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades Horatio RTI2018-101204-B-C21Junta de Andalucía APOLO (US-1264651)Junta de Andalucía EKIPMENTPLUS (P18–FR–2895

A Family of Experiments to Evaluate the Effects of Mindfulness on Software Engineering Students: The MetaMind Dataset

Context: Software Engineering students are often excellent developers although they may occasionally encounter difficulties with certain tasks such as conceptual modelling, in which mental clarity plays an essential role. With several years of experience in practising mindfulness (a meditation technique that calm the mind to see with clarity), we hypothesise that several weeks of continued mindfulness practise may increase the performance of students regarding conceptual modelling since the proven benefits of mindfulness include increased concentration and mental clarity. In order to ascertain this hypothesis, a family of controlled experiments, involving 130 students, has been carried out at the University of Seville over three consecutive academic years. Subsequent to the analysis of the individual experiments, a meta—analysis was conducted. Aim: This chapter helps understand how various datasets have been generated and traces their evolution across the family of experiments and the resulting meta—analysis. Not only does the process include the integration of datasets into a single target dataset with the complete set of data, but it also improves the structure of the dataset and adapts it to several statistical analysis tools. Method: Data collection was manually carried out during the individual experiments by means of gathering the scores of the students attained in conceptual modelling exercises. In order to obtain the complete but also simple dataset of the family of experiments, certain dataset columns were necessarily selected and renamed. New relevant information was also added to form a conclusive meta—analysis. The dataset was adapted to the type and format of SPSS for the execution of a further analysis, complementary to the main study in R. The MetaMind dataset is the set of datasets involved in the present research. The MetaMind dataset has become a helpful resource for the independent reproducibility of the results, to ascertain the evolution of the process across a family of experiments, and to enable external replications of the controlled experiment.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación HORATIO (RTI2018-101204–B–C21)Junta de Andalucía APOLO (US-1264651)Junta de Andalucía EKIPMENTPLUS (P18–FR–2895

Sustainable Network by Enhancing Attribute-Based Selection Mechanism Using Lagrange Interpolation

The security framework in Ad-hoc Networks (ANET) continues to attract the attention of researchers, although significant work has been accomplished already. Researchers in the last couple of years have shown quite an improvement in Identity Dependent Cryptography (IDC). Security in ANET is hard to attain due to the vulnerability of links (Wireless). IDC encompasses Polynomial Interpolations (PI) such as Lagrange, curve-fitting, and spline to provide security by implementing Integrated Key Management (IKM). The PI structure trusts all the available nodes in the network and randomly picks nodes for the security key generation. This paper presents a solution to the trust issues raised in Lagrange’s-PI (LI) utilizing an artificial neural network and attribute-based tree structure. The proposed structure not only improves the trust factor but also enhances the accuracy measures of LI to provide a sustainable network system. Throughput, PDR, noise, and latency have been increased by 47%, 50%, 34%, and 30%, respectively, by using LI and incorporating the aforementioned techniques

Nanocarriers: more than tour de force for thymoquinone

Introduction: Thymoquinone (TQ), 2-isopropyl-5-methylbenzo-1, 4-quinone, the main active constituent of Nigella sativa (NS) plant, has been proven to be of great therapeutic aid in various in vitro and in vivo conditions. Despite the promising therapeutic activities of TQ, this molecule is not yet in the clinical trials, restricted by its poor biopharmaceutical properties including photo-instability.Area covered: This review compiles the different types of polymeric and lipidic nanocarriers (NCs), encapsulating TQ for their improved oral bioavailability, and augmented in vitro and in vivo efficacy, evidenced on various pathologies. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive overview of TQ in relation to its encapsulation approaches advancing the delivery and improving the efficacy of TQ.Expert opinion: TQ was first identified in the essential oil of Nigella sativa L. black seed. TQ has not been used in formulations because it is a highly hydrophobic drug having poor aqueous solubility. To deal with the poor physicochemical problems associated with TQ, various NCs encapsulating TQ have been tried in the past. Nevertheless, these NCs could be impending in bringing forth this potential molecule to clinical reality. This will also be beneficial for a large research community including pharmaceutical & biological sciences and translational researchers

Azelaic acid and Melaleuca alternifolia essential oil co-loaded vesicular carrier for combinational therapy of acne

Aim: Azelaic acid (AzA), a comedolytic, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory anti-melanogenic agent, prescribed against acne vulgaris is safe on skin. Its combination with another widely used anti-acne agent, tea tree oil (EO) whose delivery is limited by volatility, instability and lipophilicity constraints was attempted. Method: Solvent injection was used to prepare AzA-EO integrated ethosomes. Result: Ethosomes were transformed into carbopol hydrogel, which exhibited pseudo-plastic properties with appreciable firmness, work of shear, stickiness and work of adhesion. The hydrogel showed better permeation and retention characteristics vis-a-vis commercial formulation (AzidermTM), when evaluated in Wistar rat skin. Further, ethosome hydrogel composite was better tolerated with no side effects. Conclusion: The findings suggests that the aforementioned strategy could be a potential treatment used for acne management. </jats:p

Metabolic Syndrome: a challenging health Issue in highly urbanized Union Territory of north India

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>1. To determine the prevalence of Metabolic Syndrome in adults aged 18 years and above in Chandigarh, India. 2. To determine the socio-demographic factors associated with MS. 3. To determine the agreement between IDF (International Diabetes federation definition) and ATP-III (National Cholesterol Education Program Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults criteria).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In a community based cross-sectional study, total 605 subjects aged 18 yrs and above were studied using multistage random sampling.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Prevalence of Metabolic Syndrome was estimated by using IDF and ATP-III criteria. By IDF, Metabolic Syndrome was found in 287 (47.4%) subjects and it was more prevalent among females 171 (59.6%) as compared to males 116 (40.4%). By applying ATP-III overall prevalence was less i.e. 233 (38.5%) but again its prevalence was more among females 141 (44.8%) than males 116 (39.5%). Higher socioeconomic status, sedentary occupation and high body mass index were significantly associated with Metabolic Syndrome.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Metabolic Syndrome is a major health problem in the region and proper emphasis should be given on its prevention and control.</p