Knowledge Nodes: the reification of organizational communities. A case study

In our work a new approach, the Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM) approach, is used and organizations are seen as constellations of communities, which \own" local knowledge and exchange it through meaning negotiation coordination processes. In order to reify communities within a DKM system, the concept of Knowledge Node (KN) is used and then applied in a case study: a complex Italian national firm, the Impresa Pizzarotti & C. S.p.A. All communities of practices are un-veiled and rei ed as KNs within a high level architecture of a DKM system. In this paper it is argued that, even if knowledge has to be organized and made useful to the whole organization, there are types of knowledge that must be managed in an autonomous way, and the DKM approach is a good system which to deal with coordination/negotiation processes

Towards Realizability Checking of Contracts using Theories

Virtual integration techniques focus on building architectural models of systems that can be analyzed early in the design cycle to try to lower cost, reduce risk, and improve quality of complex embedded systems. Given appropriate architectural descriptions and compositional reasoning rules, these techniques can be used to prove important safety properties about the architecture prior to system construction. Such proofs build from "leaf-level" assume/guarantee component contracts through architectural layers towards top-level safety properties. The proofs are built upon the premise that each leaf-level component contract is realizable; i.e., it is possible to construct a component such that for any input allowed by the contract assumptions, there is some output value that the component can produce that satisfies the contract guarantees. Without engineering support it is all too easy to write leaf-level components that can't be realized. Realizability checking for propositional contracts has been well-studied for many years, both for component synthesis and checking correctness of temporal logic requirements. However, checking realizability for contracts involving infinite theories is still an open problem. In this paper, we describe a new approach for checking realizability of contracts involving theories and demonstrate its usefulness on several examples.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in NASA Formal Methods (NFM) 201

On the definition of a theoretical concept of an operating system

We dwell on how a definition of a theoretical concept of an operating system, suitable to be incorporated in a mathematical theory of operating systems, could look like. This is considered a valuable preparation for the development of a mathematical theory of operating systems.Comment: 8 page

Neural-Augmented Static Analysis of Android Communication

We address the problem of discovering communication links between applications in the popular Android mobile operating system, an important problem for security and privacy in Android. Any scalable static analysis in this complex setting is bound to produce an excessive amount of false-positives, rendering it impractical. To improve precision, we propose to augment static analysis with a trained neural-network model that estimates the probability that a communication link truly exists. We describe a neural-network architecture that encodes abstractions of communicating objects in two applications and estimates the probability with which a link indeed exists. At the heart of our architecture are type-directed encoders (TDE), a general framework for elegantly constructing encoders of a compound data type by recursively composing encoders for its constituent types. We evaluate our approach on a large corpus of Android applications, and demonstrate that it achieves very high accuracy. Further, we conduct thorough interpretability studies to understand the internals of the learned neural networks.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE