Emisari: a management information system designed to aid and involve people

The EMISARI System described in this paper represents a major departure from conventional MIS design. It is oriented not toward data per se, but rather toward activities of the people who generate and use the data. Thus it provides not merely for reporting up the chain of command, but also for dissemination of policy guidance and reference material down the chain, and for lateral communication among all users. It places a premium upon flexibility, to permit rapid system modifications in response to changes in user functions and needs and it offers a greatly simplified operation, to avoid any necessity for extensive user training or complex operation manuals. The overall approach may be viewed as a greatly modernized version of the classic telephone party line, using a computer to organize, selectively sort, and store-and-forward a constant flow of statistics, messages, estimates, reference materials, guidelines, notices, and other informational accountrements of a modern management operation

Genetic Improvement of Software: From Program Landscapes to the Automatic Improvement of a Live System

In today’s technology driven society, software is becoming increasingly important in more areas of our lives. The domain of software extends beyond the obvious domain of computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Smart devices and the internet-of-things have inspired the integra- tion of digital and computational technology into objects that some of us would never have guessed could be possible or even necessary. Fridges and freezers connected to social media sites, a toaster activated with a mobile phone, physical buttons for shopping, and verbally asking smart speakers to order a meal to be delivered. This is the world we live in and it is an exciting time for software engineers and computer scientists. The sheer volume of code that is currently in use has long since outgrown beyond the point of any hope for proper manual maintenance. The rate of which mobile application stores such as Google’s and Apple’s have expanded is astounding. The research presented here aims to shed a light on an emerging field of research, called Genetic Improvement ( GI ) of software. It is a methodology to change program code to improve existing software. This thesis details a framework for GI that is then applied to explore fitness landscape of bug fixing Python software, reduce execution time in a C ++ program, and integrated into a live system. We show that software is generally not fragile and although fitness landscapes for GI are flat they are not impossible to search in. This conclusion applies equally to bug fixing in small programs as well as execution time improvements. The framework’s application is shown to be transportable between programming languages with minimal effort. Additionally, it can be easily integrated into a system that runs a live web service. The work within this thesis was funded by EPSRC grant EP/J017515/1 through the DAASE project

The security of application systems through menu-driven interfaces for the system manager and the user

Software development costs.continue to demand the biggest of the total system cost and this is particularly noticeable at the small end of the market where microprocessor-based systems have considerably reduced the hardware cost element. In itself, there is nothing absolutely wrong or even surprising in the situation where labour intensive programming turns out to be more expensive than any other aspect of the system. But where there is a possibility of reducing any major cost factor in any manufactured item then it will always be sound commercial practice to consider it. [Continues.

A Method for Evaluating Aircraft Electric Power System Sizing and Failure Resiliency

With the More Electric Aircraft paradigm, commercial commuter aircraft are increasing the size and complexity of electrical power systems by increasing the number of electrical loads. With this increase in complexity comes a need to analyze electrical power systems using new tools. The Hybrid Power System Optimizer (HyPSO) developed by Airbus SAS is a simulator designed to analyze new aircraft power systems. This thesis project will first provide a method to assess the reliability of complex aircraft electrical power systems before and after failure and reconfiguration events. Next, an add-on to HyPSO is developed to integrate the previously developed reliability calculations. Proof-of-concepts including new data visualizations are performed and provided

Robust Agent Control of an Autonomous Robot with Many Sensors and Actuators

This thesis presents methods for implementing robust hexpod locomotion on an autonomous robot with many sensors and actuators. The controller is based on the Subsumption Architecture and is fully distributed over approximately 1500 simple, concurrent processes. The robot, Hannibal, weighs approximately 6 pounds and is equipped with over 100 physical sensors, 19 degrees of freedom, and 8 on board computers. We investigate the following topics in depth: distributed control of a complex robot, insect-inspired locomotion control for gait generation and rough terrain mobility, and fault tolerance. The controller was implemented, debugged, and tested on Hannibal. Through a series of experiments, we examined Hannibal's gait generation, rough terrain locomotion, and fault tolerance performance. These results demonstrate that Hannibal exhibits robust, flexible, real-time locomotion over a variety of terrain and tolerates a multitude of hardware failures

New electric utility management and control systems : proceedings of conference, held in Boxborough, Massachusetts, May 30-June 1, 1979

"This work was supported by the Center for Energy Policy Research and the Electric Power Systems Engineering Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Feature Extraction from Remotely Sensed Imagery for Emergency Management and Environmental Assessment

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Simulation and implementation of novel deep learning hardware architectures for resource constrained devices

Corey Lammie designed mixed signal memristive-complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) hardware architectures, which were used to reduce the power and resource requirements of Deep Learning (DL) systems; both during inference and training. Disruptive design methodologies, such as those explored in this thesis, can be used to facilitate the design of next-generation DL systems

ICSEA 2021: the sixteenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Sixteenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2021), held on October 3 - 7, 2021 in Barcelona, Spain, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. The tracks treated the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. The conference had the following tracks: Advances in fundamentals for software development Advanced mechanisms for software development Advanced design tools for developing software Software engineering for service computing (SOA and Cloud) Advanced facilities for accessing software Software performance Software security, privacy, safeness Advances in software testing Specialized software advanced applications Web Accessibility Open source software Agile and Lean approaches in software engineering Software deployment and maintenance Software engineering techniques, metrics, and formalisms Software economics, adoption, and education Business technology Improving productivity in research on software engineering Trends and achievements Similar to the previous edition, this event continued to be very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international software engineering community. As such, it is attracting excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to receive a large amount of top quality contributions. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2021 technical program committee as well as the numerous reviewers. The creation of such a broad and high quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors that dedicated much of their time and efforts to contribute to the ICSEA 2021. We truly believe that thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consists of top quality contributions. This event could also not have been a reality without the support of many individuals, organizations and sponsors. We also gratefully thank the members of the ICSEA 2021 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics and for their work that is making this professional meeting a success. We hope the ICSEA 2021 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and to promote further progress in software engineering research

Hunting for the electro-magnetic counterpart to gravitational waves

The detection of GW170817, the first known binary neutron star merger, ushered in the era of multi-messenger astronomy. The Gravitational-Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a new multi-camera instrument designed to cover large gravitational-wave localisation regions quickly, with the aim of identifying gravitational-wave counterparts quickly. This thesis covers the deployment of GOTO and the technical development of an automatic focus script, a real-time image subtraction pipeline, and a machine learner all with the aims of finding and announcing transients in real-time. The methods developed here can be used in other highcadence optical surveys. The thesis is motivated in the introduction, summarising the history of gravitational-wave astronomy and the importance of finding counterparts. GOTO is introduced properly in the methodology section. Here, I explain how GOTO is built and optimised for rapid transient discovery. From there, I show the development of an automatic focus script that exploits source geometry to quickly achieve focus. The following two chapters detail the the development of a new image-subtraction pipeline, which proves to be faster and better quality than the techniques currently used in the literature. Finally, I conclude this work using GOTO's first Gravitational-Wave follow-up campaign in compliment with the techniques developed in this thesis to find transients coincident with Gravitational- Wave detections. Showing GOTO is indeed capable and primed to find transients associated with gravitational-waves quickly