Ways of Applying Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have become more powerful and easier to use they are increasingly deployed as key components of modern software systems. While this enables new functionality and often allows better adaptation to user needs it also creates additional problems for software engineers and exposes companies to new risks. Some work has been done to better understand the interaction between Software Engineering and AI but we lack methods to classify ways of applying AI in software systems and to analyse and understand the risks this poses. Only by doing so can we devise tools and solutions to help mitigate them. This paper presents the AI in SE Application Levels (AI-SEAL) taxonomy that categorises applications according to their point of AI application, the type of AI technology used and the automation level allowed. We show the usefulness of this taxonomy by classifying 15 papers from previous editions of the RAISE workshop. Results show that the taxonomy allows classification of distinct AI applications and provides insights concerning the risks associated with them. We argue that this will be important for companies in deciding how to apply AI in their software applications and to create strategies for its use

Connected Learning Journeys in Music Production Education

The field of music production education is a challenging one, exploring multiple creative, technical and entrepreneurial disciplines, including music composition, performance electronics, acoustics, musicology, project management and psychology. As a result, students take multiple ‘learning journeys’ on their pathway towards becoming autonomous learners. This paper uniquely evaluates the journey of climbing Bloom’s cognitive domain in the field of music production and gives specific examples that validate teaching music production in higher education through multiple, connected ascents of the framework. Owing to the practical nature of music production, Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model is also considered as a recurring function that is necessary for climbing Bloom’s domain, in order to ensure that learners are equipped for employability and entrepreneurship on graduation. The authors’ own experiences of higher education course delivery, design and development are also reflected upon with reference to Music Production pathways at both the University of Westminster (London, UK) and York St John University (York, UK)

Efficient pruning of large knowledge graphs

In this paper we present an efficient and highly accurate algorithm to prune noisy or over-ambiguous knowledge graphs given as input an extensional definition of a domain of interest, namely as a set of instances or concepts. Our method climbs the graph in a bottom-up fashion, iteratively layering the graph and pruning nodes and edges in each layer while not compromising the connectivity of the set of input nodes. Iterative layering and protection of pre-defined nodes allow to extract semantically coherent DAG structures from noisy or over-ambiguous cyclic graphs, without loss of information and without incurring in computational bottlenecks, which are the main problem of stateof- the-art methods for cleaning large, i.e., Webscale, knowledge graphs. We apply our algorithm to the tasks of pruning automatically acquired taxonomies using benchmarking data from a SemEval evaluation exercise, as well as the extraction of a domain-adapted taxonomy from theWikipedia category hierarchy. The results show the superiority of our approach over state-of-art algorithms in terms of both output quality and computational efficiency

A taxonomy of multi-industry labour force skills

This paper proposes an empirical study of the skill repertoires of 290 sectors in the United States over the period 2002–2011. We use information on employment structures and job content of occupations to flesh out structural characteristics of industry-specific know-how. The exercise of mapping the skills structures embedded in the workforce yields a taxonomy that discloses novel nuances on the organization of industry. In so doing we also take an initial step towards the integration of labour and employment in the area of innovation studies

Contract Aware Components, 10 years after

The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such as Embedded Systems or Service Oriented Architecture where the notion of contract aware components has been influential. For each of these domains we briefly describe what has been done with this idea and we discuss the remaining challenges.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Analysis reuse exploiting taxonomical information and belief assignment in industrial problem solving

To take into account the experience feedback on solving complex problems in business is deemed as a way to improve the quality of products and processes. Only a few academic works, however, are concerned with the representation and the instrumentation of experience feedback systems. We propose, in this paper, a model of experiences and mechanisms to use these experiences. More specifically, we wish to encourage the reuse of already performed expert analysis to propose a priori analysis in the solving of a new problem. The proposal is based on a representation in the context of the experience of using a conceptual marker and an explicit representation of the analysis incorporating expert opinions and the fusion of these opinions. The experience feedback models and inference mechanisms are integrated in a commercial support tool for problem solving methodologies. The results obtained to this point have already led to the definition of the role of ‘‘Rex Manager’’ with principles of sustainable management for continuous improvement of industrial processes in companies

An investigation of cognitive skills and topics development within finance programmes: a UK perspective

Finance is an important subject in many accountancy and other undergraduate programmes. The technical competencies in this area are covered under the QAA benchmark in finance (2007). However, the benchmark does not rigidly lay down the curriculum and competencies it expects students to acquire; universities are free to teach the subject from a variety of perspectives. In this paper the subject specific knowledge and skills emphasised in finance subjects in accounting undergraduate programmes in the UK are examined. Learning outcomes from module handbooks/unit specifications from ten universities in the UK are used to gauge and analyse what cognitive skills and topics are emphasised. This research finds that universites should include higher level cognitive skills in order to meet the demands of the changing environment. It is also evident that funding and sources of capital is the most important topic in the curriculum

Towards a methodology for rigorous development of generic requirements patterns

We present work in progress on a methodology for the engineering, validation and verification of generic requirements using domain engineering and formal methods. The need to develop a generic requirement set for subsequent system instantiation is complicated by the addition of the high levels of verification demanded by safety-critical domains such as avionics. We consider the failure detection and management function for engine control systems as an application domain where product line engineering is useful. The methodology produces a generic requirement set in our, UML based, formal notation, UML-B. The formal verification both of the generic requirement set, and of a particular application, is achieved via translation to the formal specification language, B, using our U2B and ProB tools