Custom Integrated Circuits

Contains reports on twelve research projects.Analog Devices, Inc.International Business Machines, Inc.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAL03-86-K-0002)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAL03-89-C-0001)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR 86-0164)Rockwell International CorporationOKI Semiconductor, Inc.U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-81-K-0742)Charles Stark Draper LaboratoryNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP 84-07285)National Science Foundation (Grant MIP 87-14969)Battelle LaboratoriesNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP 88-14612)DuPont CorporationDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency/U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-87-K-0825)American Telephone and TelegraphDigital Equipment CorporationNational Science Foundation (Grant MIP-88-58764

Custom Integrated Circuits

Contains reports on ten research projects.Analog Devices, Inc.IBM CorporationNational Science Foundation/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grant MIP 88-14612Analog Devices Career Development Assistant ProfessorshipU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Contract N0014-87-K-0825AT&TDigital Equipment CorporationNational Science Foundation Grant MIP 88-5876

A survey on software testability

Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in this area is often challenging for a practitioner or a new researcher. Objective: Our objective is to summarize the body of knowledge in this area and to benefit the readers (both practitioners and researchers) in preparing, measuring and improving software testability. Method: To address the above need, the authors conducted a survey in the form of a systematic literature mapping (classification) to find out what we as a community know about this topic. After compiling an initial pool of 303 papers, and applying a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, our final pool included 208 papers. Results: The area of software testability has been comprehensively studied by researchers and practitioners. Approaches for measurement of testability and improvement of testability are the most-frequently addressed in the papers. The two most often mentioned factors affecting testability are observability and controllability. Common ways to improve testability are testability transformation, improving observability, adding assertions, and improving controllability. Conclusion: This paper serves for both researchers and practitioners as an "index" to the vast body of knowledge in the area of testability. The results could help practitioners measure and improve software testability in their projects

Interactive Knowledge Construction in the Collaborative Building of an Encyclopedia

International audienceOne of the major challenges of Applied Artificial Intelligence is to provide environments where high level human activities like learning, constructing theories or performing experiments, are enhanced by Artificial Intelligence technologies. This paper starts with the description of an ambitious project: EnCOrE2. The specific real world EnCOrE scenario, significantly representing a much wider class of potential applicative contexts, is dedicated to the building of an Encyclopedia of Organic Chemistry in the context of Virtual Communities of experts and students. Its description is followed by a brief survey of some major AI questions and propositions in relation with the problems raised by the EnCOrE project. The third part of the paper starts with some definitions of a set of “primitives” for rational actions, and then integrates them in a unified conceptual framework for the interactive construction of knowledge. To end with, we sketch out protocols aimed at guiding both the collaborative construction process and the collaborative learning process in the EnCOrE project.The current major result is the emerging conceptual model supporting interaction between human agents and AI tools integrated in Grid services within a socio-constructivist approach, consisting of cycles of deductions, inductions and abductions upon facts (the shared reality) and concepts (their subjective interpretation) submitted to negotiations, and finally converging to a socially validated consensus

Conformance testing of peer-to-peer systems using message traffic analysis

Peer-to-Peer architectures are used by a large number of distributed systems; however, the challenges such as maintaining a reliable and stable peer-to-peer network can make such networks undesirable for distributed systems. Peer-to-peer architectures are designed to be executed on systems with diverse hardware configurations, distant geographic locations, and varied, unpredictable Internet connectivity that make the software testing process difficult. This research defines a method for conformance testing peer-to-peer content distribution systems called “Method for Conformance Testing by Analyzing Message Activity” (MCTAMA). MCTAMA uses a common representation for describing the behavior of nodes during both design and deployment. ATAMA generates, evaluates and filters test cases that help determine variation between the expected and observed behaviors. The focus on message traffic allows MCTAMA to be used at multiple stages of development and deployment while not being affected by the variations in the operating environment, availability of source code or the capabilities of a monitoring mechanism. As a part of MCTAMA, this research includes a method for combining sequence diagrams to create a description of the expected behavior of nodes in the system

Autonomous spacecraft maintenance study group

A plan to incorporate autonomous spacecraft maintenance (ASM) capabilities into Air Force spacecraft by 1989 is outlined. It includes the successful operation of the spacecraft without ground operator intervention for extended periods of time. Mechanisms, along with a fault tolerant data processing system (including a nonvolatile backup memory) and an autonomous navigation capability, are needed to replace the routine servicing that is presently performed by the ground system. The state of the art fault handling capabilities of various spacecraft and computers are described, and a set conceptual design requirements needed to achieve ASM is established. Implementations for near term technology development needed for an ASM proof of concept demonstration by 1985, and a research agenda addressing long range academic research for an advanced ASM system for 1990s are established