9,774 research outputs found

    Evaluating groupware support for software engineering students

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    Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems. This research is investigating the provision of such network-based support for software engineering students and the impact these tools have on their groupwork. We will first describe our experiences gained through the introduction of an asynchronous virtual environment ­ SEGWorld to support groupwork during the Software Engineering Group (SEG) project undertaken by all second year undergraduates within the Department of Computer Science. Secondly we will describe our Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) module which has been introduced into the students' final year of study as a direct result of our experience with SEG, and in particular its role within Software Engineering. Within this CSCW module the students have had the opportunity to evaluate various groupware tools. This has enabled them to take a retrospective view of their experience of SEGWorld and its underlying system, BSCW, one year on. We report our findings for SEG in the form of a discussion of the hypotheses we formulated on how the SEGs would use SEGWorld, and present an initial qualitative assessment of student feedback from the CSCW module

    Tools of the Trade: A Survey of Various Agent Based Modeling Platforms

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    Agent Based Modeling (ABM) toolkits are as diverse as the community of people who use them. With so many toolkits available, the choice of which one is best suited for a project is left to word of mouth, past experiences in using particular toolkits and toolkit publicity. This is especially troublesome for projects that require specialization. Rather than using toolkits that are the most publicized but are designed for general projects, using this paper, one will be able to choose a toolkit that already exists and that may be built especially for one's particular domain and specialized needs. In this paper, we examine the entire continuum of agent based toolkits. We characterize each based on 5 important characteristics users consider when choosing a toolkit, and then we categorize the characteristics into user-friendly taxonomies that aid in rapid indexing and easy reference.Agent Based Modeling, Individual Based Model, Multi Agent Systems

    Evaluation of an anthropomorphic user interface in a travel reservation context and affordances

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    This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number ofyears in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine theeffectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactivesystems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently somedisagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working toresolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in thespecific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphicfeedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective.The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. Thissuggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the resultsmay also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback

    Software engineering ethics

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    Software engineering ethics is reviewed. The following subject areas are covered: lack of a system viewpoint; arrogance of PC DOS software vendors; violation od upward compatibility; internet worm; internet worm revisited; student cheating and company hiring interviews; computing practitioners and the commodity market; new projects and old programming languages; schedule and budget; and recent public domain comments

    Writer Identification Using Inexpensive Signal Processing Techniques

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    We propose to use novel and classical audio and text signal-processing and otherwise techniques for "inexpensive" fast writer identification tasks of scanned hand-written documents "visually". The "inexpensive" refers to the efficiency of the identification process in terms of CPU cycles while preserving decent accuracy for preliminary identification. This is a comparative study of multiple algorithm combinations in a pattern recognition pipeline implemented in Java around an open-source Modular Audio Recognition Framework (MARF) that can do a lot more beyond audio. We present our preliminary experimental findings in such an identification task. We simulate "visual" identification by "looking" at the hand-written document as a whole rather than trying to extract fine-grained features out of it prior classification.Comment: 9 pages; 1 figure; presented at CISSE'09 at http://conference.cisse2009.org/proceedings.aspx ; includes the the application source code; based on MARF described in arXiv:0905.123

    nsroot: Minimalist Process Isolation Tool Implemented With Linux Namespaces

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    Data analyses in the life sciences are moving from tools run on a personal computer to services run on large computing platforms. This creates a need to package tools and dependencies for easy installation, configuration and deployment on distributed platforms. In addition, for secure execution there is a need for process isolation on a shared platform. Existing virtual machine and container technologies are often more complex than traditional Unix utilities, like chroot, and often require root privileges in order to set up or use. This is especially challenging on HPC systems where users typically do not have root access. We therefore present nsroot, a lightweight Linux namespaces based process isolation tool. It allows restricting the runtime environment of data analysis tools that may not have been designed with security as a top priority, in order to reduce the risk and consequences of security breaches, without requiring any special privileges. The codebase of nsroot is small, and it provides a command line interface similar to chroot. It can be used on all Linux kernels that implement user namespaces. In addition, we propose combining nsroot with the AppImage format for secure execution of packaged applications. nsroot is open sourced and available at: https://github.com/uit-no/nsroo
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