The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

Empirical investigations supporting an extensible, theoretical approach to understanding software inspections

Empirical software engineering research has directed substantial effort towards understanding and improving software inspection, a defect detection method much less costly than testing. However, software inspection suffers from a lack of theory governing the process and its outcomes, leading to apparently contradictory experimental outcomes that cannot easily be reconciled. This theoretical uncertainty hinders efforts to effectively address delocalisation - the occurrence of related information in different artefacts, or parts of a software system. Delocalisation is a hurdle to software comprehension, an activity fundamental to inspection.A gap currently exists between the development of inspection strategies and theories of software comprehension, manifested in two ways. First, although some strategies seek to enhance an inspector's understanding of key parts of the software, they generally ignore variability between inspectors. A particular form of guidance or cognitive support given to one inspector may have a different effect when given to another. Second, while models of inspection cost effectiveness exist, they are not expressed in terms of factors that might be manipulated to improve inspection performance. It is not clear how far an inspector should go to address one particular concern in the software, before the benefits of doing so are outweighed by the risk of ignoring other concerns.This thesis first reports on an industry survey examining the current state of practice with respect to peer reviews. Two more qualitative studies were conducted to explore approaches inspectors might take to the comprehension of artefact interrelationships and the challenges posed by delocalisation. A controlled experiment is then presented to show how active guidance and inspector expertise affect the detection of individual defects.Using the results of these studies, a theoretical framework and model of inspection cost effectiveness are proposed in which the effects of experience, cognitive support and the reading technique can be used to predict the consequences of a given inspection strategy. A simulation of the model was conducted to compare several new and existing inspection strategies. Thus, the framework and model provide a basis upon which an appropriate inspection strategy can be developed, selected or refined for a given software project.The results of these investigations suggest several ways in which inspection practices might be improved, including through the additional use of tool support and selective use of active guidance under specific conditions. By instantiating and using the proposed inspection model, software development organisations can engineer optimally cost effective inspection strategies

A Holistic Monitoring Service for Fog/Edge Infrastructures: a Foresight Study

International audienceAlthough academic and industry experts are now advocating for going from large-centralized Cloud Computing infrastructures to smaller ones massively distributed at the edge of the network, management systems to operate and use such infrastructures are still missing. In this paper, we focus on the monitoring service which is a key element to any management system in charge of operating a distributed infrastructure. Several solutions have been proposed in the past for cluster, grid and cloud systems. However, none is well appropriate to the Fog/Edge context. Our goal in this study, is to pave the way towards a holistic monitoring service for a Fog/Edge infrastructure hosting next generation digital services. The contributions of our work are: (i) the problem statement, (ii) a classification and a qualitative analysis of major existing solutions, and (iii) a preliminary discussion on the impact of the deployment strategy of functions composing the monitoring service

Local climate governance in England and Germany: converging towards a hybrid model?

This thesis investigates the governance of climate change policy in English and German cities. Based on fieldwork research in the comparable 'twin towns' of Newcastle and Gelsenkirchen, it focuses on how local authorities in these cities have worked with other actors to increase their capacity to achieve policy objectives. The study analyses these governance arrangements in the context of climate change strategies, planning policy and how the municipalities use resources in their everyday corporate activities. Drawing on theories and typologies of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2003), policy styles (Richardson 1982), urban governance (Stone 1989) and dependencies in intergovernmental relations (Rhodes 1981), it introduces a new model for mapping power relationships between governing actors. By applying this model to the empirical cases, the thesis identifies how central-local relations in England are looser than those in Germany, and how this results in weaker municipal institutions. This means that Newcastle has had to rely more on local stakeholders to achieve its objectives when compared to Gelsenkirchen. The English council is also less able to exert hierarchical authority over other bodies. Although the study found that the two cities’ approaches are converging in some areas, they are diverging in others. Indeed, they have developed their own distinct coping strategies to achieve policy objectives in the face of similar endogenous and exogenous pressures. These coping strategies are shaped by the institutional framework and power dependent relationships that apply to each city, which challenges the idea that policy problems determine the way in which the political system operates (see Lowi 1964). Such findings have implications for other municipalities in both England and Germany, as well as cities elsewhere in Europe that are seeking to address climate change or other ‘wicked’ public policy issues

Principled Explanations in Comparative Biomusicology – Toward a Comparative Cognitive Biology of the Human Capacities for Music and Language

The current thesis tackles the question “Why is music the way it is?” within a comparative biomusicology framework by focusing on musical syntax and its relation to syntax in language. Comparative biomusicology integrates different comparative approaches, biological frameworks as well as levels of analysis in cognitive science, and puts forward principled explanations, regarding cognitive systems as different instances of the same principles, as its central research strategy. The main goal is to provide a preliminary answer to this question in form of hypotheses about neurocognitive mechanisms, i.e., cognitive and neural processes, underlying a core function of syntactic computation in language and music, i.e., mapping hierarchical structure and temporal sequence. In particular, the relationship between language and music is discussed on the basis of a top-down approach taking syntax as combinatorial principles and a bottom-up approach taking neural structures and operations as implementational principles. On the basis of the top-down approach, the thesis identifies computational problems of musical syntax, cognitive processes and neural correlates of music syntactic processing, and the relationship to language syntax and syntactic processing. The neural correlates of music syntactic processing are investigated by ALE meta-analyses. The bottom-up approach then studies the relationship between language and music on the basis of neural processes implemented in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits. The main result of the current thesis suggests that the relationship between language and music syntactic processing can be explained in terms of the same neurocognitive mechanisms with different expressions on the motor-to-cognitive gradient. The current thesis, especially its bottom-up approach, opens up a possible way going toward comparative cognitive biology, i.e., a comparative approach to cognitive systems with a greater emphasis on the biology