Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Automated tools and techniques for distributed Grid Software: Development of the testbed infrastructure

Grid technology is becoming more and more important as the new paradigm for sharing computational resources across different organizations in a secure way. The great powerfulness of this solution, requires the definition of a generic stack of services and protocols and this is the scope of the different Grid initiatives. As a result of international collaborations for its development, the Open Grid Forum created the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) which aims to define the common set of services that will enable interoperability across the different implementations. This master thesis has been developed in this framework, as part of the two European-funded projects ETICS and OMII-Europe. The main objective is to contribute to the design and maintenance of large distributed development projects with the automated tool that enables to implement Software Engineering techniques oriented to achieve an acceptable level of quality at the release process. Specifically, this thesis develops the testbed concept as the virtual production-like scenario where to perform compliance tests. As proof of concept, the OGSA Basic Execution Service has been chosen in order to implement and execute conformance tests within the ETICS automated testbed framework

RGtk2: A Graphical User Interface Toolkit for R

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are growing in popularity as a complement or alternative to the traditional command line interfaces to R. RGtk2 is an R package for creating GUIs in R. The package provides programmatic access to GTK+ 2.0, an open-source GUI toolkit written in C. To construct a GUI, the R programmer calls RGtk2 functions that map to functions in the underlying GTK+ library. This paper introduces the basic concepts underlying GTK+ and explains how to use RGtk2 to construct GUIs from R. The tutorial is based on simple and pratical programming examples. We also provide more complex examples illustrating the advanced features of the package. The design of the RGtk2 API and the low-level interface from R to GTK+ are discussed at length. We compare RGtk2 to alternative GUI toolkits for R.

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Kinematic Motion Retargeting for Contact-Rich Anthropomorphic Manipulations

Hand motion capture data is now relatively easy to obtain, even for complicated grasps; however this data is of limited use without the ability to retarget it onto the hands of a specific character or robot. The target hand may differ dramatically in geometry, number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), or number of fingers. We present a simple, but effective framework capable of kinematically retargeting multiple human hand-object manipulations from a publicly available dataset to a wide assortment of kinematically and morphologically diverse target hands through the exploitation of contact areas. We do so by formulating the retarget operation as a non-isometric shape matching problem and use a combination of both surface contact and marker data to progressively estimate, refine, and fit the final target hand trajectory using inverse kinematics (IK). Foundational to our framework is the introduction of a novel shape matching process, which we show enables predictable and robust transfer of contact data over full manipulations while providing an intuitive means for artists to specify correspondences with relatively few inputs. We validate our framework through thirty demonstrations across five different hand shapes and six motions of different objects. We additionally compare our method against existing hand retargeting approaches. Finally, we demonstrate our method enabling novel capabilities such as object substitution and the ability to visualize the impact of design choices over full trajectories

Look me in the eyes: A survey of eye and gaze animation for virtual agents and artificial systems

International audienceA person's emotions and state of mind are apparent in their face and eyes. As a Latin proverb states: "The face is the portrait of the mind; the eyes, its informers.". This presents a huge challenge for computer graphics researchers in the generation of artificial entities that aim to replicate the movement and appearance of the human eye, which is so important in human-human interactions. This State of the Art Report provides an overview of the efforts made on tackling this challenging task. As with many topics in Computer Graphics, a cross-disciplinary approach is required to fully understand the workings of the eye in the transmission of information to the user. We discuss the movement of the eyeballs, eyelids, and the head from a physiological perspective and how these movements can be modelled, rendered and animated in computer graphics applications. Further, we present recent research from psychology and sociology that seeks to understand higher level behaviours, such as attention and eye-gaze, during the expression of emotion or during conversation, and how they are synthesised in Computer Graphics and Robotics

Fair and Scalable Orchestration of Network and Compute Resources for Virtual Edge Services

The combination of service virtualization and edge computing allows for low latency services, while keeping data storage and processing local. However, given the limited resources available at the edge, a conflict in resource usage arises when both virtualized user applications and network functions need to be supported. Further, the concurrent resource request by user applications and network functions is often entangled, since the data generated by the former has to be transferred by the latter, and vice versa. In this paper, we first show through experimental tests the correlation between a video-based application and a vRAN. Then, owing to the complex involved dynamics, we develop a scalable reinforcement learning framework for resource orchestration at the edge, which leverages a Pareto analysis for provable fair and efficient decisions. We validate our framework, named VERA, through a real-time proof-of-concept implementation, which we also use to obtain datasets reporting real-world operational conditions and performance. Using such experimental datasets, we demonstrate that VERA meets the KPI targets for over 96% of the observation period and performs similarly when executed in our real-time implementation, with KPI differences below 12.4%. Further, its scaling cost is 54% lower than a centralized framework based on deep-Q networks

Towards secure message systems

Message systems, which transfer information from sender to recipient via communication networks, are indispensable to our modern society. The enormous user base of message systems and their critical role in information delivery make it the top priority to secure message systems. This dissertation focuses on securing the two most representative and dominant messages systems---e-mail and instant messaging (IM)---from two complementary aspects: defending against unwanted messages and ensuring reliable delivery of wanted messages.;To curtail unwanted messages and protect e-mail and instant messaging users, this dissertation proposes two mechanisms DBSpam and HoneyIM, which can effectively thwart e-mail spam laundering and foil malicious instant message spreading, respectively. DBSpam exploits the distinct characteristics of connection correlation and packet symmetry embedded in the behavior of spam laundering and utilizes a simple statistical method, Sequential Probability Ratio Test, to detect and break spam laundering activities inside a customer network in a timely manner. The experimental results demonstrate that DBSpam is effective in quickly and accurately capturing and suppressing e-mail spam laundering activities and is capable of coping with high speed network traffic. HoneyIM leverages the inherent characteristic of spreading of IM malware and applies the honey-pot technology to the detection of malicious instant messages. More specifically, HoneyIM uses decoy accounts in normal users\u27 contact lists as honey-pots to capture malicious messages sent by IM malware and suppresses the spread of malicious instant messages by performing network-wide blocking. The efficacy of HoneyIM has been validated through both simulations and real experiments.;To improve e-mail reliability, that is, prevent losses of wanted e-mail, this dissertation proposes a collaboration-based autonomous e-mail reputation system called CARE. CARE introduces inter-domain collaboration without central authority or third party and enables each e-mail service provider to independently build its reputation database, including frequently contacted and unacquainted sending domains, based on the local e-mail history and the information exchanged with other collaborating domains. The effectiveness of CARE on improving e-mail reliability has been validated through a number of experiments, including a comparison of two large e-mail log traces from two universities, a real experiment of DNS snooping on more than 36,000 domains, and extensive simulation experiments in a large-scale environment