Musical Program Auralisation: Empirical Studies

Program auralisation aims to communicate information about program state, data, and behaviour using audio. We have argued that music offers many advantages as a communication medium [1]. The CAITLIN system [4, 16, 17, 18] was constructed to provide auralisations within a formal structured musical framework. Pilot studies [4, 16] showed that programmers could infer program structure from auralisations alone. A study was conducted using twenty-two novice programmers to assess a) whether novices could understand the musical auralisations and b) whether the musical experience and knowledge of subjects affected their performance. The results show that novices could interpret the auralisations (with accuracy varying across different levels of abstraction) and that musical knowledge had no significant effect on performance. A second experiment was conducted with another twenty-two novice programmers to study the effects of musical program auralisation on debugging tasks. The experiment aimed to determine whether auralisations would lead to higher bug detection rates. The results indicate that, in certain circumstances, musical auralisations can be used to help locate bugs in programs and that musical skill does not affect the ability to make use of the auralisations. In addition, it the experiment showed that subjective workload increased when the musical auralisations were used

The LaTeX project: A case study of open-source software

This is a case study of TeX, a typesetting software that was developed by Donald E. Knuth in the late 70's. Released with an open source license, it has become a reference in scientific publishing. TeX is now used to typeset and publish much of the world's scientific literature in physics and mathematics. This case study is part of a wider effort by academics to understand the open-source phenomenon. That development model is similar to the organization of the production of knowledge in academia; there is no set organization with a hierarchy, but free collaboration that is coordinated spontaneously and winds up generating complex products that are the property of all who can understand its functioning. The case study was led by gathering qualitative data via interviews with TeX developers and quantitative data on the TeX community -- the program's code, the software that is part of the TeX distribution, the newsgroups dedicated to the software, and many other indicators of the evolution and activity in that open-source project. The case study is aimed at economists who want to develop models to understand and analyze the open-source phenomenon. It is also geared towards policy-makers who would like to encourage or regulate open- source, and towards open-source developers who wonder what are the efficient strategies to make an open-source project successful.TeX, LaTeX, case study, open source, software, innovation, organisational structure, economic history, knowledge production, knowledge diffusion.

Music and Speech in Auditory Interfaces: When is One Mode More Appropriate Than the Other?

A number of experiments, which have been carried out using non-speech auditory interfaces, are reviewed and the advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed. The possible advantages of using non-speech audio media such as music are discussed – richness of the representations possible, the aesthetic appeal, and the possibilities of such interfaces being able to handle abstraction and consistency across the interface

Towards a debugging tutor for object-oriented environments

Programming has provided a rich domain for Artificial Intelligence in Education and many systems have been developed to advise students about the bugs in their programs, either during program development or post-hoc. Surprisingly few systems have been developed specifically to teach debugging. Learning environment builders have assumed that either the student will be taught these elsewhere or thatthey will be learnt piecemeal without explicit advice.This paper reports on two experiments on Java debugging strategy by novice programmers and discusses their implications for the design of a debugging tutor for Java that pays particular attention to how students use the variety of program representations available. The experimental results are in agreement with research in the area that suggests that good debugging performance is associated with a balanced use ofthe available representations and a sophisticated use of the debugging step facility which enables programmers to detect and obtain information from critical momentsin the execution of the program. A balanced use of the available representations seemsto be fostered by providing representations with a higher degree of dynamic linkingas well as by explicit instruction about the representation formalism employed in the program visualisations

Abstract verification and debugging of constraint logic programs

The technique of Abstract Interpretation [13] has allowed the development of sophisticated program analyses which are provably correct and practical. The semantic approximations produced by such analyses have been traditionally applied to optimization during program compilation. However, recently, novel and promising applications of semantic approximations have been proposed in the more general context of program verification and debugging [3],[10],[7]