Characterizing Scalability Issues in Spreadsheet Software using Online Forums

In traditional usability studies, researchers talk to users of tools to understand their needs and challenges. Insights gained via such interviews offer context, detail, and background. Due to costs in time and money, we are beginning to see a new form of tool interrogation that prioritizes scale, cost, and breadth by utilizing existing data from online forums. In this case study, we set out to apply this method of using online forum data to a specific issue---challenges that users face with Excel spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a versatile and powerful processing tool if used properly. However, with versatility and power come errors, from both users and the software, which make using spreadsheets less effective. By scraping posts from the website Reddit, we collected a dataset of questions and complaints about Excel. Specifically, we explored and characterized the issues users were facing with spreadsheet software in general, and in particular, as resulting from a large amount of data in their spreadsheets. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of next-generation spreadsheet software

Uma análise teórica dos principais tópicos para a escolha de sistemas erp open source

The present work is aimed at presenting a theoretical analysis of the main features of Open Source ERP systems, herein identified as success technical factors, in order to contribute to the establishment of parameters to be used in decision-making processes when choosing a system which fulfills the organization's needs. Initially, the life cycle of ERP systems is contextualized, highlighting the features of Open Source ERP systems. As a result, it was verified that, when carefully analyzed, these systems need further attention regarding issues of project continuity and maturity, structure, transparency, updating frequency, and support, all of which are inherent to the reality of this type of software. Nevertheless, advantages were observed in what concerns flexibility, costs, and non-discontinuity as benefits. The main goal is to broaden the discussion about the adoption of Open Source ERP systems.O artigo apresenta uma análise teórica, baseada em uma revisão da literatura das principais características presentes em sistemas ERP Open Source a fim de contribuir com a análise de parâmetros que possam ser utilizados para a tomada de decisão na escolha pelo sistema mais adequado às necessidades da Organização. Para isso, contextualiza-se o ciclo de vida dos sistemas ERP, destacando as características dos sistemas ERPs Open Source. Como resultado, constatou-se que ERPs Open Source, quando analisados com cuidado, carecem de especial atenção às questões ligadas à continuidade e maturidade do projeto, estrutura, transparência, frequência de atualizações e suporte oferecido, sendo fatores exclusivos tangentes à realidade destes softwares. Não obstante, vantagens com relação à flexibilidade, custos e a não descontinuidade do projeto são benefícios percebidos pelos mesmos. O principal objetivo deste artigo é ampliar a discussão sobre a adoção de sistemas ERP Open Source

Advancing MATTERS

The goal of this project is to improve the data integration and administration center for the MATTERS Dashboard for the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC), a pro-technology advocacy and lobbyist organization. Our system is comprised of two parts: the data integration pipeline manager and an administration center. Talend Open Studio is used as a core enabler for integrating data from a variety of online web sources. The Administration Center allows for future MHTC administrators to easily upload and view economy, talent, and ranking data, thus further impacting policies created in Massachusetts

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

The Advanced Framework for Evaluating Remote Agents (AFERA): A Framework for Digital Forensic Practitioners

Digital forensics experts need a dependable method for evaluating evidence-gathering tools. Limited research and resources challenge this process and the lack of multi-endpoint data validation hinders reliability in distributed digital forensics. A framework was designed to evaluate distributed agent-based forensic tools while enabling practitioners to self-evaluate and demonstrate evidence reliability as required by the courts. Grounded in Design Science, the framework features guidelines, data, criteria, and checklists. Expert review enhances its quality and practicality

Digital Pharmacovigilance: the medwatcher system for monitoring adverse events through automated processing of internet social media and crowdsourcing

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityHalf of Americans take a prescription drug, medical devices are in broad use, and population coverage for many vaccines is over 90%. Nearly all medical products carry risk of adverse events (AEs), sometimes severe. However, pre- approval trials use small populations and exclude participants by specific criteria, making them insufficient to determine the risks of a product as used in the population. Existing post-marketing reporting systems are critical, but suffer from underreporting. Meanwhile, recent years have seen an explosion in adoption of Internet services and smartphones. MedWatcher is a new system that harnesses emerging technologies for pharmacovigilance in the general population. MedWatcher consists of two components, a text-processing module, MedWatcher Social, and a crowdsourcing module, MedWatcher Personal. With the natural language processing component, we acquire public data from the Internet, apply classification algorithms, and extract AE signals. With the crowdsourcing application, we provide software allowing consumers to submit AE reports directly. Our MedWatcher Social algorithm for identifying symptoms performs with 77% precision and 88% recall on a sample of Twitter posts. Our machine learning algorithm for identifying AE-related posts performs with 68% precision and 89% recall on a labeled Twitter corpus. For zolpidem tartrate, certolizumab pegol, and dimethyl fumarate, we compared AE profiles from Twitter with reports from the FDA spontaneous reporting system. We find some concordance (Spearman's rho= 0.85, 0.77, 0.82, respectively, for symptoms at MedDRA System Organ Class level). Where the sources differ, milder effects are overrepresented in Twitter. We also compared post-marketing profiles with trial results and found little concordance. MedWatcher Personal saw substantial user adoption, receiving 550 AE reports in a one-year period, including over 400 for one device, Essure. We categorized 400 Essure reports by symptom, compared them to 129 reports from the FDA spontaneous reporting system, and found high concordance (rho = 0.65) using MedDRA Preferred Term granularity. We also compared Essure Twitter posts with MedWatcher and FDA reports, and found rho= 0.25 and 0.31 respectively. MedWatcher represents a novel pharmacoepidemiology surveillance informatics system; our analysis is the first to compare AEs across social media, direct reporting, FDA spontaneous reports, and pre-approval trials

Utility and accuracy of smell-driven performance analysis for end-user programmers

This paper proposes a technique, called Smell-driven performance analysis (SDPA), which automatically provides situated explanations within a visual dataflow language IDE to help end-user programmers to overcome performance problems without leaving the visual dataflow paradigm. An experiment showed SDPA increased end-user programmers’ success rates at finding performance problems and decreased the time required for finding solutions. Another study, based on using SDPA to analyze a corpus of example end-user programs, revealed that it is usually accurate at identifying performance problems. Based on these results, we conclude that SDPA provides a reliable basis for helping end-user programmers to troubleshoot performance problems, as well as a potential foundation for future work aimed at training users and at aiding code reuse.Keywords: End-user programming, Visual language, PerformanceKeywords: End-user programming, Visual language, Performanc

A framework for the characterization and analysis of software systems scalability

The term scalability appears frequently in computing literature, but it is a term that is poorly defined and poorly understood. It is an important attribute of computer systems that is frequently asserted but rarely validated in any meaningful, systematic way. The lack of a consistent, uniform and systematic treatment of scalability makes it difficult to identify and avoid scalability problems, clearly and objectively describe the scalability of software systems, evaluate claims of scalability, and compare claims from different sources. This thesis provides a definition of scalability and describes a systematic framework for the characterization and analysis of software systems scalability. The framework is comprised of a goal-oriented approach for describing, modeling and reasoning about scalability requirements, and an analysis technique that captures the dependency relationships that underlie typical notions of scalability. The framework is validated against a real-world data analysis system and is used to recast a number of examples taken from the computing literature and from industry in order to demonstrate its use across different application domains and system designs