Simulation and BIM in building design, commissioning and operation: a comparison with the microelectronics industry

Analogy between the Microelectronics and Building industries is explored with the focus on design, commissioning and operation processes. Some issues found in the realisation of low energy buildings are highlighted and techniques gleaned from microelectronics proposed as possible solutions. Opportunities identified include: adoption of a more integrated process, use of standard cells, inclusion of controls and operational code in the design, generation of building commissioning tests from simulation, generation of building operational control code (including self-test) from simulation, inclusion of variation and uncertainties in the design process, use of quality processes such as indices to represent design robustness and formal continuous improvement methods. The possible integration of these techniques within a building information model (BIM) flow is discussed and some examples of enabling technologies given

A Neural Model for Generating Natural Language Summaries of Program Subroutines

Source code summarization -- creating natural language descriptions of source code behavior -- is a rapidly-growing research topic with applications to automatic documentation generation, program comprehension, and software maintenance. Traditional techniques relied on heuristics and templates built manually by human experts. Recently, data-driven approaches based on neural machine translation have largely overtaken template-based systems. But nearly all of these techniques rely almost entirely on programs having good internal documentation; without clear identifier names, the models fail to create good summaries. In this paper, we present a neural model that combines words from code with code structure from an AST. Unlike previous approaches, our model processes each data source as a separate input, which allows the model to learn code structure independent of the text in code. This process helps our approach provide coherent summaries in many cases even when zero internal documentation is provided. We evaluate our technique with a dataset we created from 2.1m Java methods. We find improvement over two baseline techniques from SE literature and one from NLP literature

PyHST2: an hybrid distributed code for high speed tomographic reconstruction with iterative reconstruction and a priori knowledge capabilities

We present the PyHST2 code which is in service at ESRF for phase-contrast and absorption tomography. This code has been engineered to sustain the high data flow typical of the third generation synchrotron facilities (10 terabytes per experiment) by adopting a distributed and pipelined architecture. The code implements, beside a default filtered backprojection reconstruction, iterative reconstruction techniques with a-priori knowledge. These latter are used to improve the reconstruction quality or in order to reduce the required data volume and reach a given quality goal. The implemented a-priori knowledge techniques are based on the total variation penalisation and a new recently found convex functional which is based on overlapping patches. We give details of the different methods and their implementations while the code is distributed under free license. We provide methods for estimating, in the absence of ground-truth data, the optimal parameters values for a-priori techniques

Formalizing the Expertise of the Assembly Language Programmer

A novel compiler strategy for generating high quality code is described. The quality of the code results from reimplementing the program in the target language using knowledge of the program's behavior. The research is a first step towards formalizing the expertise of the assembly language programmer. The ultimate goal is to formalize code generation and implementation techniques in the same way that parsing and code generation techniques have been formalized. An experimental code generator based on the reimplementation strategy will be constructed. The code generator will provide a framework for analyzing the costs, applicability, and effectiveness of various implementation techniques. Several common code generation problems will be studied. Code written by experienced programmers and code generated by a conventional optimizing compiler will provide standards of comparison.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Formal Verification of Security Protocol Implementations: A Survey

Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing high-level abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approac

Semantic model-driven development of web service architectures.

Building service-based architectures has become a major area of interest since the advent of Web services. Modelling these architectures is a central activity. Model-driven development is a recent approach to developing software systems based on the idea of making models the central artefacts for design representation, analysis, and code generation. We propose an ontology-based engineering methodology for semantic model-driven composition and transformation of Web service architectures. Ontology technology as a logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning framework can provide answers to the needs of sharable and reusable semantic models and descriptions needed for service engineering. Based on modelling, composition and code generation techniques for service architectures, our approach provides a methodological framework for ontology-based semantic service architecture