Verifying UML/OCL operation contracts

In current model-driven development approaches, software models are the primary artifacts of the development process. Therefore, assessment of their correctness is a key issue to ensure the quality of the final application. Research on model consistency has focused mostly on the models' static aspects. Instead, this paper addresses the verification of their dynamic aspects, expressed as a set of operations defined by means of pre/postcondition contracts. This paper presents an automatic method based on Constraint Programming to verify UML models extended with OCL constraints and operation contracts. In our approach, both static and dynamic aspects are translated into a Constraint Satisfaction Problem. Then, compliance of the operations with respect to several correctness properties such as operation executability or determinism are formally verified

Coevolutionary immune system dynamics driving pathogen speciation

We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the development of chronic infection, rather than quick pathogen clearance. The dynamics of these chronic infections display emergent structure, including branching patterns corresponding to asexual pathogen speciation, which is fundamentally driven by the coevolutionary interaction. Over time, continued branching creates an increasingly fragile immune system, and leads to the eventual catastrophic loss of immune control.Comment: main article: 16 pages, 5 figures; supporting information: 3 page

Solving Constraints in Model Transformations

Constraint programming holds many promises for model driven software development (MDSD). Up to now, constraints have only started to appear in MDSD modeling languages, but have not been properly reflected in model transformation. This paper introduces constraint programming in model transformation, shows how constraint programming integrates with QVT Relations - as a pathway to wide spread use of our approach - and describes the corresponding model transformation engine. In particular, the paper will illustrate the use of constraint programming for the specification of attribute values in target models, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the benefit drawn from constraints integrated with QVT Relations

Developing 5GL Concepts from User Interactions

In the fulfilling of the contracts generated in Test Driven Development, a developer could be said to act as a constraint solver, similar to those used by a 5th Generation Language(5GL). This thesis presents the hypothesis that 5GL linguistic mechanics, such as facts, rules and goals, will be emergent in the communications of developer pairs performing Test Driven Development, validating that 5GL syntax is congruent with the ways that practitioners communicate. Along the way, nomenclatures and linguistic patterns may be observed that could inform the design of future 5GL languages

Prioritizing the Relative Dominance of Drivers for Intellectual Entrepreneuring Through the Tertiary Knowledge Industry.

The knowledge industry is becoming the dominant contributor to sustainable growth. It is causing a paradigm drift towards knowledge capitalization for improvement of productivity-driven competition to attain better economic performance, wealth generation, and development. Research has identified an “intellectual entrepreneurial capacity gap” as the constraint to attaining equity between developed and developing economies. The gap is fuelling the growing technological innovation divide – the widening boundary between developed and developing economies. As a contribution to reducing the gap, this paper presents a conceptual framework of drivers for intellectual entrepreneurial capacity in knowledge capitalization for technological and economic leapfrogging in development.The knowledge industry is becoming the dominant contributor to sustainable growth. It is causing a paradigm drift towards knowledge capitalization for improvement of productivity-driven competition to attain better economic performance, wealth generation, and development. Research has identified an “intellectual entrepreneurial capacity gap” as the constraint to attaining equity between developed and developing economies. The gap is fuelling the growing technological innovation divide – the widening boundary between developed and developing economies. As a contribution to reducing the gap, this paper presents a conceptual framework of drivers for intellectual entrepreneurial capacity in knowledge capitalization for technological and economic leapfrogging in development.The knowledge industry is becoming the dominant contributor to sustainable growth. It is causing a paradigm drift towards knowledge capitalization for improvement of productivity-driven competition to attain better economic performance, wealth generation, and development. Research has identified an “intellectual entrepreneurial capacity gap” as the constraint to attaining equity between developed and developing economies. The gap is fuelling the growing technological innovation divide – the widening boundary between developed and developing economies. As a contribution to reducing the gap, this paper presents a conceptual framework of drivers for intellectual entrepreneurial capacity in knowledge capitalization for technological and economic leapfrogging in development

Pre-implantation maternal uterine effects on embryo growth and development : an investigation using models of maternal constraint in sheep : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Animal Science, Massey University, Turitea, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Listed in 2017 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesPrenatal development and growth are critical to survival of the fetus and neonate. Recent evidence suggests that a critical period for determining growth is the pre-implantation period of pregnancy during which differentiation, organogenesis and development of the embryo occur and the embryo is considerably vulnerable to uterine environmental factors. The objectives of the present study were to examine the effects of restrictive uterine environments on embryo development using two sheep models of maternal constraint: litter size and dam size, and to identify embryonic and maternally-driven mechanisms that regulate development of the peri-implantation sheep embryo. Morphometric analysis (embryo length, width and heart bulge width) of the embryos in peri-implantation single and twin embryos was inconclusive; as was the transcriptomics analysis of whole embryos using RNA-seq to examine differential gene expression that may be responsible for differential regulation of growth. In a dam size model, large-breed Suffolk embryos gestated in small-breed Cheviot ewes (constrained environment) were smaller than Suffolk embryos gestated in Suffolk ewes (control) at day 19 of pregnancy, confirming previous findings that maternal constraint is evident in early pregnancy when limitations of space are not of consequence. Progesterone administered in the post-ovulatory period, day 0 to 6, alleviates this apparent constraint such that Suffolk embryos gestated in Cheviot ewes that received progesterone are larger than those gestated in Cheviot ewes that did not. Further, differential gene expression analysis of maternal uterine tissues showed that at day 6 and day 19 endometrial genes that encode for histotroph secretion and uterine receptivity are altered by post-ovulatory progesterone administration. Timing of administration of progesterone is critical not only to embryo growth but also to embryo survival. There were lower pregnancy rates in the ewes that received progesterone from day 0 than those that received progesterone from day 2. The results of this thesis indicate that progesterone exerts its effects by regulation of genes that encode for uterine structural and secretory activity to advance the uterus. This likely forces the asynchronous embryo to accelerate its growth in order to adapt to its environment. These findings contribute to the knowledge of the regulatory mechanisms controlling early embryo growth and present a platform within the livestock industry and human reproductive technology practice to manipulate embryo growth to improve survival of offspring

Replica methods for loopy sparse random graphs

I report on the development of a novel statistical mechanical formalism for the analysis of random graphs with many short loops, and processes on such graphs. The graphs are defined via maximum entropy ensembles, in which both the degrees (via hard constraints) and the adjacency matrix spectrum (via a soft constraint) are prescribed. The sum over graphs can be done analytically, using a replica formalism with complex replica dimensions. All known results for tree-like graphs are recovered in a suitable limit. For loopy graphs, the emerging theory has an appealing and intuitive structure, suggests how message passing algorithms should be adapted, and what is the structure of theories describing spin systems on loopy architectures. However, the formalism is still largely untested, and may require further adjustment and refinement.Comment: 11 pages, no figures. To be published in Proceedings of The International Meeting on High-Dimensional Data-Driven Science (HD3-2015), Kyoto, Japan, on 14-17 December, 201

Treebank-based acquisition of a Chinese lexical-functional grammar

Scaling wide-coverage, constraint-based grammars such as Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001) or Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) from fragments to naturally occurring unrestricted text is knowledge-intensive, time-consuming and (often prohibitively) expensive. A number of researchers have recently presented methods to automatically acquire wide-coverage, probabilistic constraint-based grammatical resources from treebanks (Cahill et al., 2002, Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill et al., 2004; Miyao et al., 2003; Miyao et al., 2004; Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002; Hockenmaier, 2003), addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in constraint-based grammar development. Research to date has concentrated on English and German. In this paper we report on an experiment to induce wide-coverage, probabilistic LFG grammatical and lexical resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2002) based on an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. Currently 96.751% of the CTB trees receive a single, covering and connected f-structure, 0.112% do not receive an f-structure due to feature clashes, while 3.137% are associated with multiple f-structure fragments. From the f-structure-annotated CTB we extract a total of 12975 lexical entries with 20 distinct subcategorisation frame types. Of these 3436 are verbal entries with a total of 11 different frame types. We extract a number of PCFG-based LFG approximations. Currently our best automatically induced grammars achieve an f-score of 81.57% against the trees in unseen articles 301-325; 86.06% f-score (all grammatical functions) and 73.98% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the f-structures automatically generated for the original trees in 301-325 and 82.79% (all grammatical functions) and 67.74% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the manually annotated gold-standard f-structures for 50 trees randomly selected from articles 301-325

DEVELOPMENT OF INDIA:A CO-INTEGRATION ANALYSIS

The function of planning in a predominantly market-driven economy has to be symptomatic, co-coordinative and authoritarian. That provides the good reason for India’s Planning Commission to engage in preparing development plans for the economy periodically even after liberalisation. However as it can’t control investment in the private sector so such planning can at best be at least indicative. So the five year plans are now seek to provide an indicative path of development by setting out the imperatives for alternative growth scenarios in terms of macro-variables. It is still be necessary for planning commission to integrate and coordinate the plans of different ministries and undertakings of the central government, and bring them in line with the medium and long-term goals while keeping within the budget constraint. At the same time, the system of transfers from the centre needs to be reformed. There should be some rethinking on the relative roles of the planning commission and the finance commisson. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze the inter relation between economic development and directive roles of planning process in India.Economic development, liberalization, indicative planning and Planning Policy