4,361 research outputs found
How social innovation “came to be”: tracing the evolution of a contested concept
AbstractSocial innovation is a contested concept with multiple meanings that have implications beyond academia. It is not a new term – its sociological heritage can be dated to the late nineteenth century. However, until the twenty-first century the concept was sparsely utilised, and, despite its current popularity among policy makers in Europe and the United States, remains largely ignored by social policy researchers. Through bibliometric analysis we identify the most influential articles on social innovation and explore how these have conceptualised the term. We show that over time social innovation has taken on a set of meanings far removed from its sociological roots. In particular we identify a weak tradition that sees social innovation as any increase in aggregate individual utility arising from an innovation, and a strong tradition that focuses on the process of collaboration between different groups and the restructuring of power relations. We conclude by outlining implications for social policy research.</jats:p
The C Object System: Using C as a High-Level Object-Oriented Language
The C Object System (Cos) is a small C library which implements high-level
concepts available in Clos, Objc and other object-oriented programming
languages: uniform object model (class, meta-class and property-metaclass),
generic functions, multi-methods, delegation, properties, exceptions, contracts
and closures. Cos relies on the programmable capabilities of the C programming
language to extend its syntax and to implement the aforementioned concepts as
first-class objects. Cos aims at satisfying several general principles like
simplicity, extensibility, reusability, efficiency and portability which are
rarely met in a single programming language. Its design is tuned to provide
efficient and portable implementation of message multi-dispatch and message
multi-forwarding which are the heart of code extensibility and reusability.
With COS features in hand, software should become as flexible and extensible as
with scripting languages and as efficient and portable as expected with C
programming. Likewise, Cos concepts should significantly simplify adaptive and
aspect-oriented programming as well as distributed and service-oriented
computingComment: 18
Timed Automata Semantics for Analyzing Creol
We give a real-time semantics for the concurrent, object-oriented modeling
language Creol, by mapping Creol processes to a network of timed automata. We
can use our semantics to verify real time properties of Creol objects, in
particular to see whether processes can be scheduled correctly and meet their
end-to-end deadlines. Real-time Creol can be useful for analyzing, for
instance, abstract models of multi-core embedded systems. We show how analysis
can be done in Uppaal.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2010, arXiv:1007.499
Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts
This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix
faults in general-purpose software. To provide high-quality fix suggestions and
to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the
presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as
pre- and postconditions). Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic
analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating
fixes. The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a
faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of
validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their
suitability.
In an extensive experimental evaluation, we applied AutoFix to over 200
faults in four code bases of different maturity and quality (of implementation
and of contracts). AutoFix successfully fixed 42% of the faults, producing, in
the majority of cases, corrections of quality comparable to those competent
programmers would write; the used computational resources were modest, with an
average time per fix below 20 minutes on commodity hardware. These figures
compare favorably to the state of the art in automated program fixing, and
demonstrate that the AutoFix approach is successfully applicable to reduce the
debugging burden in real-world scenarios.Comment: Minor changes after proofreadin
Reusing Test-Cases on Different Levels of Abstraction in a Model Based Development Tool
Seamless model based development aims to use models during all phases of the
development process of a system. During the development process in a
component-based approach, components of a system are described at qualitatively
differing abstraction levels: during requirements engineering component models
are rather abstract high-level and underspecified, while during implementation
the component models are rather concrete and fully specified in order to enable
code generation. An important issue that arises is assuring that the concrete
models correspond to abstract models. In this paper, we propose a method to
assure that concrete models for system components refine more abstract models
for the same components. In particular we advocate a framework for reusing
testcases at different abstraction levels. Our approach, even if it cannot
completely prove the refinement, can be used to ensure confidence in the
development process. In particular we are targeting the refinement of
requirements which are represented as very abstract models. Besides a formal
model of our approach, we discuss our experiences with the development of an
Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system in a model driven development process.
This uses extensions which we implemented for our model-based development tool
and which are briefly presented in this paper.Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2012, arXiv:1202.582
On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems
The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing
environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be
composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be
more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key
enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and
dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an
emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate
services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be
composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required
to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task.
Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages
previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and
describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration
Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694
How we might be able to Understand the Brain
Current methodologies in the neurosciences have difficulty in accounting for complex phenomena such as language, which can however be quite well characterised in phenomenological terms. This paper addresses the issue of unifying the two approaches. We typically understand complicated systems in terms of a collection of models, each characterisable in principle within a formal system, it being possible to explain higher-level properties in terms of lower level ones by means of a series of inferences based on these models. We consider the nervous system to be a mechanism for implementing the demands of an appropriate collection of models, each concerned with some aspect of brain and behaviour, the observer mechanism of Baas playing an important role in matching model and behaviour in this context. The discussion expounds these ideas in detail, showing their potential utility in connection with real problems of brain and behaviour, important areas where the ideas can be applied including the development of higher levels of abstraction, and linguistic behaviour, as described in the works of Karmiloff-Smith and Jackendoff respectively
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