Using activity-oriented design methods (AODM) to investigatemobile learning

The past few years have witnessed significant interest and developments in researching mobile learning, with a lot of important contributions being made towards understanding and defining mobile learning. However, current research efforts are being redirected towards a new agenda to establish appropriate methods for investigating mobile learning, as this book testifies. This chapter contributes to this research effort by articulating how to adapt Activity-Oriented Design Methods (AODM – see Mwanza, 2002) for use in mobile learning research

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

An interdisciplinary study of information systems: Christopher Alexander and IS failure.

This paper describes work carried out at the University of York; its contents do not represent the views or opinions of BT. It provides an example of how insights into the field of IS can be gained by looking at it from the perspective of other academic disciplines. Based on the idea that physical and virtual office spaces exist to serve parallel organisational requirements, it is argued that designers of information systems (IS) should be able to learn from the experience of architects in order to improve their methods and redefine their objectives. Firstly, the work of Christopher Alexander is reviewed to show how his work on architectural patterns has been of value to the designers object-oriented systems. Secondly, similarities in the literature between notions of failure in architecture and IS design are identified. These are then examined through interviews with practitioners to establish the relevance of the approach. Finally, the area that Alexander described as ‘the quality without a name’ is highlighted as a topic for further research.Information Systems, Patterns, Virtual Office, Christopher Alexander

Design Issues for Generalized Linear Models: A Review

Generalized linear models (GLMs) have been used quite effectively in the modeling of a mean response under nonstandard conditions, where discrete as well as continuous data distributions can be accommodated. The choice of design for a GLM is a very important task in the development and building of an adequate model. However, one major problem that handicaps the construction of a GLM design is its dependence on the unknown parameters of the fitted model. Several approaches have been proposed in the past 25 years to solve this problem. These approaches, however, have provided only partial solutions that apply in only some special cases, and the problem, in general, remains largely unresolved. The purpose of this article is to focus attention on the aforementioned dependence problem. We provide a survey of various existing techniques dealing with the dependence problem. This survey includes discussions concerning locally optimal designs, sequential designs, Bayesian designs and the quantile dispersion graph approach for comparing designs for GLMs.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000105 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Ambiguity is a double-edged sword: similarity references in communication

Designers often explain new concepts and new ideas by reference to existing designs. This is parsimonious, as it only requires a pointer to the referent and a description of the modifications. Such descriptions can be extremely powerful, expressing the entire context of a design or a process in a few words. However similarity assertions are inherently ambiguous, because they depend not only on the chosen description but also on the intention behind the similarity comparison. In this paper we attempt to analyse the effect that the ambiguity of similarity references has on communication and idea generation in design. The reinterpretation of a similarity assertion can be extremely creative, where ambiguity allows for new interpretations of a problem. At the same time, it can make accurate communication extremely difficult because every assertion can be interpreted differently unless the context is fully shared

Towards a Scalable Hardware/Software Co-Design Platform for Real-time Pedestrian Tracking Based on a ZYNQ-7000 Device

Currently, most designers face a daunting task to research different design flows and learn the intricacies of specific software from various manufacturers in hardware/software co-design. An urgent need of creating a scalable hardware/software co-design platform has become a key strategic element for developing hardware/software integrated systems. In this paper, we propose a new design flow for building a scalable co-design platform on FPGA-based system-on-chip. We employ an integrated approach to implement a histogram oriented gradients (HOG) and a support vector machine (SVM) classification on a programmable device for pedestrian tracking. Not only was hardware resource analysis reported, but the precision and success rates of pedestrian tracking on nine open access image data sets are also analysed. Finally, our proposed design flow can be used for any real-time image processingrelated products on programmable ZYNQ-based embedded systems, which benefits from a reduced design time and provide a scalable solution for embedded image processing products