104,021 research outputs found
Natural Language Does Not Emerge 'Naturally' in Multi-Agent Dialog
A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of
communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have
simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in
the protocols developed by the agents, all learned without any human
supervision!
In this paper, using a Task and Tell reference game between two agents as a
testbed, we present a sequence of 'negative' results culminating in a
'positive' one -- showing that while most agent-invented languages are
effective (i.e. achieve near-perfect task rewards), they are decidedly not
interpretable or compositional.
In essence, we find that natural language does not emerge 'naturally',
despite the semblance of ease of natural-language-emergence that one may gather
from recent literature. We discuss how it is possible to coax the invented
languages to become more and more human-like and compositional by increasing
restrictions on how two agents may communicate.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted at EMNLP 2017 as short pape
Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments
Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim\ud
that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.\ud
The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company
Support for collaborative component-based software engineering
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described.
This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject.
In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice.
Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects.
Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools).
Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying,
assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing.
Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation,
empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further
advances
Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives
This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with
respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to
the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design
cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of
perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress
specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task
interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in
order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design
An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires
evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment
for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of
several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system,
scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not
provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the
evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to
time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations.
This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the
awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline
to which the effects of awareness support may be compared
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