Explainability as a non-functional requirement: challenges and recommendations

Software systems are becoming increasingly complex. Their ubiquitous presence makes users more dependent on their correctness in many aspects of daily life. As a result, there is a growing need to make software systems and their decisions more comprehensible, with more transparency in software-based decision making. Transparency is therefore becoming increasingly important as a non-functional requirement. However, the abstract quality aspect of transparency needs to be better understood and related to mechanisms that can foster it. The integration of explanations into software has often been discussed as a solution to mitigate system opacity. Yet, an important first step is to understand user requirements in terms of explainable software behavior: Are users really interested in software transparency and are explanations considered an appropriate way to achieve it? We conducted a survey with 107 end users to assess their opinion on the current level of transparency in software systems and what they consider to be the main advantages and disadvantages of embedded explanations. We assess the relationship between explanations and transparency and analyze its potential impact on software quality. As explainability has become an important issue, researchers and professionals have been discussing how to deal with it in practice. While there are differences of opinion on the need for built-in explanations, understanding this concept and its impact on software is a key step for requirements engineering. Based on our research results and on the study of existing literature, we offer recommendations for the elicitation and analysis of explainability and discuss strategies for the practice. © 2020, The Author(s)

Measuring the impact of corporate governance on non-financial reporting in the top HEIs worldwide

Purpose: This study aims to measure the relationship between corporate governance and non-financial reporting (NFR) in higher education institutions (HEIs). Board effectiveness, student engagement, audit quality, Vice-Chancellor (VC) pay and VC gender are targeted for analysis.Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on content analysis. The authors used the EU NFR Directive (2014/95/EU) to measure NFR. This includes environmental, corporate social responsibility, human rights, corporate board effectiveness and corruption and bribery. Cross-sectional data was collected from 89 HEIs worldwide across 15 different countries over three years. Content analysis, the weighted scoring method and panel data analysis are used to obtain the results.Findings: Through a neo-institutional theoretical lens, this study provides a broader understanding of NFR content disclosure practices within HEIs. The findings reveal that the audit quality, VC pay and VC gender are significantly and positively associated with NFR content disclosure. However, board effectiveness has a significant negative impact on NFR content disclosure. More interestingly, the findings reveal that student engagement has an insignificant association with NFR content disclosure and there significant difference on the level of NFR content disclosure across universities situated in the different geographical region such as the USA, Australia, the UK and EU, Asia and Canada. The findings have important implications for regulators and policymakers. The evidence appears to be robust when controlling for possible endogeneities.Originality/value: The study contributes to the literature on corporate non-financial disclosure as it provides new insights of corporate governance mechanisms and NFR disclosure within HEIs.</p

Machine learning applied to the context of Poker

A combinação de princípios da teoria de jogo e metodologias de machine learning aplicados ao contexto de formular estratégias ótimas para jogos está a angariar interesse por parte de uma porção crescentemente significativa da comunidade científica, tornando-se o jogo do Poker num candidato de estudo popular devido à sua natureza de informação imperfeita. Avanços nesta área possuem vastas aplicações em cenários do mundo real, e a área de investigação de inteligência artificial demonstra que o interesse relativo a este objeto de estudo está longe de desaparecer, com investigadores do Facebook e Carnegie Mellon a apresentar, em 2019, o primeiro agente de jogo autónomo de Poker provado como ganhador num cenário com múltiplos jogadores, uma conquista relativamente à anterior especificação do estado da arte, que fora desenvolvida para jogos de apenas 2 jogadores. Este estudo pretende explorar as características de jogos estocásticos de informação imperfeita, recolhendo informação acerca dos avanços nas metodologias disponibilizados por parte de investigadores de forma a desenvolver um agente autónomo de jogo que se pretende inserir na classificação de "utility-maximizing decision-maker".The combination of game theory principles and machine learning methodologies applied to encountering optimal strategies for games is garnering interest from an increasing large portion of the scientific community, with the game of Poker being a popular study subject due to its imperfect information nature. Advancements in this area have a wide array of applications in real-world scenarios, and the field of artificial intelligent studies show that the interest regarding this object of study is yet to fade, with researchers from Facebook and Carnegie Mellon presenting, in 2019, the world’s first autonomous Poker playing agent that is proven to be profitable while confronting multiple players at a time, an achievement in relation to the previous state of the art specification, which was developed for two player games only. This study intends to explore the characteristics of stochastic games of imperfect information, gathering information regarding the advancements in methodologies made available by researchers in order to ultimately develop an autonomous agent intended to adhere to the classification of a utility-maximizing decision-maker

To Comply Software and IT System Development with Related Laws

. Accretion procedure of crimes and security breaches against the privacy of individual’s information and their maintenance information systems has cost huge amount of financial and other resources loose. Consequently governments take serious actions toward approving protective legislation against cyber crimes and it will be duty of software developers to adopt policies and measures to ensure that their designed systems are compatible with existing laws and their amendments. Since information technology and legislation are two quite distinct sciences, existence of a mechanism to do this adjustment and satisfy security and legal requirements of a designing software system is very essential. This paper is representing a framework that will help IT professionals to extract security requirements from relevant rules and use them in design of a system which is in accordance with those rules. It is giving brief discussion of the framework’s methodology and design of a simulating computer-aided system of this framework. It also reports the research progress and new discovered conclusions

Polite like an Egyptian? Case Studies of ‘Politeness’ in the Late Ramesside Letters

The Late Ramesside Letters (LRL), a corpus of over 70 personal communications written in Late Egyptian, are one of the most complete letter collections from ancient Egypt (1099–1069 BC). A key feature of ancient Egyptian letter writing is the adherence to the social positions of, and relationships between, the interlocutors, allowing scholars to reconstruct the hierarchical network of individuals directly and indirectly included in the corpus. How then can modern scholars discern what was considered to be ‘polite’ communicative behaviour within these relationships and how can developments in historical politeness help us do this? This article will explore three case studies surrounding different aspects of politeness research: first-order politeness, facework, and discernment politeness, in order to explore the phenomenon of ‘politeness’ in Late Egyptian and reflect on the suitability of current ‘politeness’ frameworks for the analysis of the Late Ramesside Letters

Requirements engineering for explainable systems

Information systems are ubiquitous in modern life and are powered by evermore complex algorithms that are often difficult to understand. Moreover, since systems are part of almost every aspect of human life, the quality in interaction and communication between humans and machines has become increasingly important. Hence the importance of explainability as an essential element of human-machine communication; it has also become an important quality requirement for modern information systems. However, dealing with quality requirements has never been a trivial task. To develop quality systems, software professionals have to understand how to transform abstract quality goals into real-world information system solutions. Requirements engineering provides a structured approach that aids software professionals in better comprehending, evaluating, and operationalizing quality requirements. Explainability has recently regained prominence and been acknowledged and established as a quality requirement; however, there is currently no requirements engineering recommendations specifically focused on explainable systems. To fill this gap, this thesis investigated explainability as a quality requirement and how it relates to the information systems context, with an emphasis on requirements engineering. To this end, this thesis proposes two theories that delineate the role of explainability and establish guidelines for the requirements engineering process of explainable systems. These theories are modeled and shaped through five artifacts. These theories and artifacts should help software professionals 1) to communicate and achieve a shared understanding of the concept of explainability; 2) to comprehend how explainability affects system quality and what role it plays; 3) in translating abstract quality goals into design and evaluation strategies; and 4) to shape the software development process for the development of explainable systems. The theories and artifacts were built and evaluated through literature studies, workshops, interviews, and a case study. The findings show that the knowledge made available helps practitioners understand the idea of explainability better, facilitating the creation of explainable systems. These results suggest that the proposed theories and artifacts are plausible, practical, and serve as a strong starting point for further extensions and improvements in the search for high-quality explainable systems

Charateristics and Impact of Interpersonal Conflicts on Requirements Risks

Interpersonal conflicts in software projects have an impact on project’s success, product’s quality, team’s performance, etc. However, in Requirements Engineering (RE), there is dearth of research on this topic; previous research has focused largely on conflicts among requirements. We conducted a case study of an industrial project to determine the characteristics (e.g., type, severity, conflict management styles, etc.) and impact of interpersonal conflicts rooted in RE (RE-Conflicts), on project risks associated with requirements (e..g., inadequately identified requirements, incorrect requirements, etc). The findings show that the conflicts over administrative procedures (47%) had the highest frequency count. The highest number of RE-Conflict incidences took place in the elicitation activity (46%). A significant impact of RE-Conflicts on requirements risks was also observed (e.g., ‘continually changing requirements’ was affected by 80% RE-Conflicts). This knowledge can aid in initiating risk management in RE and in developing tools, mitigation strategies and mid-range theories on RE-Conflicts

Software product quality requirements engineering method : SOQUAREM

The IT industry needs reliable data about Quality Requirements (QRs) to adequately evaluate systems and their architecture. Quality requirements management of the software product is an emerging discipline aiming to enhance the software product quality by addressing its quality requirements. Dealing with this kind of requirements is not easy and implies much effort from practitioners, better involvement of interested stakeholders and a solid knowledge in quality management techniques. In fact they are vague, difficult to define and often conflict with other requirements. New approaches toward QRs management are developed to resolve problems of traditional software engineering views as: a) lack of systematic guidelines on how to elicit QRs; b) difficulty to identify QRs and to represent them in models and processes. In the context of a proposal for a SOftware product QUAlity Requirements Engineering Method (SOQUAREM), this thesis provides a structured QRs engineering process with its supporting ISO/IEC SQuaRE 25030 standard, management techniques and concepts. SOQUAREM process spans 2 high levels of abstraction (business and system) and six conceptual phases such as: identification and refinement of business goals, derivation and consolidation of the quality attributes and their integration into the functional process. The proposed SOQUAREM illustrates in a structured and easy to use way how several concepts can be combined at different organizational levels to identify, represent, document and retrace quality attributes. This document is divided into six chapters: the first chapter presents a background and related work on "Quality requirements" in general and on various quality requirements management methods such as MOQARE (Misuse-Oriented QuAlity Requirements Engineering)), IESE NFR (Institute for Experimental Software Engineering Non Functional Requirements), Soft Goal Notation (Chung Framework), FDAF (Formal Design and Analysis Framework) and ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method). The second chapter introduces the research topic with its objectives, its limits, the research methodology and research steps. The third chapter describes the research execution by analyzing the current situation of quality requirements with the resulted indicators from academic and industrial environments and formulating the future requirements of the proposed research solution. An overview of the innovative aspects of proposed method like its specific features, metamodel, building process, and process structure are pinpointed. The fourth chapter describes primarily the most important parts of the research which are the development of a new quality requirements engineering method called SOftware product QUAlity Requirements Engineering Method including fundamentals, key concepts and a process model. The fifth chapter presents an illustrative example applied to a building automation system called MSLite. Applicability of SOQUAREM process in this example is developed and analyzed. The last chapter presents a conclusion on this research work and its expected evolution in the future

National Firefighter Registry (NFR) protocol

Version: 8/22/2022Revised in response to NFR Subcommittee Report dated 08/04/2020Revision approved by DFSE and NIOSH Office of Director on 10/29/2020Revision approved by DFSE and NIOSH Office of Director on 8/22/2022Cancer risk in the U.S. fire service is a topic of growing concern, and firefighters\u2019 occupational exposure to hazardous contaminants is thought to play an important role in their excess cancer risk. Dozens of chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known or probable carcinogens (IARC, 2010; IARC, 2020) have been identified on the fireground. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) metabolites, some of which are classified as known or probable carcinogens by IARC, have been identified in firefighters\u2019 urine after fire responses (Fent et al., 2014).20221190