From Inscriptions to Lexica and Back: A Platform for Editing and Linking the Languages of Ancient Italy

Available language technology is hardly applicable to scarcely attested ancient languages, yet their digital semantic representation, though challenging, is an asset for the purpose of sharing and preserving existing cultural knowledge. In the context of a project on the languages and cultures of ancient Italy, we took up this challenge. This paper thus describes the development of a user friendly web platform, EpiLexO, for the creation and editing of an integrated system of language resources for ancient fragmentary languages centered on the lexicon, in compliance with current digital humanities and Linked Open Data principles. EpiLexo allows for the editing of lexica with all relevant cross-references: for their linking to their testimonies, as well as to bibliographic information and other (external) resources and common vocabularies. The focus of the current implementation is on the languages of ancient Italy, in particular Oscan, Faliscan, Celtic and Venetic; however, the technological solutions are designed to be general enough to be potentially applicable to different contexts and scenarios

Programming Languages shouldn't be "too Natural"

Despite much research on programming language principles, most often the design of modern languages ignores such principles which results in cumbersome, hard to understand, and error-prone code. We substantiate our claim through a short sampling of the features of some widely used languages and by referring to other criticisms widely publicized in the literature. We argue that a major reason of such an unpleasant state of the art is that programming languages evolve in a way that too much resembles that of natural languages. We advocate a different attitude in programming language design, going back to essentiality and rigorous application of few basic, well-chosen principles

From usability to secure computing and back again

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows multiple parties to jointly compute the output of a function while preserving the privacy of any individual party’s inputs to that function. As MPC protocols transition from research prototypes to realworld applications, the usability of MPC-enabled applications is increasingly critical to their successful deployment and widespread adoption. Our Web-MPC platform, designed with a focus on usability, has been deployed for privacy-preserving data aggregation initiatives with the City of Boston and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. After building and deploying an initial version of the platform, we conducted a heuristic evaluation to identify usability improvements and implemented corresponding application enhancements. However, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these changes within the context of real-world deployments using traditional web analytics tools without compromising the security guarantees of the platform. This work consists of two contributions that address this challenge: (1) the Web-MPC platform has been extended with the capability to collect web analytics using existing MPC protocols, and (2) as a test of this feature and a way to inform future work, this capability has been leveraged to conduct a usability study comparing the two versions ofWeb-MPC. While many efforts have focused on ways to enhance the usability of privacy-preserving technologies, this study serves as a model for using a privacy-preserving data-driven approach to evaluate and enhance the usability of privacy-preserving websites and applications deployed in realworld scenarios. Data collected in this study yields insights into the relationship between usability and security; these can help inform future implementations of MPC solutions.Published versio

Probabilistic Programming Concepts

A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been developed since more than 20 years

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types