50,941 research outputs found
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
How functional programming mattered
In 1989 when functional programming was still considered a niche topic, Hughes wrote a visionary paper arguing convincingly ‘why functional programming matters’. More than two decades have passed. Has functional programming really mattered? Our answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’. Functional programming is now at the forefront of a new generation of programming technologies, and enjoying increasing popularity and influence. In this paper, we review the impact of functional programming, focusing on how it has changed the way we may construct programs, the way we may verify programs, and fundamentally the way we may think about programs
Teaching staff knowledge, attributions and confidence in relation to working with children with an intellectual disability and challenging behaviour
The present study examined Scottish teaching staff knowledge about the definition and management of challenging behaviour displayed by children with an intellectual disability. Knowledge levels were relatively low, and participants were most likely to define challenging behaviour by function or topography. Teaching staff were largely unaware of positive programming strategies, suggesting that they may not be properly equipped to manage challenging behaviour effectively in the longer term. The teaching staff were found to hold attributions which research suggests are associated with reduced helping behaviour and increased anger. This indicates a continuing need to identify effective ways of promoting more accurate knowledge and positive attributions in teaching staff
Reactive concurrent programming revisited
In this note we revisit the so-called reactive programming style, which
evolves from the synchronous programming model of the Esterel language by
weakening the assumption that the absence of an event can be detected
instantaneously. We review some research directions that have been explored
since the emergence of the reactive model ten years ago. We shall also outline
some questions that remain to be investigated
From Events to Reactions: A Progress Report
Syndicate is a new coordinated, concurrent programming language. It occupies
a novel point on the spectrum between the shared-everything paradigm of threads
and the shared-nothing approach of actors. Syndicate actors exchange messages
and share common knowledge via a carefully controlled database that clearly
scopes conversations. This approach clearly simplifies coordination of
concurrent activities. Experience in programming with Syndicate, however,
suggests a need to raise the level of linguistic abstraction. In addition to
writing event handlers and managing event subscriptions directly, the language
will have to support a reactive style of programming. This paper presents
event-oriented Syndicate programming and then describes a preliminary design
for augmenting it with new reactive programming constructs.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2016, arXiv:1606.0540
Health and social care workers’ understanding of the meaning and management of challenging behaviour in learning disability services.
The present study sought to investigate the relationship between professional background, length of experience, understanding of the term “challenging behaviour” and opinions of factors important in managing challenging behaviour in people with a learning disability. Health Workers identified significantly more definition criteria than Social Care Workers, yet no significant difference was found between their overall scores for management criteria. Rather the emphasis of their knowledge of management principles appeared to be different. A significantly greater percentage of Health Workers identified management criteria relating to psychological principles, while a greater percentage of Social Care Workers identified that of reactive responses. Health Workers seemed more likely to identify challenging behaviour in terms of its impact on the service while Social Care Workers appeared to concentrate on the type of behaviour evident. Finally, the longer the experience of the Social Care Worker, the higher their overall scores for the definition and management criteria. However, no significant relationship was found between experience and overall scores amongst Health Workers. Implications of the findings are discussed
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