6,266 research outputs found
Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations
The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments
Discrete modes of social information processing predict individual behavior of fish in a group
Individual computations and social interactions underlying collective
behavior in groups of animals are of great ethological, behavioral, and
theoretical interest. While complex individual behaviors have successfully been
parsed into small dictionaries of stereotyped behavioral modes, studies of
collective behavior largely ignored these findings; instead, their focus was on
inferring single, mode-independent social interaction rules that reproduced
macroscopic and often qualitative features of group behavior. Here we bring
these two approaches together to predict individual swimming patterns of adult
zebrafish in a group. We show that fish alternate between an active mode in
which they are sensitive to the swimming patterns of conspecifics, and a
passive mode where they ignore them. Using a model that accounts for these two
modes explicitly, we predict behaviors of individual fish with high accuracy,
outperforming previous approaches that assumed a single continuous computation
by individuals and simple metric or topological weighing of neighbors behavior.
At the group level, switching between active and passive modes is uncorrelated
among fish, yet correlated directional swimming behavior still emerges. Our
quantitative approach for studying complex, multi-modal individual behavior
jointly with emergent group behavior is readily extensible to additional
behavioral modes and their neural correlates, as well as to other species
Designing Software Architectures As a Composition of Specializations of Knowledge Domains
This paper summarizes our experimental research and software development activities in designing robust, adaptable and reusable software architectures. Several years ago, based on our previous experiences in object-oriented software development, we made the following assumption: ‘A software architecture should be a composition of specializations of knowledge domains’. To verify this assumption we carried out three pilot projects. In addition to the application of some popular domain analysis techniques such as use cases, we identified the invariant compositional structures of the software architectures and the related knowledge domains. Knowledge domains define the boundaries of the adaptability and reusability capabilities of software systems. Next, knowledge domains were mapped to object-oriented concepts. We experienced that some aspects of knowledge could not be directly modeled in terms of object-oriented concepts. In this paper we describe our approach, the pilot projects, the experienced problems and the adopted solutions for realizing the software architectures. We conclude the paper with the lessons that we learned from this experience
Comparative Analysis of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans Protein Interaction Network
Protein interaction networks aim to summarize the complex interplay of
proteins in an organism. Early studies suggested that the position of a protein
in the network determines its evolutionary rate but there has been considerable
disagreement as to what extent other factors, such as protein abundance, modify
this reported dependence.
We compare the genomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans
with those of closely related species to elucidate the recent evolutionary
history of their respective protein interaction networks. Interaction and
expression data are studied in the light of a detailed phylogenetic analysis.
The underlying network structure is incorporated explicitly into the
statistical analysis.
The increased phylogenetic resolution, paired with high-quality interaction
data, allows us to resolve the way in which protein interaction network
structure and abundance of proteins affect the evolutionary rate. We find that
expression levels are better predictors of the evolutionary rate than a
protein's connectivity. Detailed analysis of the two organisms also shows that
the evolutionary rates of interacting proteins are not sufficiently similar to
be mutually predictive.
It appears that meaningful inferences about the evolution of protein
interaction networks require comparative analysis of reasonably closely related
species. The signature of protein evolution is shaped by a protein's abundance
in the organism and its function and the biological process it is involved in.
Its position in the interaction networks and its connectivity may modulate this
but they appear to have only minor influence on a protein's evolutionary rate.Comment: Accepted for publication in BMC Evolutionary Biolog
Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing
Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements
Recommended from our members
Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions
The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions
- …