A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information

Computer Analysis of Architecture Using Automatic Image Understanding

In the past few years, computer vision and pattern recognition systems have been becoming increasingly more powerful, expanding the range of automatic tasks enabled by machine vision. Here we show that computer analysis of building images can perform quantitative analysis of architecture, and quantify similarities between city architectural styles in a quantitative fashion. Images of buildings from 18 cities and three countries were acquired using Google StreetView, and were used to train a machine vision system to automatically identify the location of the imaged building based on the image visual content. Experimental results show that the automatic computer analysis can automatically identify the geographical location of the StreetView image. More importantly, the algorithm was able to group the cities and countries and provide a phylogeny of the similarities between architectural styles as captured by StreetView images. These results demonstrate that computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms can perform the complex cognitive task of analyzing images of buildings, and can be used to measure and quantify visual similarities and differences between different styles of architectures. This experiment provides a new paradigm for studying architecture, based on a quantitative approach that can enhance the traditional manual observation and analysis. The source code used for the analysis is open and publicly available

PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks

Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geolocate images, especially en-masse. In computer vision, the photo geolocation problem is usually approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using millions of geotagged images. While previous approaches only recognize landmarks or perform approximate matching using global image descriptors, our model is able to use and integrate multiple visible cues. We show that the resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain photos, we demonstrate that this model achieves a 50% performance improvement over the single-image model

World Expos and architectonic structures :An intimate relationship

[Abstract] This article approaches, in a summarized way, the existing relations between World Expos and architectural structures, establishing the diverse historical stages existing in this relation. Likewise, it explains, through relevant examples, the influence that these structures have had on others built outside of Expos.[Resumen] Este artículo aborda, de forma resumida, las relaciones existentes entre las Exposiciones Mundiales y las estructuras arquitectónicas, estableciendo las diversas etapas históricas existentes en esta relación. Asimismo, explica, a través de ejemplos relevantes, la influencia que estas estructuras han tenido sobre otras construidas fuera de las Expos

Tourist product in experience economy

Przełom XX i XXI w. to rozwoju tzw. gospodarki doznań, w której podstawowym towarem stają się nie konkretne produkty, ale emocje, przeżycia i doświadczenia klientów. Turystyka była i jest swoistym "przemysłem wakacyjnych doświadczeń". W ostatnich latach jednak jeszcze wyraźniej niż do tej pory kładzie się nacisk na świadome kreowanie produktów turystycznych silnie nasyconych emocjami. Usilnie dąży się do multiplikowania oraz intensyfikacji wrażeń turystów. Do najważniejszych działań w tym zakresie zaliczono: przekształcanie infrastruktury turystycznej w unikatowe atrakcje turystyczne, wzbogacanie tradycyjnych usług/pakietów usług o dodatkowe elementy zapewniające dodatkowe doznania i satysfakcje, wykorzystanie nowoczesnych technologii wzbogacania realnej przestrzeni turystycznej o wirtualne byty (rozszerzona rzeczywistość), a także wygodnego zapisywania doświadczeń turystycznych oraz dzielenia się wrażeniami z masową publicznością.The turn of the 20th and 21st c. was marked by the development of experience economy, in which the basic commodities are not specific products, but the customers' emotions, impressions and experiences. Tourism has always been a particular "holiday experience industry". In recent years, however, the importance of the conscious creation of emotional tourist products has become even greater, we may observe continuous efforts to multiply and intensify tourism experience. The key activities to achieve this goal include transforming tourism infrastructure into unique tourism attractions, enlarging traditional services/service packages by elements providing additional emotions and satisfaction, using modern technologies in order to add virtual entities to real tourism space (augmented reality), as well as to conveniently record tourism experience and share it with the public