Modelling and managing reliability growth during the engineering design process

[This is a keynote speech presented at the 2nd International Conference on Design Engineering and Science, discussing modelling and managing reliability growth during the engineering process.] Reliability is vital for safe and efficient operation of systems. Decisions about the configuration and selection of parts within a system, and the development activities to prove the chosen design, will influence the inherent reliability. Modelling provides a mechanism for explicating the relationship between the engineering activities and the statistical measures of reliability so that useful estimates of reliability can be obtained. Reliability modelling should be aligned to support the decisions taken during design and development. We examine why and how a reliability growth model can be structured, the type of data required and available to populate them, the selection of relevant summary measures, the process for updating estimates and feeding back into design to support planning decisions. The modelling process described is informed by our theoretical background in management science and our practical experience of working with UK industry

Serious Gaming for the Evaluation of Market Mechanisms

Design science consists of two major design processes: building and evaluation. A wellexecuted evaluation of design artifacts is crucial to their success. Traditional evaluation tools have certain weaknesses because design artifacts include “wicked” problems. Serious Gaming can help to overcome these problems. To this end an online based cloud resource managing game is developed which simulates the implementation of a market mechanism and represents a new design artifact. This mechanism is a heuristic solution consisting of dynamic pricing and a priority policy. The aim of this research is to show that Serious Gaming complements traditional evaluation tools and improves the evaluation of market mechanisms. Therefore, a general guideline for designing Serious Games for evaluation is developed and a classification of Serious Gaming is established. After having collected sufficient data, future work will be to analyze players’ behavior and finally evaluate the market mechanism

Re-examination of Oostenbroek et al. (2016): evidence for neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have implications for theories of social-cognitive development. Here we identify 11 flaws in Oostenbroek et al.'s experimental design that biased the results toward null effects. We requested and obtained the authors’ raw data. Contrary to the authors’ conclusions, new analyses reveal significant tongue-protrusion imitation at all four ages tested (1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks old). We explain how the authors missed this pattern and offer five recommendations for designing future experiments. Infant imitation raises fundamental issues about action representation, social learning, and brain–behavior relations. The debate about the origins and development of imitation reflects its importance to theories of developmental science

Making a Cloud Provenance-Aware

The advent of cloud computing provides a cheap and convenient mechanism for scientists to share data. The utility of such data is obviously enhanced when the provenance of the data is also available. The cloud, while convenient for storing data, is not designed for storing and querying provenance. In this paper, we present desirable properties for distributed provenance storage systems and present design alternatives for storing data and provenance on Amazon’s popular Web Services platform (AWS). We evaluate the properties satisfied by each approach and analyze the cost of storing and querying provenance in each approach.Engineering and Applied Science