Spellburst: A Node-based Interface for Exploratory Creative Coding with Natural Language Prompts

Creative coding tasks are often exploratory in nature. When producing digital artwork, artists usually begin with a high-level semantic construct such as a "stained glass filter" and programmatically implement it by varying code parameters such as shape, color, lines, and opacity to produce visually appealing results. Based on interviews with artists, it can be effortful to translate semantic constructs to program syntax, and current programming tools don't lend well to rapid creative exploration. To address these challenges, we introduce Spellburst, a large language model (LLM) powered creative-coding environment. Spellburst provides (1) a node-based interface that allows artists to create generative art and explore variations through branching and merging operations, (2) expressive prompt-based interactions to engage in semantic programming, and (3) dynamic prompt-driven interfaces and direct code editing to seamlessly switch between semantic and syntactic exploration. Our evaluation with artists demonstrates Spellburst's potential to enhance creative coding practices and inform the design of computational creativity tools that bridge semantic and syntactic spaces

Maturity of Software Modelling and Model Driven Engineering: a Survey in the Italian Industry

Background: The main claimed advantage of Model-driven engineering is improvement in productivity. However, few information is available about its actual adoption during software development and maintenance in the industry. Objective: The main aim of this work is investigating the level of maturity in the adoption of software models and of Model-driven engineering in the Italian industry. The perspective is that of software engineering researchers. Method: First, we conducted an exploratory personal opinion survey with 155 Italian software professionals. The data were collected with the help of a web-based on-line questionnaire. Then, we conducted focused interviews with three software professionals to interpret doubtful results. Results: Software modelling is a very relevant phenomenon in the Italian industry. Model-Driven techniques are used in the industry, even if (i) only for a limited extent, (ii) despite a quite generalized dissatisfaction about available tools and (iii) despite a generally low experience of the IT personnel in such techniques. Limitations: Generalization of results is limited due to the sample size. Moreover, possible self-exclusion from participants not interested in modelling could have biased the results. Conclusion: Results reinforce existing evidence regarding the usage of software modelling and (partially of) Model-driven engineering in the industry but highlight several aspects of immaturity of the Italian industry

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors (1.0).:A COPIM WP6 Research and Scoping Report

This report explores how publishers and authors can promote, nurture, and facilitate interaction with openly available books. Open access (obviously) opens up scholarship, but it also offers scope to enhance interactions between books, scholars, publishers, resources, librarians, and of course readers. This might take the form of creating communities and conversations around books, of gathering comments and hyperlinks, or of enabling updating, remixing and reusing, translating, modifying, reviewing, versioning, and forking of existing books. Open access, in short can create additional value and new avenues and formats that go beyond openness, by changing how people interact with books. Research shows that making books available in open access enhances discovery and online consultation (Snijder, 2019), but the short outline above makes clear that there is still a lot to be done to stimulate, explore, and practice the full range of book interactions made possible by open access. The first part of this report provides a literature overview that identifies the opportunities that digital technologies and enhanced interactions with open access books can provide for scholarship; it outlines some of the main types of interactions around scholarship—and around and as part of open access books more in particular—that scholars are involved in; and it showcases some of the experiments within humanities book publishing with reuse and remix; finally it presents some of the main (technological and socio-cultural) inhibitions that have prevented further uptake of these practices. The second part of this report more closely explores the technical dependencies that the introduced interactions and affordances rely upon. Doing so, it outlines and showcases various open source tools, software, technologies, platforms, infrastructures, guidelines and best practices, that lend themselves to being adopted by publishers and authors (or by publishers and authors working in collaboration with each other) to facilitate interaction around their book(s). The third part of this report then summarises the findings of the previous parts and provides recommendations, guidelines, and strategies (again, both socio-cultural and technological) for publishers and authors to further open up their books and collections to community interaction and reuse. Who is this Report for? The main communities we want to reach with this report are publishers and authors/scholars (or communities of scholars), to explore how they, by experimenting and often just making simple adjustments, can start to open up and stimulate interactions around their books. Where larger (commercial) publishers often have the resources to develop tools and workflows for interaction in-house (and often proprietary), scholar-led publishers, for example, although they have been at the vanguard of more experimental forms of publishing, have indicated that they often lack expertise and familiarity with more experimental forms of publishing and with the tools available to support them (Adema and Stone, 2017). We therefore focus in this report on open source tools and openly and freely available resources and guidelines that can help small-scale and not-for-profit book publishers that cannot afford to build their own custom platforms, to stimulate engagement around books. We also show various examples throughout this report of how publishers, publishing collectives and platforms, authors, and scholarly communities already are stimulating interaction around books in interesting ways and the tools and practices they have adopted to do so. This report focuses on interactions with books and on books within the humanities and social sciences in particular. Many of the types of interaction and interactive practices we describe within this report (such as for example open peer review and data mining), are being used and adopted more commonly within the STEM fields (where their uptake is also more widely researched). The humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences) in general have lower adoption rates where it concerns these types of practices and also have field specific preferences (as well as prejudices) towards many of these practices, which will be taken into account and further discussed in this report. Types of Interaction As part of our research we have identified several types of scholarly interaction taking place around books. The first part of this report is structured around some of the more common kinds of interaction that open access books afford: annotations, open peer review, remix and reuse, social scholarship and networked books, and emergent practices (including versioning, forking, and human computer interactions). This report doesn’t aim to cover all forms of interaction around books but has chosen to focus on the kinds of interactions that publishers and scholars would be able to promote and recreate with relatively simple adaptations to their workflows, systems, practices, and licensing. Each of the above identified types of interaction around books will be discussed in the next section, including how we can stimulate them and what obstacles currently exist towards their more general implementation. Throughout the next part of this report we will also be providing examples from within humanities book publishing to illustrate the different kinds of interaction. --- --- --- --- --- --- The report has itself been published in an experimental way. Making use of the advanced versioning functionalities offered by PubPub, we will iteratively update this document over the remainder of the project, thus allowing us to incorporate user feedback and new technological developments. Hence, we would be really grateful for constructive feedback from the communities out there who are already experimenting with new forms of interaction. Please don’t hesitate to leave comments either on the PubPub version (account and login required), or get in touch via email at [email protected] The report is published as a PDF here on Zenodo, while a more interactive book version that is available as a PubPub book.Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Polyglot software development

The languages we choose to design solutions influence the way we think about the problem, the words we use in discussing it with colleagues, the processes we adopt in developing the software which should solve that problem. Therefore we should strive to use the best language possible for depicting each facet of the system. To do that we have to solve two challenges: i) first of all to understand merits and issues brought by the languages we could adopt and their long reaching effects on the organizations, ii) combine them wisely, trying to reduce the overhead due to their assembling. In the first part of this dissertation we study the adoption of modeling and domain specific languages. On the basis of an industrial survey we individuate a list of benefits attainable through these languages, how frequently they can be reached and which techniques permit to improve the chances to obtain a particular benefit. In the same way we study also the common problems which either prevent or hinder the adoption of these languages. We then analyze the processes through which these languages are employed, studying the relative frequency of the usage of the different techniques and the factors influencing it. Finally we present two case-studies performed in a small and in a very large company, with the intent of presenting the peculiarities of the adoption in different contexts. As consequence of adopting specialized languages, many of them have to be employed to represent the complete solution. Therefore in the second part of the thesis we focus on the integration of these languages. Being this topic really new we performed preliminary studies to first understand the phenomenon, studying the different ways through which languages interact and their effects on defectivity. Later we present some prototypal solutions for i) the automatic spotting of cross-language relations, ii) the design of language integration tool support in language workbenches through the exploitation of common meta-metamodeling. This thesis wants to offer a contribution towards the productive adoption of multiple, specific languages in the same software development project, hence polyglot software development. From this approach we should be able to reduce the complexity due to misrepresentation of solutions, offer a better facilities to think about problems and, finally to be able to solve more difficult problems with our limited brain resources. Our results consists in a better understanding of MDD and DSLs adoption in companies. From that we can derive guidelines for practitioners, lesson learned for deploying in companies, depending on the size of the company, and implications for other actors involved in the process: company management and universities. Regarding cross-language relations our contribution is an initial definition of the problem, supported by some empirical evidence to sustain its importance. The solutions we propose are not yet mature but we believe that from them future work can stem

Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences