Aspect oriented programming: Concepts, characteristics and implementation

Programming techniques have been passed through many development stages in their progressing path to cope with the increasing complexity of systems requirements. So, one of the main goals of the programming languages designers is how to develop programming language that can handle and manage the spread and overlapping of different functionality concerns. Because unmanageable and uncontrollable scattering of concerns inside the system may cause many problems during system running in present or/and during applying maintenance and developing the system in future. One of the most recent and powerful solutions to overcome these problems is via using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) approach. This research is demonstrates the features and the problems with implying AOP techniques in the software development process

Coordination in Business Process Offshoring

We investigate coordination strategies in the remote delivery of business services (i.e. Business Process Offshoring). We analyze 126 surveys of offshored processes to understand both the sources of difficulty in the remote delivery of services as well as how organizations overcome these difficulties. We find that interdependence between offshored and onshore processes can lower offshore process performance. Investment in coordination mechanisms such as modularity, ongoing communication and generating common ground across locations ameliorate the performance impact of interdependence. In particular, we are able to show that building common ground – knowledge that is shared and known to be shared- across locations is a coordination mechanism that is distinct from building communication channels or modularising processes. Our results also suggest the firms may be investing less in common ground than they should.Coordination; offshoring; modularity; common ground; interdependence

From manufacturing to design : an essay on the work of Kim B. Clark. Harvard Business School Working Paper- 07-057

In this paper, we describe Clark's research and discuss his contributions to management scholarship and economics. We look at three distinct bodies of work. In the first, Clark (in conjunction with Robert Hayes and Steven Wheelwright) argued that the abandonment by U.S. managers of manufacturing as a strategic function exposed U.S. companies to Japanese competition in terms of the cost and quality of goods. In the second, conducted with Wheelwright, Bruce Chew, Takahiro Fujimoto, Kent Bowen and Marco Iansiti, Clark made the case that product development could be managed in new ways that would lead to significant competitive advantage for firms. Finally, in work conducted with Abernathy, Rebecca Henderson and Carliss Baldwin, Clark placed product and process designs at the center of his explanation of how innovation determines the structure and evolution of industries.

Modularis: Modular Relational Analytics over Heterogeneous Distributed Platforms

The enormous quantity of data produced every day together with advances in data analytics has led to a proliferation of data management and analysis systems. Typically, these systems are built around highly specialized monolithic operators optimized for the underlying hardware. While effective in the short term, such an approach makes the operators cumbersome to port and adapt, which is increasingly required due to the speed at which algorithms and hardware evolve. To address this limitation, we present Modularis, an execution layer for data analytics based on sub-operators, i.e.,composable building blocks resembling traditional database operators but at a finer granularity. To demonstrate the advantages of our approach, we use Modularis to build a distributed query processing system supporting relational queries running on an RDMA cluster, a serverless cloud platform, and a smart storage engine. Modularis requires minimal code changes to execute queries across these three diverse hardware platforms, showing that the sub-operator approach reduces the amount and complexity of the code. In fact, changes in the platform affect only sub-operators that depend on the underlying hardware. We show the end-to-end performance of Modularis by comparing it with a framework for SQL processing (Presto), a commercial cluster database (SingleStore), as well as Query-as-a-Service systems (Athena, BigQuery). Modularis outperforms all these systems, proving that the design and architectural advantages of a modular design can be achieved without degrading performance. We also compare Modularis with a hand-optimized implementation of a join for RDMA clusters. We show that Modularis has the advantage of being easily extensible to a wider range of join variants and group by queries, all of which are not supported in the hand-tuned join.Comment: Accepted at PVLDB vol. 1

Making Knowledge and Making Drugs? Experimenting with University Innovation Capacity

The innovation process for novel medical therapies needs repair. The United States spends more than ever before on drug discovery without a corresponding increase in new medical therapies

Fostering the adoption of i* by practitioners: some challenges and research directions

The i* framework is a widespread formalism in the software engineering discipline that allows expressing intentionality of system actors. From the time it was issued, in the mid-nineties, a growing research community has adopted it either in its standard form or formulating variations in order to adapt it to some particular purpose. New methods, techniques and tools have made evolve the framework in a way that it may be currently considered quite mature from the scientific perspective. However, the i* framework has not been transferred to practitioners at the same extent yet: industrial experiences using i* are not many and have been mainly conducted by i* experts that are part of that very research community. Therefore, it may be argued that some steps are needed for boosting the adoption of i* by practitioners. In this chapter, we identify some scientific challenges whose overcoming could represent a step towards this goal. For each challenge, we present the problem that is addressed, its current state of the art and some envisaged lines of research.Preprin

Grounding knowledge and normative valuation in agent-based action and scientific commitment

Philosophical investigation in synthetic biology has focused on the knowledge-seeking questions pursued, the kind of engineering techniques used, and on the ethical impact of the products produced. However, little work has been done to investigate the processes by which these epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical forms of inquiry arise in the course of synthetic biology research. An attempt at this work relying on a particular area of synthetic biology will be the aim of this chapter. I focus on the reengineering of metabolic pathways through the manipulation and construction of small DNA-based devices and systems synthetic biology. Rather than focusing on the engineered products or ethical principles that result, I will investigate the processes by which these arise. As such, the attention will be directed to the activities of practitioners, their manipulation of tools, and the use they make of techniques to construct new metabolic devices. Using a science-in-practice approach, I investigate problems at the intersection of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. I consider how practitioners within this area of synthetic biology reconfigure biological understanding and ethical categories through active modelling and manipulation of known functional parts, biological pathways for use in the design of microbial machines to solve problems in medicine, technology, and the environment. We might describe this kind of problem-solving as relying on what Helen Longino referred to as “social cognition” or the type of scientific work done within what Hasok Chang calls “systems of practice”. My aim in this chapter will be to investigate the relationship that holds between systems of practice within metabolic engineering research and social cognition. I will attempt to show how knowledge and normative valuation are generated from this particular network of practitioners. In doing so, I suggest that the social nature of scientific inquiry is ineliminable to both knowledge acquisition and ethical evaluations

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain