Quality-Aware Tooling

Programming is a fascinating activity that can yield results capable of changing people lives by automating daily tasks or even completely reimagining how we perform certain activities. Such a great power comes with a handful of challenges, with software maintainability being one of them. Maintainability cannot be validated by executing the program but has to be assessed by analyzing the codebase. This tedious task can be also automated by the means of software development. Programs called static analyzers can process source code and try to detect suspicious patterns. While these programs were proven to be useful, there is also an evidence that they are not used in practice. In this dissertation we discuss the concept of quality-aware tooling —- an approach that seeks a promotion of static analysis by seamlessly integrating it into development tools. We describe our experience of applying quality-aware tooling on a core distribution of a development environment. Our main focus is to provide live quality feedback in the code editor, but we also integrate static analysis into other tools based on our code quality model. We analyzed the attitude of the developers towards the integrated static analysis and assessed the impact of the integration on the development ecosystem. As a result 90% of software developers find the live feedback useful, quality rules received an overhaul to better match the contemporary development practices, and some developers even experimented with a custom analysis implementations. We discovered that live feedback helped developers to avoid dangerous mistakes, saved time, and taught valuable concepts. But most importantly we changed the developers' attitude towards static analysis from viewing it as just another tool to seeing it as an integral part of their toolset

Surveillance technology, dementia and the media: Responses from people living with dementia and family carers

Globally technology has become a popular response to the challenges of ageing populations. Dementia presents a particular problem for family carers and policy makers for which surveillance technologies (STs) such as monitoring devices are posited as solutions. ST products are marketed online focusing on their capacity to empower people with dementia; however, these products are developed without considering (potential) user input. The literature about dementia and surveillance was reviewed as was the nature of the ST market. The involvement of users in setting the parameters and utilities of such products was investigated through qualitative research. This interdisciplinary research undertook a tripartite approach studying: production (what is on the market); audience reception (what do users need); and media content (what media techniques are used to attract attention) in the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands. The key finding across studies was that there was little recognition that people with dementia have different needs from those of carers. A “wanderer” discourse gave minimum representation to people with dementia interacting with technology stressing instead the dangers of wandering from carers’ perspectives. This dichotomy was reflected in the different interpretations that each group made of advertisements. Carers focused on wanting small trackers for covert use. People with dementia conversely thought ST was not for them as it stigmatised them. People with dementia are not passive. They have individual needs for independence and these can conflict with those of carers. These findings are relevant to technology designers and advertisers by highlighting their assumptions about this gap in the (civil rights) movement market

Interaction-aware development environments: recording, mining, and leveraging IDE interactions to analyze and support the development flow

Nowadays, software development is largely carried out using Integrated Development Environments, or IDEs. An IDE is a collection of tools and facilities to support the most diverse software engineering activities, such as writing code, debugging, and program understanding. The fact that they are integrated enables developers to find all the tools needed for the development in the same place. Each activity is composed of many basic events, such as clicking on a menu item in the IDE, opening a new user interface to browse the source code of a method, or adding a new statement in the body of a method. While working, developers generate thousands of these interactions, that we call fine-grained IDE interaction data. We believe this data is a valuable source of information that can be leveraged to enable better analyses and to offer novel support to developers. However, this data is largely neglected by modern IDEs. In this dissertation we propose the concept of "Interaction-Aware Development Environments": IDEs that collect, mine, and leverage the interactions of developers to support and simplify their workflow. We formulate our thesis as follows: Interaction-Aware Development Environments enable novel and in- depth analyses of the behavior of software developers and set the ground to provide developers with effective and actionable support for their activities inside the IDE. For example, by monitoring how developers navigate source code, the IDE could suggest the program entities that are potentially relevant for a particular task. Our research focuses on three main directions: 1. Modeling and Persisting Interaction Data. The first step to make IDEs aware of interaction data is to overcome its ephemeral nature. To do so we have to model this new source of data and to persist it, making it available for further use. 2. Interpreting Interaction Data. One of the biggest challenges of our research is making sense of the millions of interactions generated by developers. We propose several models to interpret this data, for example, by reconstructing high-level development activities from interaction histories or measure the navigation efficiency of developers. 3. Supporting Developers with Interaction Data. Novel IDEs can use the potential of interaction data to support software development. For example, they can identify the UI components that are potentially unnecessary for the future and suggest developers to close them, reducing the visual cluttering of the IDE

Selling surveillance technology: semiotic themes in advertisements for ageing in place with dementia

Six advertisements were explored that sell surveillance technologies for people living with dementia through qualitative content analysis. Advertisements from the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands were analysed to explore semiotic textual meaning and people living with dementia (N = 5) and carers (N = 4) responded to these advertisements. The semiotic themes report a “wanderer” discourse which signals to track people living with dementia, children pets and possessions. Mainly negative representations communicate the dangers of wandering towards younger-female carers, few positive representations show a smiling person with dementia and only one person was represented as interacting with technology. Participants did not understand the advertisements and people living with dementia felt stigmatised. There is a lack of reflexivity when people living with dementia are seen as objects. The reliance on stereotypes targeted at carers with misunderstood conceivable trackers hinders resilience for people living with dementia and implies the continuous stigmatisation that occurs when they are disregarded as human technology-users

GERBIL: General Entity Annotator Benchmarking Framework

We present GERBIL, an evaluation framework for semantic entity annotation. The rationale behind our framework is to provide developers, end users and researchers with easy-to-use interfaces that allow for the agile, fine-grained and uniform evaluation of annotation tools on multiple datasets. By these means, we aim to ensure that both tool developers and end users can derive meaningful insights pertaining to the extension, integration and use of annotation applications. In particular, GERBIL provides comparable results to tool developers so as to allow them to easily discover the strengths and weaknesses of their implementations with respect to the state of the art. With the permanent experiment URIs provided by our framework, we ensure the reproducibility and archiving of evaluation results. Moreover, the framework generates data in machine-processable format, allowing for the efficient querying and post-processing of evaluation results. Finally, the tool diagnostics provided by GERBIL allows deriving insights pertaining to the areas in which tools should be further refined, thus allowing developers to create an informed agenda for extensions and end users to detect the right tools for their purposes. GERBIL aims to become a focal point for the state of the art, driving the research agenda of the community by presenting comparable objective evaluation results

Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device

Thriving Downtowns: an investment playbook for rural Appalachia

Appalachia is a region of contrasts. Rich history, abundant natural beauty, and hard-working, good-hearted people co-exist alongside enduring poverty and unemployment, polluted abandoned mine lands, chronic poor health, and widespread opioid abuse. Appalachia is historically under-resourced and underinvested. A 2017 report showed granting foundations spent only $43.00 per person in Appalachia versus the national average of$451.00. This means the average Appalachian resident had access to less than 10% of the charitable giving funds available to most Americans; yet, the need for investment and charitable giving in Appalachia is greater now than ever due to higher rates of poverty and unemployment, struggles with educational achievement, and poor health outcomes.These current facts do not have to be the final story of Appalachia. Geoff Marietta, an Eastern Kentucky investor and founder of Invest 606, eastern Kentucky's business accelerator and pitch competition, said in a recent interview that "if you want to be successful in investing, you have to know a secret...you have to know something no one else knows, because if everyone else knows, it becomes price competitive." The secret Geoff knows is simple: Appalachia is one of the best places in America to invest. There is a movement across the region with local residents leading the charge to rewrite the story of Appalachia as people are currently investing in their communities like never before. After over a century of relying on coal, a single extractive industry, locals are spurring an entrepreneurship renaissance and making their hometowns places where they want to continue living and others want to start visiting.This playbook builds on the momentum of the Appalachian Investment Ecosystem Initiative, Invest Appalachia, Central Appalachian Network, Appalachian Funders Network, and countless other efforts to foster sustainable economic development across the region, and provides communities with tools and resources to stimulate downtown revitalization.

Circulation, Volume 25, No. 2

Spring 2020 issue of CCPO Circulation featuring the article, Offshore Wind Activities at CCPO as Turbines Rise off the Virginia Coast in 2020, by George Hagerman, Senior Project Scientist.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/ccpo_circulation/1062/thumbnail.jp