8,978 research outputs found
Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems
Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art.
In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too.
We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them.
We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions.
Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems.
Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants
BRAMAC: Compute-in-BRAM Architectures for Multiply-Accumulate on FPGAs
Deep neural network (DNN) inference using reduced integer precision has been
shown to achieve significant improvements in memory utilization and compute
throughput with little or no accuracy loss compared to full-precision
floating-point. Modern FPGA-based DNN inference relies heavily on the on-chip
block RAM (BRAM) for model storage and the digital signal processing (DSP) unit
for implementing the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation, a fundamental DNN
primitive. In this paper, we enhance the existing BRAM to also compute MAC by
proposing BRAMAC (Compute-in-AM
rchitectures for
ultiply-cumulate). BRAMAC supports
2's complement 2- to 8-bit MAC in a small dummy BRAM array using a hybrid
bit-serial & bit-parallel data flow. Unlike previous compute-in-BRAM
architectures, BRAMAC allows read/write access to the main BRAM array while
computing in the dummy BRAM array, enabling both persistent and tiling-based
DNN inference. We explore two BRAMAC variants: BRAMAC-2SA (with 2 synchronous
dummy arrays) and BRAMAC-1DA (with 1 double-pumped dummy array).
BRAMAC-2SA/BRAMAC-1DA can boost the peak MAC throughput of a large Arria-10
FPGA by 2.6/2.1, 2.3/2.0, and
1.9/1.7 for 2-bit, 4-bit, and 8-bit precisions, respectively at
the cost of 6.8%/3.4% increase in the FPGA core area. By adding
BRAMAC-2SA/BRAMAC-1DA to a state-of-the-art tiling-based DNN accelerator, an
average speedup of 2.05/1.7 and 1.33/1.52 can
be achieved for AlexNet and ResNet-34, respectively across different model
precisions.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, FCCM conference 202
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH
Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on peopleâs lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)
Cost-effective non-destructive testing of biomedical components fabricated using additive manufacturing
Biocompatible titanium-alloys can be used to fabricate patient-specific medical components using additive manufacturing (AM). These novel components have the potential to improve clinical outcomes in various medical scenarios. However, AM introduces stability and repeatability concerns, which are potential roadblocks for its widespread use in the medical sector. Micro-CT imaging for non-destructive testing (NDT) is an effective solution for post-manufacturing quality control of these components. Unfortunately, current micro-CT NDT scanners require expensive infrastructure and hardware, which translates into prohibitively expensive routine NDT. Furthermore, the limited dynamic-range of these scanners can cause severe image artifacts that may compromise the diagnostic value of the non-destructive test. Finally, the cone-beam geometry of these scanners makes them susceptible to the adverse effects of scattered radiation, which is another source of artifacts in micro-CT imaging.
In this work, we describe the design, fabrication, and implementation of a dedicated, cost-effective micro-CT scanner for NDT of AM-fabricated biomedical components. Our scanner reduces the limitations of costly image-based NDT by optimizing the scanner\u27s geometry and the image acquisition hardware (i.e., X-ray source and detector). Additionally, we describe two novel techniques to reduce image artifacts caused by photon-starvation and scatter radiation in cone-beam micro-CT imaging.
Our cost-effective scanner was designed to match the image requirements of medium-size titanium-alloy medical components. We optimized the image acquisition hardware by using an 80 kVp low-cost portable X-ray unit and developing a low-cost lens-coupled X-ray detector. Image artifacts caused by photon-starvation were reduced by implementing dual-exposure high-dynamic-range radiography. For scatter mitigation, we describe the design, manufacturing, and testing of a large-area, highly-focused, two-dimensional, anti-scatter grid.
Our results demonstrate that cost-effective NDT using low-cost equipment is feasible for medium-sized, titanium-alloy, AM-fabricated medical components. Our proposed high-dynamic-range strategy improved by 37% the penetration capabilities of an 80 kVp micro-CT imaging system for a total x-ray path length of 19.8 mm. Finally, our novel anti-scatter grid provided a 65% improvement in CT number accuracy and a 48% improvement in low-contrast visualization. Our proposed cost-effective scanner and artifact reduction strategies have the potential to improve patient care by accelerating the widespread use of patient-specific, bio-compatible, AM-manufactured, medical components
Cultivating Agrobiodiversity in the U.S.: Barriers and Bridges at Multiple Scales
The diversity of crops grown in the United States (U.S.) is declining, causing agricultural landscapes to become more and more simplified. This trend is concerning for the loss of important plant, insect, and animal species, as well as the pollution and degradation of our environment. Through three separate but related studies, this dissertation addresses the need to increase the diversity of these agricultural landscapes in the U.S., particularly through diversifying the type and number of crops grown. The first study uses multiple, openly accessible datasets related to agricultural land use and policies to document and visualize change over recent decades. Through this, I show that U.S. agriculture has gradually become more specialized in the crops grown, crop production is heavily concentrated in certain areas, and crop diversity is continuing to decline. Meanwhile, federal agricultural policy, while having become more influential over how U.S. agriculture operates, incentivizes this specialization. The second study uses nonlinear statistical modeling to identify and compare social, political, and ecological factors that best predict crop diversity across nine regions in the U.S. Factors of climate, prior land use, and farm inputs best predict diversity across regions, but regions show key differences in how factors are important, indicating that patterns at the regional scale constrain and enable further diversification. Finally, the third study relied on interviews with farmers and key informants in southern Idahoâs Magic Valley â a cluster of eight counties that is known to be agriculturally diverse. Interviews gauge what farmers are currently doing to manage crop diversity (the present) and how they imagine alternative landscapes (the imaginary). We found that farmers in the Magic Valley manage current diversity mainly through cover cropping and diverse crop rotations, but daily struggles and political barriers make experimenting with and imagining alternative landscapes difficult and unlikely to occur. Together, these three studies provide an integrated view of how and why U.S. agriculture landscapes simplify or diversify, as well as the barriers and bridges such pathways of diversification
The Adirondack Chronology
The Adirondack Chronology is intended to be a useful resource for researchers and others interested in the Adirondacks and Adirondack history.https://digitalworks.union.edu/arlpublications/1000/thumbnail.jp
Foundations for programming and implementing effect handlers
First-class control operators provide programmers with an expressive and efficient
means for manipulating control through reification of the current control state as a first-class object, enabling programmers to implement their own computational effects and
control idioms as shareable libraries. Effect handlers provide a particularly structured
approach to programming with first-class control by naming control reifying operations
and separating from their handling.
This thesis is composed of three strands of work in which I develop operational
foundations for programming and implementing effect handlers as well as exploring
the expressive power of effect handlers.
The first strand develops a fine-grain call-by-value core calculus of a statically
typed programming language with a structural notion of effect types, as opposed to the
nominal notion of effect types that dominates the literature. With the structural approach,
effects need not be declared before use. The usual safety properties of statically typed
programming are retained by making crucial use of row polymorphism to build and
track effect signatures. The calculus features three forms of handlers: deep, shallow,
and parameterised. They each offer a different approach to manipulate the control state
of programs. Traditional deep handlers are defined by folds over computation trees,
and are the original con-struct proposed by Plotkin and Pretnar. Shallow handlers are
defined by case splits (rather than folds) over computation trees. Parameterised handlers
are deep handlers extended with a state value that is threaded through the folds over
computation trees. To demonstrate the usefulness of effects and handlers as a practical
programming abstraction I implement the essence of a small UNIX-style operating
system complete with multi-user environment, time-sharing, and file I/O.
The second strand studies continuation passing style (CPS) and abstract machine
semantics, which are foundational techniques that admit a unified basis for implementing deep, shallow, and parameterised effect handlers in the same environment. The
CPS translation is obtained through a series of refinements of a basic first-order CPS
translation for a fine-grain call-by-value language into an untyped language. Each refinement moves toward a more intensional representation of continuations eventually
arriving at the notion of generalised continuation, which admit simultaneous support for
deep, shallow, and parameterised handlers. The initial refinement adds support for deep
handlers by representing stacks of continuations and handlers as a curried sequence of
arguments. The image of the resulting translation is not properly tail-recursive, meaning some function application terms do not appear in tail position. To rectify this the
CPS translation is refined once more to obtain an uncurried representation of stacks
of continuations and handlers. Finally, the translation is made higher-order in order to
contract administrative redexes at translation time. The generalised continuation representation is used to construct an abstract machine that provide simultaneous support for
deep, shallow, and parameterised effect handlers. kinds of effect handlers.
The third strand explores the expressiveness of effect handlers. First, I show that
deep, shallow, and parameterised notions of handlers are interdefinable by way of typed
macro-expressiveness, which provides a syntactic notion of expressiveness that affirms
the existence of encodings between handlers, but it provides no information about the
computational content of the encodings. Second, using the semantic notion of expressiveness I show that for a class of programs a programming language with first-class
control (e.g. effect handlers) admits asymptotically faster implementations than possible in a language without first-class control
Investigating and mitigating the role of neutralisation techniques on information security policies violation in healthcare organisations
Healthcare organisations today rely heavily on Electronic Medical Records systems (EMRs), which have become highly crucial IT assets that require significant security efforts to safeguard patientsâ information. Individuals who have legitimate access to an organisationâs assets to perform their day-to-day duties but intentionally or unintentionally violate information security policies can jeopardise their organisationâs information security efforts and cause significant legal and financial losses. In the information security (InfoSec) literature, several studies emphasised the necessity to understand why employees behave in ways that contradict information security requirements but have offered widely different solutions. In an effort to respond to this situation, this thesis addressed the gap in the information security academic research by providing a deep understanding of the problem of medical practitionersâ behavioural justifications to violate information security policies and then determining proper solutions to reduce this undesirable behaviour. Neutralisation theory was used as the theoretical basis for the research. This thesis adopted a mixed-method research approach that comprises four consecutive phases, and each phase represents a research study that was conducted in light of the results from the preceding phase. The first phase of the thesis started by investigating the relationship between medical practitionersâ neutralisation techniques and their intention to violate information security policies that protect a patientâs privacy. A quantitative study was conducted to extend the work of Siponen and Vance [1] through a study of the Saudi Arabia healthcare industry. The data was collected via an online questionnaire from 66 Medical Interns (MIs) working in four academic hospitals. The study found that six neutralisation techniquesâ(1) appeal to higher loyalties, (2) defence of necessity, (3) the metaphor of ledger, (4) denial of responsibility, (5) denial of injury, and (6) condemnation of condemnersâsignificantly contribute to the justifications of the MIs in hypothetically violating information security policies. The second phase of this research used a series of semi-structured interviews with IT security professionals in one of the largest academic hospitals in Saudi Arabia to explore the environmental factors that motivated the medical practitioners to evoke various neutralisation techniques. The results revealed that social, organisational, and emotional factors all stimulated the behavioural justifications to breach information security policies. During these interviews, it became clear that the IT department needed to ensure that security policies fit the daily tasks of the medical practitioners by providing alternative solutions to ensure the effectiveness of those policies. Based on these interviews, the objective of the following two phases was to improve the effectiveness of InfoSec policies against the use of behavioural justification by engaging the end users in the modification of existing policies via a collaborative writing process. Those two phases were conducted in the UK and Saudi Arabia to determine whether the collaborative writing process could produce a more effective security policy that balanced the security requirements with daily business needs, thus leading to a reduction in the use of neutralisation techniques to violate security policies. The overall result confirmed that the involvement of the end users via a collaborative writing process positively improved the effectiveness of the security policy to mitigate the individual behavioural justifications, showing that the process is a promising one to enhance security compliance
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After Creation: Intergovernmental Organizations and Member State Governments as Co-Participants in an Authority Relationship
This is a re-amalgamation of what started as one manuscript and became two when the length proved to be more than any publisher wanted to consider. The splitting consisted of removing what are now Parts 3, 4, and 5 so that the manuscript focused on the outcome-related shared beliefs holding an authority relationship together. Those parts were last worked on in 2018. The rest were last worked on in late 2021 but also remain incomplete.
The relational approach adopted in this study treats intergovernmental organizations and the governments of member states as co-participants in an authority relationship with the governments of their member states. Authority relationships link two types of actor, defined by their authority-holder or addressee role in the relationship, through a set of shared beliefs about why the relationship exists and how the participants should fulfill their respective roles. The IGO as authority holder has a role that includes a right to instruct other actors about what they should or should not do; the governments of member states as addressees are expected to comply with the instructions. Three sets of shared beliefs provide the conceptual âglueâ holding the relationship together. The first defines the goal of the collective effort, providing both the rationale for having the authority relationship and providing a lode star for assessments of the collective effortâs success or lack of success. The second set defines the shared understanding about allocation of roles and the process of interaction by establishing shared expectations about a) the selection process by which particular actors acquire authority holder roles, b) the definitions identifying one or more categories of addressees expected to follow instructions, and c) the procedures through which the authority holder issues instructions. The third set focus on the outcomes of cooperation through the relationship by defining a) the substantive areas in which the authority holder may issue instructions, b) the bases for assessing the relevance actions mandated in instructions for reaching the goal, and c) the relative efficacy of action paths chosen for reaching the goal as compared to other possible action paths.
Using an authority relationship framework for analyzing cooperation through IGOs highlights the inherently bi-directional nature of IGO-member government activity by viewing their interaction as involving a three-step process in which the IGO as authority holder decides when to issue what instruction, the member state governments as followers react to the instruction with anything from prompt and full compliance through various forms of pushback to outright rejection, and the IGO as authority holder responds to how the followers react with efforts to increase individual compliance with instructions and reinforce continuing acceptance of the authority relationship. Foregrounding the dynamics produced by the interaction of these two streams of perception and action reveals more clearly how far intergovernmental organizations acquire capacity to operate as independent actors, the dynamic ways they maintain that capacity, and how much they influence member governmentsâ beliefs and actions at different times. The approach fosters better understanding of why, when, and for how long governments choose cooperation through an IGO even in periods of rising unilateralism
Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning
Developing artificial learning systems that can understand and generate natural language has been one of the long-standing goals of artificial intelligence. Recent decades have witnessed an impressive progress on both of these problems, giving rise to a new family of approaches. Especially, the advances in deep learning over the past couple of years have led to neural approaches to natural language generation (NLG). These methods combine generative language learning techniques with neural-networks based frameworks. With a wide range of applications in natural language processing, neural NLG (NNLG) is a new and fast growing field of research. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate the recent developments and applications of NNLG in its full extent from a multidimensional view, covering critical perspectives such as multimodality, multilinguality, controllability and learning strategies. We summarize the fundamental building blocks of NNLG approaches from these aspects and provide detailed reviews of commonly used preprocessing steps and basic neural architectures. This report also focuses on the seminal applications of these NNLG models such as machine translation, description generation, automatic speech recognition, abstractive summarization, text simplification, question answering and generation, and dialogue generation. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of the described frameworks by pointing out some open research directions.This work has been partially supported by the European Commission ICT COST Action âMulti-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generationâ (CA18231). AE was supported by BAGEP 2021 Award of the Science Academy. EE was supported in part by TUBA GEBIP 2018 Award. BP is in in part funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) grant 9063-00077B. IC has received funding from the European Unionâs Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 838188. EL is partly funded by Generalitat Valenciana and the Spanish Government throught projects PROMETEU/2018/089 and RTI2018-094649-B-I00, respectively. SMI is partly funded by UNIRI project uniri-drustv-18-20. GB is partly supported by the Ministry of Innovation and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office within the framework of the Hungarian Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory Programme. COT is partially funded by the Romanian Ministry of European Investments and Projects through the Competitiveness Operational Program (POC) project âHOLOTRAINâ (grant no. 29/221 ap2/07.04.2020, SMIS code: 129077) and by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project âAWAKEN: content-Aware and netWork-Aware faKE News mitigationâ (grant no. 91809005). ESA is partially funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project âDeep-Learning Anomaly Detection for Human and Automated Users Behaviorâ (grant no. 91809358)
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