22,005 research outputs found
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism
Overview
This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.
The paper is structured as follows:
Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS).
Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth âSOCMINTâ) for counter-terrorism.
Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored.
Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work
Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World
This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar
16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World".
The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps
and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two
years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying
performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and
feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research
community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud
computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify
cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting
collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps.
The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD
students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior
Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance
engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current
research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research
challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations
How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies
Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards.
Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives
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Artificial Intelligence, International Competition, and the Balance of Power (May 2018)
World leaders, CEOs, and academics have suggested that a revolution in artificial intelligence is upon us. Are they right, and what will advances in artificial intelligence mean for international competition and the balance of power? This article evaluates how developments in artificial intelligence (AI) â advanced, narrow applications in particular â are poised to influence military power and international politics. It describes how AI more closely resembles âenablingâ technologies such as the combustion engine or electricity than a specific weapon. AIâs still-emerging developments make it harder to assess than many technological changes, especially since many of the organizational decisions about the adoption and uses of new technology that generally shape the impact of that technology are in their infancy. The article then explores the possibility that key drivers of AI development in the private sector could cause the rapid diffusion of military applications of AI, limiting first-mover advantages for innovators. Alternatively, given uncertainty about the technological trajectory of AI, it is also possible that military uses of AI will be harder to develop based on private-sector AI technologies than many expect, generating more potential first-mover advantages for existing powers such as China and the United States, as well as larger consequences for relative power if a country fails to adapt. Finally, the article discusses the extent to which U.S. military rhetoric about the importance of AI matches the reality of U.S. investments.LBJ School of Public Affair
Modeling User-Affected Software Properties for Open Source Software Supply Chains
Background: Open Source Software development community relies heavily on users of the software and contributors outside of the core developers to produce top-quality software and provide long-term support. However, the relationship between a software and its contributors in terms of exactly how they are related through dependencies and how the users of a software affect many of its properties are not very well understood.
Aim: My research covers a number of aspects related to answering the overarching question of modeling the software properties affected by users and the supply chain structure of software ecosystems, viz. 1) Understanding how software usage affect its perceived quality; 2) Estimating the effects of indirect usage (e.g. dependent packages) on software popularity; 3) Investigating the patch submission and issue creation patterns of external contributors; 4) Examining how the patch acceptance probability is related to the contributors\u27 characteristics. 5) A related topic, the identification of bots that commit code, aimed at improving the accuracy of these and other similar studies was also investigated.
Methodology: Most of the Research Questions are addressed by studying the NPM ecosystem, with data from various sources like the World of Code, GHTorrent, and the GiHub API. Different supervised and unsupervised machine learning models, including Regression, Random Forest, Bayesian Networks, and clustering, were used to answer appropriate questions.
Results: 1) Software usage affects its perceived quality even after accounting for code complexity measures. 2) The number of dependents and dependencies of a software were observed to be able to predict the change in its popularity with good accuracy. 3) Users interact (contribute issues or patches) primarily with their direct dependencies, and rarely with transitive dependencies. 4) A user\u27s earlier interaction with the repository to which they are contributing a patch, and their familiarity with related topics were important predictors impacting the chance of a pull request getting accepted. 5) Developed BIMAN, a systematic methodology for identifying bots.
Conclusion: Different aspects of how users and their characteristics affect different software properties were analyzed, which should lead to a better understanding of the complex interaction between software developers and users/ contributors
Mitigations to Reduce the Law of Unintended Consequences for Autonomy and Other Technological Advances
The United Nations states that Earths population is expected to reach just under 10 billion people (9.7) by the year 2050. To meet the demands of 10 billion people, governments, multinational corporations and global leaders are relying on autonomy and technological advances to augment and/or accommodate human efforts to meet the required needs of daily living. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) gene-edited plants and cloning will be utilized to expand human food supply. Biomimetic implants are expected to improve life expectancy with 3D printed body parts. Human functioning will be extended with wearables and cybernetic implants continuing humanitys path toward transhumanism. Families will be strengthened with 3 parent households. Disease will surely be eradicated using the CRISPR-CAS9 genetic engineering revolution to design out undesirable human traits and to design in new capabilities. With autonomous cars, trucks and buses on our roads and on-demand autonomous aircraft delivering pizzas, medical prescriptions and groceries in the air and multi-planet vehicles traversing space, utopia will finally arrive! Or will it? All of these powerful, man-made, technological systems will experience unintended consequences with certainty. Instead of over-reacting with hysteria and fear, we should be seeking answers to the following questions - What skills are required to architect socially-healthy technological systems for 2050? What mindsets should we embody to ameliorate hubris syndrome and to build our future technological systems with deliberation, soberness and social responsibility
Analysis of information systems for hydropower operations
The operations of hydropower systems were analyzed with emphasis on water resource management, to determine how aerospace derived information system technologies can increase energy output. Better utilization of water resources was sought through improved reservoir inflow forecasting based on use of hydrometeorologic information systems with new or improved sensors, satellite data relay systems, and use of advanced scheduling techniques for water release. Specific mechanisms for increased energy output were determined, principally the use of more timely and accurate short term (0-7 days) inflow information to reduce spillage caused by unanticipated dynamic high inflow events. The hydrometeorologic models used in predicting inflows were examined to determine the sensitivity of inflow prediction accuracy to the many variables employed in the models, and the results used to establish information system requirements. Sensor and data handling system capabilities were reviewed and compared to the requirements, and an improved information system concept outlined
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Drones: Innovative Technology for Use in Precision Pest Management.
Arthropod pest outbreaks are unpredictable and not uniformly distributed within fields. Early outbreak detection and treatment application are inherent to effective pest management, allowing management decisions to be implemented before pests are well-established and crop losses accrue. Pest monitoring is time-consuming and may be hampered by lack of reliable or cost-effective sampling techniques. Thus, we argue that an important research challenge associated with enhanced sustainability of pest management in modern agriculture is developing and promoting improved crop monitoring procedures. Biotic stress, such as herbivory by arthropod pests, elicits physiological defense responses in plants, leading to changes in leaf reflectance. Advanced imaging technologies can detect such changes, and can, therefore, be used as noninvasive crop monitoring methods. Furthermore, novel methods of treatment precision application are required. Both sensing and actuation technologies can be mounted on equipment moving through fields (e.g., irrigation equipment), on (un)manned driving vehicles, and on small drones. In this review, we focus specifically on use of small unmanned aerial robots, or small drones, in agricultural systems. Acquired and processed canopy reflectance data obtained with sensing drones could potentially be transmitted as a digital map to guide a second type of drone, actuation drones, to deliver solutions to the identified pest hotspots, such as precision releases of natural enemies and/or precision-sprays of pesticides. We emphasize how sustainable pest management in 21st-century agriculture will depend heavily on novel technologies, and how this trend will lead to a growing need for multi-disciplinary research collaborations between agronomists, ecologists, software programmers, and engineers
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