9,960 research outputs found

    In the soft-to-hard technical spectrum: Where is software engineering?

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    In the computer journals and tabloids, there have been a plethora of articles written about the software engineering field. But while advocates of the need for an engineering approach to software development, it is impressive how many authors have treated the subject of software engineering without adequately addressing the fundamentals of what engineering as a discipline consists of. A discussion is presented of the various related facets of this issue in a logical framework to advance the thesis that the software development process is necessarily an engineering process. The purpose is to examine more of the details of the issue of whether or not the design and development of software for digital computer processing systems should be both viewed and treated as a legitimate field of professional engineering. Also, the type of academic and professional level education programs that would be required to support a software engineering discipline is examined

    Expert system verification and validation survey, delivery 4

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    The purpose is to determine the state-of-the-practice in Verification and Validation (V and V) of Expert Systems (ESs) on current NASA and Industry applications. This is the first task of a series which has the ultimate purpose of ensuring that adequate ES V and V tools and techniques are available for Space Station Knowledge Based Systems development. The strategy for determining the state-of-the-practice is to check how well each of the known ES V and V issues are being addressed and to what extent they have impacted the development of ESs

    Annotated Bibliography: Anticipation

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    Dependability Metrics : Research Workshop Proceedings

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    Justifying reliance in computer systems is based on some form of evidence about such systems. This in turn implies the existence of scientific techniques to derive such evidence from given systems or predict such evidence of systems. In a general sense, these techniques imply a form of measurement. The workshop Dependability Metrics'', which was held on November 10, 2008, at the University of Mannheim, dealt with all aspects of measuring dependability

    Heavy Quark Theory

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    These lectures describe the most important theoretical methods in b-physics. We discuss the formalism of effective weak Hamiltonians, heavy quark effective theory, the heavy quark expansion for inclusive decays of b-hadrons and, finally, the more recent ideas of QCD factorization for exclusive nonleptonic B decays. While the main emphasis is put on introducing the basic theoretical concepts, some key applications in phenomenology are also presented for illustration.Comment: 50 pages, Lectures given at the 55th Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics, 7-23 August 2001, St. Andrews, Scotlan

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    A distributed agent architecture for real-time knowledge-based systems: Real-time expert systems project, phase 1

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    We propose a distributed agent architecture (DAA) that can support a variety of paradigms based on both traditional real-time computing and artificial intelligence. DAA consists of distributed agents that are classified into two categories: reactive and cognitive. Reactive agents can be implemented directly in Ada to meet hard real-time requirements and be deployed on on-board embedded processors. A traditional real-time computing methodology under consideration is the rate monotonic theory that can guarantee schedulability based on analytical methods. AI techniques under consideration for reactive agents are approximate or anytime reasoning that can be implemented using Bayesian belief networks as in Guardian. Cognitive agents are traditional expert systems that can be implemented in ART-Ada to meet soft real-time requirements. During the initial design of cognitive agents, it is critical to consider the migration path that would allow initial deployment on ground-based workstations with eventual deployment on on-board processors. ART-Ada technology enables this migration while Lisp-based technologies make it difficult if not impossible. In addition to reactive and cognitive agents, a meta-level agent would be needed to coordinate multiple agents and to provide meta-level control
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