Wear and Care Feminisms at a Long Maker Table

Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, the FemTechNet initiative (a feminist collective of which we are both a part) argues that such history is often hidden and that feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. At the same time, initiatives to promote critical making, acts of “shared construction” in which makers work to understand both the technologies and their social environments, often exclude women and girls from hacker/makerspaces that require both explicit permissions and access to implicit reserves of tacit knowledge. Even attempts to provide superficial hospitality can inflict microagressions on those who feel excluded from the sites of technology. When these bastions for tinkering under the hood promote “pinkification” with hyper-feminized projects and materials empha - sizing servility, consumerism, or beauty culture, the results are often counterproductive. Take, for example, Google’s recent “Made with Code” effort, which emphasized accessories and selfies as projects appropriate for girls. Even the otherwise admirable “Girls Who Code” site tends to rely on the default design schemes of stereotypical gender typing, including a curling cursive script for section heads, a color palette dominated by a rose-pink, and the iconography of sisterhood and empowerment in the graphics and scrolling images.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1004/thumbnail.jp

An analysis of the application of AI to the development of intelligent aids for flight crew tasks

This report presents the results of a study aimed at developing a basis for applying artificial intelligence to the flight deck environment of commercial transport aircraft. In particular, the study was comprised of four tasks: (1) analysis of flight crew tasks, (2) survey of the state-of-the-art of relevant artificial intelligence areas, (3) identification of human factors issues relevant to intelligent cockpit aids, and (4) identification of artificial intelligence areas requiring further research

Space station data system analysis/architecture study. Task 2: Options development, DR-5. Volume 3: Programmatic options

Task 2 in the Space Station Data System (SSDS) Analysis/Architecture Study is the development of an information base that will support the conduct of trade studies and provide sufficient data to make design/programmatic decisions. This volume identifies the preferred options in the programmatic category and characterizes these options with respect to performance attributes, constraints, costs, and risks. The programmatic category includes methods used to administrate/manage the development, operation and maintenance of the SSDS. The specific areas discussed include standardization/commonality; systems management; and systems development, including hardware procurement, software development and system integration, test and verification

Executable system architecting using systems modeling language in conjunction with Colored Petri Nets - a demonstration using the GEOSS network centric system

Models and simulation furnish abstractions to manage complexities allowing engineers to visualize the proposed system and to analyze and validate system behavior before constructing it. Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its systems engineering extension, Systems Modeling Language (SysML), provide a rich set of diagrams for systems specification. However, the lack of executable semantics of such notations limits the capability of analyzing and verifying defined specifications. This research has developed an executable system architecting framework based on SysML-CPN transformation, which introduces dynamic model analysis into SysML modeling by mapping SysML notations to Colored Petri Net (CPN), a graphical language for system design, specification, simulation, and verification. A graphic user interface was also integrated into the CPN model to enhance the model-based simulation. A set of methodologies has been developed to achieve this framework. The aim is to investigate system wide properties of the proposed system, which in turn provides a basis for system reconfiguration --Abstract, page iii

Makers at School, Educational Robotics and Innovative Learning Environments

This open access book contains observations, outlines, and analyses of educational robotics methodologies and activities, and developments in the field of educational robotics emerging from the findings presented at FabLearn Italy 2019, the international conference that brought together researchers, teachers, educators and practitioners to discuss the principles of Making and educational robotics in formal, non-formal and informal education. The editors’ analysis of these extended versions of papers presented at FabLearn Italy 2019 highlight the latest findings on learning models based on Making and educational robotics. The authors investigate how innovative educational tools and methodologies can support a novel, more effective and more inclusive learner-centered approach to education. The following key topics are the focus of discussion: Makerspaces and Fab Labs in schools, a maker approach to teaching and learning; laboratory teaching and the maker approach, models, methods and instruments; curricular and non-curricular robotics in formal, non-formal and informal education; social and assistive robotics in education; the effect of innovative spaces and learning environments on the innovation of teaching, good practices and pilot projects

Design, Formal Modeling, and Validation of Cloud Storage Systems using Maude

To deal with large amounts of data while offering high availability, throughput and low latency, cloud computing systems rely on distributed, partitioned, and replicated data stores. Such cloud storage systems are complex software artifacts that are very hard to design and analyze. We argue that formal specification and model checking analysis should significantly improve their design and validation. In particular, we propose rewriting logic and its accompanying Maude tools as a suitable framework for formally specifying and analyzing both the correctness and the performance of cloud storage systems. This chapter largely focuses on how we have used rewriting logic to model and analyze industrial cloud storage systems such as Google's Megastore, Apache Cassandra, Apache ZooKeeper, and RAMP. We also touch on the use of formal methods at Amazon Web Services.This work is based on research sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, under agreement number FA8750-11-2-0084. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. This work is also based on research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. NSF CNS 1409416 and NSF CNS 1319527.Ope

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Compact Deterministic Self-Stabilizing Leader Election: The Exponential Advantage of Being Talkative

This paper focuses on compact deterministic self-stabilizing solutions for the leader election problem. When the protocol is required to be \emph{silent} (i.e., when communication content remains fixed from some point in time during any execution), there exists a lower bound of Omega(\log n) bits of memory per node participating to the leader election (where n denotes the number of nodes in the system). This lower bound holds even in rings. We present a new deterministic (non-silent) self-stabilizing protocol for n-node rings that uses only O(\log\log n) memory bits per node, and stabilizes in O(n\log^2 n) rounds. Our protocol has several attractive features that make it suitable for practical purposes. First, the communication model fits with the model used by existing compilers for real networks. Second, the size of the ring (or any upper bound on this size) needs not to be known by any node. Third, the node identifiers can be of various sizes. Finally, no synchrony assumption, besides a weakly fair scheduler, is assumed. Therefore, our result shows that, perhaps surprisingly, trading silence for exponential improvement in term of memory space does not come at a high cost regarding stabilization time or minimal assumptions