71,445 research outputs found
Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1
Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences
The Construction of Verification Models for Embedded Systems
The usefulness of verification hinges on the quality of the verification model. Verification is useful if it increases our confidence that an artefact bahaves as expected. As modelling inherently contains non-formal elements, the qualityof models cannot be captured by purely formal means. Still, we argue that modelling is not an act of irrationalism and unpredictable geniality, but follows rational arguments, that often remain implicit. In this paper we try to identify the tacit rationalism in the model construction as performed by most people doing modelling for verification. By explicating the different phases, arguments, and design decisions in the model construction, we try to develop guidelines that help to improve the process of model construction and the quality of models
Comprehensive Monitor-Oriented Compensation Programming
Compensation programming is typically used in the programming of web service
compositions whose correct implementation is crucial due to their handling of
security-critical activities such as financial transactions. While traditional
exception handling depends on the state of the system at the moment of failure,
compensation programming is significantly more challenging and dynamic because
it is dependent on the runtime execution flow - with the history of behaviour
of the system at the moment of failure affecting how to apply compensation. To
address this dynamic element, we propose the use of runtime monitors to
facilitate compensation programming, with monitors enabling the modeller to be
able to implicitly reason in terms of the runtime control flow, thus separating
the concerns of system building and compensation modelling. Our approach is
instantiated into an architecture and shown to be applicable to a case study.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043
Memory usage verification using Hip/Sleek.
Embedded systems often come with constrained memory footprints. It is therefore essential to ensure that software running on such platforms fulfils memory usage specifications at compile-time, to prevent memory-related software failure after deployment. Previous proposals on memory usage verification are not satisfactory as they usually can only handle restricted subsets of programs, especially when shared mutable data structures are involved. In this paper, we propose a simple but novel solution. We instrument programs with explicit memory operations so that memory usage verification can be done along with the verification of other properties, using an automated verification system Hip/Sleek developed recently by Chin et al.[10,19]. The instrumentation can be done automatically and is proven sound with respect to an underlying semantics. One immediate benefit is that we do not need to develop from scratch a specific system for memory usage verification. Another benefit is that we can verify more programs, especially those involving shared mutable data structures, which previous systems failed to handle, as evidenced by our experimental results
Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware
The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future
Ten virtues of structured graphs
This paper extends the invited talk by the first author about the virtues
of structured graphs. The motivation behind the talk and this paper relies on our
experience on the development of ADR, a formal approach for the design of styleconformant,
reconfigurable software systems. ADR is based on hierarchical graphs
with interfaces and it has been conceived in the attempt of reconciling software architectures
and process calculi by means of graphical methods. We have tried to
write an ADR agnostic paper where we raise some drawbacks of flat, unstructured
graphs for the design and analysis of software systems and we argue that hierarchical,
structured graphs can alleviate such drawbacks
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