Modeling the emergence of contact languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena

Towards Product Lining Model-Driven Development Code Generators

A code generator systematically transforms compact models to detailed code. Today, code generation is regarded as an integral part of model-driven development (MDD). Despite its relevance, the development of code generators is an inherently complex task and common methodologies and architectures are lacking. Additionally, reuse and extension of existing code generators only exist on individual parts. A systematic development and reuse based on a code generator product line is still in its infancy. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify the mechanism necessary for a code generator product line by (a) analyzing the common product line development approach and (b) mapping those to a code generator specific infrastructure. As a first step towards realizing a code generator product line infrastructure, we present a component-based implementation approach based on ideas of variability-aware module systems and point out further research challenges.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, pp. 539-545, Angers, France, SciTePress, 201

Software Engineering Timeline: major areas of interest and multidisciplinary trends

Ingeniería del software. EvolucionSociety today cannot run without software and by extension, without Software Engineering. Since this discipline emerged in 1968, practitioners have learned valuable lessons that have contributed to current practices. Some have become outdated but many are still relevant and widely used. From the personal and incomplete perspective of the authors, this paper not only reviews the major milestones and areas of interest in the Software Engineering timeline helping software engineers to appreciate the state of things, but also tries to give some insights into the trends that this complex engineering will see in the near future

The University of Rhode Island Graduate Dual Degree Program with the Technical University of Braunschweig – Its Added Value, Synergies, and Gains for Engineering Students

This paper takes a closer look at the learning outcomes and synergies for participants of a dual degree master program between the University of Rhode island and the Technical University of Braunschweig. It focuses on an area of international graduate level education and collaboration that has not been very well researched so far: the impact of study abroad experience on graduate engineering students. Are there any technical skills or additional research methods gained by students involved in graduate level dual degree programs? To what extent does such a research intense program have an impact on broadening research perspectives and opportunities for its participants? How does an international dual degree program, which requires students to conduct research in at least two institutions (one of them abroad) leverage the advancement of science and engineering for its participants? The paper examines four concrete cases and provides a summary of learning outcomes

Geo-located Twitter as the proxy for global mobility patterns

In the advent of a pervasive presence of location sharing services researchers gained an unprecedented access to the direct records of human activity in space and time. This paper analyses geo-located Twitter messages in order to uncover global patterns of human mobility. Based on a dataset of almost a billion tweets recorded in 2012 we estimate volumes of international travelers in respect to their country of residence. We examine mobility profiles of different nations looking at the characteristics such as mobility rate, radius of gyration, diversity of destinations and a balance of the inflows and outflows. The temporal patterns disclose the universal seasons of increased international mobility and the peculiar national nature of overseen travels. Our analysis of the community structure of the Twitter mobility network, obtained with the iterative network partitioning, reveals spatially cohesive regions that follow the regional division of the world. Finally, we validate our result with the global tourism statistics and mobility models provided by other authors, and argue that Twitter is a viable source to understand and quantify global mobility patterns.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure

Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability

Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems. Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL, Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using a single notation for the purpose