Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

Effective versus Statutory Taxation: Measuring Effective Tax Administration in Transition Economies

Wide differences between effective or realised average tax rates and tax yields that would result if statutory tax rates were strictly applied indicate tax compliance and collection problems. Due to the greater politicisation of tax systems in transition economies (TEs), we would expect the shortfalls in effective tax yields for TEs to be larger than a benchmark for the mature market economies where tax systems are well established, the administrative capacity is stronger and tax arrears are tolerated less frequently. The methodology involves calculating an effective/statutory (E/S) tax ratio. Initial results indicate that the leading TEs have E/S ratios similar to the EU average. We find a positive correlation between progress in transition and effective tax administration, as measured by our E/S ratio. For slow reformers, the effectiveness of tax collection appears to vary with the extent of state control. Those TEs that have maintained the apparatus of the state have done well in tax collection compared to those countries where there is evidence of state decay. This raises a number of broad policy issues relating to the speed of transition, the interaction of politics and economic reforms, the capacity of the state to govern and the need for market institutions to develop.statutory taxation, average tax rate, tax collection, effective administration, transition economies

Code Flows: Visualizing Structural Evolution of Source Code

Understanding detailed changes done to source code is of great importance in software maintenance. We present Code Flows, a method to visualize the evolution of source code geared to the understanding of fine and mid-level scale changes across several file versions. We enhance an existing visual metaphor to depict software structure changes with techniques that emphasize both following unchanged code as well as detecting and highlighting important events such as code drift, splits, merges, insertions and deletions. The method is illustrated with the analysis of a real-world C++ code system.

Code Flows: Visualizing Structural Evolution of Source Code

Understanding detailed changes done to source code is of great importance in software maintenance. We present Code Flows, a method to visualize the evolution of source code geared to the understanding of fine and mid-level scale changes across several file versions. We enhance an existing visual metaphor to depict software structure changes with techniques that emphasize both following unchanged code as well as detecting and highlighting important events such as code drift, splits, merges, insertions and deletions. The method is illustrated with the analysis of a real-world C++ code system.