Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems

Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art. In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too. We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them. We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions. Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems. Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

Living with sea level change and coastal flooding – Collective responses of households and communities in Indonesia

Responding to flooding and sea level change is a daily challenge for coastal popula-tions worldwide. Filling knowledge gaps on how households and communities re-spond to these hazards is crucial to recognize the adaptation needs and capacities of exposed communities. This thesis presents the results of original, mixed-methods research (focus group discussions and a standardized household survey) collected in Jakarta and the Semarang Bay area on Java, Indonesia. This study analyses the main question: How do households and communities respond to coastal hazards and what are their resources to self-organize and to act collectively? The adaptive capacity of communities, especially in the Global South, is critically related to social capital, as manifested through social networks, self-organization, and collective action. This thesis applies social capital first from a spatial perspective, focusing on local socio-spatial structures, and second, from a translocal perspective, analyzing boundary-crossing social networks. The results show that coastal hazards have become a normal element of live in the risk perception of local people. Rather than retreating or gaining permanent protec-tion, people found ways to accommodate to and hence live with floods. This result adds an important dimension to the contemporary theorization of responding to coastal hazards. Accommodating strategies, such as informal non-bank saving sys-tems, are crucial for people to maintain their livelihoods on a more substantial basis than recognized in much of the literature. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that social capital is significantly shaped by the specific spatial forms of neighborhoods, particularly in the presence and form of places to meet. The urban form of North Jakarta facilitates bonding social capital, which enables the formation of responsive neighborhoods capable of responding on mid-term scales. Bonding ties, together with attachment to place and social belonging, appear to be key local assets for flood responses. However, there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the current urban form of North Jakarta supports the formation of adaptive neighborhoods in the long-term, which would require social ties to the outside world. In this regard, the results on translocal social capital show that households with a higher number of translocal contacts are more likely to act proactively against coastal hazards. Furthermore, the propensity for translocal social capital is economically stratified. Poorer households have fewer translocal ties, which impairs their adaptive capacities. The results add to advancing the conceptualization of collective adaptation process-es and derive important policy implications. The thesis offers new insights into how community-based approaches can be better aligned with top-down strategies, one of the biggest challenges for contemporary and future disaster risk reduction. Further-more, the findings provide new understanding into how the urban form of neighbor-hoods influences the resulting social capital and adaptive capacities. Thus, a spatial perspective on collective hazard responses is important for urban planning to em-power local communities. Planning together with instead of just for hazard-affected communities is the key to long-term and effective coastal adaptation

Ocean Energy in Belgium - 2019

B

Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action

China’s road to sustainability has attracted global attention. Since the “Reform & Opening Up” policy, China’s rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization has made its being the second largest economy but meantime a heavy environmental price has been paid over the past few decades for addressing the economic developmental target. Today, as the biggest developing country, China needs to take more responsibilities for constructing its local ecological-civilization society as well as for addressing the global challenges such as climate change, resources scary and human beings well-fare; therefore, we need to have deeper understandings into China’s way to sustainability at very different levels, both spatially and structurally, concerns ranging from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, from developing technological applications to generate institutional changes. In this spirit, this publication, “Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action” aims to investigate the intended and spontaneous issues concerning China’s road to sustainability in a combined top-down and bottom-up manner, linking international knowledge to local-based studies

Flood Risk Governance for More Resilience

Flood risks worldwide are being exacerbated due to urbanisation and the consequences of climate change. This poses a challenge to traditional managerial approaches to flood risk management that try to be ‘fail-safe’. This book presents innovative and practical lessons on how to make flood risk management strategies ‘safe-to-fail’ and therewith more resilient. The book focuses on governance – rather than technical/managerial – approaches. As the book shows, new governance strategies are needed that ensure that flood risk management is not left to water managers alone. Various actors, including spatial planners, contingency agencies, NGOs and individual citizens, have a role to play in flood risk governance. Ten chapters assess different case studies from around the globe. These highlight the challenges and good practices related to learning, inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation, and debating and meeting the normative end-goals of flood risk governance. This book is essential reading for grounded scholars, reflexive policymakers and practitioners, and everyone else who is interested in contributing to more resilient and future-proof flood risk governance

Linguistic Refactoring of Business Process Models

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization and internationalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support for business. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to align business strategy, organization, controlling, and business activities to react flexibly to market changes. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since companies tend to have a growing number of business process models stored in a process model repository, analysis techniques are required that assess the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. While available techniques can easily check the formal content of a process model, there are only a few techniques available that analyze the natural language content of a process model. Therefore, techniques are required that address linguistic issues caused by the actual use of natural language. In order to close this gap, this doctoral thesis explicitly targets inconsistencies caused by natural language and investigates the potential of automatically detecting and resolving them under a linguistic perspective. In particular, this doctoral thesis provides the following contributions. First, it defines a classification framework that structures existing work on process model analysis and refactoring. Second, it introduces the notion of atomicity, which implements a strict consistency condition between the formal content and the textual content of a process model. Based on an explorative investigation, we reveal several reoccurring violation patterns are not compliant with the notion of atomicity. Third, this thesis proposes an automatic refactoring technique that formalizes the identified patterns to transform a non-atomic process models into an atomic one. Fourth, this thesis defines an automatic technique for detecting and refactoring synonyms and homonyms in process models, which is eventually useful to unify the terminology used in an organization. Fifth and finally, this thesis proposes a recommendation-based refactoring approach that addresses process models suffering from incompleteness and leading to several possible interpretations. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed techniques is further evaluated by real-world process model repositories from various industries. (author's abstract

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission