An Investigation of Modular Dependencies in Aspects, Features and Classes

The essence of software design is to construct well-defined, encapsulated modules that are composed together to build the desired software application. There are several design paradigms in use today, including traditional Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Feature-Oriented Programming (FOP), Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and Instance-Oriented Programming (IOP). FOP studies the modularity of features in product lines, where a feature is an increment in program functionality. AOP aims to separate and modularize aspects when an aspect is a crosscutting concern. IOP, as an extension to FOP, makes the layers work like object factories. While each is good at solving different types of problems, they are closely related. The composition of modules is complicated because modules have (often hidden) dependencies on other modules. This thesis aims to better understand the way dependencies are managed by each approach. Based on this, we focus on the precedence issue in AOP and FOP, that is, how designers are able to specify the order by which modules are composed together. Different precedence means different semantics, but the current tools can not guarantee the correct precedence is adopted. We first solve the precedence issue separately for AOP and FOP, then based on this, we come up with a unified model to solve the precedence issue by using source code annotations to specify the precedence. We evaluate our technique with use cases

The Variable Expression of Transitive Subject and Possesor in Wayuunaiki (Guajiro)

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. Mosonyi (1975) describes the Subjective and Objective transitive clauses as focus alternatives. Álvarez (1993) discovered that the O in the Objective clause must be definite. Despite the association of definiteness and focus as a central factors, the usage of the alternatives in discourse has has not received enough attention. I here conclude that the Subjective variant is the pragmatically marked option, whose primary function is to defocus a 3rd person O that is typically inanimate, new and non-topical. This clause type has the effect of retaining its syntactic valency, but expresseing semantically low transitivity. Álvarez (1990) documents possessor ascension as a construction that involves unrestricted noun incorporation. Matera (2001) adds that the possessor of an incorporated noun can only assume the role of transitive object or stative subject. In the present corpus exploration, I conclude that the External Possessor construction is the functionally marked clause, whose function is primarily to defocus a possessed nominal that is typically inalienable, inanimate, and non-topical information. Additionally, whole-part relationships frequently participate in incorporation, while kinship relations do so rarely. These two ways to cross-reference arguments are here interpreted as differential focus assignment on clausal arguments (Dixon & Aikhenvald 1997). They both involve the prefixation of a- referring to the transitive subject and the external possessor. I conclude that in these constructions this prefix has the effect of backgrounding an entity and consequently assigning undivided focus to the subject or the possessor

Anthropologies of fiber: Claire Zeisler, Ed Rossbach, Sheila Hicks

In the 1960s and 1970s, American artists Claire Zeisler, Ed Rossbach, and Sheila Hicks helped forge an international art movement that expanded the boundaries of fiber usage and, by extension, the boundaries of art itself. Often with only a loom, hook, or their own hands as tools, they crafted soft sculptures from thread, string, and rope. In contrast to recent formalist and feminist attempts to recover the overlooked genre of Fiber Art, this dissertation explores the ways in which artists employed fiber to register the ethnic and economic tensions of their era. Zeisler, Rossbach, and Hicks borrowed anthropological strategies to research the materials and processes associated with non-Western, Native American, and South American textile histories. Incorporating these principles into their own work, the artists in this project promote such art forms while simultaneously appropriating them as a ground for articulating their own responses to issues of industrialization and globalization. Chapter One contextualizes the dissertation’s three case studies by describing the Fiber Art movement, its contemporary reception, and its relationship to anthropology. Chapter Two highlights Chicagoan Claire Zeisler, who used her personal collection of African, Oceanic, and Native American art as source material for her thread-based sculptures. She therefore promoted diverse cultural traditions while also taking advantage of these art forms to establish her own artistic identity. Ed Rossbach, the subject of Chapter Three, studied international textile traditions as a teacher and theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He repurposed ancient and foreign techniques using ephemeral, mass-produced materials, thereby challenging the romanticized distinction between the industrial present and preindustrial past. Finally, Chapter Four considers how Sheila Hicks engaged directly with fiber workshops in Mexico, Chile, India, Morocco, and France through travel and collaboration. By assimilating motifs and materials from these experiences into installations that were shown in corporate settings, her art alluded to the complex relationships between workers around the world. In their respective roles as collector, scholar, and traveler, these artists drew from anthropological discourses to provide critical perspective on United States society at a time when global communication and transportation technologies brought cultures into collision.2020-02-14T00:00:00

Aspect-Oriented State Machines

UML state machines are a widely used language for modeling software behavior. They are considered to be simple and intuitively comprehensible, and are hence one of the most popular languages for modeling reactive components. However, this seeming ease to use vanishes rapidly as soon as the complexity of the system to model increases. In fact, even state machines modeling ``almost trivial'' behavior may get rather hard to understand and error-prone. In particular, synchronization of parallel regions and history-based features are often difficult to model in UML state machines. We therefore propose High-Level Aspect (HiLA), a new, aspect-oriented extension of UML state machines, which can improve the modularity, thus the comprehensibility and reusability of UML state machines considerably. Aspects are used to define additional or alternative system behaviors at certain ``interesting'' points of time in the execution of the state machine, and achieve a high degree of separation of concerns. The distinguishing feature of HiLA w.r.t. other approaches of aspect-oriented state machines is that HiLA aspects are defined on a high, i.e. semantic level as opposed to a low, i.e. syntactic level. This semantic approach makes \HiLA aspects often simpler and better comprehensible than aspects of syntactic approaches. The contributions of this thesis include 1) the abstract and the concrete syntax of HiLA, 2) the weaving algorithms showing how the (additional or alternative) behaviors, separately modeled in aspects, are composed with the base state machine, giving the complete behavior of the system, 3) a formal semantics for HiLA aspects to define how the aspects are activated and (after the execution) left. We also discuss what conflicts between HiLA aspects are possible and how to detect them. The practical applicability of HiLA is shown in a case study of a crisis management system

Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time

Increasingly, software needs to dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in the supporting computing infrastructure and in the surrounding physical environment. Adaptability is emerging as a necessary underlying capability, particularly for highly dynamic systems such as context-aware or ubiquitous systems. By automating tasks such as installation, adaptation, or healing, Autonomic Computing envisions computing environments that evolve without the need for human intervention. Even though there is a fair amount of work on architectures and their theoretical design, Autonomic Computing was criticised as being a \hype topic" because very little of it has been implemented fully. Furthermore, given that the autonomic system must change states at runtime and that some of those states may emerge and are much less deterministic, there is a great challenge to provide new guidelines, techniques and tools to help autonomic system development. This thesis shows that building up on the central ideas of Model Driven Development (Models as rst-order citizens) and Software Product Lines (Variability Management) can play a signi cant role as we move towards implementing the key self-management properties associated with autonomic computing. The presented approach encompass systems that are capable of modifying their own behavior with respect to changes in their operating environment, by using variability models as if they were the policies that drive the system's autonomic recon guration at runtime. Under a set of recon guration commands, the components that make up the architecture dynamically cooperate to change the con guration of the architecture to a new con guration. This work also provides the implementation of a Model-Based Recon guration Engine (MoRE) to blend the above ideas. Given a context event, MoRE queries the variability models to determine how the system should evolve, and then it provides the mechanisms for modifying the system.Cetina Englada, C. (2010). Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/7484Palanci

Well-Formed and Scalable Invasive Software Composition

Software components provide essential means to structure and organize software effectively. However, frequently, required component abstractions are not available in a programming language or system, or are not adequately combinable with each other. Invasive software composition (ISC) is a general approach to software composition that unifies component-like abstractions such as templates, aspects and macros. ISC is based on fragment composition, and composes programs and other software artifacts at the level of syntax trees. Therefore, a unifying fragment component model is related to the context-free grammar of a language to identify extension and variation points in syntax trees as well as valid component types. By doing so, fragment components can be composed by transformations at respective extension and variation points so that always valid composition results regarding the underlying context-free grammar are yielded. However, given a language’s context-free grammar, the composition result may still be incorrect. Context-sensitive constraints such as type constraints may be violated so that the program cannot be compiled and/or interpreted correctly. While a compiler can detect such errors after composition, it is difficult to relate them back to the original transformation step in the composition system, especially in the case of complex compositions with several hundreds of such steps. To tackle this problem, this thesis proposes well-formed ISC—an extension to ISC that uses reference attribute grammars (RAGs) to specify fragment component models and fragment contracts to guard compositions with context-sensitive constraints. Additionally, well-formed ISC provides composition strategies as a means to configure composition algorithms and handle interferences between composition steps. Developing ISC systems for complex languages such as programming languages is a complex undertaking. Composition-system developers need to supply or develop adequate language and parser specifications that can be processed by an ISC composition engine. Moreover, the specifications may need to be extended with rules for the intended composition abstractions. Current approaches to ISC require complete grammars to be able to compose fragments in the respective languages. Hence, the specifications need to be developed exhaustively before any component model can be supplied. To tackle this problem, this thesis introduces scalable ISC—a variant of ISC that uses island component models as a means to define component models for partially specified languages while still the whole language is supported. Additionally, a scalable workflow for agile composition-system development is proposed which supports a development of ISC systems in small increments using modular extensions. All theoretical concepts introduced in this thesis are implemented in the Skeletons and Application Templates framework SkAT. It supports “classic”, well-formed and scalable ISC by leveraging RAGs as its main specification and implementation language. Moreover, several composition systems based on SkAT are discussed, e.g., a well-formed composition system for Java and a C preprocessor-like macro language. In turn, those composition systems are used as composers in several example applications such as a library of parallel algorithmic skeletons

Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92400/1/j.1467-9787.2012.00780_4.x.pd

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too