52,649 research outputs found
Designing community care systems with AUML
This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p
Understanding Hackers' Work: An Empirical Study of Offensive Security Practitioners
Offensive security-tests are a common way to pro-actively discover potential
vulnerabilities. They are performed by specialists, often called
penetration-testers or white-hat hackers. The chronic lack of available
white-hat hackers prevents sufficient security test coverage of software.
Research into automation tries to alleviate this problem by improving the
efficiency of security testing. To achieve this, researchers and tool builders
need a solid understanding of how hackers work, their assumptions, and pain
points.
In this paper, we present a first data-driven exploratory qualitative study
of twelve security professionals, their work and problems occurring therein. We
perform a thematic analysis to gain insights into the execution of security
assignments, hackers' thought processes and encountered challenges.
This analysis allows us to conclude with recommendations for researchers and
tool builders to increase the efficiency of their automation and identify novel
areas for research.Comment: 11 pages, we have chosen the category "Software Engineering" and not
"Cryptography and Security" as while this is a paper about security
practices, we target software engineering researcher
Software Supply Chain Attribute Integrity (SCAI)
The Software Supply Chain Attribute Integrity, or SCAI (pronounced "sky"),
specification proposes a data format for capturing functional attribute and
integrity information about software artifacts and their supply chain. SCAI
data can be associated with executable binaries, statically- or
dynamically-linked libraries, software packages, container images, software
toolchains, and compute environments.
As such, SCAI is intended to be implemented as part of an existing software
supply chain attestation framework by software development tools or services
(e.g., builders, CI/CD pipelines, software analysis tools) seeking to capture
more granular information about the attributes and behavior of the software
artifacts they produce. That is, SCAI assumes that implementers will have
appropriate processes and tooling in place for capturing other types of
software supply chain metadata, which can be extended to add support for SCAI
Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies
Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside
and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs,
and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet
finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet
link and metadata collection building. The open-source software
and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable
strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries,
library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related
collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately
anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users.published or submitted for publicatio
The CMS Event Builder
The data acquisition system of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron
Collider will employ an event builder which will combine data from about 500
data sources into full events at an aggregate throughput of 100 GByte/s.
Several architectures and switch technologies have been evaluated for the DAQ
Technical Design Report by measurements with test benches and by simulation.
This paper describes studies of an EVB test-bench based on 64 PCs acting as
data sources and data consumers and employing both Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet
technologies as the interconnect. In the case of Ethernet, protocols based on
Layer-2 frames and on TCP/IP are evaluated. Results from ongoing studies,
including measurements on throughput and scaling are presented.
The architecture of the baseline CMS event builder will be outlined. The
event builder is organised into two stages with intelligent buffers in between.
The first stage contains 64 switches performing a first level of data
concentration by building super-fragments from fragments of 8 data sources. The
second stage combines the 64 super-fragments into full events. This
architecture allows installation of the second stage of the event builder in
steps, with the overall throughput scaling linearly with the number of switches
in the second stage. Possible implementations of the components of the event
builder are discussed and the expected performance of the full event builder is
outlined.Comment: Conference CHEP0
Reconfigurable phased microstrip antenna array with defected ground structure and defected microstrip structure for beam steering application
Beam steering is defined as the ability to electronically steer the beam maximum of an antenna electric field pattern to some predefined point in space. The performance of a phased antenna array for beam steering without moving the antennas is important to military and civil applications. A steerable antenna with tunable phase shifter continues to be a popular choice to provide such systems. However, this additional device makes the structure more complicated, bulky and it represent a great part of the production cost of a phased array antenna. Therefore, it creates new challenges to find an alternative approach. This work proposed two alternative approaches to steer the main beam. The first is based on a defected ground structure (DGS), while the second is a defected microstrip structure (DMS), which due to their slow wave effect and band-stop property, are able to disturb surface current distribution, then change the element phase and hence steer the main beam. This work started with investigating and applying new method for beam steering based on using DGS and DMS, where this reflects the first objective. As a second objective, this work proposed new approach for beam steering, where DGS is integrated between two patches for the bandwidth within X-band. The simulated results revealed the achievement of the target to steer the main beam to 50° along H-plane. For the third objective, a spiral antenna array (SAA) has been proposed, and it was observed that the best choice for selecting feed network for feeding circular antenna array is a common sequential feed network (SFN), which has a circular shape with four ports to feed four elements. In order to increase the number of ports and hence design suitable feed network for feeding SAA, this study proposed new spiral sequential feed network (SSFN). As a dual structure of DGS, and compared with DGS, DMS is of great advantage in design due to its reduced size and the feature of electromagnetic interference noise immunity. Furthermore, DMS has higher effective inductance compared to DGS. Therefore, this work proposed new reconfigurable SAA with DMS fed by SSFN within C-band. The simulated results showed the achievement of the target to steer the main beam to 61° and 84° along E-plane and H-plane, respectively. Furthermore, as the last objective, a new approach was proposed for extracting equivalent circuit model for DGS with dual patches, SSFN and SAA. Two prototypes of dual patches with and without DGS, SSFN and two prototypes of SAA with DMS were fabricated for scattering parameter and far-field radiation pattern measurements. The results showed close agreement with the predicted results, where array with DGS confirmed a beam steering of 36° along H-plane, while SAA with DMS displayed 45° beam steering along E-plane, respectively. Future works will focus on increasing the array gain and reducing the array beam width which will give a clear vision for beam steering of array
How to achieve sustainability : regulatory challenges
The importance of designing sustainable buildings is gaining greater acceptance worldwide. Evidence of this is how regulators
are incorporating sustainable design principles into building regulations and requirements. The aim being to increase the number
of sustainable buildings and move from a traditional voluntary compliance to one that is mandatory. However, developing
regulations that actually achieve these aims can be a difficult exercise.
Several countries in South East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have performance based building regulations that are
supplemented by prescriptive measures for achieving the desired performance. Australia too has similar building regulations and
has had energy efficiency regulations within the Building Code of Australia for over a decade. This paper explores some of the
difficulties and problems that Australian regulators have experienced with the performance-based method and the prescriptive or
“deemed-to-comply” method and measures that have been taken to try and overcome these problems. These experiences act as
a useful guide to all regulators considering the incorporation of sustainable design measures into their countries building
regulations.
The paper also speculates on future environmental requirements being incorporated into regulations, including the possibility of
non-residential buildings being required to meet minimum energy efficiency requirements, and the possible systems that would
need to be in place before such requirements were included.
Finally, the paper looks at a possible way forward using direct assessment from electronic designs and introduces several
software tools that are currently being developed that move towards achieving this goal.
Keywords: Sustainable buildings, Performance-based, Regulations, Energy efficiency, Assessment tools
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