Architectural reflection for software evolution

Software evolution is expensive. Lehman identifies several problems associated with it: Continuous adaptation, increasing complexity, continuing growth, and declining quality. This paper proposes that a reflective software engineering environment will address these problems by employing languages and techniques from the software architecture community. Creating a software system will involve manipulating a collection of views, including low-level code views and high-level architectural views which will be tied together using reflection. This coupling will allow the development environment to automatically identify inconsistencies between the views, and support software engineers in managing architectures during evolution. This paper proposes a research programme which will result in a software engineering environment which addresses problems of software evolution and the maintenance of consistency between architectural views of a software system

A UML-based tool for designing HLA federates

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

A Rule-based Engine to support a Framework for the Experimental Validation of Domain Specific Languages

Software systems are widely used in people daily routines and responsibilities, therefore, systems need to be developed rapidly and efficiently. Domain specific languages (DSLs) are languages that are applied to a specific application domain. Since DSLs provide notations and constructs adapted to a particular domain, they offer gains in expressiveness and ease of use when compared with general-purpose languages (GPLs). Therefore, one of the most important steps in the Software Language Engineering is the evaluation of the languages produced, with the end-users, since the risk of building inappropriate languages, that often do not fit the end users, may decrease productivity. Although DSLs evaluation is one of the most important steps in development process, Software Language Engineers tend to relax the experimental validation of their products due to several reasons like costs (time, means, money, the number of people required, etc.) and required know-how associated with it. The lack of systematic approaches and guidelines to evaluate DSLs, and a comprehensive set of tools may explain this shortcoming in the current state of practice. The Usability Driven DSL development with USE-ME (USE-ME) approach, developed in NOVA-LINCS, "promotes the quality in use of DSLs by building a framework that leverages usability as a main concern". The feedback of the pilot studies was that despite the approach was "more or less easy" to understand it was not easy to model, since "there were too many steps to follow" and the framework did not provide a "guided cycle". So, in order to improve the system usability and the quality of the models produced with USE-ME, we developed a new version of the framework with validation rules implemented with Eclipse Validation Language (EVL) that guide, suggest and validate the Software Language Engineer actions throughout the development process. The validation rules were designed in such a way that the tool educates the user about the process, so that the user makes the best decision regarding his DSL evaluation. We performed two experiments, with different goals. The main goals of the first one was to analyse the effect of validation rules on the USE-ME framework, with respect to their impact on the System Usability Scale, and on the Model Correctness of USE-ME models. We analysed the results and we found evidences of improvements on the System Usability Scale, and on the Model Correctness of models, brought by the addition of the rules. The second experiment was conducted with a research team from Ege University, in Turkey. The main goal of this experiment was to perform a guided evaluation on a DSL related with Multi-Agent Systems, SEA-ML. Since the number of participants was low we cannot draw conclusions regarding this experiment. Despite the significant results from the first experiment further evaluation on the new version of the framework is necessary, this time, with more experienced users and with more complex exercises. With this new experiment, we can compare the results and improve the USE-ME framework

Algorithms & Fiduciaries: Existing and Proposed Regulatory Approaches to Artificially Intelligent Financial Planners

Artificial intelligence is no longer solely in the realm of science fiction. Today, basic forms of machine learning algorithms are commonly used by a variety of companies. Also, advanced forms of machine learning are increasingly making their way into the consumer sphere and promise to optimize existing markets. For financial advising, machine learning algorithms promise to make advice available 24–7 and significantly reduce costs, thereby opening the market for financial advice to lower-income individuals. However, the use of machine learning algorithms also raises concerns. Among them, whether these machine learning algorithms can meet the existing fiduciary standard imposed on human financial advisers and how responsibility and liability should be partitioned when an autonomous algorithm falls short of the fiduciary standard and harms a client. After summarizing the applicable law regulating investment advisers and the current state of robo-advising, this Note evaluates whether robo-advisers can meet the fiduciary standard and proposes alternate liability schemes for dealing with increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms

Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Money: Technology-Based Art and the Dynamics of Sustainability

Proposes innovative new approaches and models for art and technology institutions, and provides details for an "Arts Lab," a unique hybrid art center and research lab

Towards useful and usable interaction design tools: CanonSketch

Despite all the effort dedicated to bringing better User-Centered Design (UCD) tools to market, current studies show that the industry is still dominated by tools that do not support the activities and workstyles of designers. Also, there is a growing need for interaction design tools aimed at software engineers, a problem related to bringing usability into the software engineering processes. We propose a new workstyle model that can be effectively used to envision, design and evaluate a new generation of innovative interaction and software design tools, aimed at integrating usability and software engineering. We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by describing a new tool, called CanonSketch, that was built in order to support UCD in terms of the dimensions in our workstyle model. We also describe an evaluation study aimed at contrasting paper prototyping with our tool as well as the level of workstyle support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio