53,523 research outputs found
Active artefact management for distributed software engineering
We describe a software artefact repository that provides its contents with some awareness of their own creation. "Active" artefacts are distinguished from their passive counterparts by their enriched meta-data model which reflects the work-flow process that created them, the actors responsible, the actions taken to change the artefact, and various other pieces of organisational knowledge. This enriched view of an artefact is intended to support re-use of both software and the expertise gained when creating the software. Unlike other organisational knowledge systems, the meta-data is intrinsically part of the artefact and may be populated automatically from sources including existing data-format specific information, user supplied data and records of communication.
Such a system is of increased importance in the world of
"virtual teams" where transmission of vital organisational
knowledge, at best difficult, is further constrained by the
lack of direct contact between engineers and differing development cultures
A NeISS collaboration to develop and use e-infrastructure for large-scale social simulation
The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project is focused on
developing e-Infrastructure to support social simulation research. Part of NeISS aims to
provide an interface for running contemporary dynamic demographic social simulation
models as developed in the GENESIS project. These GENESIS models operate at the
individual person level and are stochastic. This paper focuses on support for a simplistic
demographic change model that has a daily time steps, and is typically run for a number
of years.
A portal based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed as a set
of standard portlets. One portlet is for specifying model parameters and setting a
simulation running. Another is for comparing the results of different simulation runs.
Other portlets are for monitoring submitted jobs and for interfacing with an archive of
results. A layer of programs enacted by the portlets stage data in and submit jobs to a
Grid computer which then runs a specific GENESIS model program executable. Once a
job is submitted, some details are communicated back to a job monitoring portlet. Once
the job is completed, results are stored and made available for download and further
processing. Collectively we call the system the Genesis Simulator.
Progress in the development of the Genesis Simulator was presented at the UK e-
Science All Hands Meeting in September 2011 by way of a video based demonstration
of the GUI, and an oral presentation of a working paper. Since then, an automated
framework has been developed to run simulations for a number of years in yearly time
steps. The demographic models have also been improved in a number of ways. This
paper summarises the work to date, presents some of the latest results and considers the
next steps we are planning in this work
Communication and conflict issues in collaborative software research projects
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OS-
CAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS
project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls.
We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium
to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we outline below have solutions only visible with hindsight. Instead, we seek to provide a fair-minded critique of our role and the mistakes we made in a fairly typical two-year EU research project, and to provide a set of recommendations for other similar projects, in order that they can (attempt to) avoid suffering similarly
Environments to support collaborative software engineering
With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of
software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long
periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support
for collaborative working is needed by software engineers.
In this paper, two approaches to developing
improved system support for collaborative software engineering are
described: GENESIS and OPHELIA.
As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and
contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future
collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out
comparative studies of our approaches in practical use
An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR)
system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to
non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial.
This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture of an artefact's life from creation to (eventual) retirement with the intention of supporting collaboration both amongst the members of the software engineering team and agents acting on their behalf
Fostering innovation in a small open economy: The case of the New Zealand biotechnology sector
The New Zealand Biotechnology sector is worthy of study for several reasons. While there is a large and growing international literature on economic aspects of biotechnology innovation these studies concentrate on the United States and Europe. The New Zealand biotechnology sector may be expected to develop along a different trajectory as a consequence of a markedly different set of initial and framework conditions. Government has indicated a strong interest in fostering innovation and aims to concentrate on selected areas where New Zealand may be able to develop a new comparative advantage. One such area is biotechnology, which would build on New Zealand’s existing comparative advantage in the primary sector (dairy, forestry, meat, wool and horticulture). This paper describes the preliminary results of an ongoing study that aims to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of innovation processes in New Zealand while using the international literature as a benchmark. The paper focuses on the drivers of innovation in the biotechnology sector; the role of networks and other linkages; the role of government and industry, the role of human and venture capital, and data from patenting
Tree-Chain: A Fast Lightweight Consensus Algorithm for IoT Applications
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications
including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including
decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional
blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have
limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose
tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels
of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator
of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant
characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii)
blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular
consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces
parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding
transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is
runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving
near real-time transaction settlement
Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives
The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in
recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their
social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as
Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and
CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger
transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research
Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the
world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over
traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career
scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as
this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database.
Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to
a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for
performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly
publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in
measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available
altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely
used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus
argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics
based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and
validations are needed before their adoption
Historical awareness support and its evaluation in collaborative software engineering
The types of awareness relevant to collaborative soft-
ware engineering are identified and an additional type,
"historical awareness" is proposed. This new type of
awareness is the knowledge of how software artefacts re-
sulting from collaboration have evolved in the course of
their development.
The types of awareness that different software engineer-
ing environment architectures can support are discussed. A
way to add awareness support to our existing OSCAR sys-
tem, a component of the GENESIS software engineering
platform, is proposed. Finally ways of instrumenting and
evaluating the awareness support offered by the modified
system are outlined
Performance Analysis of Blockchain Platforms
Blockchain technologies have drawn massive attention to the world these past few years mostly because of the burst of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Etherium, Ripple and many others. A Blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, has demonstrated huge potential in saving time and costs. This open-source technology which generates a decentralized public ledger of transactions is widely appreciated for ensuring a high level of privacy through encryption and thus sharing the transaction details only amongst the participants involved in the transactions. The Blockchain is used not only for cryptocurrency but also by various companies to meet their business ends, such as efficient management of supply chains and logistics. The rise and fall of numerous crypto-currencies based on blockchain technology have generated debate among tech-giants and regulatory bodies. There are various groups which are working on standardizing the blockchain technology. At the same time, numerous groups are actively working, developing and fine-tuning their own blockchain platforms. Platforms such as etherium, hyperledger, parity, etc. have their own pros and cons. This research is focused on the performance analysis of blockchain platforms which gives a comparative understanding of these platforms
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