Assess Your Stress: Conceptual re-design of the TrackYourTinnitus system for measuring stress at the workplace

The Track Your Tinnitus (TYT ) platform has been developed in a joint project by the universities of Ulm and Regensburg in Germany for several years. The framework was created to assist tinnitus patients in measuring and keeping track of their symptoms over extended periods of time. For this purpose, TYT provides a central, WWW-based platform to manage and distribute questionnaires to users, who fill in these questionnaires using their mobile devices multiple times per day when prompted by the application. In comparison to other non-computerized methods, this approach offers a more precise and reliable measurement of psychological phenomena and symptoms like tinnitus, which are generally difficult to estimate otherwise. However, the general principles behind TYT can also be applied to other use cases. After a new German law was passed, which aims to improve public health through a variety of measures in all areas of life, the stakeholders of the TYT project decided to initialize a project to apply TYT to measurement of stress at the workplace. Another purpose of this project was to completely redesign and rebuild the framework from scratch due to flaws in its design and the now outdated software it was built on. This new iteration of the TYT concept was named Assess Your Stress (AYS). The main goals were to apply the TYT concept to stress tracking, while also generalizing the platform to make it more open for extensions and different fields of application in the future. The project’s main contributions are a detailed concept of the platform overhaul, a stable core system, upon which future extensions can be built, and a basic web-based client developed as a single-page application in AngularJS. While the system’s application to stress tracking is prototypical in this release, it serves as a preliminary indication that the principles behind TYT are useful in the context of stress tracking

Behavioral synthesis from VHDL using structured modeling

This dissertation describes work in behavioral synthesis involving the development of a VHDL Synthesis System VSS which accepts a VHDL behavioral input specification and performs technology independent synthesis to generate a circuit netlist of generic components. The VHDL language is used for input and output descriptions. An intermediate representation which incorporates signal typing and component attributes simplifies compilation and facilitates design optimization.A Structured Modeling methodology has been developed to suggest standard VHDL modeling practices for synthesis. Structured modeling provides recommendations for the use of available VHDL description styles so that optimal designs will be synthesized.A design composed of generic components is synthesized from the input description through a process of Graph Compilation, Graph Criticism, and Design Compilation. Experiments were performed to demonstrate the effects of different modeling styles on the quality of the design produced by VSS. Several alternative VHDL models were examined for each benchmark, illustrating the improvements in design quality achieved when Structured Modeling guidelines were followed

Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.

The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto- peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services. The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no. EP/K012304/1)

Three Studies on Model Transformations - Parsing, Generation and Ease of Use

ABSTRACTTransformations play an important part in both software development and the automatic processing of natural languages. We present three publications rooted in the multi-disciplinary research of Language Technology and Software Engineering and relate their contribution to the literature on syntactical transformations. Parsing Linear Context-Free Rewriting SystemsThe first publication describes four different parsing algorithms for the mildly context-sensitive grammar formalism Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems. The algorithms automatically transform a text into a chart. As a result the parse chart contains the (possibly partial) analysis of the text according to a grammar with a lower level of abstraction than the original text. The uni-directional and endogenous transformations are described within the framework of parsing as deduction. Natural Language Generation from Class DiagramsUsing the framework of Model-Driven Architecture we generate natural language from class diagrams. The transformation is done in two steps. In the first step we transform the class diagram, defined by Executable and Translatable UML, to grammars specified by the Grammatical Framework. The grammars are then used to generate the desired text. Overall, the transformation is uni-directional, automatic and an example of a reverse engineering translation. Executable and Translatable UML - How Difficult Can it Be?Within Model-Driven Architecture there has been substantial research on the transformation from Platform-Independent Models (PIM) into Platform-Specifc Models, less so on the transformation from Computationally Independent Models (CIM) into PIMs. This publication reflects on the outcomes of letting novice software developers transform CIMs specified by UML into PIMs defined in Executable and Translatable UML.ConclusionThe three publications show how model transformations can be used within both Language Technology and Software Engineering to tackle the challenges of natural language processing and software development

View-based textual modelling

This work introduces the FURCAS approach, a framework for view-based textual modelling. FURCAS includes means that allow software language engineers to define partial and overlapping textual modelling languages. Furthermore, FURCAS provides an incremental update approach that enables modellers to work with multiple views on the same underlying model. The approach is validated against a set of formal requirements, as well as several industrial case studies showing its practical applicability

A Scholarship Approach to Model-Driven Engineering

Model-Driven Engineering is a paradigm for software engineering where software models are the primary artefacts throughout the software life-cycle. The aim is to define suitable representations and processes that enable precise and efficient specification, development and analysis of software. Our contributions to Model-Driven Engineering are structured according to Boyer\u27s four functions of academic activity - the scholarships of teaching, discovery, application and integration. The scholarships share a systematic approach towards seeking new insights and promoting progressive change. Even if the scholarships have their differences they are compatible so that theory, practice and teaching can strengthen each other.Scholarship of Teaching: While teaching Model-Driven Engineering to under-graduate students we introduced two changes to our course. The first change was to introduce a new modelling tool that enabled the execution of software models while the second change was to adapt pair lecturing to encourage the students to actively participate in developing models during lectures. Scholarship of Discovery: By using an existing technology for transforming models into source code we translated class diagrams and high-level action languages into natural language texts. The benefit of our approach is that the translations are applicable to a family of models while the texts are reusable across different low-level representations of the same model.Scholarship of Application: Raising the level of abstraction through models might seem a technical issue but our collaboration with industry details how the success of adopting Model-Driven Engineering depends on organisational and social factors as well as technical. Scholarship of Integration: Building on our insights from the scholarships above and a study at three large companies we show how Model-Driven Engineering empowers new user groups to become software developers but also how engineers can feel isolated due to poor tool support. Our contributions also detail how modelling enables a more agile development process as well as how the validation of models can be facilitated through text generation.The four scholarships allow for different possibilities for insights and explore Model-Driven Engineering from diverse perspectives. As a consequence, we investigate the social, organisational and technological factors of Model-Driven Engineering but also examine the possibilities and challenges of Model-Driven Engineering across disciplines and scholarships