Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach

End-users productivity in model-based spreadsheets: an empirical study

Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 6654, 2011Spreadsheets are widely used and studies show that most of the existing ones contain non-trivial errors. To improve end-users productivity, recent research proposes the use of a model-driven engineering approach to spreadsheets. In this paper we conduct the first empirical study to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. A set of spreadsheet end users worked with two different model-based spreadsheets. We present and analyze here the results achieved.(undefined

Kinetic User Interface: Interaction through Motion for Pervasive Computing Systems

Abstract. We present in this paper a semantic model for the conception of pervasive computing systems based on object or user's motions. We describe a system made of moving entities, observers and views. More specifically, we focus on the tracking of implicit interaction between entities and their environment. We integrate the user’s motion as primary input modality as well as the contexts in which the interaction takes place. We have combined the user activities with contexts to create situations. We illustrate this new concept of motion-awareness with examples of applications built on this model

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

Refactoring smelly spreadsheet models

Identifying bad design patterns in software is a successful and inspiring research trend. While these patterns do not necessarily correspond to software errors, the fact is that they raise potential problematic issues, often referred to as code smells, and that can for example compromise maintainability or evolution. The identification of code smells in spreadsheets, which can be viewed as software development environments for non-professional programmers, has already been the subject of confluent researches by different groups. While these research groups have focused on detecting smells on concrete spreadsheets, or spreadsheet instances, in this paper we propose a comprehensive set of smells for abstract representations of spreadsheets, or spreadsheet models. We also propose a set of refactorings suggesting how spreadsheet models can become simpler to understand, manipulate and evolve. Finally we present the integration of both smells and refactorings under the MDSheet framework.Part funded by ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within projects FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022701 and Network Sensing for Critical Systems Monitoring (NORTE-01-0124-FEDER-000058), ref. BIM-2013 BestCase RL3.2 UMINHO

Dark Matter in the Singlet Extension of MSSM: Explanation of Pamela and Implication on Higgs Phenomenology

As discussed recently by Hooper and Tait, the singlino-like dark matter in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) extended by a singlet Higgs superfield can give a perfect explanation for both the relic density and the Pamela result through the Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation into singlet Higgs bosons ($a$ or $h$ followed by $h->a a$) with $a$ being light enough to decay dominantly to muons or electrons. In this work we analyze the parameter space required by such a dark matter explanation and also consider the constraints from the LEP experiments. We find that although the light singlet Higgs bosons have small mixings with the Higgs doublets in the allowed parameter space, their couplings with the SM-like Higgs boson $h_{SM}$ (the lightest doublet-dominant Higgs boson) can be enhanced by the soft parameter $A_\kappa$ and, in order to meet the stringent LEP constraints, the $h_{SM}$ tends to decay into the singlet Higgs pairs $aa$ or $hh$ instead of $b\bar b$. So the $h_{SM}$ produced at the LHC will give a multi-muon signal, h_{SM} -> aa -> 4 muons or h_{SM} -> hh -> 4 a -> 8 muons.Comment: Version in JHE

Value of formalisation for women entrepreneurs in developing contexts: a review and research agenda

Formalisation is constantly being proposed as of great benefit to business expansion and success. This claim however has not been previously tested through a review of the empirical evidence, especially in relation to the large number of women in the developing world that operate in the informal economy. Therefore, our aim in this review is to systematise the current empirical evidence on gender, the informal economy and formalisation using a narrative synthesis of 76 papers. The papers were analysed along three main analytical themes – identity, institutions and, constraints and preferences, highlighting their conceptualisation in studies of different academic disciplines – economics, sociology, entrepreneurship and development. The review calls for more accurate accounts of formalisation decisions by widening the lens through which formalisations decisions are conceptualised. These should take account of the rich contextual and temporal dimensions central to these decisions, and recognise that gender alone is not a sufficient factor in explaining women’s choices in the informal economy. The review also highlights limitations in relation to the limited conceptual and empirical evidence on which development priorities such as formalisation are set. We propose a research agenda that centres on the need for conceptual frameworks that are more sensitive towards the multi-dimensional contexts of women’s choices

SO(10) unified models and soft leptogenesis

Motivated by the fact that, in some realistic models combining SO(10) GUTs and flavour symmetries, it is not possible to achieve the required baryon asymmetry through the CP asymmetry generated in the decay of right-handed neutrinos, we take a fresh look on how deep this connection is in SO(10). The common characteristics of these models are that they use the see-saw with right-handed neutrinos, predict a normal hierarchy of masses for the neutrinos observed in oscillating experiments and in the basis where the right-handed Majorana mass is diagonal, the charged lepton mixings are tiny. In addition these models link the up-quark Yukawa matrix to the neutrino Yukawa matrix Y^\nu with the special feature of Y^\nu_{11}-> 0 Using this condition, we find that the required baryon asymmetry of the Universe can be explained by the soft leptogenesis using the soft B parameter of the second lightest right-handed neutrino whose mass turns out to be around 10^8 GeV. It is pointed out that a natural way to do so is to use no-scale supergravity where the value of B ~1 GeV is set through gauge-loop corrections.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures. Added references, new appendix of a relevant fit and improved comment

Towards a catalog of spreadsheet smells

Spreadsheets are considered to be the most widely used programming language in the world, and reports have shown that 90% of real-world spreadsheets contain errors. In this work, we try to identify spreadsheet smells, a concept adapted from software, which consists of a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem. Our smells have been integrated in a tool, and were computed for a large spreadsheet repository. Finally, the analysis of the results we obtained led to the refinement of our initial catalog