39 research outputs found
The Introduction of Clerp 9 Audit Regulation and its Impact on the Auditing Profession
This study examines the introduction of legally enforceable Australian Auditing Standards (ASAs) and the impact on the audit profession after their first year of implementation. This study is informed by regulation theories and potential costs, benefits and other impacts of the new regulatory regime identified by the Australian governmentâs April 2006 Regulation Impact Statement (RIS). This study collected relevant data through semi-structured in-depth interviews with the same key stakeholders as RIS (accounting firms, professional bodies and regulatory bodies). The results indicate significant differences to the governmentâs pre-implementation RIS expectations, as well as differences between stakeholder groups. Overall the accounting profession does not consider that the extra burden of demonstrating compliance with the legally enforceable ASAs has changed the audit process or audit outcomes. The auditing profession does not consider the extra burden of the new regime justifiable as it has not increased audit quality or public confidence, which were the main aims of the governmentâs regulatory intervention
Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification
Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between
different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key
element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation
of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are
transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed
from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains
provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the
grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we
use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the
grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language
Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar
transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences
between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and
structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to
asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite
for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many
examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the
extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to
automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence
process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent
Using informative behavior to increase engagement while learning from human reward
In this work, we address a relatively unexplored aspect of designing agents that learn from human reward. We investigate how an agentâs non-task behavior can affect a human trainerâs training and agent learning. We use the TAMER framework, which facilitates the training of agents by human-generated reward signals, i.e., judgements of the quality of the agentâs actions, as the foundation for our investigation. Then, starting from the premise that the interaction between the agent and the trainer should be bi-directional, we propose two new training interfaces to increase a human trainerâs active involvement in the training process and thereby improve the agentâs task performance. One provides information on the agentâs uncertainty which is a metric calculated as data coverage, the other on its performance. Our results from a 51-subject user study show that these interfaces can induce the trainers to train longer and give more feedback. The agentâs performance, however, increases only in response to the addition of performance-oriented information, not by sharing uncertainty levels. These results suggest that the organizational maxim about human behavior, âyou get what you measureââi.e., sharing metrics with people causes them to focus on optimizing those metrics while de-emphasizing other objectivesâalso applies to the training of agents. Using principle component analysis, we show how trainers in the two conditions train agents differently. In addition, by simulating the influence of the agentâs uncertaintyâinformative behavior on a humanâs training behavior, we show that trainers could be distracted by the agent sharing its uncertainty levels about its actions, giving poor feedback for the sake of reducing the agentâs uncertainty without improving the agentâs performance
Evaluating usefulness of software metrics: an industrial experience report
Contains fulltext :
116980.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)ICSE'13: 35 International Conference on Software Engineering, May 18th-26th, 2013, San Francisco, C
Getting what you measure
Contains fulltext :
103392.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access
Real-space study of the growth of magnesium on ruthenium
The growth of magnesium on ruthenium has been studied by low-energy electron microscopy (LEEM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). In LEEM, a layer-by-layer growth is observed except in the first monolayer, where the completion of the first layer in inferred by a clear peak in electron reflectivity. Desorption from the films is readily observable at 400 K. Real-space STM and low-energy electron diffraction confirm that sub-monolayer coverage presents a moirĂ© pattern with a 12 Ă
periodicity, which evolves with further Mg deposition by compressing the Mg layer to a 22 Ă
periodicity. Layer-by-layer growth is followed in LEEM up to 10 ML. On films several ML thick a substantial density of stacking faults are observed by dark-field imaging on large terraces of the substrate, while screw dislocations appear in the stepped areas. The latter are suggested to result from the mismatch in heights of the Mg and Ru steps. Quantum size effect oscillations in the reflected LEEM intensity are observed as a function of thickness, indicating an abrupt Mg/Ru interface