Variable-Precision Reaching Definitions Analysis

During reverse engineering and reengineering of large legacy systems, reaching denitions computation is an important step, from which successive analyses, such as slicing and impact analysis, can produce useful views of the code linkages for the programmer. The involved activities are interactive, thus program analysis tools may be asked for fast answers by the maintainer. Therefore the control on the trade-o between accuracy and eciency should be given to the user. Furthermore, real world programs (specially in languages like C) make much use of pointers, so that an ecient points-to analysis should be integrated with the data dependences computation. This paper proposes three dierent approaches to interprocedural reaching de- nitions analysis based on dierent levels of increasing precision, dependently on the sensitivity to calling context and control ow. A lower precision degree produces an overestimate of the reaching denitions in a program. The result is conservative (all dependences that hold are denitely reported), and faster than their more accurate counterparts. To be applicable to real programs written in modern programming languages, these analyses need to eciently handle pointers, and to integrate pointers analysis with reaching denitions computation. Results on a test suite show that an almost 2000:1 reduction factor can be gained in execution time by the less accurate analysis, but an average 41 % extra dependences are added. The intermediate variant is much more precise than the less accurate one (2 % extra dependences), and remains more than 30 times faster than the most accurate analysis. Therefore while on medium size systems the intermediate variant could be a good compromise, on large systems the less accurate variant becomes extremely valua..

Experiencing Real-Life Interactions with the Mobile Platform of MAIA

Over the years, automated vehicles have evolved from reliable yet rigidly constrained AGV to the fairly flexible ones of the HelpMate generation. If many problems related to the autonomous navigation of such vehicles have found solutions that appear to be adequato to many practical situations, yet their capacity of interacting with the users and the environment is still limited. In the present paper, the research work done at Irst in the framework of the Experimental Platform of MAIA is presented. In particular, a transport mission scenario (MAIA `94) is considered, in which autonomous navigation, speech recognition and planning skills represents three aspects of one and the same ability that the system can exhibit of establishing interactions with the external world in an reliable and autonomous fashio

A Function Point-Like Measure for Object-Oriented Software

We present a method for estimating the size, and consequently effort and duration, of object oriented software development projects. Different estimates may be made in different phases of the development process, according to the available information. We define an adaptation of traditional function points, called "Object Oriented Function Points", to enable the measurement of object oriented analysis and design specifications. Tools have been constructed to automate the counting method. The novel aspect of our method is its flexibility. An organisation can experiment with different counting policies, to find the most accurate predictors of size, effort, etc. in its environment. The method and preliminary results of its application in an industrial environment are presented and discussed

Finite State Network, Isolated Word, Real Time Automatic Speech Recognizer based on DSP32C.

This work describes a Finite State Network (FSN), isolated word, speaker dependent, real time Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. FSNs are used to represent grammars belonging to regular language class [ Aho et al., 1974 ] . It is well known that regular languages are powerful enough to generate useful subsets of the natural language. On the other hand, they can be easily integrated into an ASR system [ Bahl et al., 1983 ] [ Rabiner and Juang, Jan 1988 ] embedding grammar constraints to reduce the search space, hence the time spent in recognition, and increase the recognition rate [ Rabiner and Levinson, 1981 ] [ Kai-Fu Lee, April 1988 ] . For isolated word, speaker dependent ASR systems, a template matching recognition algorithm based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) [ Velichko and Zagoruyko, 1970 ] [ Vintsyuk, 1968 ] [ Silverman and Morgan, July 1990 ] ensures a high recognition rate and quick development. A single AT&T LSI DSP32C board plugged into an ISA bus has been used as co..

Tools for Development, Test and Analysis of ASRs.

The aim of this work is to present a set of tools that can be helpful in the design, development and test of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems based on DSP boards. The architecture of the system presented allows the user to concentrate on ASR design problems rather than on the DSP board interfacing problem. This is obtained through the introduction of an intermediate module, called manager, that guides the communication between the acquisition module (DSP board) and a set of processes. Each process performs a specific task like data I/O from DSP board or to/from other devices, ASR testing, signal plotting, and so on. Finite State Networks (FSNs) was used to represent both the manager architecture and the languages accepted by various ASRs. In order to reduce both the time spent for defining the language and the time and space required by ASR algorithms, a package of routines was developed for defining, optimizing and transforming FSNs. The tools depicted above have been verifi..