Chinese International Students\u27 and Faculty Members\u27 Views of Plagiarism in Higher Education

As the enrollment of Chinese international students (CIS) increased at a private institution in the Midwest, so did suspected cases of plagiarism. This study addressed the problem of how faculty members grappled with CIS\u27 interpretation and application of Western-based views of plagiarism. The purpose of the study was to identify similarities and differences in the views of these 2 groups. Social cognitive theory, intercultural adaptation theory, and neutralization theory framed this qualitative case study. The research questions focused on how these particular CIS interpreted and applied the Western concept of plagiarism to assignments and exams, the impact of classroom practices and instructional processes on their view and experience, how the faculty members experienced CIS\u27 interpretation and use of Western concepts of plagiarism, and respectively the differences in perceptions of U.S. faculty and of CIS. Eight full-time CIS and 8 faculty members who taught or currently teach CIS were purposefully selected. Data were collected using individual interviews, course syllabi, and plagiarism-related institutional policies. The interview data were analyzed using an ecological perspective to reveal themes; these data were triangulated with the data from course syllabi and institutional policies to ensure research credibility. The results of the study indicated a disconnect between student and faculty perceptions of Western-based contextualized plagiarism, the plagiarism ethos, and academic cultural differences between faculty and CIS that led to the creation of a faculty professional development plan using blended learning focused on cultural differences and teaching methods to deter plagiarism. The results may advance positive social change by improving faculty understanding of CIS and educational practices about plagiarism to better service these students

A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; submitted to the IEEE Systems Journal on 3rd June 201

A quality of service framework for adaptive and dependable large scale system-of-systems

There is growing recognition within industry that for system growth to be sustainable, the way in which existing assets are used must be improved. Future systems are being developed with a desire for dynamic behaviour and a requirement for dependability at mission critical and safety critical levels. These levels of criticality require predictable performance and as such have traditionally not been associated with adaptive systems. The software architecture proposed for such systems is based around a publish/subscribe model, an approach that, while adaptive, does not typically support critical levels of performance. There is, however, the scope for dependability within such architectures through the use of Quality of Service (QoS) methods. QoS is used in systems where the distribution of resources cannot be decided at design time. A QoS based framework is proposed for providing adaptive and dependable behaviour for future large-scale system-of-systems. Initial simulation results are presented to demonstrate the benefits of QoS

A quality of service framework for dependability in large-scale distributed systems

As recognition grows within industry for the advantages that can be gained through the exploitation of large-scale dynamic systems, a need emerges for dependable performance. Future systems are being developed with a requirement to support mission critical and safety critical applications. These levels of criticality require predictable performance and as such have traditionally not been associated with adaptive systems. The software architecture proposed for such systems takes its properties from the service-oriented computing paradigm and the communication model follows a publish/subscribe approach. While adaptive, such architectures do not, however, typically support real-time levels of performance. There is scope, however, for dependability within such architectures through the use of Quality of Service (QoS) methods. QoS is used in systems where the distribution of resources cannot be decided at design time. In this paper a QoS based framework is proposed for providing adaptive and dependable behaviour for future large-scale dynamic systems through the flexible allocation of resources. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the benefits of the QoS framework and the tradeoffs that occur between negotiation algorithms of varying complexities

Process and tool support for real-time performance analysis of integrated modular systems

This paper describes a real-time system performance analysis methodology and toolset that has been developed at SEIC to be an integral part of a broader BAE Systems Military Air Solutions (MAS) process and toolset for Integrated Modular Systems (IMS). The proposed modelling approach and toolset components provide some key ‘through-life’ real-time system engineering benefits relating to system performance, including : the ability to construct a performance prediction model during the early stages of system design and to independently model the timing behaviour of end-to-end transactions across a distributed system of shared processing and network resources

Cross-layer signalling and middleware: a survey for inelastic soft real-time applications in MANETs

This paper provides a review of the different cross-layer design and protocol tuning approaches that may be used to meet a growing need to support inelastic soft real-time streams in MANETs. These streams are characterised by critical timing and throughput requirements and low packet loss tolerance levels. Many cross-layer approaches exist either for provision of QoS to soft real-time streams in static wireless networks or to improve the performance of real and non-real-time transmissions in MANETs. The common ground and lessons learned from these approaches, with a view to the potential provision of much needed support to real-time applications in MANETs, is therefore discussed

Adaptive architectures for future highly dependable, real time systems

Many present-day safety-critical or mission-critical military applications are deployed using intrinsically static architectures. Often these applications are real-time systems, where late responses may cause potentially catastrophic results. Static architectures allow system developers to certify with a high degree of confidence that their systems will provide correct functionality during operation, but a more adaptive approach could provide some clear benefits. In particular, the ability to dynamically reconfigure the system at run time would give increased flexibility and performance in response to unpredictable or unplanned operating scenarios. Many current dynamic architectural approaches provide little or no features to facilitate the highly dependable, real-time performance required by critical systems. The challenge is to provide the features and benefits of dynamic architectural approaches while still achieving the required level of performance and dependability. This paper describes the early results of an ongoing research programme, part funded by the Software Systems Engineering Initiative (SSEI), aimed at developing a more adaptive software architecture for future military systems. A range of architectures with adaptive features (including object-based, agent based and publish/subscribe) are reviewed against the desirable characteristics of highly dependable systems. A publish/subscribe architecture is proposed as a potential way forward and a discussion of its advantages and disadvantages for highly dependable, real-time systems is given

A SysML Profile for Fault Trees : Linking Safety Models to System Design

Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has encouraged the use of a single systems model in languages such as SysML that fully specify the system and which form the basis of all development effort. However, using SysML models for safety analysis has been restricted by the lack of defined modelling standards for analytical techniques like Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). In lieu of such standards, the ENCASE project (See acknowledgements.) has formulated a simple SysML profile that captures the information required to represent fault trees and which enables the linkage of failure modes to other parts of the SysML model. We describe our experience of integrating fault tree models within a SysML MBSE environment for critical systems development, and show how that can be done while keeping existing (often certified) analytical tools as part of the development process. Common definitions of the system specification improves the quality of safety analysis, and the closer alignment of system and safety models provides opportunities for greater traceability, coherence and verification

A quality of service framework for adaptive and dependable large scale system-of-systems

There is growing recognition within industry that for system growth to be sustainable, the way in which existing assets are used must be improved. Future systems are being developed with a desire for dynamic behaviour and a requirement for dependability at mission critical and safety critical levels. These levels of criticality require predictable performance and as such have traditionally not been associated with adaptive systems. The software architecture proposed for such systems is based around a publish/subscribe model, an approach that, while adaptive, does not typically support critical levels of performance. There is, however, the scope for dependability within such architectures through the use of Quality of Service (QoS) methods. QoS is used in systems where the distribution of resources cannot be decided at design time. A QoS based framework is proposed for providing adaptive and dependable behaviour for future large-scale system-of-systems. Initial simulation results are presented to demonstrate the benefits of QoS