Liability in Software Engineering: Overview of the LISE Approach and Illustration on a Case Study

© ACM – 2010. This is the authors' pre-version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE international Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'10) - Volume 1 – 978-1-60558-719-6/10/05 – (May 2-8 – 2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1806799.1806823LISE is a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. This report provides an overview of the overall approach taken in the project based on a case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties to a contract wish to include in the agreement specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system

3D models related to the publication: Molar wear in house mice: insight into diet preferences at an ecological time scale?

This contribution contains 3D models of upper molar rows of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) belonging to Western European commensal and Sub-Antarctic feral populations. These two groups are characterized by different patterns of wear and alignment of the three molars along the row, related to contrasted masticatory demand in relation with their diet. These models are analyzed in the following publication: Renaud et al 2023, "Molar wear in house mice, insight into diet preferences at an ecological time scale?", https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blad091

Data from: Divergent in shape and convergent in function: adaptive evolution of the mandible in Sub-Antarctic mice

Convergent evolution in similar environments constitutes strong evidence of adaptive evolution. Transported with people around the world, house mice colonized even remote areas, such as Sub-Antarctic islands. There, they returned to a feral way of life, shifting towards a diet enriched in terrestrial macroinvertebrates. Here, we test the hypothesis that this triggered convergent evolution of the mandible, a morphological character involved in food consumption. Mandible shape from four Sub-Antarctic islands was compared to phylogeny, tracing the history of colonization, and climatic conditions. Mandible shape was primarily influenced by phylogenetic history, thus discarding the hypothesis of convergent evolution. The biomechanical properties of the jaw were then investigated. Incisor in-lever and temporalis out-lever suggested an increase in the velocity of incisor biting, in agreement with observations on various carnivorous and insectivorous rodents. The mechanical advantage related to incisor biting also revealed an increased functional performance in Sub-Antarctic populations, and appears to be an adaptation to catch prey more efficiently. The amount of change involved was larger than expected for a plastic response, suggesting microevolutionary processes were evolved. This study thus denotes some degree of adaptive convergent evolution related to changes in habitat-related changes in dietary items in Sub-Antarctic mice, but only regarding simple, functionally relevant aspects of mandible morphology

Med Sikte på Förbättrad Produktutveckling i KonsultBranschen: En Studie av Avalon Innovation Model

Detta projekt har utförts tillsammans med Mälarplast, en tillverkare av plastprodukter ochAvalon Innovation, en konsult firma som specialiserar sig på produktutveckling. Det förstamålet var att utveckla en flexibel förvaringslösning för användning inom flyg- och tågcatering,genom att använda Avalons nya utvecklingsprocess, Avalon Innovation Model (AIM).Behovet var att kunna tillverka en basversion som kunde konfigureras till att dela av en avMälarplasts lådor i fack av olika storlek. Det andra målet för projektet var att utvärdera ochanalysera hur väl AIM fungerade som en produktutvecklingsprocess samt som serviceproduktför sina kunder. Detta skulle i sin tur leda till rekommendationer för fortsatt utveckling ochförbättring av AIM.Genom att följa AIM utfördes användarstudier, vid servering under en tågresa och hos utrustningsavdelningenvid ett flygbolag. Användarbehov som framkom under studierna rangordnadesmed hjälp av användare, köpare, säljare och tillverkare av liknande produkter. Huvudproblemensom identifierades var: flexibilitet i form av fack samt ett behov att hålla mat vidjämn temperatur. Det slutgiltiga konceptet var ett ilägg i plast som kunde anpassas för olikafackstorlekar i den aktuella lådan. Lösningen optimerades till att passa de vanligaste glasstorlekarnasom hittades. Resultatet presenterades som renderade bilder och ritningar från 3Dmodeller producerade i Solid Works.AIM analyserades genom intervjuer och diskussioner med nyckelpersoner samt utövare avAIM hos Avalon. Dessutom genomfördes studier av relevant teori genom vetenskapliga artiklaroch andra litterära källor samt intryck från det projekt som nämndes ovan. Resultatetvisade att AIMs beskrivningar av utvecklingsverktyg saknade tillräckliga beskrivningar avhur och när det skulle användas. Det saknades också en strategi för integration av funktioneroch kunder inom AIM, något som skulle kunna leda till ineffektivitet och färre lyckade innovationsprojekt.Ytterligare rekommendationer innefattade förslag på förbättringar av processdesignen samt strategin gällande hantering av iterationer av produktkoncept och idéer, genomatt göra processen mer kvick (‖agil‖) och flexibel. Slutligen argumenteras för en tydligareseparation av produkten AIM och processen AIM. Detta rekommenderades för att förbättrafokus på erbjudandet till kunder samt information som är ämnad åt produktutvecklare.This project has been carried out in cooperation with Mälarplast, a manufacturer of plasticproducts, and Avalon Innovation, an engineering consultant firm focusing on product development.The first objective was to develop a flexible storage solution for inflight and railwaycatering, using Avalon’s new development process Avalon Innovation Model (AIM). Mälarplasthad realized a need for a product which they could produce as one solution which couldbe configured to divide their drawers, used by airline and railway caterers, into pockets ofdifferent sizes. The second objective was to evaluate and analyze how well AIM worked as aproduct development tool and process as well as a service product. With the intention ofproviding recommendations for improvements for further development of the model, both interms of a service product and as product development process.Proceeding according to AIM, user studies at caterers, during service on a train and at an airlineutility department were performed. User needs identified during these studies wereranked with the help of users, buyers, sellers and manufacturers of these kinds of products.Two main problems were found, these were: flexibility in terms of pocket sizes and a need tokeep food at an even temperature during transport. The final concept was for a flexible plasticinlay that creates pockets in the specified drawer. It was optimized to hold the most commonglass sizes reported by contacted airlines.AIM was analyzed through interviews and discussions with key personnel and practitioners ofAIM at Avalon. Theoretical studies through scientific articles and other literature resources aswell as impressions from the project mentioned above were also used. The result showed thatAIM was not well described in terms of when and where the specified development toolsshould be used as well as how. Further, a lack of functional integration of teams and customersin AIM was found, which could make the process less than optimal in terms of efficiencyand innovation success. Recommendations offered including improvements of the process’slayout and strategy in terms of handling iterations of product concepts and ideas, by makingthe process more agile and flexible. Also a better separation between AIM the product andAIM the process is recommended in order to improve the focus of the offer to customers aswell as the information given to developers

Differentiation in molar shape among populations, according to three different multivariate analyses.

<p>A. Principal Component Analysis (PCA); note that this analysis is performed on all specimens (grey dots). Group means are highlighted (large colored symbols). B. Between-group PCA. C and D. Canonical Variate Analysis (CVA), in C first vs. second axes, in D third vs. fourth axes.</p

Particle Filtering Applied to Musical Tempo Tracking

This paper explores the use of particle filters for beat tracking in musical audio examples. The aim is to estimate the time-varying tempo process and to find the time locations of beats, as defined by human perception. Two alternative algorithms are presented, one which performs Rao-Blackwellisation to produce an almost deterministic formulation while the second is a formulation which models tempo as a Brownian motion process. The algorithms have been tested on a large and varied database of examples and results are comparable with the current state of the art. The deterministic algorithm gives the better performance of the two algorithms

Phylogenetic tree for <i>M</i>. <i>m</i>. <i>domesticus</i> mt DNA control region.

<p>The tree includes mice from France, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Marion Island, Guillou Island, Corsica and Orkney (based on data available in GenBank). The tree was drawn after Bayesian analysis and shows the different origins of the island mouse populations.</p

Diagrams showing how Pmax impacts the patterns of differentiation provided by a PCA and a CVA.

<p>Symbols represent group means, lines are phylogenetic relationships; full lines are ‘ancient’ branches representing differentiations of clades, dotted lines represent recent diversification in an archipelago. Dotted ellipses represent the ellipse of variance of some groups; the vector inside Pmax. Dotted vector: first axis of the multivariate analysis. Above: the first axis of a PCA is aligned with Pmax; recent diversification events occurring along this line of least resistance are highlighted. Below: the standardization of the within-group variance in a CVA compresses the differentiation along Pmax up to make the variance per group circular; this dampens the representation of diversification along Pmax and promotes patterns of phylogenetic differentiation along other axes. To the right, reconstructed outlines (using an inverse Fourier transform) exemplifying the corresponding interpretation in the cases of molar shape. Pmax corresponds to a variance from thin to broad molars; so does the first axis of the PCA. The first axis of the CVA is oblique to this direction and corresponds to more localized, detailed features on the tooth.</p

Effect of homogeneizing variances on the pattern of differentiation provided by PCA, bgPCA and CVA.

<p>The initial groups were bootstrapped, with the condition that the variance of all shape variables should follow a similar uniform distribution. The 999 resulting data sets were analysed using PCA, bgPCA and CVA. The resulting configurations on the first four axes of each analysis were compared using a Protest, providing a Procrustes distance estimating how much the configurations differ. For each pairwise comparison between analyses (PCA vs. bgPCA, PCA vs. CVA, bgPCA vs. CVA), this provided a simulated distribution (histograms in grey) for data sets with homogeneous variances. The observed distances (red lines) between analyses based on the real data set, characterized by strongly anisotropic variances for each group, were compared to these simulated distributions.</p

Samples used in this study.

<p>Area and country/island are indicated, locality of trapping, labels used in the figures, and number of first upper molars (UM1) measured.</p