Rethinking Experiments in a Socio-Technical Perspective: The Case of Software Engineering

Experiments in computing share many characteristics with the traditional experimental method, but also present significant differences from a practical perspective, due to their aim at producing software artifacts and the central role played by human actors and organizations (e.g., programmers, project teams, software houses) involved in the software development process. By analyzing some of the most significant experiments in the subfield of software engineering, we aim at showing how the conceptual framework that supports experimental methodology in this context needs an extension in a socio-technical perspective

WiseEye: next generation expandable and programmable camera trap platform for wildlife research

Funding: The work was supported by the RCUK Digital Economy programme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1. The work of S. Newey and RJI was part funded by the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS). Details published as an Open Source Toolkit, PLOS Journals at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169758Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Relating the Chondrocyte Gene Network to Growth Plate Morphology: From Genes to Phenotype

During endochondral ossification, chondrocyte growth and differentiation is controlled by many local signalling pathways. Due to crosstalks and feedback mechanisms, these interwoven pathways display a network like structure. In this study, a large-scale literature based logical model of the growth plate network was developed. The network is able to capture the different states (resting, proliferating and hypertrophic) that chondrocytes go through as they progress within the growth plate. In a first corroboration step, the effect of mutations in various signalling pathways of the growth plate network was investigated

A commitment-based communicative act library

International Workshops on Agent Communication, AC 2005 and AC 2006, Utrecht, Netherlands, July 25, 2005, and Hakodate, Japan, May 9, 2006, Selected and Revised Paper

Communication languages for multiagent systems

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have recently acquired a primary role in open multiagent systems, which need a standard communication framework shared by all interacting heterogeneous agents. According to the most important ACL standard proposals so far, agents are supposed to carry out the communication process by performing actions of a specific type, namely, communicative acts, whose semantics is defined in terms of the agents' mental states. Although following the mainstream guidelines inspired by the Speech Act Theory, our work illustrates an alternative model of agent communication, by shifting the focus from agents' mental states to their social state. Taking an existing communicative act library, we provide a semantics for a significant set of acts based on the concept of commitment, and prove that our approach tackles some issues that have not been dealt with in an effective way yet and that may have hindered the rise of an universally accepted ACL standard

From message exchange, to communicative acts, to commitments

none2VERDICCHIO M.; M. COLOMBETTIVerdicchio, M.; Colombetti, Marc