Beyond Critical Period Learning: Striatal FoxP2 Affects the Active Maintenance of Learned Vocalizations in Adulthood.

In humans, mutations in the transcription factor forkhead box P2 (FOXP2) result in language disorders associated with altered striatal structure. Like speech, birdsong is learned through social interactions during maturational critical periods, and it relies on auditory feedback during initial learning and on-going maintenance. Hearing loss causes learned vocalizations to deteriorate in adult humans and songbirds. In the adult songbird brain, most FoxP2-enriched regions (e.g., cortex, thalamus) show a static expression level, but in the striatal song control nucleus, area X, FoxP2 is regulated by singing and social context: when juveniles and adults sing alone, its levels drop, and songs are more variable. When males sing to females, FoxP2 levels remain high, and songs are relatively stable: this "on-line" regulation implicates FoxP2 in ongoing vocal processes, but its role in the auditory-based maintenance of learned vocalization has not been examined. To test this, we overexpressed FoxP2 in both hearing and deafened adult zebra finches and assessed effects on song sung alone versus songs directed to females. In intact birds singing alone, no changes were detected between songs of males expressing FoxP2 or a GFP construct in area X, consistent with the marked stability of mature song in this species. In contrast, songs of males overexpressing FoxP2 became more variable and were less preferable to females, unlike responses to songs of GFP-expressing control males. In deafened birds, song deteriorated more rapidly following FoxP2 overexpression relative to GFP controls. Together, these experiments suggest that behavior-driven FoxP2 expression and auditory feedback interact to precisely maintain learned vocalizations

Interface Automata with Complex Actions

AbstractMany formalisms use interleaving to model concurrency. To describe some system behaviours appropriately, we need to limit interleaving. For example, in component-based systems, we wish to limit interleaving to force the inputs to a method to arrive together in order. We introduce interface automata with complex actions (IACA), which add complex actions to de Alfaro and Henzinger's interface automata (IA). A complex action is a sequence of actions that may not be interleaved with actions from other components. The composition and refinement operations are more involved in IACA compared to IA, and we must sacrifice associativity of composition. However, we argue that the advantages of having complex actions make it a useful formalism

Big-Step Semantics

With the popularity of model-driven methodologies, and the abundance of modelling languages, a major question for a requirements engineer is: which language is suitable for modelling a system under study? We address this question from a semantic point-of-view for big-step modelling languages (BSMLs). BSMLs are a popular class of behavioural modelling languages in which a model can respond to an environmental input by executing multiple, possibly concurrent, transitions. We deconstruct the semantics of a large class of BSMLs into high-level, orthogonal semantic aspects and discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of the semantic options for each of these aspects to allow a requirements engineer to compare and choose the right BSML. We accompany our presentation with many modelling examples that illustrate the differences between a set of relevant semantic options.

Diversity in Software Engineering Conferences and Journals

Diversity with respect to ethnicity and gender has been studied in open-source and industrial settings for software development. Publication avenues such as academic conferences and journals contribute to the growing technology industry. However, there have been very few diversity-related studies conducted in the context of academia. In this paper, we study the ethnic, gender, and geographical diversity of the authors published in Software Engineering conferences and journals. We provide a systematic quantitative analysis of the diversity of publications and organizing and program committees of three top conferences and two top journals in Software Engineering, which indicates the existence of bias and entry barriers towards authors and committee members belonging to certain ethnicities, gender, and/or geographical locations in Software Engineering conferences and journal publications. For our study, we analyse publication (accepted authors) and committee data (Program and Organizing committee/ Journal Editorial Board) from the conferences ICSE, FSE, and ASE and the journals IEEE TSE and ACM TOSEM from 2010 to 2022. The analysis of the data shows that across participants and committee members, there are some communities that are consistently significantly lower in representation, for example, publications from countries in Africa, South America, and Oceania. However, a correlation study between the diversity of the committees and the participants did not yield any conclusive evidence. Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence that papers with White authors or male authors were more likely to be cited. Finally, we see an improvement in the ethnic diversity of the authors over the years 2010-2022 but not in gender or geographical diversity.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Finite Model Finding Using the Logic of Equality with Uninterpreted Functions

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Formal Methods. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_41The problem of finite model finding, finding a satisfying model for a set of first-order logic formulas for a finite scope, is an important step in many verification techniques. In MACE-style solvers, the problem is mapped directly to a SAT problem. We investigate an alternative solution of mapping the problem to the logic of equality with uninterpreted functions (EUF), a decidable logic with many well-supported tools (e.g., SMT solvers). EUF reasoners take advantage of the typed functional structures found in the formulas to improve performance. The challenge is that EUF reasoning is not inherently finite scope. We present an algorithm for mapping a finite model finding problem to an equisatisfiable EUF problem. We present results that show our method has better overall performance than existing tools on a range of problems

Static Profiling of Alloy Models

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Modeling of software-intensive systems using formal declarative modeling languages offers a means of managing software complexity through the use of abstraction and early identification of correctness issues by formal analysis. Alloy is one such language used for modeling systems early in the development process. Little work has been done to study the styles and techniques commonly used in Alloy models. We present the first static analysis study of Alloy models. We investigate research questions that examine a large corpus of 1,652 Alloy models. To evaluate these research questions, we create a methodology that leverages the power of ANTLR pattern matching and the query language XPath. Our research questions are split into two categories depending on their purpose. The Model Characteristics category aims to identify what language constructs are used commonly. Modeling Practices questions are considerably more complex and identify how modelers are using Alloy's constructs. We also evaluate our research questions on a subset of models from our corpus written by expert modelers. We compare the results of the expert corpus to the results obtained from the general corpus to gain insight into how expert modelers use the Alloy language. We draw conclusions from the findings of our research questions and present actionable items for educators, language and environment designers, and tool developers. Actionable items for educators are intended to highlight underutilized language constructs and features, and help student modelers avoid discouraged practices. Actionable items aimed at language designers present ways to improve the Alloy language by adding constructs or removing unused ones based on trends identified in our corpus of models. The actionable items aimed at environment designers address features to facilitate model creation. Actionable items for tool developers provide suggestions for back-end optimizations.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Representing hierarchical state machine models in SMT-LIB

© ACM 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in MiSE '16: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering https://doi.org/10.1145/2896982.2896990.We motivate and present a proposal for how to represent the syntax of behavioural models written in extended finite-state machine languages with hierarchical states (e.g., the Statecharts family) in SMT-LIB. By including the state structure explicitly in the SMT-LIB model, our goal is to facilitate effective automated deductive reasoning, which can exploit the structure found in the state hierarchy. We present a novel method that combines deep and shallow encoding techniques to describe models that have both state hierarchy and use the rich datatypes found in SMT-LIB. Our representation permits varying semantics to be chosen for the syntax recognizing the rich variety of semantics that exist for this family of modelling languages. We hope that discussion of these representation issues will facilitate model sharing for investigation of analysis techniques.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

Representing Behavioural Models with Rich Control Structures in SMT-LIB

We motivate and present a proposal for how to represent extended finite state machine behavioural models with rich hierarchical states and compositional control structures (e.g., the Statecharts family) in SMT-LIB. Our goal with such a representation is to facilitate automated deductive reasoning on such models, which can exploit the structure found in the control structures. We present a novel method that combines deep and shallow encoding techniques to describe models that have both rich control structures and rich datatypes. Our representation permits varying semantics to be chosen for the control structures recognizing the rich variety of semantics that exist for the family of extended finite state machine languages. We hope that discussion of these representation issues will facilitate model sharing for investigation of analysis techniques

Dash+: Extending Alloy with Hierarchical States and Replicated Processes for Modelling Transition Systems

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Modelling systems abstractly shows great promise to uncover bugs early in system development. The formal language Alloy provides the means of writing constraints abstractly, but lacks explicit constructs for describing transition systems. Extensions to Alloy, such as Electrum, DynAlloy, and Dash, provide such constructs. However, still missing are language constructs to describe easily multiple processes with the same behaviour (replicated processes) running in parallel as is found in languages such as PlusCal and PROMELA. In this paper, we describe our proposal for adding explicit constructs to Dash for replicated processes. The result is Dash+: an Alloy language extension for describing transition systems that include both concurrent and hierarchical states and parametrized concurrent processes.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

Which Classes of Structures Are Both Pseudo-elementary and Definable by an Infinitary Sentence?

When classes of structures are not first-order definable, we might still try to find a nice description. There are two common ways for doing this. One is to expand the language, leading to notions of pseudo-elementary classes, and the other is to allow infinite conjuncts and disjuncts. In this paper we examine the intersection. Namely, we address the question: Which classes of structures are both pseudo-elementary and $\mathcal{L}_{\omega_1 \omega}$-elementary? We find that these are exactly the classes that can be defined by an infinitary formula that has no infinitary disjunctions