User Interface Matters : Analysing the Complexity of Mobile Applications from a Visual Perspective

Product-centric techniques to analyze mobile applications leverage traditional source code analysis, size, market success, complexity, and others. Many of these techniques converge in the strategy of evaluating metrics taken from the source code that delivers the functionality of the software product. However, when following the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, mobile applications are typically constructed by a compound of at least two programming languages, one to deliver the functionality and the other to describe the visual aspects. The latter is commonly left out from source code analysis, even though critical parts of the application are present in the graphic User Interface (UI). In this paper, we identify an opportunity to strengthen the product-centric mobile app analysis by incorporating UI metrics. This approach aims to enhance the expressiveness of source code metrics and deliver a more comprehensive analysis of the complexity, maintainability, and effort estimation of a mobile app. To introduce the concept, we present a case study realized using a block-based programming language to create mobile apps, in which we describe and calculate functional and UI metrics, discover commonalities and differences, discuss traits, and open tracks for further research.Peer reviewe

Deadlines and MOOCs : How Do Students Behave in MOOCs with and without Deadlines

Full research paper-Online education can be delivered in many ways. For example, some MOOCs let students to proceed with their own pace, while others rely on strict schedules. Although the variety of how MOOCs can be organized is generally well understood, less is known about how the different ways of organizing MOOCs affect retention. In this work, we compare self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs in terms of retention and work-load. Using data from over 8.000 students participating in two versions of a massive open online course in programming, we observe that drop-out rates at the beginning of the courses are greater than towards the end of the courses, with self-paced MOOC being more extreme in this respect. Mostly because of different starts, the fixed-schedule course has a better overall retention rate (45%) than its self-paced counterpart (13%). We hypothesize that students initial investment of time and effort contributes to their persistence in their course, meaning that they do not want to let their initial investment go to waste. At the same time, in both self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs, there are students who receive almost full points from one week but fail to continue to the next week. This suggests that the issue of dropouts in MOOCs may also be related to participants struggling to take up new tasks or schedule their work over a longer time period. Our results support scheduling student activities in open online courses and opens up new research directions in engaging students in self-paced courses.Peer reviewe

Business and Ethical Concerns in Domestic Conversational Generative AI-Empowered Multi-robot Systems

Business and technology are intricately connected through logic and design. They are equally sensitive to societal changes and may be devastated by scandal. Cooperative multi-robot systems (MRSs) are on the rise, allowing robots of different types and brands to work together in diverse contexts. Generative artificial intelligence has been a dominant topic in recent artificial intelligence (AI) discussions due to its capacity to mimic humans through the use of natural language and the production of media, including deep fakes. In this article, we focus specifically on the conversational aspects of generative AI, and hence use the term Conversational Generative artificial intelligence (CGI). Like MRSs, CGIs have enormous potential for revolutionizing processes across sectors and transforming the way humans conduct business. From a business perspective, cooperative MRSs alone, with potential conflicts of interest, privacy practices, and safety concerns, require ethical examination. MRSs empowered by CGIs demand multi-dimensional and sophisticated methods to uncover imminent ethical pitfalls. This study focuses on ethics in CGI-empowered MRSs while reporting the stages of developing the MORUL model.© 2024 The Author(s). This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Solving a system of Master Equations for parallel chemical interactions

The stochastic kinetics of a well-stirred mixture of molecular species interacting through different biochemical reactions can modelled by the chemical master equation. Till now the scientific computing community has focussed mostly on the development of numerical techniques to approximate the solution of the chemical master equation many realizations of the associated Markov jump process. Consequeltly, the domain of exact algorithms for directly solving a chemiacl master equation is still an open research area. In this work we present a method to solve analytically a chemical master equation to describe a reversible molecular reaction and we propose a method to solve a system of such equations. In this method molecular populations are considered as time-dependent, integer-valued random variables. Moreover, we developed mathematical procedures for solving a system of chemical master equations referred to a set of parallel and interdependent biochemical interactions. The causal dependence between reactions is modeled on the time scale in the following way: a reaction starts when its antecessor has produced a sufficient quantity of reactants

An integration of miRNA target predictions for the characterization of human miRNAs

Master Thesis Second Level International Master in Computational and Systems Biolog

From Game Design with Children to Game Development with University Students

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development of game design ideas by children. These were specified in structured informal documents and low-fidelity paper prototypes. University students were challenged to develop children's informal specifications of games into high-fidelity interactive prototypes, and to have these tested with children. What issues did university students encounter in children's informal specifications? This paper answers such questions by explaining the organization of the development process for students in as much details so as to allow for its analysis and replicability in different contexts

Is Machine Learning Software Just Software: A Maintainability View

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is becoming commonplace in numerous fields. As they are often embedded in the context of larger software systems, issues that are faced with software systems in general are also applicable to AI/ML. In this paper, we address ML systems and their characteristics in the light of software maintenance and its attributes, modularity, testability, reusability, analysability, and modifiability. To achieve this, we pinpoint similarities and differences between ML software and software as we traditionally understand it, and draw parallels as well as provide a programmer's view to ML at a general level, using the established software design principles as the starting point.Peer reviewe