A flexible software architecture concept for the creation of accessible PDF documents

This paper presents a flexible software architecture concept that allows the automatic generation of fully accessible PDF documents originating from various authoring tools such as Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word. The architecture can be extended to include any authoring tools capable of creating PDF documents. For each authoring tool, a software accessibility plug-in must be implemented which analyzes the logical structure of the document and creates an XML representation of it. This XML file is used in combination with an untagged non-accessible PDF to create an accessible PDF version of the document. The implemented accessibility plug-in prototype allows authors of documents to check for accessibility issues while creating their documents and add the additional semantic information needed to generate a fully accessible PDF document

Development of a Computer Vision-Based Three-Dimensional Reconstruction Method for Volume-Change Measurement of Unsaturated Soils during Triaxial Testing

Problems associated with unsaturated soils are ubiquitous in the U.S., where expansive and collapsible soils are some of the most widely distributed and costly geologic hazards. Solving these widespread geohazards requires a fundamental understanding of the constitutive behavior of unsaturated soils. In the past six decades, the suction-controlled triaxial test has been established as a standard approach to characterizing constitutive behavior for unsaturated soils. However, this type of test requires costly test equipment and time-consuming testing processes. To overcome these limitations, a photogrammetry-based method has been developed recently to measure the global and localized volume-changes of unsaturated soils during triaxial test. However, this method relies on software to detect coded targets, which often requires tedious manual correction of incorrectly coded target detection information. To address the limitation of the photogrammetry-based method, this study developed a photogrammetric computer vision-based approach for automatic target recognition and 3D reconstruction for volume-changes measurement of unsaturated soils in triaxial tests. Deep learning method was used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of coded target recognition. A photogrammetric computer vision method and ray tracing technique were then developed and validated to reconstruct the three-dimensional models of soil specimen

Software prefetching for software pipelined loops

The paper investigates the interaction between software pipelining and different software prefetching techniques for VLIW machines. It is shown that processor stalls due to memory dependencies have a great impact into execution time. A novel heuristic is proposed and it is show to outperform previous proposals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Automated software quality visualisation using fuzzy logic techniques

In the past decade there has been a concerted effort by the software industry to improve the quality of its products. This has led to the inception of various techniques with which to control and measure the process involved in software development. Methods like the Capability Maturity Model have introduced processes and strategies that require measurement in the form of software metrics. With the ever increasing number of software metrics being introduced by capability based processes, software development organisations are finding it more difficult to understand and interpret metric scores. This is particularly problematic for senior management and project managers where analysis of the actual data is not feasible. This paper proposes a method with which to visually represent metric scores so that managers can easily see how their organisation is performing relative to quality goals set for each type of metric. Acting primarily as a proof of concept and prototype, we suggest ways in which real customer needs can be translated into a feasible technical solution. The solution itself visualises metric scores in the form of a tree structure and utilises Fuzzy Logic techniques, XGMML, Web Services and the .NET Framework. Future work is proposed to extend the system from the prototype stage and to overcome a problem with the masking of poor scores

Fast and accurate imputation of summary statistics enhances evidence of functional enrichment

Imputation using external reference panels is a widely used approach for increasing power in GWAS and meta-analysis. Existing HMM-based imputation approaches require individual-level genotypes. Here, we develop a new method for Gaussian imputation from summary association statistics, a type of data that is becoming widely available. In simulations using 1000 Genomes (1000G) data, this method recovers 84% (54%) of the effective sample size for common (>5%) and low-frequency (1-5%) variants (increasing to 87% (60%) when summary LD information is available from target samples) versus 89% (67%) for HMM-based imputation, which cannot be applied to summary statistics. Our approach accounts for the limited sample size of the reference panel, a crucial step to eliminate false-positive associations, and is computationally very fast. As an empirical demonstration, we apply our method to 7 case-control phenotypes from the WTCCC data and a study of height in the British 1958 birth cohort (1958BC). Gaussian imputation from summary statistics recovers 95% (105%) of the effective sample size (as quantified by the ratio of $\chi^2$ association statistics) compared to HMM-based imputation from individual-level genotypes at the 227 (176) published SNPs in the WTCCC (1958BC height) data. In addition, for publicly available summary statistics from large meta-analyses of 4 lipid traits, we publicly release imputed summary statistics at 1000G SNPs, which could not have been obtained using previously published methods, and demonstrate their accuracy by masking subsets of the data. We show that 1000G imputation using our approach increases the magnitude and statistical evidence of enrichment at genic vs. non-genic loci for these traits, as compared to an analysis without 1000G imputation. Thus, imputation of summary statistics will be a valuable tool in future functional enrichment analyses.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering Model for Automotive Electronic/Software Systems Development

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityThis paper is presenting a proposal of a novel approach to automotive electronic/software systems development. It is based on the combination of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering, a Toyota approach to product development, with the standard V-Model of software development. Automotive industry currently faces the problem of growing complexity of electronic/software systems. This issue is especially visible at the level of integration of these systems which is difficult and error-prone. The presented conceptual proposal is to establish better processes that could handle the electronic/software systems design and development in a more integrated and consistent manner.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

A software service supporting software quality forecasting

Software repositories such as source control, defect tracking systems and project management tools, are used to support the progress of software projects. The exploitation of such data with techniques like forecasting is becoming an increasing need in several domains to support decision-making processes. However, although there exist several statistical tools and languages supporting forecasting, there is a lack of friendly approaches that enable practitioners to exploit the advantages of creating and using such models in their dashboard tools. Therefore, we have developed a modular and flexible forecasting service allowing the interconnection with different kinds of databases/data repositories for creating and exploiting forecasting models based on methods like ARIMA or ETS. The service is open source software, has been developed in Java and R and exposes its functionalities through a REST API. Architecture details are provided, along with functionalities’ description and an example of its use for software quality forecasting.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Building safe software

Murphy is a set of techniques and tools under investigation for their potential in enhancing the safety of software. This paper describes some of the work which has been done and some which is planned

USAge of Groupware in Software Engineering Education at the Cscw Laboratory of University Duisburg-essen: Possibilities and Limitations

This paper analyzes the application level in CSCW laboratory there are Electronic meeting rooms, Video Conferencing, Desktop Conference (Passenger), and BSCW system which conducting in The University Duisburg – Essen Germany. This analysis included short analysis and discussion about possibilities and limitation of each experiment followed by outlook how this lab can be further developed.Multi-user to Multipoint Videoconferences is introduced to cover all of devices join to the conferences. A computer network, PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), ISDN Phone, Wireless Infrastructures (accessed by laptop, smart phone, PDA) and videoconferences systems is proposed to be integrate