Estimation of sea surface temperature from AVHRR data: reply to some comments by J. R. Eyre

Abstract

This paper refers to a previous comment by J. R. Eyre on an earlier paper of ours in which we tried to make the best possible use of 4-channel AVHRR/1 data for the determination of sea surface temperatures in situations where data from the 5-channel AVHRR/2 were not available. Here we clarify certain points regarding the philosophy of our earlier paper and also respond to some specific points made by Eyre.     

Visible Improvement: Rebuttal to Paul N. Edwards's Response

Minds and Machines -     

Response to Jiau et al.'s comments

The consistency problems in UML models and related software processes can be very complex. First, although UML supports a modeling process that should yield inter and intraconsistent models, the meaning of the UML dependencies and their specializations is not precisely defined and, for this reason, many inconsistencies may appear in their models and processes. Precise definitions would form a basis for methods to detect and analyze consistency problems related to UML dependencies and relationships, as well as problems related to software processes described in UML. In addition, we are using the UML object constraint language (OCL) to describe constraints related to the framework instantiation process. OCL is recognized as a limited language in some aspects for expressing well-formedness rules. We have presented a method (T.C. Oliveira et al., 2004) that works in the case of consistent rules and consistent instantiation processes.     

Some remarks on a paper by R. R. Yager

We show that slight technical changes in the definition transform the probability of fuzzy events introduced by R. R. Yager [16] into a new concept of such probabilities having nice properties, both from an intuitive and from a mathematical point of view: monotonicity, additivity, and continuity.     

A Pragmatic Introduction to Machine Vision,by R. Jain,R. Kasturi and B. G. Schunck

Machine vision, by R. Jain, R. Kasturi and B.G. Schunck, aims at providing a practical introduction to the area of computer vision. Covering a broad range of currently important topics, the book does accomplish its main objective, although some issues are only briefly reviewed and discussed.     

How to reach O.R. Wisdom

This paper identifies the Operations Research (O.R.) problems from a systems view of information, knowledge and understanding. This systems view is examined as a basis for a developmental approach to problem solving and decision making processes. O.R. wisdom lies in achieving a balance between short-and long-term goals through a process of participation and learning.     

Other comments on 'Optimization algorithms for distributed queries' by P.M.G. Apears

An erroneous fact concerning the assumption of irreducibility of nonjoining attributes of the distributed query optimization algorithm called GENERAL presented in the above paper (see ibid., vol.SE-9, no.1, p.57-68, Jan. 1983) is pointed out. It is shown that it is possible to generate an efficient semijoin program with better response time than the one produced by the GENERAL algorithm. A counterexample that proves this possibility is provided.<>     

Code Attention: translating source code to comments by exploiting the code constructs

Appropriate comments of code snippets provide insight for code functionality, which are helpful for program comprehension. However, due to the great cost of authoring with the comments, many code projects do not contain adequate comments. Automatic comment generation techniques have been proposed to generate comments from pieces of code in order to alleviate the human efforts in annotating the code. Most existing approaches attempt to exploit certain correlations (usually manually given) between code and generated comments, which could be easily violated if coding patterns change and hence the performance of comment generation declines. In addition, recent approaches ignore exploiting the code constructs and leveraging the code snippets like plain text. Furthermore, previous datasets are also too small to validate the methods and show their advantage. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism called CodeAttention to translate code to comments, which is able to utilize the code constructs, such as critical statements, symbols and keywords. By focusing on these specific points, CodeAttention could understand the semantic meanings of code better than previous methods. To verify our approach in wider coding patterns, we build a large dataset from open projects in GitHub. Experimental results in this large dataset demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance over existing approaches in both objective and subjective evaluation. We also perform ablation studies to determine effects of different parts in CodeAttention.     

Victor R. Basili's contributions to software quality

This article deals with Victor R. Basili's contributions to software quality. Basili's contributions cover three broad areas: research in the 1970s and early 1980s on software measurement and the Goal Question Metric (GQM) model, research in the 1980s and 1990s on these measurement ideas' maturation into a software engineering model of empirical studies, including the development of the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP) and the influence of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Software Engineering Laboratory, and research since 1990 in the Experience Factory as a model for creating learning organizations for continuous software process improvement. Some of Basili's most important contributions are in measuring software development processes and products and gifted the community with an invaluable tool: the GQM approach. The GQM approach is based on the assumption that for an organization to measure its products and processes usefully, it must first specify goals for itself and its projects.