Automating deployment planning with an aspect weaver

Deployment has emerged as a major challenge in distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. Application deployment planners must integrate numerous functional and non-functional constraints, such as security and performance, to produce correct deployment plans. The numerous deployment constraints and their complex interactions make manually deducing correct/efficient deployments hard. Four contributions to the study of automated deployment processes are presented. First, it shows that a deployment planner and an aspect weaver accomplish the same abstract problem - that is, mapping items from a source set (advice or components) to items in a target set (joinpoints or nodes) according to a set of rules - and uses this abstract definition of deployment planning to automate it with an aspect weaver. Second, this paper describes how the ScatterML domain-specific aspect language incorporates complex global constraints for specifying deployment pointcuts. Third, we show how static aspect weaving problems can be reduced to a constraint satisfaction problem and a constraint solver used to deduce a correct weaving. Fourth, we show that phrasing weaving as a constraint satisfaction problem and automating deployment through a constraint solver-based weaver yields several key benefits, ranging from guaranteed deployment plan correctness to bounds on worst-case solution quality.     

Aspect-oriented weaving and the .NET common language runtime

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP), now practically a consolidated academic discipline, has yet to build more solid industrial foundations, especially in the realms of the .NET platform. It's believed that this situation is caused by the lack of a robust and user-friendly AOP tool for .NET comparable with the Java-based AspectJ. This work investigates the basic infrastructure required for building such a tool: aspect-oriented weaving with the common language runtime (CLR) environment. In this regard, a classification schema is built, analysing the attributes a hypothetical aspect weaver for .NET might have. It assesses the different classes of weavers that can be built on top of the CLR today and investigates what extensions to the platform would be needed in order to enable more sophisticated weaving technologies. Some typical use cases for the resulting AOP tools, and classify what attributes a corresponding weaver would need to have in order to fulfil these requirements. Finally, two existing aspect weaver implementations in terms of these very same attributes are analysed.     

Language extinction and linguistic fronts

Language diversity has become greatly endangered in the past centuries owing to processes of language shift from indigenous languages to other languages that are seen as socially and economically more advantageous, resulting in the death or doom of minority languages. In this paper, we define a new language competition model that can describe the historical decline of minority languages in competition with more advantageous languages. We then implement this non-spatial model as an interaction term in a reaction–diffusion system to model the evolution of the two competing languages. We use the results to estimate the speed at which the more advantageous language spreads geographically, resulting in the shrinkage of the area of dominance of the minority language. We compare the results from our model with the observed retreat in the area of influence of the Welsh language in the UK, obtaining a good agreement between the model and the observed data.     

Improving word coverage using unsupervised morphological analyser

Powerful computers are needed for processing tasks related to human languages these days. Human languages, also called natural languages, are highly versatile systems of encoding information and can capture information of various domains. To enable a computer to process information in human languages, the language needs to be appropriately ‘described’ to the computer, i.e. the language needs to be ‘modelled’. In this work, we present an approach for acquisition of morphology of inflectional language like Hindi. It is an unsupervised learning approach, suitable for languages with a rich concatenative morphology. Broadly, our work is carried out in three steps: 1. Acquire the morphology of Hindi from a raw (un annotated) Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore text corpus, 2. prepare clusters and prepare stem bag and suffix bag, 3. use the morphological knowledge to decompose given word as stems and suffixes according to their morphological behaviour and add new words. A prime motivation behind this work is to eventually develop an unsupervised morphological analyser which is language-independent (used for Hindi). Second motivation is to develop a Morphological segmentation which is language-independent as it is shown that study of morphology would benefit to a range of NLP tasks such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and information retrieval. Though Hindi is an important and a national language in India, little computational work has been done so far in this direction. Our work is one of the first efforts in this regard and can be considered pioneering. There are many such languages for which it is very important to have a suitable but inexpensive computational acquisition process. Languages receive very little attention of computational linguistic research both in terms of availability of funds and number of researchers. We however do not claim that our approach is a solution for all such languages. Different languages have characteristics that require individual research attention.     

Modelling biological behaviours with the unified modelling language: an immunological case study and critique

We present a framework to assist the diagrammatic modelling of complex biological systems using the unified modelling language (UML). The framework comprises three levels of modelling, ranging in scope from the dynamics of individual model entities to system-level emergent properties. By way of an immunological case study of the mouse disease experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, we show how the framework can be used to produce models that capture and communicate the biological system, detailing how biological entities, interactions and behaviours lead to higher-level emergent properties observed in the real world. We demonstrate how the UML can be successfully applied within our framework, and provide a critique of UML''s ability to capture concepts fundamental to immunology and biology more generally. We show how specialized, well-explained diagrams with less formal semantics can be used where no suitable UML formalism exists. We highlight UML''s lack of expressive ability concerning cyclic feedbacks in cellular networks, and the compounding concurrency arising from huge numbers of stochastic, interacting agents. To compensate for this, we propose several additional relationships for expressing these concepts in UML''s activity diagram. We also demonstrate the ambiguous nature of class diagrams when applied to complex biology, and question their utility in modelling such dynamic systems. Models created through our framework are non-executable, and expressly free of simulation implementation concerns. They are a valuable complement and precursor to simulation specifications and implementations, focusing purely on thoroughly exploring the biology, recording hypotheses and assumptions, and serve as a communication medium detailing exactly how a simulation relates to the real biology.     

Grammatical approaches to engineering design,part II: Melding configuration and parametric design using attribute grammars

Parametric design tools are applicable in engineering design when the configuration is known a priori. Grammatical approaches to design, on the other hand, are useful for considering a range of configurations but do not accommodate the consideration of engineering parameters and design requirements. We discussattribute grammars, which were developed for the semantic analysis of computer languages, and show how engineering design can be facilitated by modest extensions of the attribute grammar formalism. We demonstrate with examples how a component-based design artifact language can be augmented with engineering parameters and how such a language can be parsed to evaluate conformance with design requirements. We also demonstrate how grammatical attributes can be used to represent design requirements and can direct the generation of design alternatives.     

Extending grammars and metamodels for reuse: the Reuseware approach

The trend towards domain-specific languages leads to an ever-growing plethora of highly specialised languages. Developers of such languages focus on their specific domains rather than on the technical challenges of language design. The generic features of languages are rarely included in special-purpose languages. One very important feature is the ability to formulate partial programs in separate encapsulated entities, which can be composed into complete programs in a well-defined manner. A language-independent approach is presented that adds useful constructs for defining components. The authors discuss the underlying concepts and describe a composition environment and tool supporting these ideas-the reuseware composition framework. To evaluate this approach, the authors enrich the (Semantic) Web query language Xcerpt with an additional useful reuse concept - modules.     

Editorial domain specific aspect languages

Most research in the AOSD community focuses on generalpurpose aspect languages. Unfortunately, the trend towards ever more expressive languages has a major drawback: general-purpose aspect languages (GPALs) are losing their purposefullness. In the extreme, pointcut expressions, for instance, become Turing-complete queries.     

The “own-language preference”: Measures of relative language self-citation

It has already been pointed out that the foreign language barrier is probably the greatest impediment to the free flow and transfer of information. This barrier is even growing as scientists of more and more countries publish in their own languages. Almost all studies addressing the language barrier problem were conducted from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, limiting their scope to English-language sources or English speakers. Little research has been devoted to studying and measuring language preference among non-English-speaking scholars. This article reviews measures proposed in former studies such as the “relative own-language preference” indicator, and the “straight odds ratio”, pointing out their advantages and drawbacks. Two new refined measures (in both “raw” and normalised versions) are offered, claiming to be free of these drawbacks, and thus enabling a better and more reliable comparison between journals of different languages. Practical use of the proposed measures is illustrated by applying them to findings of a former language-citation study done on nine sociology journals.     

Virtual machine framework for constructing domain-specific languages

An object-oriented framework is proposed for constructing a virtualmachine (VM) to be used in the context of incrementally and iteratively developing a domain-specific language (DSL).The framework iswritten in C#. It includes abstract instruction and environment classes. By extending these, a concrete layer of classes is obtained whose instances define the semantics of a set of instructions, as well as one or more execution environment instances that can be manipulated by the instructions. The framework provides a generic mechanism for reading a set of instructions, executing them sequentially by default but branching if necessary, storing or retrieving internal variables, and accessing and manipulating the environment as per the instructions. In general, each instruction can execute an arbitrary C# method as specified by the developer. The syntactic form of instructions is limited to five possibilities. Using the framework, a range of VMs can be generated, each tailored to support a developerdesigned target-level DSL. Since each such language is built in terms of these five instruction formats, these targetlevel languages share a common syntactic structure. The result is a platform to support an incremental iterative language design and implementation approach that involves the following three phases: determine a set of targetlevel instructions with semantics appropriate to the specific domain; determine source-level language instructions whose syntax appeals to the domain specialist and provide a simple compiler to map the source to target instructions. The first two phases are relatively disjoint and importantly separate syntax concerns from semantics concerns. The final phase is quite straightforward. Comparative performance results support the use of the framework as an alternative to using an interpreter or hardcoded VM for DSL development.     

CLP(ℛ) as a general finite element model definition language

There are today as many finite element input languages as there are finite element programs. These input languages were developed to serve one purpose: to provide the analyst with the means to convey the necessary analysis and design criteria to specific finite element programs. They were not developed as general finite element model-definition languages, and as a result their syntax and semantics are often unnatural and contrived. In this work we do not invent a new input language. Instead, we propose and evaluate the Contraint Logic Programming language CLP(?) as a general finite element model-definition and input language.     

Improving Interoperability by Incorporating UnitsML Into Markup Languages

Maintaining the integrity of analytical data over time is a challenge. Years ago, data were recorded on paper that was pasted directly into a laboratory notebook. The digital age has made maintaining the integrity of data harder. Nowadays, digitized analytical data are often separated from information about how the sample was collected and prepared for analysis and how the data were acquired. The data are stored on digital media, while the related information about the data may be written in a paper notebook or stored separately in other digital files. Sometimes the connection between this “scientific meta-data” and the analytical data is lost, rendering the spectrum or chromatogram useless. We have been working with ASTM Subcommittee E13.15 on Analytical Data to create the Analytical Information Markup Language or AnIML—a new way to interchange and store spectroscopy and chromatography data based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML is a language for describing what data are by enclosing them in computer-useable tags. Recording the units associated with the analytical data and metadata is an essential issue for any data representation scheme that must be addressed by all domain-specific markup languages. As scientific markup languages proliferate, it is very desirable to have a single scheme for handling units to facilitate moving information between different data domains.At NIST, we have been developing a general markup language just for units that we call UnitsML. This presentation will describe how UnitsML is used and how it is being incorporated into AnIML.     

Paninian framework and its application toAnusaraka

ThePaninian framework proposeskarakas as semanticosyntactic relations that play a crucial role in mediating between surface form and meaning. The framework accounts for theta-role assignment, active passive, and control in a uniform manner. It has been successfully used in building an extremely fast prototype machine-translation system between two Indian languages. The constraint parser and the generator are designed with information theoretic considerations. Paninian framework is particularly suited to free word order languages. As most human languages are relatively word-order free, the Paninian framework should be explored as a serious contender for such languages. Based on the Paninian theory, the concept of language accessor oranusaraka has emerged, which has the potential to overcome the language barrier in India. In this paper non-English words occur many times and hence are italicized only at first mention. Several people have worked on the implementation of the core parser: Sivasubramanian, B Srinivas, P V Ravisankar on the earlier version, and Jayvant Anantpur, Vasudev Verma, Amba Kulkarni on the current version. Mr V N Narayana has been working on the Kannada-Hindi anusaraka.     

Effect of pre-treatments on hydrolysis and methane production potentials of by-products from meat-processing industry

Language issues are problems with communication via speech, signs, gestures or their written equivalents. They may result from poor reading and writing skills, a mix of foreign languages and other circumstances. Language issues are not picked up as a safety risk on the shop floor by current safety management systems. These safety risks need to be identified, acknowledged, quantified and prioritised in order to allow risk reducing measures to be taken. This study investigates the nature of language issues related danger in literature, by experiment and by a survey among the Seveso II companies in the Netherlands. Based on human error frequencies, and on the contents of accident investigation reports, the risks associated with language issues were ranked. Accident investigation method causal factor categories were found not to be sufficiently representative for the type and magnitude of these risks. Readability of safety related documents used by the companies was investigated and found to be poor in many cases. Interviews among regulators and a survey among Seveso II companies were used to identify the gap between the language issue related dangers found in literature and current best practices. This study demonstrates by means of triangulation with different investigative methods that language issue related risks are indeed underestimated. A recommended coarse of action in order to arrive at appropriate measures is presented.     

Quality management implementation across different scenarios of competitive structure: an empirical investigation

This study aims to determine if there are differences in quality management (QM) implementation across competitive environments and if so, how and why they differ. With these objectives, we develop several propositions relating the competitive environment to QM implementation practices. To test our propositions, we gathered a sample of 273 European managers. We presented 16 different factors of competitive structure to members of the sample and elicited their likelihood of implementing different QM practices. The research findings indicated that high buyer and customer power were associated with a preference for cost reducing-oriented QM practices. We also found that the managers are more likely to try to boost profitability by focusing on QM practices aimed at differentiation when intensity of competitive rivalry or threat of new entrants is high. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications of our results.     

The Impact Factor in non-English-speaking countries

The representativeness of the ISI-Thomson Impact Factor rankings and the existing relationship between countries?? national languages and the diffusion of scientific publications is analyzed. We discuss literature on the Impact Factor related to language use, publication strategies for authors and editors from non-English-speaking countries, the effects of the inclusion of a new journal in the ISI-Thomson databases and the scientific policies articulated in some non-English-speaking countries. The adoption of the Impact Factor as the valuation criterion for scientific activities has favoured the consolidation of English language journals in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. The vernacular languages only conserve part of their importance in certain disciplines, such as Clinical Medicine or Social Sciences and Humanities. The Impact Factor, invented over 50?years ago now, could be a limitation for non-English authors and scientific journals, and does not consider some widely used practices among the scientific community concerning the development of Internet as a means for the diffusion of knowledge.     

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact

When speakers of different languages interact, they are likely to influence each other: contact leaves traces in the linguistic record, which in turn can reveal geographical areas of past human interaction and migration. However, other factors may contribute to similarities between languages. Inheritance from a shared ancestral language and universal preference for a linguistic property may both overshadow contact signals. How can we find geographical contact areas in language data, while accounting for the confounding effects of inheritance and universal preference? We present sBayes, an algorithm for Bayesian clustering in the presence of confounding effects. The algorithm learns which similarities are better explained by confounders, and which are due to contact effects. Contact areas are free to take any shape or size, but an explicit geographical prior ensures their spatial coherence. We test sBayes on simulated data and apply it in two case studies to reveal language contact in South America and the Balkans. Our results are supported by findings from previous studies. While we focus on detecting language contact, the method can also be used to uncover other traces of shared history in cultural evolution, and more generally, to reveal latent spatial clusters in the presence of confounders.     

Two economically optimized nonparametric schemes for monitoring process variability

Controlling and reducing process variability is an essential aspect for maintaining the product or service quality. Even though most practitioners believe that an increasing process variability is often a more severe concern than a shift in location, barely a few research paid attention to the cost-efficient monitoring of process variability. Some of the existing studies addressed the dispersion aspect, assuming that the quality characteristic is Gaussian. Non-normal and complex distributions are not uncommon in modern production processes, time to event processes, or processes involving service quality. Unfortunately, we find no literature on economically designed nonparametric (distribution-free) schemes for monitoring process variability. This article introduces two Shewhart-type cost-optimized nonparametric schemes for monitoring the variability of any unknown but continuous processes to fill the research gap. The proposed monitoring schemes are based on two popular two-sample rank statistics for differences in scale parameters, known as the Ansari–Bradley statistic and the Mood statistic. We assess their actual performance for a set of process scenarios and illustrate the design along with the implementation steps. We discuss a practical problem related to product quality management. It is expected that the proposed schemes will be beneficial in various industrial operations.