The Programmer's Apprentice: a research overview

The long-term goal of the Programmer's Apprentice project is to develop a theory of how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs. The authors present their vision of the Programmer's Apprentice, the principles and techniques underlying it, and their progress toward it. The primary vehicle for this exposition is three scenarios illustrating the use of the Apprentice in three phases of the programming task: implementation, design, and requirements. The first scenario is taken from a completed working prototype. The second and third scenarios are the targets for prototype systems currently under construction     

The Programmer's Apprentice: A Session with KBEmacs

The Knowledge-Based Editor in Emacs (KBEmacs) is the current demonstration system implemented as part of the Programmer's Apprentice project. KBEmacs is capable of acting as a semiexpert assistant to a person who is writing a program-taking over some parts of the programming task. Using KBEmacs, it is possible to construct a program by issuing a series of high level comnmands. This series of commands can be as much as an order of magnitude shorter than the program it describes.     

The Programmer's Apprentice: Knowledge Based Program Editing

An initial implementation of an interactive programming assistant system called the programmer's apprentice (PA) is described. The PA is designed to be midway between an improved programming methodology and an automatic programming system. The intention is that the programmer will do the hard parts of design and implementation while the PA will assist him wherever possible. One of the major underpinnings of the PA is a representation (called a plan) for programs which abstracts away from the inessential features of a program, and represents the basic logical properties of the algorithm explicitly.     

The MATS robot: service climbing robot for personal assistance

The human care and service field requires an innovative robotic solution to make the daily care of elderly and disabled people in both home and workplace environments easier. The European Union (EU) project MATS (flexible mechatronic assistive technology system) has developed a new concept of a climbing robot for this type of service application. The climbing process is performed by moving the robot between very simple docking stations (DSs) placed in the environment. The MATS climbing robot is a symmetrical, five degrees of freedom (5 DOF), self-containing manipulator that includes all the control and communication systems on board. To fulfil the climbing movements successfully, the developed robot is lightweight, about 11 kg for a 1.3 m reach. This article presents real experiments conducted with the robot during its climbing movements and assistance tasks for disabled persons.     

Large-Scale Requirements Analysis Revisited: The need for Understanding the Political Ecology of Requirements Engineering

This paper addresses the political nature of requirements for large systems, and argues that requirements engineering theory and practice must become more engaged with these issues. It argues that large-scale system requirements is constructed through a political decision process, whereby requirements emerge as a set of mappings between consecutive solution spaces justified by a problem space of concern to a set of principals. These solution spaces are complex socio-technical ensembles that often exhibit non-linear behaviour in expansion due to domain complexity and political ambiguity. Stabilisation of solutions into agreed-on specifications occurs only through the exercise of organisational power. Effective requirements engineering in such cases is most effectively seen as a form of heterogeneous engineering in which technical, social, economic and institutional factors are brought together in a current solution space that provides the baseline for construction of proposed new solution spaces.     

Combining Master and Apprentice Roles: Potential for Learning in Distributed Manufacturing Networks

The purpose of this paper is to explore possible effects for learning when a manufacturing plant takes a double role, as being both master plant and apprentice plant, in a globally distributed industrialization process. Industrialization is here understood as the process of preparing new products for volume manufacturing. Two research questions are addressed. The first is what characterizes the dual roles. The second concerns how the dual roles affect knowledge integration and learning processes, and whether this arrangement facilitates learning between master and apprentice. Based on a study of a global telecom equipment company, the paper provides insights into some of the challenges and effects of dynamic switching of roles. By separating the network function from the strategic role of the plant, the study identifies four options for learning. The case adds to the literature on learning in manufacturing networks and to previous research on how distributed processes affect innovation capability.     

Unwind: a musical biofeedback for relaxation assistance

Unwind is a musical biofeedback interface which combines nature sounds and sedative music into a form of New-Age music for relaxation exercises. The nature sounds respond to the user’s physiological data, functioning as an informative layer for biofeedback display. The sedative music aims to induce calmness and evoke positive emotions. UnWind incorporates the benefits of biofeedback and sedative music to facilitate deep breathing, moderate arousal, and promote mental relaxation. We evaluated Unwind in a 2?×?2 factorial experiment with music and biofeedback as independent factors. Forty young adults performed the relaxation exercise under one of the following conditions after experiencing a stressful task: Nature sounds only (NS), Nature sounds with music (NM), and Auditory biofeedback with nature sounds (NSBFB), and UnWind musical biofeedback (NMBFB). The results revealed a significant interaction effect between music and biofeedback on the improvement of heart rate variability. The combination of music and nature sounds also showed benefits in lowering arousal and reducing self-report anxiety. We conclude with a discussion of UnWind for biofeedback and the wider potential of blending nature sounds with music as a musical interface.     

EXTRA: a system for example-based translation assistance

In this paper we present EXTRA (EXample-based TRanslation Assistant), a translation memory (TM) system. EXTRA is able to propose effective translation suggestions by relying on syntactic analysis of the text and on a rigorous, language-independent measure; the search is performed efficiently in large amounts of bilingual texts thanks to its advanced retrieval techniques. EXTRA does not use external knowledge requiring the intervention of users and is completely customizable and portable as it has been implemented on top of a standard DataBase Management System. The paper provides a thorough evaluation of both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our system. In particular, in order to quantify the benefits offered by EXTRA assisted translation over manual translation, we introduce a simulator implementing specifically devised statistical, process-oriented, discrete-event models. As far as we know, this is the first time statistical simulation experiments have been used to face the nontrivial problem of evaluating TM systems, particularly for comparing the time that could be saved by performing assisted translation versus “manual” translation and for optimally tuning the system behaviour with respect to differently skilled users. In our experiments, we considered three scenarios, manual translation with one or two translators and assisted translation with one translator. The time needed for one translator to do an assisted translation is significantly closer to that of a team of two translators than to that of the single translator. The mean sentence translation time is by far the lowest for this scenario, corresponding to the highest per translator productivity. We also estimate the total translation time when the number of query sentences, the maximum number of suggestions to be read, and the probability of look up are varied: the best trade-off is given by reading (and presenting) four or five suggestions at the most.     

Requirements and GitHub Issues: An Automated Approach for Quality Requirements Classification

Programming and Computer Software - In the development of quality software, critical decisions related to planning, estimating, and managing resources are bound to the correct and timely...     

The automated office

The concept of the automated office has now become a possibility with the advent of low cost computing power. The authors discuss the concept in some detail and review the equipment currently available together with some of its limitations. Future developmental trends are described and the ultimate implications of the fully-automated office are discussed.     

Software assistance for data caches

Hardware and software cache optimizations are active fields of research, that have yielded powerful but occasionally complex designs and algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of combined through simple software and hardware optimizations. Because current caches provide little flexibility for exploiting temporal and spatial locality, two hardware modifications are proposed to support these two kinds of locality. Spatial locality is exploited by using large virtual cache lines which do not exhibit the performance flaws of large physical cache lines. Temporal locality is exploited by minimizing cache pollution with a bypass mechanism that still allows to exploit spatial locality. Subsequently, it is shown that simple software informations on the spatial/temporal locality of array references, as provided by current data locality optimization algorithms, can be used to increase cache performance significantly. The performance and design tradeoffs of the proposed mechanisms are discussed, Software-assisted caches are also shown to provide a very convenient support for further enhancement of data locality optimizations.     

A Requirements Engineering Methodology for Real-Time Processing Requirements

This paper describes a methodology for the generation of software requirements for large, real-time unmanned weapons systems. It describes what needs to be done, how to evaluate the intermediate products, and how to use automated aids to improve the quality of the product. An example is provided to illustrate the methodology steps and their products and the benefits. The results of some experimental applications are summarized.     

Auxilio: A portable cable-driven exosuit for upper extremity assistance

This paper introduces a fully portable, lightweight exosuit-type device for shoulder and elbow assistance. The main motivation of this research was to design a portable upper limb exosuit capable to assist dynamic rehabilitation tasks where patient can involve trunk motions and overground movements (e.g., during pick-and-place tasks). The proposed system provides assistance for shoulder flexion and abduction, as well as for elbow flexion. The mechanism is driven by DC motors which are worn on the wearer’s back, and the power is transferred from the actuators to the arm by means of cable-driven transmission. The unique features of the proposed exosuit are the absence of rigid links or joints around the arm, high compliance and portability. This paper describes operating principle and kinematic model of the proposed exosuit and provides force analysis and experimental evaluation of the manufactured device. As the result of this work, we performed a simulation of rehabilitation scenario with the developed wearable prototype.     

The automated generation of test cases for compilers

The testing of a compiler is a difficult process, since often a very high quality product is expected by the user, particularly with respect to the compiler's correctness. This paper seeks to review the main methods that have been proposed for the automation of part of this process, using the automatic generation of test cases and the automatic checking of the results. It then summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the general approach and highlights several areas for further research.