Uni-REPM: validated and improved

Software products are usually developed for either a specific customer (bespoke) or a broader market (market-driven). Due to their characteristic, bespoke and market-driven development face different challenges, especially concerning requirements engineering. Many challenges are caused by an inadequate requirements engineering process, and hence there is a need for process improvement frameworks based on empirical research and industry needs. In a previous article we introduced Uni-REPM, a lightweight requirements engineering process assessment framework based on a review of empirically motivated practices in market-driven and bespoke requirements engineering literature. In this article, we validate this framework in academia as well as industry, in order to prepare Uni-REPM for widespread industry use. We conduct two validations; a static validation based on interviews with seven academic experts and a dynamic validation where Uni-REPM is applied in four industrial organisations. Uni-REPM is refined according to the feedback obtained in the validations. The study shows that Uni-REPM is a quick, simple, and cost-effective solution to assess the maturity level of the requirements engineering process of projects. Moreover, the assessment method using checklists is highly usable and applicable in various international development environments.     

Smart card security evaluation: Community solutions to intractable problems

Evaluation of smart card security faced seemingly intractable problems of consistency and repeatability in its early days. The deeply specialised technologies, large parameter spaces for attacks, and the evolving attack types and countermeasures mean that the scope for variation in evaluation practice, and hence in evaluation conclusions, is potentially huge. The situation is further complicated by the fact that countermeasures against some types of attacks depend on both hardware and software, but there is also a need to evaluate hardware without specific software present at the time of evaluation. Stakeholders in the smart card world have formed a Community that has successfully created and applied interpretation of Common Criteria (ISO 15408) to deal with this problem and to achieve international mutual recognition of evaluation results. This paper discusses examples of the smart card security problem in order to illustrate some of the difficulties, and describes some of the interpretation that has been defined for rating the difficulty of an attack via calculation of an attack potential. It also considers the nature of the Community that has enabled the interpretation to be both defined and put into practice successfully.     

Tissue-level segmentation and tracking of cells in growing plant roots

With the spread of systems approaches to biological research, there is increasing demand for methods and tools capable of extracting quantitative measurements of biological samples from individual and time-based sequences of microscope images. To this end, we have developed a software tool for tissue level segmentation and automatic tracking of a network of cells in confocal images of the roots of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The tool implements a novel hybrid technique, which is a combination of the recently developed Network Snakes technique and MCMC-based particle filters and incorporates automatic initialisation of the network snakes. A novel method of evaluation of network-structured multi-target tracking is also presented, and is used to evaluate the developed tracking framework for accuracy and robustness against several timelapse sequences of Arabidopsis roots. Evaluation results are presented, along with a comparison between the results of the component techniques and the hybrid approach. The results show that the hybrid approach performed consistently well at all levels of complexity and better than the component methods alone.     

A comparative review of dynamic neural networks and hidden Markov model methods for mobile on-device speech recognition

The adoption of high-accuracy speech recognition algorithms without an effective evaluation of their impact on the target computational resource is impractical for mobile and embedded systems. In this paper, techniques are adopted to minimise the required computational resource for an effective mobile-based speech recognition system. A Dynamic Multi-Layer Perceptron speech recognition technique, capable of running in real time on a state-of-the-art mobile device, has been introduced. Even though a conventional hidden Markov model when applied to the same dataset slightly outperformed our approach, its processing time is much higher. The Dynamic Multi-layer Perceptron presented here has an accuracy level of 96.94% and runs significantly faster than similar techniques.

     

Biodegradability of biomass pyrolysis oils: Comparison to conventional petroleum fuels and alternatives fuels in current use

Concern with environmental issues such as global climate change has stimulated research into the development of more environmentally friendly technologies and energy sources. One critical area of our economy is liquid fuels. Fast pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass for liquids production is of particular concern, as it is one of the most interesting ways to produce renewable liquid fuel for transport and heat and power production.The aerobic biodegradability of various pyrolysis oils from different origins and of a EN 590 diesel sample was examined using the Modified Sturm (OECD 301B). The results demonstrate that all fast pyrolysis oils assessed are biodegradable with similar shaped curves with 41–50% biodegradation after 28 days, whereas the diesel sample reached only 24% biodegradation. Since pyrolysis oils achieved biodegradability over 20% these are classified as inherently biodegradable. Modelling of biodegradation processes was successfully performed with a first-order chemical reaction.The biodegradability results obtained for biomass pyrolysis oils are compared to those of conventional and alternative fuels.