Software execution processes as an evolving complex network

Inspired by the surprising discovery of several recurring structures in various complex networks, in recent years a number of related works treated software systems as a complex network and found that software systems might expose the small-world effects and follow scale-free degree distributions. Different from the research perspectives adopted in these works, the work presented in this paper treats software execution processes as an evolving complex network for the first time. The concept of software mirror graph is introduced as a new model of complex networks to incorporate the dynamic information of software behavior. The experimentation paradigm with statistical repeatability was applied to three distinct subject programs to conduct several software experiments. The corresponding experimental results are analyzed by treating the software execution processes as an evolving directed topological graph as well as an evolving software mirror graph. This results in several new findings. While the software execution processes may demonstrate as a small-world complex network in the topological sense, they no longer expose the small-world effects in the temporal sense. Further, the degree distributions of the software execution processes may follow a power law. However, they may also follow an exponential function or a piecewise power law.     

Methods for evaluating volunteers’ contributions in a deforestation detection citizen science project

Today, due to the availability of free remote sensing data, efficient algorithms for image classification and increased connectivity and computing power, together with international policy initiatives, such as the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD), more and more countries are investing in their own national forest monitoring schemes. However, tropical forests remain under threat worldwide. Recently, a citizen science project that enables citizens around the globe to be involved in forest monitoring tasks has been proposed, called “ForestWatchers” (www.forestwatchers.net). Its main goal is to allow volunteers (many of them with no scientific training) around the globe, with their own smartphones, tablets and notebooks, review satellite images of forested regions and confirm whether automatic assignments of forested and deforested regions are correct. Inspected images are then sent to a central database where the results are integrated to generate up-to-date deforestation maps. This approach offers a low-cost way to both strengthen the scientific infrastructure and engage members of the public in science. Here, we describe the methods developed within the scope of the ForestWatchers project to assess the volunteers’ performance. These tools have been evaluated with data of two of the project’s preliminary tasks. The first, called “BestTile”, asks volunteers to select which of several images of the same area has the least cloud cover, while in the second, called “Deforestation”, volunteers draw polygons on satellite images delimiting areas they believe have been deforested. The results from more than 500 volunteers show that using simple statistical tests, it is possible to achieve a triple goal: to increase the overall efficiency of the data collecting tasks by reducing the required number of volunteers per task, to identify malicious behavior and outliers, and to motivate volunteers to continue their contributions.     

A rule‐based approach to detect and prevent inconsistency in the domain‐engineering process

A medium‐sized domain‐engineering process can contain thousands of features that all have constraint dependency rules between them. Therefore, the validation of the content of domain‐engineering process is vital to produce high‐quality software products. However, it is not feasible to do this manually. This paper aims to improve the quality of the software products generated by the domain‐engineering process by ensuring the validity of the results of that process. We propose rules for two operations: inconsistency detection and inconsistency prevention. We introduce first‐order logic (FOL) rules to detect three types of inconsistency and prevent the direct inconsistency in the domain‐engineering process. Developing FOL rules to detect and prevent inconsistency in the domain‐engineering process directly without the need to the configuration process is our main contribution. We performed some experiments to test the scalability and applicability of our approach on domain‐engineered software product lines containing 1000 assets to 20000 assets. The results show that our approach is scalable and could be utilized to improve the domain‐engineering process.     

独立学院《嵌入式系统》实验及实践教学探索

《嵌入式系统》课程是一门侧重实践和应用的课程,注重培养学生的实际动手能力。分析《嵌入式系统》课程的特点,指出实验及实践教学在其中的重要性,同时结合实际教学工作,探讨嵌入式实验及实践教学体系的建设,并给出具体的实验和实践教学方案。     

关于仿真模型验证

本文对国内外仿真模型的发展进行了述评,陈述了仿真模型验证的定义和有关概念,提出了模型验证的区间假设检验法,介绍了自相关函数检验法。     

仿真可信性的研究综述

从概念性研究、技术方法和工程应用等三个方面综述了仿真可信性研究的发展。．     

浅谈《C程序设计》课程教学

C程序设计作为一门重要的计算机基础课程,在其教学过程中,主要存在着学生学习目的不明确、积极性不高、编程思维欠缺、动手能力差等问题。针对以上问题,结合教学中的一些体会对课程教学提出了一些方法和建议,以取得更好的教学效果。     

Evaluating ASP and Commercial Solvers on the CSPLib

This paper deals with four solvers for combinatorial problems: the commercial state-of-the-art solver ILOG oplstudio, and the research answer set programming (ASP) systems dlv, smodels and cmodels. The first goal of this research is to evaluate the relative performance of such systems when used in a purely declarative way, using a reproducible and extensible experimental methodology. In particular, we consider a third-party problem library, i.e., the CSPLib, and uniform rules for modelling and instance selection. The second goal is to analyze the marginal effects of popular reformulation techniques on the various solving technologies. In particular, we consider structural symmetry breaking, the adoption of global constraints, and the addition of auxiliary predicates. Finally, we evaluate, on a subset of the problems, the impact of numbers and arithmetic constraints on the different solving technologies. Results show that there is not a single solver winning on all problems, and that reformulation is almost always beneficial: symmetry-breaking may be a good choice, but its complexity has to be carefully chosen, by taking into account also the particular solver used. Global constraints often, but not always, help opl, and the addition of auxiliary predicates is usually worth, especially when dealing with ASP solvers. Moreover, interesting synergies among the various modelling techniques exist.     

Impacts in multibody systems: modeling and experiments

This paper outlines a novel approach to the modeling and analysis of impact involving multibody systems. This approach is based on an analysis of energy absorption and restitution during impact, using a decomposition of the kinetic energy, which decouples the parts associated with the spaces of admissible and constrained motions of the underlying unilateral constraints. Such a decomposition turns out to be useful in the analysis of energy dissipation during impact, and leads to a generalized definition of the energetic coefficient of restitution, which targets particularly collisions in multibody systems. The applicability of the approach reported is investigated by conducting an experimental study on a robotic testbed. It is shown that impact between multibody systems is considerably affected not only by the local dynamics characteristics of the interacting bodies, but also the configuration of the whole multibody system. The results reported here show that our decomposition can offer a sound characterization of impact in several problems of multibody systems.     

Safe design of high-performance embedded systems in an MDE framework

In this paper, we use the UML MARTE profile to model high-performance embedded systems (HPES) in the GASPARD2 framework. We address the design correctness issue on the UML model by using the formal validation tools associated with synchronous languages, i.e., the SIGALI model checker, etc. This modeling and validation approach benefits from the advantages of UML as a standard, and from the number of validation tools built around synchronous languages. In our context, model transformations act as a bridge between UML and the chosen validation technologies. They are implemented according to a model-driven engineering approach. The modeling and validation are illustrated using the multimedia functionality of a new-generation cellular phone.