In this article, we study how learning affects the dynamics of opinion formation in a population of agents modeled through the so-called naming game. This agent-based model captures the essential features of the agree...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780769551371
In this article, we study how learning affects the dynamics of opinion formation in a population of agents modeled through the so-called naming game. This agent-based model captures the essential features of the agreement dynamics by means of a memory-driven negotiation process. We analyze the impact of learning in such social agreement model through a control parameter a describing the resistance toward learning. We show that there exists a critical a above which the consensus time diverges. In particular, we embed this model on various interaction topologies and real-world face-to-face interaction data and, thereby, point out the important differences in the agreement dynamics that take place in a real time-varying social settings vis-a-vis different static social settings. Remarkably, in all types of topology, we observe that beyond the critical value of a, the number of unique words increase manifold in the system and hence the time to consensus diverges possibly pointing to an universal aspect of language learning. In order to support the simulation results, we further develop a web-based online game - the 'tagging game' - which is a close correlate of the naming game and observe the game dynamics when human subjects are exposed to play the game. Remarkably, similar characteristic properties as that of the modified naming game is observed here even while different people from different geographical location play the game. This shows that synthetic modeling has nowadays reached the maturity to answer certain long-standing questions in cognitive science reasonably well.
Our undergraduate curriculum includes a one semester course on object-oriented programming in the C# language and the. NET platform. The course underwent a major change in its labs organization two years ago - an intr...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781467351409
Our undergraduate curriculum includes a one semester course on object-oriented programming in the C# language and the. NET platform. The course underwent a major change in its labs organization two years ago - an introduction of regular one-week lab assignments motivated by a need to enhance unsatisfactory skills of students attending the course. However such change of the course scheme would not be possible without introduction of an automated evaluation system of the lab assignments. Besides the expected positive results, we were worried about any unforeseen consequences of the change. Having enough data from before and after the change of the course scheme the paper presents a unique analysis of impact of such a change on students and the course itself. The paper provides two main contributions: (1) to our best knowledge, we provide the first empirical validation of expected impacts on real-world data and (2) we identify and discuss several unexpected aspects and drawbacks of introduction of such a new scheme.
Test suites, just like the applications they are testing, evolve throughout their lifetime. One of the main reasons for test-suite evolution is test obsolescence: test cases cease to work because of changes in the cod...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781467330763
Test suites, just like the applications they are testing, evolve throughout their lifetime. One of the main reasons for test-suite evolution is test obsolescence: test cases cease to work because of changes in the code and must be suitably repaired. There are several reasons why it is important to achieve a thorough understanding of how test cases evolve in practice. In particular, researchers who investigate automated test repair-an increasingly active research area-can use such understanding to develop more effective repair techniques that can be successfully applied in real-world scenarios. More generally, analyzing test-suite evolution can help testers better understand how test cases are modified during maintenance and improve the test evolution process, an extremely time consuming activity for any non-trivial test suite. Unfortunately, there are no existing tools that facilitate investigation of test evolution. To tackle this problem, we developed TESTEVOL, a tool that enables the systematic study of test-suite evolution for Java programs and JUnit test cases. This demonstration presents TESTEVOL and illustrates its usefulness and practical applicability by showing how TESTEVOL can be successfully used on real-world software and test suites. Demo video at http://***/similar to orso/software/testevol/
Several decision making algorithms that are developed in robotics domain are found to be useful in automotive industrial applications. In order to use these algorithms in safety critical embedded systems one has to en...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781467364041;9781467364034
Several decision making algorithms that are developed in robotics domain are found to be useful in automotive industrial applications. In order to use these algorithms in safety critical embedded systems one has to ensure a minimum confidence level, quality assurance, and reliability. In addition, decision algorithms are designed and developed by domain experts and system integrators do not have control over the performance of low level components. Hence, there is a compelling need for a scalable framework, which accelerates the system integration and at the same time is conform to safety levels. This position paper presents a Quality of Service (QoS) based component architecture so as to address this problem. Our approach introduces a component model that segregates the functional and non-functional aspects of decision making.
In many reactive systems, programs run cyclically. In each cycle, they check the current status and handle the business for a single step. The business logic has to be blasted to pieces, which violates the way that pe...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780769549866
In many reactive systems, programs run cyclically. In each cycle, they check the current status and handle the business for a single step. The business logic has to be blasted to pieces, which violates the way that people are used to. Cyclic programs are difficult to develop and their reliability is hard to guarantee. To tackle these problems, we propose a model-based formal design flow which is more rigorous and rapid than the V-model. Our method consists of three phases: modeling, verification and code synthesis. In the modeling phase, BIP (Behavior-Interaction-Priority) language, which is expressive and allows flexible modeling, is used as the modeling language. Real-time behavior, that is highly concerned in reactive systems, can be modeled as well. In the verification phase, the system model is translated to timed automata and checked by UPPAAL. Verification helps to ensure the correctness of the model. In the code synthesis phase, the software part of the system model is synthesized to cyclic code. We propose an algorithm which can generate high-performance cyclic code from a model which describes the business work-flow. This feature significantly simplifies program development. A set of tools is implemented to support our design flow and they are successfully applied to an industrial case study for a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) system which is used to control several physical devices in a huge palace.
Timed Modelling Spider Diagrams (TMSDs) are a visual language which supports the modeling of object-oriented systems with time constraints. They are used to define policies in which TMSDs specify admissible evolutions...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781479903696
Timed Modelling Spider Diagrams (TMSDs) are a visual language which supports the modeling of object-oriented systems with time constraints. They are used to define policies in which TMSDs specify admissible evolutions of the state of some instance. We define a process for deriving a rewriting system from a policy specification, so that the generated system defines a language of sequences of basic TMSDs satisfying the policy. Moreover, by identifying the different ways in which the constraints set by the policy can be violated, we can produce special rules whose application results in erroneous sequences. The resulting transformation systems can be used both to simulate possible behaviours when reasoning on the definition of policies and to test policy verification algorithms.
We present a tool-supported framework for the engineering of service-based systems (SBSs) capable of self-verifying their compliance with developer-specified reliability requirements. These self-verifying systems sele...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781479902156
We present a tool-supported framework for the engineering of service-based systems (SBSs) capable of self-verifying their compliance with developer-specified reliability requirements. These self-verifying systems select their services dynamically by using a combination of continual quantitative verification and online updating of the verified models. Our framework enables the practical exploitation of recent theoretical advances in the development of self-adaptive SBSs through (a) automating the generation of the software components responsible for model updating, continual verification and service selection;and (b) employing standard SBS development processes.
Modern software systems are built by composing components drawn from large repositories, whose size and complexity increase at a fast pace. Software systems built with components from a release of a repository should ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781467330763
Modern software systems are built by composing components drawn from large repositories, whose size and complexity increase at a fast pace. Software systems built with components from a release of a repository should be seamlessly upgradeable using components from the next release. Unfortunately, users are often confronted with sets of components that were installed together, but cannot be upgraded together to the latest version from the new repository. Identifying these broken sets can be of great help for a quality assurance team, that could examine and fix these issues well before they reach the end user. Building on previous work on component co-installability, we show that it is possible to find these broken sets for any two releases of a component repository, computing extremely efficiently a concise representation of these upgrade issues, together with informative graphical explanations. A tool implementing the algorithm presented in this paper is available as free software, and is able to process the evolution between two major releases of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution in just a few seconds. These results make it possible to integrate seamlessly this analysis in a repository development process.
Pattern calculus treats all computation as pattern matching, which is, in turn, central to the implementation of programming languages. Hence, its realisation in the general-purpose language bondi provides a natural h...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780769550534
Pattern calculus treats all computation as pattern matching, which is, in turn, central to the implementation of programming languages. Hence, its realisation in the general-purpose language bondi provides a natural host in which to develop domain-specific languages (DSLs). bondi is a strongly typed language that supports mixing of programming styles to support the features required for language implementation. In particular, bondi supports queries, views and transformations that can be used to develop object-oriented meta-models. The approach is illustrated by growing a small combinatory language in which each language feature i.e. each production of each grammar, is isolated within a single object-oriented class that captures the rules for parsing, type inference, evaluation and printing. Further, growth is used to support lambda-abstractions, providing good evidence that this combinatory language could grow to support a general purpose programming language.
In the software implementation of a general Ambient Intelligence (AmI) system, there are two major issues, on which depend the flexibility and the performance of the project. One is the implementation paradigm - how t...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780769549804
In the software implementation of a general Ambient Intelligence (AmI) system, there are two major issues, on which depend the flexibility and the performance of the project. One is the implementation paradigm - how the various entities are organized and how they interact;the other is the management of context information, and how context-awareness is integrated as a first-class element in the implementation. This paper is framed in a research effort to develop an agent-based platform for AmI applications. While in previous research we have already argued in favor of using an agent-oriented paradigm for the implementation, and we have already introduced the concept of context graphs and context patterns, it is in this paper that we argue that matching context patters against context graphs is a valid method for detecting the user's situation and acting upon the user's context. In support of this, we analyze several algorithms for graph matching, adapted to our problem, and compare their performance on specific examples of context matching.
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