Archive

Yukikazu Nakamoto, Towards customizable and collective workspace with mobile phones

Abstract: Firstly, a new customizable user interface for smart devices based on hyperlink associativity is presented. The proposed framework, Hyrax, attempts to improve the menu structure and accessibility of functions while considering user preferences. In Hyrax, the user interface is constructed and customized using hyperlinks for access to application functions. We implement the on-device customization capabilities and evaluate the capabilities of the proposed interface. Secondly, I present building a virtual collaboration workspace in a mobile cloud, which is ongoing work. To implement that, we propose a distributed shared resource by extending the function accessibility to the cloud and a donation mechanism to limit resource usage in a mobile phone.

Atsushi Sawada, Making Software Architecture Traceable to Requirements Specification

Abstract: In this talk, we will present our ongoing work concerning a design method for software architecture. It is commonly said that software architecture becomes a basis of all activities in software engineering. And well designed architecture is especially vital for long life products which are reused and maintained over time. In order to establish a design method for software architecture, we have proposed what we call "Architecture Design Catalogue" to help architects to design a well-documented software architecture. The catalogue provides design rationales as well as mappings between non-functional requirements and sets of static/dynamic module structure. The architecture designed using the catalogue is expected to have good traceability to the requirements specification. We will also illustrate the catalogue based architectural design process using a simple example software for airship control.

Short Bio: Atsushi Sawada is a professor in the Department of Software Engineering at Nanzan University. He received the B.E., the M.E., and the Doctor of Engineering degrees from Kyoto University 1990, 1992, and 1997, respectively. His research interests covers software engineering environments, CASE, methods and tool support for software architectural design, product line engineering for embedded systems, software analysis, etc.
More information at:http://www.seto.nanzan-u.ac.jp/~sawada/

Adrian Schröter, What influences developers to request information about a change?

Abstract: Developers need to coordinate their work and often do that through means of direct communication. We are currently conducting a study at the Zurich IBM Rational Labs and through a series of questionnaires and interviews we explore different technical, social and process related influences that change the behavior on how and when people request information about changes. Changes can reach from source code to work item changes. With the study we so far had a chance to gain a glance at the Release Endgame of the RTC development cycle and found that different aspects of this special phase alone influence how and when people communicate.

Short Bio: Adrian Schröter is a PhD student in the group of Prof. Daniela Damian at the University of Victoria, Canada. More information at: http://www.segal.uvic.ca/members/schadr/adrian-schroeter

Yuriy Brun, Self-Assembling Distributed Internet Software

Abstract: Nature uses decentralized mechanisms that can often scale and self-adapt better than human-engineered ones. Certain types of software systems share requirement and resource properties with nature and may benefit from nature-inspired mechanisms. For example, large, highly distributed Internet systems resemble biological bodies with billions of self-contained cells, coordinating to achieve high-level tasks. For such systems, self-management and self-adaptation are critical.

In this talk, I will present sTile: a nature-inspired, software architecture-based technique for distributing trust-needing computation onto large, insecure, public networks, such as the Internet. I will demonstrate how sTile systems can solve important real-world problems, such as protein folding, image recognition, and resource allocation, while providing guarantees on (1) privacy preservation: sTile systems preserve the privacy of the algorithm and data, (2) fault and attack tolerance: sTile systems can tolerate faulty and malicious nodes, and (3) scalability: sTile systems scale well to leverage the size of the public network to accelerate the computation. In addition to a formal theoretical evaluation, I will discuss an empirical evaluation of a prototype sTile system deployed on the globally distributed PlanetLab. The analysis shows that problems requiring privacy-preservation can be solved using sTile orders of magnitude faster than using today's state-of-the-art alternatives.

Short Bio: Yuriy Brun is an NSF CRA postdoctoral Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2008 from the University of Southern California, as an Andrew Viterbi Fellow, and his M.Eng. degree in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral research was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 2008. Brun’s research interests are in the area of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing software systems. His work combines theoretical computer science approaches to modeling nature-inspired algorithms and software engineering approaches to leveraging those algorithms to build systems. www.cs.washington.edu/homes/brun

Marco Triverio, Application Heartbeats: a technique to enhance system self-adaptability

Abstract: Nowadays the complexity of computing systems is skyrocketing. Programmers have to deal with extremely powerful systems that take time and considerable skills to be instructed to perform at their best. It is clear that it is not feasible to rely on human intervention to tune a system: conditions change constantly, rapidly, and unpredictably. It would be desirable to have the system automatically adapt to the mutating environment with the aim of guaranteeing the minimum Quality of Service (QoS) expected by the applications running on the system itself. This work focuses on the design and implementation of an Observe-Decide-Act (ODA) framework that allows: (1) applications states and performances to be observed through an ad-hoc API; (2) potential modifications to the system to be discovered and selected; (3) modifications to be enacted with the purpose of optimizing the system's performance.

Short Bio: Marco Triverio is a student of the M.Sc. in Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He recently graduated with a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests span Software Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Architectures, and Interaction Design. More information at: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~mtriveri/Triverio_Resume.pdf

Thomas Fritz, Using Information Fragments to Answer the Questions Developers Ask

Abstract: Each day, a software developer needs to answer a variety of questions that require the integration of different kinds of project information. Currently, answering these questions, such as ``What have my co-workers been doing?'', is tedious, and sometimes impossible, because the only support available requires the developer to manually link and traverse the information step-by-step. Through interviews with eleven professional developers, we identified 78 questions developers want to ask, but for which support is lacking. We introduce an information fragment model (and prototype tool) that automates the composition of different kinds of information and that allows developers to easily choose how to display the composed information. In a study, 18 professional developers used the prototype tool to answer eight of the 78 questions. All developers were able to easily use the prototype to successfully answer 94% of questions in a mean time of 2.3 minutes per question.

Short Bio: Thomas Fritz is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Gail Murphy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, expecting to finish in 2010. He conducted his Diploma thesis at the OBASCO (Objects, Aspects and Components) group at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France, and completed his Diplom degree at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, in 2005. He also gathered experience working as a research and development intern with several companies including the IBM labs in Zurich and Ottawa.
His research focuses on aiding developers to answer questions over integrated information and more generally on understanding how to support software developers to better manage the information and systems they have to deal with. At ICSE 2010, Thomas won an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award and came third in the ACM Student Research Competition.