1,720,975 research outputs found
Introduction to the Software Engineering and Formal Methods 2013 special issue
No full textWe are in the world in which society is increasingly dependent
on software, and so, the quality of this software is
more important than ever. Unfortunately, the development of
high-quality software is becoming increasingly challenging
as complexity grows and systems are often concurrent and
distributed. The Software Engineering and Formal Methods
communities have developed a range of approaches that help
address this problem, but initially there was relatively little
interaction between these areas and some saw them as rivals.
Thankfully, these attitudes have gradually changed, with the
communities accepting that each makes a useful contribution
in tackling an important problem.
It is arguable that several factors have helped bring
together the Software Engineering and Formal Methods communities.
For example, there has been increasing interest in
topics such as model-based testing that fall within both areas,
and so, there is much more overlap between the communities.
Recent years have seen increases in computation power
and improvements in solution mechanisms such as SAT/SMT
solvers and model checkers. This has led to verification and
static analysis techniques, developed in the formal methods
community, scaling to much larger systems and being used by
many more software engineers. However, events that bring
these communities together have also played a crucial role
Validation of transformation from abstract state machine models to C++ code
No full textThe automatic transformation of models to code is one of the most important cornerstones in the model-driven engineering paradigm. Starting from system models, users are able to automatically generate machine code in a seamless manner with an assurance of potential bug freeness of the generated code. Asm2C++ [4] is the tool that transforms Abstract State Machine models to code. However, no validation activities have been performed in the past to guarantee the correctness of the transformation process. In this paper, we define a mechanism to test the correctness of the model-to-code transformation with respect to two main criteria: syntactical correctness and semantic correctness, which is based on the definition of conformance between the specification and the code. Using this approach, we have devised a process able to test the generated code by reusing unit tests. Coverage measures give a user the confidence that the generated code has the same behavior as specified by the ASM model
Neural Networks as Artificial Specifications
Full text linkIn theory, a neural network can be trained to act as an artificial specification for a program by showing it samples of the programs executions. In practice, the training turns out to be very hard. Programs often operate on discrete domains for which patterns are difficult to discern. Earlier experiments reported too much false positives. This paper revisits an experiment by Vanmali et al. by investigating several aspects that were uninvestigated in the original work: the impact of using different learning modes, aggressiveness levels, and abstraction functions. The results are quite promising
Lookahead-based approaches for minimizing adaptive distinguishing sequences
No full textFor Finite State Machine (FSM) based testing, it has been shown that the
use of shorter Adaptive Distinguishing Sequences (ADS) yields shorter
test sequences. It is also known, on the other hand, that constructing
a minimum cost ADS is an NP-hard problem and it is NP-hard to approximate.
In this paper, we introduce a lookahead-based greedy algorithm to construct
reduced ADSs for FSMs. The greedy algorithm inspects a search space to
make a decision. The size of the search space is adjustable, allowing a trade-off
between the quality and the computation time. We analyse the performance of the
approach on randomly generated FSMs by comparing the ADSs constructed by our algorithm with the ADSs that are computed by the existing algorithms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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