We developed a self-assessment tool for computing students in higher education to measure their Creative Problem Solving skills. Our survey encompasses 7 dimensions of creativity, based on existing validated scales and conducted focus groups. These are: technical knowledge, communication, constraints, critical thinking, curiosity, creative state of mind, and creative techniques. Principal axis factor analysis groups the dimensions into three overarching constructs: ability, mindset, and interaction. The results of a pilot study (n = 269) provide evidence for its psychometric qualities, making it a useful instrument for educational researchers to investigate students' creative skills.

Research on global competencies of computing students suggests that next to technical programming knowledge, the teaching of non-technical skills such as creativity is becoming very relevant. Many CS1 courses introduce a layer of creative freedom by employing open project assignments. We are interested in the quality of the submitted projects in relation to the creativity that students show when tackling these open assignments. We have analyzed 110 projects from two academic years to investigate whether there is a relation between creativity and clean code in CS1 student projects. Seven judges were recruited that evaluated the creativity based on Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique, while the PMD tool was used to explore code quality issues in the Java projects. Results indicate that the more projects are deemed as creative, the more likely code quality issues arise in these projects, and thus the less clean the code will be. We argue that next to promoting creativity in order to solve programming problems, the necessary attention should also be given to the clean code principles.

As the importance of non-technical skills in the software engineering industry increases, the skill sets of graduates match less and less with industry expectations. A growing body of research exists that attempts to identify this skill gap. However, only few so far explicitly compare opinions of the industry with what is currently being taught in academia. By aggregating data from three previous works, we identify the three biggest non-technical skill gaps between industry and academia for the field of software engineering: devoting oneself to continuous learning , being creative by approaching a problem from different angles , and thinking in a solution-oriented way by favoring outcome over ego . Eight follow-up interviews were conducted to further explore how the industry perceives these skill gaps, yielding 26 sub-themes grouped into six bigger themes: stimulating continuous learning , stimulating creativity , creative techniques , addressing the gap in education , skill requirements in industry , and the industry selection process . With this work, we hope to inspire educators to give the necessary attention to the uncovered skills, further mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.

To this day, efficient timer management is a major challenge in virtualized environments. Contemporary timekeeping techniques in guest kernels frequently interact with timer hardware, which requires continual and costly hypervisor interference.

Despite great advancements in hardware-assisted virtualization of the x86 architecture, certain workloads still suffer significant overhead. This article dissects said overhead in the context of multi-threading. We describe the state-of-the-art, pinpoint challenges, and suggest improvements, aiming to provide a valuable reference to developers and users of virtualization systems alike. We study the virtualization overhead of the PARSEC and SPLASH2X multithreaded benchmarks in a variety of scenarios using a state-of-the-art system. Through controlled experiments, source code analysis and literature review, we quantify the virtualization overhead multithreading still induces and link it to its root causes, after which we suggest possible mitigation strategies. Multithreading still induces high virtualization overhead, mainly caused by synchronization, spinning at user level and NUMA management. The overhead is diverse in nature and embodiment as it is a function of many system and workload properties. System-level solutions are feasible, but often imply difficult trade-offs. Systematic workload optimization is a promising alternative.

Numerous studies have shown that Game-Based Learning positively impacts educational effectiveness and student motivation. However, according to Amabile's Componential Model of Creativity, motivation is only one aspect of creativity, next to expertise and creative skills. Therefore, we looked beyond motivational aspects in order to amplify all dimensions of creativity. In a 'Software Design in C++' course at our local faculty of Engineering Technology, students learn to apply high-level object-oriented software development techniques on low-level embedded hardware. By introducing the Game Boy Advance (GBA), a 32-bit handheld released by Nintendo in 2001, students not only need the domain-specific technical expertise and motivation to succeed, but also the right creative skills to cope with the limitations of this embedded system that has only 96kb of VRAM. We focused the labs on stimulating these creative problem-solving techniques. Results are promising: students were highly motivated and creative output was distinctly increased; but technical expertise was still lacking during examination. Further work involves investigating the impact of peer-assessment on all aspects of creativity.

Important building blocks of software engineering concepts are without a doubt technical. During the last decade, research and practical interest for non-technicalities has grown, revealing the building blocks to be various skills and abilities beside pure technical knowledge. Multiple attempts to categorise these blocks have been made, but so far little international studies have been performed that identify skills by asking experts from both the industrial and academic world: which abilities are needed for a developer to excel in the software engineering industry? To answer this question, we performed a Delphi study, inviting 36 experts from 11 different countries world-wide, affiliated with 21 internationally renowned institutions. This study presents the 55 identified and ranked skills as classified in four major areas: communicative skills (empathy, actively listening, etc.), collaborative skills (sharing responsibility, learning from each other, etc.), problem solving skills (verifying assumptions, solution-oriented thinking, etc.), and personal skills (curiosity, being open to ideas, etc.), of which a comparison has been made between opinions of technical experts, business experts, and academics. We hope this work inspires educators and practitioners to adjust their training programs, mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.

Due to its numerous advantages, the IT industry is moving more and more towards the cloud for hosting applications. Reducing the virtualization overhead inherent to cloud computing has therefore been a topic of much research and innovation, resulting in a drastic reduction of this overhead for most workloads. For specific tasks however, challenges remain. One example is parallel, CPU-intensive workloads. Studies concerning this specific workload exist, but focus on low-level properties of the virtualization process, which are often out of reach of the application programmer in commercial cloud environments. Therefore, we aim to approach virtualization overhead from an application architecture and implementation perspective, and provide guidelines for application programmers to develop their software in such a way that they avoid virtualization overhead without the need for access to the hypervisor or specific hardware. As a first step towards this goal, this paper offers a proof of concept applied to the dedup benchmark from the PARSEC benchmark suite, which is notorious for its high virtualization overhead. We provide an alternative implementation of this benchmark, which suffers negligible virtualization overhead compared to the original, thus increasing performance by up to 45%.

This paper presents an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool that generates basic building blocks for cryptographic hardware in VHDL. The purpose of the tool is to decrease the design time of cryptographic hardware and to allow designers to make abstraction of both the arithmetic and design complexity. The tool generates multiple implementations for one arithmetic description and then benchmarks the implementations to find the most optimal, based upon design space parameters. These parameters consist of area and speed requirements. We present datapath and control logic results for a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The novelty in our approach lies in the fact that we exploit the higher-order features of functional languages to facilitate the design space exploration and that we take benefit from the strength of the third-party synthesis tool by generating VHDL code at an abstraction level that is higher than the gate level. Nevertheless, in this stage of the development of the tool, the different cryptographic architectures are hand-made and the selection of the most optimal solution, based upon user requirements, is done by exhaustive search. This means that the tool leaves room for improvement, but forms a solid base for further development.

status: Published