Economists have long recognized that technological innovation is a key contributor to economic growth due to its impact on productivity. In this paper, we explore the impact of COVID-19 on innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand future effects on economic growth and productivity. Using patents as a measure of innovation and knowledge production, we analyze monthly patent application filing data from January 2015 to June 2021 to compare and assess trends. Past research has shown that growth in patents in the fields of AI have accelerated since 2012, with 6.5 times more annual filings occurring from 2006 to 2017. Here, we focus specifically on determining if the pandemic has had an impact on this acceleration in AI-related innovation. To accomplish this task we must confront the challenge in using up-to-date patent data for this kind of analysis due to the fact that there are considerable time lags associated with patent filing dates and their ultimate publication dates. In real-time situations such as COVID-19, it is, therefore, difficult to ascertain impact using the publicly available patenting data directly. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for examining existing and up-to-date publicly available patent filing data and use that method to gain new insights into the pandemic’s effects on AI-related innovation. Our findings suggest that the pandemic has had a slowing impact on the rate of innovation in these areas but that the downturn may be reversing.

GitHub facilitates software development practices that encourage collaboration and communication. Part of GitHub's model includes forking, which enables users to make changes on a copy of the base repository. The process of forking opens avenues of communication between the users from the base repository and the users from the forked repositories. Since forking on GitHub is a common mechanism for initiating repositories, we are interested in how communication between a repository and its forks (forming a software family) relates to stars. In this paper, we study communications within 385 software families comprised of 13,431 software repositories. We find that the fork depth, the number of users who have contributed to multiple repositories in the same family, the number of followers from outside the family, familial pull requests, and reported issues share a statistically significant relationship with repository stars. Due to the importance of issues and pull requests, we identify and compare common topics in issues and pull requests from inside the repository (via branching) and within the family (via forking). Our results offer insights into the importance of communication within a software family, and how this leads to higher individual repository star counts.

Despite efforts to achieve a sustainable state of control over the management of global crises, disasters are occurring with greater frequency, intensity, and affecting many more people than ever before while the resources to deal with them do not grow apace. As we enter 2015, with continued concerns that mega-crises may become the new normal, we need to develop novel methods to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our management of disasters. Software engineering as a discipline has long had an impact on society beyond its role in the development of software systems. In fact, software engineers have been described as the developers of prototypes for future knowledge workers; tools such as Github and Stack Overflow have demonstrated applications beyond the domain of software engineering. In this paper, we take the potential influence of software engineering one-step further and propose using the software service engineering paradigm as a new approach to managing disasters. Specifically, we show how the underlying principles of service-oriented architectures (SOA) can be applied to the coordination of disaster response operations. We describe key challenges in coordinating disaster response and discuss how an SOA approach can address those challenges.

We describe a framework and methodology for managing the privacy policy of an enterprise, including creation (based on factors like legislation and consumer preferences), validation and verification, deployment and enforcement, and compliance testing for business processes and software. To evaluate this approach, one module of our framework (compliance testing) is implemented for an existing prominent electronic commerce software application. Our unique approach monitors the personal information sent and received by the software application and converts it to a standardized representation. At defined points in the electronic commerce workflow, the transmissions are compared to a set of privacy rules (extracted from a privacy policy) to ascertain compliance. Non-compliant transmissions of personal information are labeled `potential privacy infractions' and are reported. Though presently implemented for software testing, ultimately the methodology is intended to halt or alter a workflow to avoid privacy infractions.

No abstract available.

As the cost of both hardware and software falls due to technological advancements and economies of scale, the cost of ownership for database applications is increasingly dominated by the cost of people to manage them. Databases are growing rapidly in scale and complexity, while skilled database administrators (DBAs) are becoming rarer and more expensive. The scope of responsibility of DBAs is indeed daunting. This paper describes the self-managing technology in IBM DB2 Universal Database to illustrate how self-managing technology can enhance the usability of enterprise middleware and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

A multimedia news application, an example of a distributed multimedia application, is described. It is explained how this type of application benefit from advanced communication services, which provides multireception and the capability to deal with high data rates. Connection and resource management issues that are main concerns in such applications and communication services are outlined.