A μ-kernel is an operating system (OS) paradigm that facilitates a strong cybersecurity posture for embedded systems. Unlike a monolithic OS such as Linux, a μ-kernel reduces overall system privilege by deploying most OS functionality within isolated, userspace protection domains. Moreover, a μ-kernel ensures confidentiality and integrity between protection domains (i.e., spatial isolation), and offers timing predictability for real-time tasks in mixed-criticality systems (i.e., temporal isolation). One popular μ-kernel is seL4 which offers extensive formal guarantees of implementation correctness and flexible temporal budgeting mechanisms.

Scientists often write code to support their science. To investigate the state of scientific programming on smaller teams in diverse scientific contexts, we interviewed eleven scientists about their programming practices, and the extent to which they adhere to six common best practices. We argue that these practices are essential to the core scientific value of reproducibility. Our results indicate that many of these practices are not followed because of barriers such as low self-efficacy and misaligned incentive structures. We conclude with suggested improvements to the tooling, education, and incentives of scientific programmers.

Although automatic text grading systems have reached an accuracy level comparable to human grading, with successful commercial and research implementations (e.g., Latent Semantic Analysis), these systems can provide limited feedback about which statements of the text are incorrect and why they are incorrect. In the present work, we propose the use of a hybrid Ontology-based Information Extraction (OBIE) system to identify both correct and incorrect statements by combining extraction rules and machine learning based information extractors. Experiments show that given 77 student answers to a Cell Biology final exam question, our hybrid system can identify both correct and incorrect statements with high precision and recall measures.

Automatic grading systems for summaries and essays have been studied for years. Most commercial and research implementations are based in statistical methods, such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which can provide high accuracy on similarity between the essay and the graded or standard essays, but they can offer very limited feedback. In the present work, we propose a novel method to provide both grades and meaningful feedback for student summaries by Ontology-based Information Extraction (OBIE). We use ontological concepts and relationships to create extraction rules to identify correct statements. Based on ontology constraints (e.g., disjointness between concepts), we define patterns that are logically inconsistent with the ontology to create rules to extract incorrect statements. Experiments show that the grades given to 18 student summaries on Ecosystems by OBIE are correlated to human gradings. OBIE also provide meaningful feedback on the errors those students made in their summaries.

In this paper we describe a TV-based reminder system for helping people with cognitive disabilities get to appointments on time and with the items they need. The TVBox uses a person's own TV to deliver reminders about trips that the person needs to make. The TVBox is also used to make sure that the person has the items that they need when at their destination.

We describe a system that supports travel planning for a user with a cognitive impairment.

The objective of this workshop is to consolidate the interest in the software engineering community on autonomic, self-managing, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-configuring, and self-adaptive systems. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers to share new results, raise awareness of new adaptive concerns, and promote collaboration among the community. This workshop will be the first of several to assess progress and identify challenges in this important area.

Our GO (www.go-outside.org) project focuses on community access for the cognitively impaired population. In addition to devising new facilities, we are interested in using existing appliances found in an apartment to interact with a user to help with a specific task, e.g., making a trip to the doctor. This requires establishment of collaboration protocols between the appliances (and smart agents) and user to be established. These protocols must enforce certain safety properties, e.g., that the user get timely information to start a task. We will show how we use a light-weight formal modeling toolkit to reason about a protocol's ability to meet safety properties.

In this paper, I make a case for integration of requirements engineering (RE) with clinical disciplines. To back my case, I look at two examples that employ a clinical RE approach, first, that of introducing email into the life of a brain-injured individual, and second, introducing digital darkroom tools into my life. The former uses a Brownfield approach by starting with an existing clinical process, cognitive rehabilitation, and then defining an RE process that fits. The latter uses a Greenfield approach that postulates a new clinical RE process that focuses on the problems some of us have using digital darkroom tools.

Our group has taken a clinical approach to doing requirements engineering for a specific domain: delivering email tools to the cognitively impaired population. The clinical view suggests a process that first gathers an individual's goals, assesses the individual's abilities, delivers a tailored system, and finally, monitors usage over time to look for adaptation needs. One concept that has arisen from our project is the notion of a deferred requirement (or deferred goal). Professional clinicians ask an individual to think broadly of the goals they have, and think about not only goals that are achievable today, but ones that might be striven for and become achieved in the future. We discuss this idea of deferred requirements in terms of a longitudinal study working with nine participants over a two year period. We also report on initial attempts to build automated tools around deferred requirements, monitoring, and system adaptation.

A framework for requirements analysis is proposed that accounts for individual and personal goals and the effect of time and context on personal requirements. The implications of the framework on system architecture are considered as three implementation pathways: functional specifications, development of customisable features and automatic adaptation by the system. These pathways imply the need to analyse system architecture requirements. Different implementation pathways have cost-benefit implications for stakeholders, so cost-benefit analysis techniques are proposed to assess tradeoffs between goals and implementation strategies. The use of the framework is illustrated with two case studies in assistive technology domains: e-mail and a personalised navigation system.

A prototype e-mail system was developed for cognitively disabled users, with four different interfaces (free format, idea prompt, form fill and menu driven). The interfaces differed in the level of support provided for the user and complexity of facilities for composing e-mail messages. Usability evaluation demonstrated that no one interface was superior because of individual differences in usability problems, although the majority of users preferred interfaces which did not restrict their freedom of expression (free format). In contrast to traditional evaluation studies, no common pattern of usability errors emerged, demonstrating the need for customisation of interfaces for individual cognitively disabled users. A framework for customising user interfaces to individual users is proposed, and usability principles derived from the study are expressed as claims following the task artefact cycle.

This paper motivates and describes the notion of mobile ad-hoc information systems. Such a system consists of a decentralized and self-organizing network of autonomous, mobile devices that interact as peers. Connectivity is determined by distance between devices; as hosts change their physical location they establish pair-wise communication links based on mutual proximity. We describe application scenarios for mobile ad-hoc information systems and identify technical challenges of a generic software infrastructure. Moreover, we present the goals and architecture of Proem, a peer-to-peer system and development platform for mobile ad-hoc applications. Proem has successfully been used as instructional tool in an advanced software engineering course on peer-to-peer computing.

No abstract available.

We propose requirements monitoring to aid in the maintenance of systems that reside in dynamic environments. By requirements monitoring we mean the insertion of code into a running system to gather information from which it can he determined whether, and to what degree, that running system is meeting its requirements. Monitoring is a commonly applied technique in support of performance tuning, but the focus therein is primarily on computational performance requirements in short runs of systems. We wish to address systems that operate in a long lived, ongoing fashion in nonscientific enterprise applications. We argue that the results of requirements monitoring can be of benefit to the designers, maintainers and users of a system-alerting them when the system is being used in an environment for which it was not designed, and giving them the information they need to direct their redesign of the system. Studies of two commercial systems are used to illustrate and justify our claims.

The design process that spans the gap between the requirements acquisition process and the implementation process, in which the basic architecture of a system is defined, and functions are allocated to software, hardware, and human agents. is studied. The authors call this process composite system design. The goal is an interactive model of composite system design incorporating deficiency-driven design, formal analysis, incremental design and rationalization, and design reuse. They discuss knowledge representations and reasoning techniques that support these goals for the product (composite system) that they are designing, and for the design process. To evaluate the model, the authors report on its use to reconstruct the design of two existing composite systems rationally.>

In this panel session, the following topics are discussed: artificial intelligence in business; artificial intelligence in multimedia; neural networks as a tool for artificial intelligence: software engineering for knowledge-based systems: and artificial intelligence as a solution for software engineering.>

This paper reports on efforts to extend the transformational implementation (TI) model of software development [1]. In particular, we describe a system that uses AI techniques to automate major portions of a transformational implementation. The work has focused on the formalization of the goals, strategies, selection rationale, and finally the transformations used by expert human developers. A system has been constructed that includes representations for each of these problem-solving components, as well as machinery for handling human-system interaction and problem-solving control. We will present the system and illustrate automation issues through two annotated examples.