18787334
Loop Parallelization using the 3D Iteration Space Visualizer
A 3D iteration space visualizer (ISV) is presented to analyze the parallelism in loops and to find loop transformations which enhance the parallelism. Using automatic program instrumentation, the iteration space dependency graph (ISDG) is constructed, which shows the exact data dependencies of arbitrarily nested loops. Various graphical operations such as rotation, zooming, clipping, coloring and filtering, permit a detailed examination of the dependence relations. Furthermore, an animated dataflow execution shows the maximal parallelism and the parallel loops are indicated automatically by an embedded data dependence analysis. In addition, the user may discover and indicate additional parallelism for which a suitable unimodular loop transformation is calculated and verified. The ISV has been applied to parallelize algorithmic kernel programs, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation code, the detection of statement-level parallelism and loop variable privatization. The applications show that the visualizer is a versatile and easy to use tool for the high-performance application programmer.
9459993
From goals to aspects: discovering aspects from requirements goal models
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been attracting much attention in the software engineering community by advocating that programs should be structured according to programmer concerns, such as "efficient use of memory". However, like other programming paradigms in their early days, AOP hasn't addressed yet earlier phases of software development. In particular, it is still an open question how one identifies aspects early on in the software development process. This work proposes an answer to this question. Specifically, we show that aspects can be discovered during goal-oriented requirements analysis. Our proposal includes a systematic process for discovering aspects from relationships between functional and nonfunctional goals. We illustrate the proposed process with a case study adapted from the literature.
2820577
Localizing XML Documents through XSLT
Existing efforts on XML internationalization and localization have been focusing on the contents of XML documents instead of on the meta presentations such as tags and attributes. Although XML standard allows the use of unicode throughout a document including the meta level presentations, most tags and attributes of XML documents are still defined in English, which makes it difficult for native people to use. This paper presents a pure XSLT stylesheet to completely translate and localize XML documents into different natural languages. Furthermore, we also describe how this technique can be applied to translation problems in programming (e.g. C and Java) or documentation (e.g. LaTeX) languages when the program or the document can be converted to and from XML documents.
1353091
A Lightweight Approach to Semantic Web Service Synthesis
Web service technologies are becoming a new paradigm for distributed computing. With increasing number of web services available on the internet, there is an urgent need for information brokers that can autonomously integrate web services on behalf of a user. To this end, we propose web service specification, which defines what the service is but not how the service is implemented, and service synthesizer, which can dynamically synthesize the implementation of the specification from existing web services over the web.
5687277
A self-adaptive scheduling algorithm of on-demand broadcasts
In mobile wireless systems data on air can be accessed by a large number of mobile users. Many of these applications such as wireless internets and traffic information systems are pull-based, that is, they respond to on-demand user requests. In this paper, we study the scheduling problems of on-demand broadcast environments. Traditionally, the response time of the requests has been used as a performance measure. In this paper we consider the performance as the average cost of request composed of three kinds of costs—access time cost, tuning time cost, and cost of handling failure request. Our main contribution is a self-adaptive scheduling algorithm named LDFC, which computes the delay cost of data item as the priority for broadcast. It performs well compared with some previous algorithms in this context.
11507388
JPT: A Java Parallelization Tool
PVM is a succesfull programming environment for distributed computing in the languages C and Fortran. Recently several implementations of PVM for Java have been added, making PVM programming accessible to the Java community. 
 
With PVM for Java however, the user still needs to partition the problem, calculate the data partitioning and program the message passing and synchronization. In this paper, JPT is introduced, a parallelization tool which generates PVM code from a serial Java program. JPT automatically detects parallel loops and generates master and slave PVM programs.
44493552
Adaptation of the temporal receptive fields of macaque V1 neurons
Abstract Traditional view of macaque V1 neurons is that they are static spatiotemporal filters. This study shows that V1 neurons’ temporal receptive fields (kernels) are dynamic and adaptive. In order to study the adaptation of the kernels to a variety of stimuli, we developed a regression approach to recover kernels using naturalistic stimuli. Using this technique, we studied how the kernels of the V1 neurons in macaque monkeys adapt to the frequency bandwidth of naturalistic signals. We found that the temporal frequency tunings and the gains of the receptive fields of the neurons change according to the statistical context of the stimulus environment.
15449420
Procurement of enterprise resource planning systems: experiences with some Hong Kong companies
Many cases of adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been reported in the literature. Some of the adopted ERP systems fail to satisfy the customer's requirements, despite the high spending and substantial efforts that have been put into the adoption exercise. This is undoubtedly unsatisfactory. A way to avoid this problem is to adopt a well planned, managed, and controlled ERP procurement process. This paper describes our studies of three Chinese companies in Hong Kong which have adopted ERP systems. We report the experience of these companies, and discuss how the Chinese culture might have shaped the procurement practices in their ERP adoption exercises.
15986119
Designing activities for learning software quality practices
This paper presents our design of the learning activities in a course on software quality practices. We describe how we strive to provide opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience on exemplar software quality practices in spite of various constraints.
3035412
On the Expected Number of Failures Detected by Subdomain Testing and Random Testing
We investigate the efficacy of subdomain testing and random testing using the expected number of failures detected (the E-measure) as a measure of effectiveness. Simple as it is, the E-measure does provide a great deal of useful information about the fault detecting capability of testing strategies. With the E-measure, we obtain new characterizations of subdomain testing, including several new conditions that determine whether subdomain testing is more or less effective than random testing. Previously, the efficacy of subdomain testing strategies has been analyzed using the probability of detecting at least one failure (the P-measure) for the special case of disjoint subdomains only. On the contrary, our analysis makes use of the E-measure and considers also the general case in which subdomains may or may not overlap. Furthermore, we discover important relations between the two different measures. From these relations, we also derive corresponding characterizations of subdomain testing in terms of the P-measure.
1347392
Explaining Low-Level Brightness-Contrast Illusions Using Disinhibition
Conventional Difference of Gaussian (DOG) filter is usually used to model the early stage of visual processing. However, convolution operation used with DOG does not explicitly account for the effects of disinhibition. Because of this, complex brightness-contrast (B-C) illusions such as the White’s effect cannot be explained using DOG filters. We discovered that a model based on lateral disinhibition in biological retinas allows us to explain subtle B-C illusions. Further, we show that a feedforward filter can be derived to achieve this operation in a single pass. The results suggest that contextual effects can be processed through recurrent disinhibition. Such a context sensitive structure might be employed to improve network robustness of visual capturing or displaying systems. Another potential application of this algorithm could be automatic detection and correction of perceived incoherences where accurate perception of intensity level is critical.