17377991
Applying the HYRIWYG incentive mechanism in a recommender system
The use of recommender systems (RS) has become common in several e-commerce Web sites. Collaborative filtering is one of the most popular RS techniques. It infers a user's predilections based on similarity with other users. However, to work correctly, the RS depends on the evaluator's participation with truly opinions. The HYRIWYG mechanism proposes an incentive model to motivate users to contribute with a high number of opinions and, more important, guaranteeing the truthfulness of the information. In this paper, we present HYRIWYG mechanism and discuss it using an empirical study in the movie evaluation domain. Initial results highlight the great potential benefits of using this kind of incentive mechanism.
44575256
An X-Ray of the Brazilian e-Gov Web Sites
The digital inclusion promotes the reduction of social inequalities. Based on this principle, the Brazilian Government has been setting up an increasing number of Web access locations to render virtual support to its citizens. However, there are no guidelines for the construction and assessment of these electronic Government (e-Gov) sites. In this article we measure the web site quality in the e-Gov domain with the following proprieties: usability, accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, information reliability, and service agility. We implemented our method, by using a checklist tool, in the evaluation of 127 Brazilian government sites (federal, state and municipal). Our method proved itself efficient in the diagnosis and identification of specific problems in the e-Gov site domain.
29246421
Sharing design perspectives through storytelling
Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them, and selecting the best one are expected steps in the designer’s decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process, sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts occur due to misunderstanding of one’s assessment of specifications and contexts. Decision explanations play a key role in teamwork success. Designers are rational agents trained to follow rational methods. Acceptable justifications include value function, requirements, constraints, and criteria. Generally, explanations are delivered in a multimedia fashion, composed of text, graphics and gestures, to provide the audience the ability to perceive what was contextually imagined. The more spatial the reasoning is, the richer the explanation channel should be. This paper presents CineADD, a design explanation generation model based on cinema techniques such as animation, scripting, editing, and camera movements. The idea is to provide designers with a tool for describing the way their projects should be visually explained, as in a movie. Designers develop their projects in an active design document environment. Rationale is captured as a design model, so explanations can be generated instead of retrieved. The captured design model serves as a base to visually reconstruct design, giving emphasis and guidance by using movie storytelling techniques. CineADD was implemented for the domain of oil pipeline layout showing the feasibility of this approach. We expect CineADD to become a commodity attachable to any intelligent CAD system.
5520687
Web Navigation Patterns
13425018
Lithofacies recognition hybrid bench
Well offshore petroleum exploration is a risky, but very profitable task. Determining the rock formation of each layer of a given reservoir diminishes the risks of expending a great deal of money drilling dry wells. Since collecting offshore rock samples is difficult and expensive, geologists must decide upon drilling based on indirect measures called well log. Traditional statistical methods have been used to assist this task. Neural networks have also been successfully used. As an alternative fuzzy logic based systems have an extra appeal of intuitive comprehension of some uncertainties. This paper presents a hybrid tool that combines neural networks, fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy logic to improve human intuition when analyzing the potential of oil fields.
6652666
A method for analyzing team design activity
Design is a comples activity that has been the focus of substantial research work. Alone or in groups, dcsigncrs create, develop. refine. analyze and document their conceptualization of a product. Many research prqjects have proposed methods for observing the design activity. These methods vary from simple documentation analysis to video tape analysis. Although video tape technology has been in use for many years to record design activity. systematic methods have not been developed to analyze video data. This paper presents a method for analyzing team design activity recorded in videotapes. The purpose of the method is to reduce the subjectivity of video data analysis. Our study has been developed in the domain of cotlaborativc software design. The design activity of a multi-disciplinary group including from five to eight people was vidcotapcd and has heen analyzed. The team was involved with the design of an educational software system using the approach of decision making meetings. The analysis focused on the dynamics of the interactions among people involved in the design activity. This study is based on the belief that the interactions established among designers will provide important insights for a better understanding of design practice.
5202352
Taming Agents and Objects in Software Engineering
Agent-based software engineering has been proposed in addition to object-oriented software engineering as a means of mastering the complexity associated with the development of large-scale distributed systems. However, there is still a poor understanding of the interplay between the notions of agents and objects from a software engineering perspective. Moreover, the many facets of agent-based software engineering are rarely used in the various phases of the software development lifecycle because of the lack of a comprehensive framework to provide the software designers with a clear understanding of the use of these two key abstractions. In this context, this paper presents TAO, an evolving innovative conceptual framework based on agent and object abstractions, which are the foundations for modeling large-scale software systems. The conceptual framework allows for the characterization of large-scale software systems as organizations of passive components, the objects, and autonomous components, the agents, with each of these elements playing roles to interact with each other and to coordinate their actions in order to fulfill system goals.
8265478
MIRA: A Distributed and Scalable WAN/LAN Real-Time Measurement Platform
In this paper we describe MIRA, a distributed and scalable architecture for flow-based monitoring and traffic analysis. MIRA relies on data inspection to provide advanced monitoring services such as Acceptable User Policy auditing. It is based on a low cost hardware platform that can be deployed in both LAN and WAN environments. The distributed architecture of the measurement platform is designed to provide real-time global results from a complex network. Processing rate can be seamlessly increased by the addition of new hardware elements. The MIRA architecture has been thoroughly tested in a field trial on RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research Network.
15401536
An aspect-oriented generative approach
The integration of generative and aspect-oriented techniques is not a trivial task. This paper describes our experience in the definition of an aspect-oriented generative approach for the context of multi-agent systems. Our generative approach is composed of: (i) a domain-specific language called Agent-DSL, which allows to model crosscutting and non-crosscuting agent features; (ii) an aspect-oriented architecture that models a family of software agents; and (iii) a code generator that maps abstractions of the Agent-DSL to specific compositions of objects and aspects in specific implementations of agent architectures. The use of aspect-oriented techniques in the definition of our generative approach brought benefits to the modeling and code generation of crosscutting features since early design stages.
13430499
A Unified Meta-Level Software Architecture for Sequential and Concurrent Exception Handling
979214
Enhancing agent-oriented models with aspects
The modular representation of concerns is imperative in the design modeling of multi-agent systems (MASs). However, MAS designers typically face a number of concerns that inherently affect several system agents and their respective internal elements, such as actions and goals. These crosscutting concerns encompass both internal and systemic properties, such as learning, mobility, error handling, and security. Without an explicit modeling of such MAS properties, designers can not properly communicate and reason about them and their broadly-scoped effects. The result is a multitude of agent-oriented design breakdowns: poor traceability from requirements to design models, hindering of reuse opportunities, and decreased evolvability. This paper presents an enhancement of an existing agent-oriented modeling language with aspects. We illustrate the use of our approach through some classical examples of crosscutting concerns in agent-oriented design models.