11578423
A Framework to place Cross-cultural Case Study Research in an Information Systems Action Research Context
2 School of Management Information Systems, Deakin University, Australia. E-mail: smithr@deakin.edu.au . ABSTRACT: The progressive evolution of the global information society has escalated the debate over effective ways to facilitate relevance in information systems research without sacrificing rigor. Accommodation of interpretivist research methodologies has been suggested to address this problem, particularly in instances of research conducted in Asian developing countries. This paper discusses problems encountered in attempting to apply, in such a context, positivist longitudinal case study research methods, using models originating from research focused on organisations in Western, developed economies. We outline a synthesis of the positivist methods with an action research approach, and the subsequent use of a particular research framework to track progress and report outcomes.
31744347
Undergraduate Software Engineering - An Innovative Degree at Swinburne
In this paper we outline the context for the development of an undergraduate degree in Software Engineering in Australia, reflect on curriculum development ideas relevant to such a degree, and describe aspects of the Computer Science degree at Swinburne which, despite its title, may be viewed as a Software Engineering degree. We emphasise the role of project-based units within the degree.
1589294
A Conceptual-Modeling Approach to Extracting Data from the Web
Electronically available data on the Web is exploding at an ever increasing pace. Much of this data is unstructured, which makes searching hard and traditional database querying impossible. Many Web documents, however, contain an abundance of recognizable constants that together describe the essence of a document’s content. For these kinds of data-rich documents (e.g., advertisements, movie reviews, weather reports, travel information, sports summaries, financial statements, obituaries, and many others) we can apply a conceptual-modeling approach to extract and structure data. The approach is based on an ontology – a conceptual model instance – that describes the data of interest, including relationships, lexical appearance, and context keywords. By parsing the ontology, we can automatically produce a database scheme and recognizers for constants and keywords, and then invoke routines to recognize and extract data from unstructured documents and structure it according to the generated database scheme. Experiments show that it is possible to achieve good recall and precision ratios for documents that are rich in recognizable constants and narrow in ontological breadth.
17086760
Cost profile of a highly assured, secure operating system
The Logical Coprocessing Kernel (LOCK) began as a research project to stretch the state of the art in secure computing by trying to meet or even exceed the “A1” requirements of the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC). Over the span os seven years, the project was transformed into an effort to develop and deploy a product: the Standard Mail Guard (SMG). Since the project took place under a US government contract, the development team needed to maintain detailed records of the time spent on the project. The records from 1987 to 1992 have been combined with information about software code size and error detection. This information has been used to examine the practical impacts of high assurance techniques on a large-scale software development program. Tasks are associated with the A1 formal assurance requirements added approximately 58% to the development cost of security-critical software. In exchange for these costs, the formal assurance tasks (formal specifications, proofs, and specification code correspondence) uncovered 68% of the security flaws detected in LOCK's critical security mechanisms. However, a study of flaw detection during the SMG program found that only 14% of all flaws detected were of the type that could be detected using formal assurance, and that the work of the formal assusrance team only accounted for 19% of all flaws detected. While formal assurance is clearly effective at detecting flaws, its practicality hinges on the degree to which the formally modeled system properties represent all of a system's esential properties.
11197998
A Modular Tool Kit for Knowledge Management
We describe an integrated programming environment for develop ing knowledge-based systems. The environment contains a variety of general-purpose tools: a rule interpretation system, a semantic integrity manager, a task representation system and a file manager. Although the tools have different origins (eg. rule based systems, database management, process control), an obiect-oriented foundation lends modularity and consistency to the tool kit.
2984394
Augmented Reality Chinese Checkers
This paper presents an application, Augmented Reality Chinese Checkers that we created to investigate user interface issues for table top projected augmented reality entertainment applications. A new tangible interaction device, the wireless button enhanced fiducial, is introduced to support selection tasks in mixed reality environments. The Augmented Reality Chinese Checkers game is built on a framework which can be used to create other computer supported collaborative games. The system is built using the Passive Detection Framework to track the 6 degrees of freedom position in real time of marked objects in the environment. The game supports up to six players at a time.
16499745
The Self-4.0 user interface: manifesting a system-wide vision of concreteness, uniformity, and flexibility
Manipulating programs is hard, while manipulating objects in the physical world is often easy. Several attributes of the physical world help make it comprehensible and manipulable: concreteness, uniformity, and flexibility. The Self programming system attempts to apply these attributes to the world within the computer. The semantics of the language, the efficiency and fidelity of its implementation, and the architecture of its user interface conspire to make the experience of constructing programs in Self immediate and tangible. We describe the mechanisms used to achieve this goal, and illustrate those mechanisms within the context of an extended programming task.