Leveraging Execution Logs to Support Model Inference and Software Testing

Doctoral thesis (2021)

Many software engineering activities process the events contained in log files. However, before performing any processing activity, it is necessary to correctly parse the entries in a log file to retrieve ... [more ▼]

Many software engineering activities process the events contained in log files. However, before performing any processing activity, it is necessary to correctly parse the entries in a log file to retrieve the actual events recorded in the log. In the case of cyber-physical systems, execution logs are highly important because such systems integrate multiple third-party components where their source code is not always available. This limits the visibility of the system behavior to what is collected in the execution logs. The increasing amount of logs produced by cyber-physical systems calls for 1) more advanced techniques for accurate log parsing, 2) scalable model inference that will enabling efficient program comprehension and, 3) cost-effective software testing to ensuring the quality of complex soft- ware systems. [less ▲]

Légionnaires Rallye: a thrilling treasure hunt game. On the trail of the Légionnaires outside the museum walls

Article for general public (2021)

UL HPC Facility Workload Analysis

Presentation (2021, June 24)

Discovering Pesticides, Pharmaceuticals TPs in Luxembourg Waters using Open Cheminformatics Approaches

Scientific Conference (2021, June 24)

The Educational Economics of UNESCO's First Regional Centre on Fundamental Education in the Immediate Post-War Period: An Archival Exploration

Scientific Conference (2021, June 21)

The end of the Second World War marked the start of a new era, with worldwide support for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in December 1948. By signing the Universal Declaration, the Member ... [more ▼]

The end of the Second World War marked the start of a new era, with worldwide support for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in December 1948. By signing the Universal Declaration, the Member States of the United Nations pledged to promote a series of universal values. As part of the UN, UNESCO made a major effort to disseminate the Declaration and its content globally, at a national, regional and local level. The idea of “building peace in the minds of men and women” and encouraging equal rights was central to UNESCO’s mission. An archival exploration of the correspondence material of UNESCO’s secretariat, available at the UNESCO archives, offers an insight into the continuous struggle faced by the staff for the creation and implementation of educational initiatives on human rights. One focus of UNESCO’s work was the area of fundamental education. Early general correspondence found related to this topic reveals the continuous flow of communication between the different UNESCO departments, especially the office of the Director-General and the Departments of Mass Communication and Education. The discussions were mainly centred on the development of centres for fundamental education. The location to choose, the content and methodology to use, and the appropriate strategy to raise the funds needed for the continued implementation of regional centres of fundamental education, were just some of the issues addressed. The initial financial and ideological support from the Member States seems to have been slowly replaced by budgetary constraints and political opposition. A network of international experts on fundamental education helped promote UNESCO’s initiatives to possible funders with a view to creating twelve fundamental education centres all over the world. Their contribution was seen as vital for the implementation of the project. Despite the hard work and lobbying activities, only two of the initially planned twelve centres were established. Through this focus on fundamental education, I will argue that, despite the worldwide support for this philosophical and humanistic ideal, political and economic interests soon came to dominate the transition of this initial project to local communities, creating imbalances in relations within and between nations. Consequently, the dissemination and promotion of the UDHR was subject to a wide range of individual translations by UNESCO’s Member States. This only enlarged the difficult task for the intergovernmental organisation to mediate the development of peace in the minds of men and women. [less ▲]

The COVID-19 in Portugal: new school year, similar responses, accountabilities and research

Scientific Conference (2021, June 21)

The gap in Covid-19 memory banks: on the use and usefulness of rapid response collections

Scientific Conference (2021, June 18)

SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Doctoral thesis (2021)

Current trends in academia show that a key factor for tackling complex problems and doing successful research is interdisciplinarity. With the increasing availability of digital tools and online databases ... [more ▼]

Current trends in academia show that a key factor for tackling complex problems and doing successful research is interdisciplinarity. With the increasing availability of digital tools and online databases, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are seeking to incorporate computational techniques in their research workflow. Digital humanities (DH) is a collaborative and interdisciplinary area of research that bridges computing and the humanities disciplines, bringing digital tools to humanities scholars to use, together with a critical understanding of such tools. Social network analysis is one of such tools. Social network analysis focuses on relationships among social actors and it is an important addition to standard social and behavioral research, which is primarily concerned with attributes of the social units. In this work we present the field of digital humanities and its current challenges, as well as an overview of the most recent trends in historical network research, emphasizing the advantages of using social network analysis in history and the missed opportunities. We then present the field of network analysis, providing a formalization of the concept of social network, models that explain the mechanism governing complex networks and tools such as network metrics, orbit analysis and Exponential Random Graph Model. We tackle the problem of community detection. We propose MemLPA, a new version of the label propagation algorithm, by incorporating a memory element, in order for nodes to consider past states of the network in their decision rule. We present a use case, drawn from the collaboration with a historian colleague, showing how social network analysis can be used to answer research questions in history. In particular, we addressed the gender and ethnic bias problem in computer science research by looking at different collaboration patterns in the temporal co-authorship network. Finally, we present another use case, based on collaboration data collected at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) in Thailand. We build a temporal collaboration network where researchers are connected if they worked together on one or more artifacts, focusing on measuring productivity and quality of research and development, while linking these metrics to the structure of the collaboration network. [less ▲]

Luxembourg born-digital heritages of the COVID-19 crisis, Round Table

Scientific Conference (2021, June 16)

Efficient Numerical Methods for Secrecy Capacity of Gaussian MIMO Wiretap Channel

in 2021 IEEE 93rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2021-Spring) (2021, June 15)

This paper presents two different low-complexity methods for obtaining the secrecy capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel subject to a sum power constraint (SPC). The challenges ... [more ▼]

This paper presents two different low-complexity methods for obtaining the secrecy capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel subject to a sum power constraint (SPC). The challenges in deriving computationally efficient solutions to the secrecy capacity problem are due to the fact that the secrecy rate is a difference of convex functions (DC) of the transmit covariance matrix, for which its convexity is only known for the degraded case. In the first method, we capitalize on the accelerated DC algorithm, which requires solving a sequence of convex subproblems. In particular, we show that each subproblem indeed admits a water-filling solution. In the second method, based on the equivalent convex-concave reformulation of the secrecy capacity problem, we develop a so-called partial best response algorithm (PBRA). Each iteration of the PBRA is also done in closed form. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods. [less ▲]