APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: January 2019
How UX Practitioners Produce Findings in Usability Testing
The Paper How UX Practitioners Produce Findings in Usability Testing by Stuart Reeves, in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, January 2019. Notes Various features of this paper make it a shoe-in for Research Watch. It is about the intersection between … Continue reading
Posted in academia, social-science, UI
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Grooming the Backfog
This is “Pub Walks in Warwickshire”. NEW EDITION, it tells me! This particular EDITION was actually NEW back in 2008. It’s no longer in print. Each chapter is a separate short walk, starting and finishing at a pub with a … Continue reading
Structured Pruning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Structured Pruning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Sajid Anwar et al. In the ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing special issue on hardware and algorithms for learning-on-a-chip, May 2017. Notes Quick, a software engineer mentions a “performance” problem to … Continue reading
Posted in academia, AI
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On the continuous history of approximation
The Difference Engine – the Charles Babbage machine, not the steampunk novel – is a device for finding successive solutions to polynomial equations by adding up the differences introduced by each term between the successive input values. This sounds like … Continue reading
HPC’s Shift to the Cloud
Timothy Prickett Morgan writes on The Next Platform about the slow but inevitable shift to cloudy infrastructure. It seems that a tipping point has been reached, where the amount of IT money spent on “cloudy” infrastructure overtook the amount spent … Continue reading
Posted in HPC
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The ABC of Software Engineering Research
About this paper The ABC of Software Engineering Research by Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald, published October 2018. See link for full citation. Notes There are too many ways in which terms describing research methods in software engineering get used, … Continue reading
Java By Contract: a Worked Example
Java by Contract is an implementation of Design by Contract, as promoted by Bertrand Meyer and the Eiffel Software company, for the Java programming language. The contract is specified using standard Java methods and annotations, making it a more reliable … Continue reading
Posted in Java
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Updates to JavaByContract
Some improvements to JavaByContract, the design-by-contract tool for Java: Preconditions, Postconditions and Invariants now appear in the Javadoc for types that use JavaByContract. While this is only a small source change, it’s a huge usability improvement, as programmers using your … Continue reading
Posted in Java
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Impossibility and Uncertainty in AI
About this paper Impossibility and Uncertainty Theorems in AI Value Alignment (or why your AGI should not have a utility function), Peter Eckersley. Submitted to the ArXiV on December 31, 2018. Notes Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence applications have arguably … Continue reading
Posted in academia, AI
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The App that Wasn’t (Yet)
One of the early goals written into the mission statement of the Labrary was an eponymous app for organising research notes. I’ve used Mekentosj Springer Readcube Papers for years, and encountered Mendeley and others, and found that they were all … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, design
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